"Laurence Manning - The Living Galaxy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Manning Laurence)

distant pin-points. This sky now showed blankly black—dead black—the unseeable darkness where
light simply does not exist in any form, color, hue, or strength. They had arrived at the end of Matter and,
by theory, also at the end of space itself. But of this latter point they were not yet certain, for though they
saw this blank area, they had not yet reached it. At full speed they proceeded in its direction guided by
the near stars. But before, they passed these, fresh stars swung into view from the left or the right and
seemed to move into the space ahead. This, Bzonn decided, must be caused by the curvature of space
which seemed to be greatly magnified at its edges. To overcome this deceptive effect was impossible by
physical means, for light waves and even motion itself were all equally distorted. A thousand years were
spent in study and a corrective curve drawn painstakingly from empiric tests. For its solution it was
necessary to solve the problem of three forces—three impinging curves, each of three dimensions, and
this tedious mathematical task had to await the breeding and educating of a thousand new humans and
the construction of countless elaborate calculating machines. When at length it was finished and a course
could be set, it seemed so startling and disastrous in its implications that the work must needs be gone
over again painstakingly.
There was no mistake; the course was correctly laid out. But it called for driving at full speed on a
course that curved more sharply as the last fringe of stars were approached until at the last the course
twisted back upon itself and would return them, seemingly, into the very universe from which they sought
to escape! Seven hundred years were spent in completing the manoeuver and at the end they were
apparently driving with full power straight back toward a distant star. It was days before they suspected
and months before they were certain of the amazing fact that the faster they drove toward it, the farther
away it became! When it finally vanished as a far pin-prick of light, they searched with the telescopes and
took sufficient observations to orient themselves, afterwards attempting to correct the photographs for
light curvature. For they had passed beyond the stars.
And now picture these intrepid ones, gazing on one hand out upon nothingness and on the other upon
a far distant wall of dusty light that was all that remained of Creation! This wall they imagined as a floor
and across it they sped for a hundred thousand years searching for anything that might project above
it—that might possibly explain the great shift to the red that had been the cause of their adventure. And
they found it. What they found is, of course, still debatable. Ahead of them there loomed up a wall of
distant starlight at right angles to the great floor beneath their planet-ship. This they approached not too
closely, but skirted it and in the course of a million years completely circled the mass of star-matter. It
rose about a million light years in height and half that in diameter. Photographs of its contour were taken
and by superimposing the outlines, a tiny model was created—a weird little thing that stood on their
laboratory table. This sculpture you have all seen copied in the museums under the title of "The Living
Galaxy." This is, of course, a misnomer, for upwards of fifty galaxies were noted in it. The title, however,
clearly gives the idea of one theory of its origin, which is that the protuberance was a creature of life in
some form which utilized solar systems after the fashion of atoms. This theory is much supported by the
observed fact that photographic projections of its outline repeated at intervals of a hundred years showed
clearly that the mass was in movement. For two million years it was studied with the most intense interest
and a serious of miniature statues were projected and photographed upon moving-picture film, one after
the other, each in its proper attitude. It was found that when the film was viewed rapidly, the result was
progressive movement.
Let us be as explicit as we may: The shape of this mass was that of a rounded cylinder, bulged out
roughly above the center line. From this projected a streamer which tapered almost to nothingness. The
motion observed was, briefly, a wriggling of the streamer (possibly a tentacle?) and a slow bending
forward of the main body.
The next action of Bzonn upon establishing these facts was characteristic of the fearless and coldly
scientific mind which drove him continuously throughout this extraordinary voyage. Straight down toward
the wriggling tip of the tentacle of star-matter he sped his ship Humanity. The voyage lasted half a million
years and as the last stars in the streamer came into view, it was noted that at its point commenced the
enormous vacancy in the universes—that conical emptiness formerly occupied by countless stars that had