worked hard and well to arrive here and no harm will befall you.'
'I am Scott Marston,' said my friend, 'and this man is Peter Sands.'
The thoughts of the light-cone reached out to envelop us and there was a faint tinge of rebuke, a timbre of pity at what must have appeared to the thing as unwarranted egotism on our part.
'In this place there are no names. We are known by our personalities. However, as your mentality demands an identifying name, you may think of me as the Creator.
'And now, there are others I would have you see.'
He sounded a call, a weird call which seemed to incorporate as equally a weird name.
There was a patter of feet on the floor and from an adjoining room ran three animallike figures. Two were similar. They were pudgy of body, with thick, short legs which terminated in rounded pads that made sucking sounds as they ran. They had no arms, but from the center of their bulging chests sprang a tentacle, fashioned somewhat after the manner of an elephant's trunk, but with a number of small tentacles at its end. Their heads, rising to a peak from which grew a plume of gaily colored feathers, sat upon their tapering shoulders without benefit of necks.
The third was an antithesis of the first two. He was tall and spindly, built on the lines of a walking stick insect. His gangling legs were three-jointed. His grotesquely long arms dangled almost to the floor. Looking at his body, I believed I could have encircled it with my two hands. His head was simply an oval ball set on top of the sticklike body. The creature more nearly resembled a man than the other two, but he was a caricature of a man, a comic offering from the pen of a sardonic cartoonist.
The Creator seemed to be addressing the three.
'Here,' he said, 'are some new arrivals. They came here, I gather, in much the same manner you did. They are great scientists, great as yourselves. You will be friends.'
The Creator turned his attention to us.
'These beings which you see came here as you did and are my guests as you are my guests. They may appear outlandish to you. Rest assured that you appear just as queer to them.
They are brothers of yours, neighbors of yours. They are from your — .'
I received the impression of gazing down on vast space, filled with swirling motes of light.
'He means our solar system,' suggested Scott.
Carefully I built up in my mind a diagram of the solar system.
Wo!' The denial crashed like an angry thunderbolt upon us. Again the image of unimaginable space and of thousands of points of light — of swirling nebulae, of solar systems, mighty double suns and island universes.
'He means the universe,' said Scott.
'Certainly they came from our universe,' I replied. 'The universe is everything, isn't it — all existing things?'
Again the negative of the Creator burned its way into our brains.
'You are mistaken, Earthman. Your knowledge here counts as nothing. You are mere infants. But come; I will show you what your universe consists of.'
OUR UNIVERSE?
Streamers of light writhed down from the cone toward us. As we shrank back they coiled about our waists and gently lifted us. Soothing thoughts flowed over us, instructions to commit ourselves unreservedly to the care of the Creator, to fear no harm. Under this reassurance, my fears quieted. I felt that I was under the protection of a benevolent being, that his great power and compassion would shield me in this strange world. A Creator, in very truth!
The Creator glided across the floor to set us on our feet on the top of a huge table, which stood about seven feet above the floor level.
On the tabletop, directly before me, I saw a thin oval receptacle, made of a substance resembling glass. It was about a foot across its greatest length and perhaps a little more than half as wide and about four inches deep. The receptacle was filled with a sort of grayish substance, a mass of puttylike material. To me it suggested nothing more than a mass of brain substance.
'There,' said the Creator, pointing a light-streamer finger at the disgusting mass, 'is your universe.'
'What!' cried Scott.
'It is so,' ponderously declared the Creator.
'Such a thing is impossible,' firmly asserted Scott. 'The universe is boundless. At one time it was believed that it was finite, that it was enclosed by the curvature of space. I am convinced, however, through my study of time, that the universe, composed of millions of overlapping and interlocking dimensions, can be nothing but eternal and infinite. I do not mean that there will not be a time when all matter will be destroyed, but I do maintain — '
'You are disrespectful and conceited,' boomed the thought vibrations of the Creator. That is your universe. I made it. I created it. And more. I created the life that teems within it. I was curious to learn what form that life would take, so I sent powerful thought vibrations into it, calling that life out. I had little hope that it had developed the necessary intelligence to find the road to my laboratory, but I find that at least five of the beings evolving from my created life possessed brains tuned finely enough to catch my vibrations and possessed sufficient intelligence to break out of their medium. You are two of these five. The other three you have just seen.'
'You mean,' said Scott, speaking softly, 'that you created matter and then went further and created life?'
'I did.'
I stared at the puttylike mass. The universe! Millions of galaxies composed of millions of suns and planets — all in that lump of matter!
This is the greatest hoax I've ever seen,' declared Scott, a deliberate note of scorn in his voice. 'If that is the universe down there, how are we so big? I could step on that dish and break the universe all to smithereens. It doesn't fit.'
The light-finger of the Creator flicked out and seized my friend, wafting him high above the table. The Creator glowed with dull flashes of red and purple.
His thought vibrations filled the room to bursting with their power.
'Presumptuous one! You defy the Creator. You call his great work a lie! You, with your little knowledge! You, a specimen of the artificial life I created, would tell me, your very Creator, that I am wrong!'
I stood frozen, staring at my friend, suspended above me at the end of the rigid light-streamer. I could see Scott's face. It was set and white, but there was no sign of fear upon it.
His voice came down to me, cold and mocking.
'A jealous god,' he taunted.
The Creator set him down gently beside me. His thoughts came to us evenly, with no trace of his terrible anger of only a moment before.
'I am not jealous. I am above all your imperfect emotions. I have evolved to the highest type of life but one — pure thought. In time I will achieve that. I may grow impatient at times with your tiny brains, with your imperfect knowledge, with your egotism, but beyond that I am unemotional. The emotions have become unnecessary to my existence.'
I hurried to intervene.
'My friend spoke without thinking,' I explained. 'You realize this is all unusual to us. Something beyond any previous experience. It is hard for us to believe.'
'I know it must be hard for you to understand,' agreed the Creator. 'You are in an ultra-universe. The electrons and protons making up your body have grown to billions and billions of times their former size, with correspondingly greater distances between them. It is all a matter of relativity. I did not consciously create your universe, I merely created electrons and protons. I created matter. I created life — and injected it into the matter.
'I learned from the three who preceded you here that all things upon my electrons and protons, even my very
