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Explorers into infinity

Chapter 2: FOREWORD
By Ray Cummings
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About This Book

The narrator is summoned to the home of the Gryce family and becomes involved in an ambitious experiment that permits travel through extremes of size and time. A small expedition is propelled into successively larger cosmic realms, encountering strange intelligences, alien landscapes, and existential hazards that challenge their understanding of space, time, and causality. The adventure alternates action with speculative exposition, using fantastical episodes to articulate an imaginative theory of an infinitely large universe and the human perspective altered by such voyages.

FOREWORD

Some of my present readers will doubtless remember "The Girl in the Golden Atom." When I wrote that book of the realm of infinite smallness there was in my mind its logical converse, the realm of the infinitely large. The one a complement to the other. And so I offer "Explorers Into Infinity," in no sense as a sequel to "The Girl in the Golden Atom," for fictionally they have no connection, but rather as its companion story.

You will find here a complete theory of the material universe as I conceive it may perhaps really be. To my own imagination—and I think very likely to your own—it is difficult to conceive of an infinite distance beyond the stars—empty Space stretching out forever. Nor is Einstein more satisfying to me, rather less so, for out beyond the Einstein system of curved Space must lie something or nothing. It is the nothingness which puzzles me. I have tried vainly to imagine a realm, infinitely large, of unending nothingness. Time is equally puzzling. I can conceive of eventful eons lying ahead of us; but rob that time of its future events and I flounder. To me at least, the conception of Time with nothing ever happening anywhere is impossible. To me also, an event presupposes the existence of something; and so, in my effort to imagine the infinitely large—Space illimitable, Time unending—I am forced to conceive what must fill that Space, what must happen to create that time.

You may call this tale fantastic, weird, bizarre. Doubtless it is. But with our most powerful microscopes reaching inward so tiny a distance to see no end in infinite smallness; our greatest telescopes groping futilely out into largeness unending to our vision, what is left but our imagination? And that, at least, we can send winging into the infinite!

I would not have you fear from this foreword that my story may be some pedantic, heavily technical exposition. It is not; for it is fiction only—a romance with which to entertain you; an effort, by using fictional methods, to reduce theories purely imaginative into concrete form with as great a degree of plausibility as may be. It is this only I desire: to carry you with me as you read; to make plausible this flight of our imaginations momentarily set free from the tiny everyday universe which is all we have physically to envisage.

Ray Cummings.