'We tried so hard to do everything just as you told us,' said the Engineer.
'We are pleased that everything is all right. We had a hard time understanding one thing. Those paintings on the wall. You said they were things you had and were used to and we wanted so much to make everything as you wanted it. But they were something we had never thought of, something we had never done. We are sorry that we were so stupid. They are fine things. When this trouble is over, we may make more of them. They are so very beautiful. How queer it was we hadn't thought of them.”
Gary swung around and stared at the painting opposite the table. Obviously it was a work in oils and seemed a very fine one. It portrayed some fantastic scene, a scene with massive mountains in the background and strange twisted trees and waist-high grass and the glitter of a distant waterfall. A picture, Gary decided, that any art gallery would be proud to hang.
'You mean,' be asked, 'that these are the first pictures you ever painted?”
'We hadn't even thought of it before,' said the Engineer.
They hadn't known of paintings before. No single Engineer had ever thought to capture a scene on canvas. They had never wielded an artist's brush. But here was a painting that was perfect in color and in composition, well balanced, pleasing to the eye!
'One thing about you fellows,' said Tommy, 'is that you will tackle anything.”
'It was so simple,' said the Engineer, 'that we are ashamed we never thought of it.”
'But this trouble,' rumbled Kingsley. 'This danger to the universe. You told us about it back on Pluto, but you didn't explain. We would like to know.”
'That,' said the Engineer, 'is what I am here to tell you…”
No change in the tone of the thoughts… no slightest trend of emotion. No change of expression on his face.
'We will do whatever we can to help,' Kingsley told him.
'We are sure of that,' said the Engineer. 'We are glad that you are here.
We were so satisfied when you said that you would come. We feel you can help us very, very much.”
'But the danger,' prompted Caroline. 'What is the danger?”
'I will begin,' said the Engineer, 'with information that to us is very elemental, although I do not believe you know it. You had no chance to find it out, being so far from the edge of the universe. But we who have lived here so many years, found the truth long ago.
'This universe is only one of many universes. Only one of billions and billions of universes. We believe there are as many universes as there are galaxies within our own universe.”
The Earthlings looked in astonishment at him. Gary glanced at Kingsley and the scientist seemed speechless. He was sputtering, trying to talk.
'There are over fifty billion galaxies within our universe,' he finally said. 'Or at least that is what our astronomers believe.”
'Sorry to contradict,' said the Engineer. 'There are many more than that.
Many times more than that.”
'More!' said Kingsley, faintly for him.
'The universes are four-dimensional,' said the Engineer, 'and they exist within a five-dimensional inter-space, perhaps another great super-universe with the universes within it taking the place of the galaxies as they are related to our universe.”
'A universe within a universe,' said Gary, nodding his head. 'And might it not be possible that this super- universe is merely another universe within an even greater super-universe?”
'That might be so,' declared the Engineer. 'It is a theory we have often pondered. But we have no way of knowing. We have so little knowledge…”
A little silence fell upon the room, a silence filled with awe. This talk of universes and super-universes. This dwarfing of values. This relegating of the universe to a mere speck of dust in an even greater place!
'The universes, even as the galaxies, are very far apart,' the Engineer went on. 'So very far apart that the odds against two of them ever meeting are almost incomprehensibly great. Farther apart than the suns in the galaxies, farther apart, relatively, than the galaxies in the universe. But entirely possible that once in eternity two universes will meet.”
He paused, a dramatic silence in his thought. 'And that chance has come,”
he said. 'We are about to collide with another universe.”
They sat in stunned silence.
'Like two stars colliding,' said Kingsley. 'That's what formed our solar system.”
'Yes,' said the Engineer, 'like two stars colliding. Like a star once collided with your Sun.”
Kingsley jerked his head up.
'You know about that?' he asked.
'Yes, we know about that. It was long ago. Many million years ago.”
'How do you know about this other universe?' asked Tommy. 'How could you know?”
'Other beings in the other universe told us,' said the Engineer. 'Beings that know much more in many lines of research than we shall ever know.
Beings we have been talking to for these many years.”
'Then you knew for many years that the collision would take place,' said Kingsley.
'Yes, we knew,' said the Engineer. 'And we tried hard, the two peoples; We of this universe and those of the other universe. We tried hard to stop it, but there seemed no way. And so at last we agreed to summon, each from his own universe, the best minds we could find. Hoping they perhaps could find a way… find a way where we had failed.”
'But we aren't the best minds of the universe,' said Gary. 'We must be far down the scale. Our intelligence, comparatively, must be very low. We are just beginning. You know more than we can hope to know for centuries to come.”
'That may be so,' agreed the Engineer, 'but you have something else. Or you may have something else. You may have a courage that we do not possess. You may have an imagination that we could not summon. Each people must have something to contribute. Remember, we had no art, we could not think up a painting; our minds are different. It is so very important that the two universes do not collide.”
'What would happen,' asked Kingsley, 'if they did collide?”
'The laws of the five-dimensional inter-space,' explained the Engineer, 'are not the laws of our four- dimensional universe. Different results would occur under similar conditions. The two universes will not actually collide. They will be destroyed before they collide.”
'Destroyed before they collide?' asked Kingsley.
'Yes,' said the Engineer. 'The two universes will 'rub,' come so close together that they will set up a friction, or a frictional stress, in the five-dimensional inter-space. Under the inter-space laws this friction would create new energy… raw energy… stuff that had never existed before. Each of the universes will absorb some of that energy, drink it up.
The energy will rush into our universes in ever-increasing floods.
Unloosed, uncontrollable energy. It will increase the mass energy in each universe, will give each a greater mass…”
Kingsley leaped to his feet, tipping over a coffee cup, staining the table cloth.
'Increase the mass!' he shouted. 'But…”
Then he sat down again, sagged down, a strangely beaten man.
'Of course that would destroy us,' he mumbled. 'Presence of mass is the only cause for the bending of space. An empty universe would have no space curvature. In utter nothingness there would be no condition such as we call space. Totally devoid of mass, space would be entirely uncurved, would be a straight line and would have no real existence. The more mass there is, the tighter space is curved. The more mass there is, the less space there is for it to occupy.'- 'Flood the universe with energy from inter-space,' the Engineer agreed, 'and space begins curving back, faster and faster, tighter and tighter, crowding the matter it does contain into smaller space. We would have a contracting rather than an expanding universe.”
'Throw enough of that new energy into the universe,' Kingsley rumbled excitedly, 'and it would be more like an implosion than anything else.
