But this cosmical companion of mine was legion, and he had entry into my very mind. He quenched my thoughts with the ceaseless murmur of his own vapid, almost featureless experience.

For though with my strange power of microscopic telepathy I could for a while distinguish a few of the individual mindlets, I could discern nothing whatever in their devastatingly similar experiences but the vaguest unrest and the vaguest tactual, or I should I say sexual, titillation; nothing but an inconceivably faint and somnolent appetite, which at rare intervals was gratified by an instantaneous orgasm and ejaculation of the divine physical energy.

I could not for long discriminate the individual experiences of the mindlets. Fatigue soon blurred my insight. The minute prickling of distinct primal beings against my mind gave place to the confused and indescribably nauseating impression of the I whole myriadfold cosmic experience.

In utter boredom and indignation I cursed my fate. Why, why had I been snatched out of the vivid though distressful world of men to be subjected to all this irrelevance? Had I not a life to live, entwined, with other lives?

4

THE GREAT NEBULAE APPEAR

I need not have been so despondent, for I was soon to find myself in a world of passionate beings whose alien, yet not entirely inhuman nature was to tax my comprehension and to wring me with conflicting sympathy and loathing. In a few brief aeons of cosmical time I was to be the spectator of a drama the very existence of which my fellow men had never suspected.

The clouds continued to drift apart from one another, continued to contract and gyrate and define themselves. Presently they were but small soft globes or flecks of light, snowflakes whirling in the huge gulf of space. They seemed to me minute; yet in each one of them was material for a host of suns, and worlds innumerable. For these were the Great Nebulae.

I had at first no inkling that these largest of all physical objects were alive, that each one of them in its own unique way was a sensitive and intelligent being, that every movement of this great host was no less significant of joy and grief than the gestures and facial expressions of men and women, that here before me were many which, though possessing nothing at all like a human eye, regarded one another’s eloquent forms with joys and longings no less vivid than the personal loves of men and women, and many more which, though blind and deaf to the, external world, lived out a strange, passionate yet solipsistic life.

In time I was to learn, through long and difficult experience, not only to understand these beings up to a point, but also to respect them. But how can I give by means of a few printed pages the insight which I myself took aeons to acquire? There is nothing for it but to beg the reader once more to have patience while I try to describe as briefly as possible the physical and mental nature of the great nebulae. For without understanding the great difference between nebular and human nature he cannot possibly appreciate the strange and moving story which will follow.

In the earliest age of nebular history, when the expansion of the cosmos was not yet far advanced, the nebulae were very much closer to one another than in the age of man. They were also far more numerous; for many, as I shall tell, have been destroyed, and their flesh converted into energy to carry out the all too human activities of their fellows. They were also, at this time, much less evenly distributed than in our day. Most lay even now remote from all neighbours, lone sails on the ocean. These were the “lone nebulae” which spent their formative youth each in its own solipsistic universe. Others voyaged in convoy of a dozen or a score, or eddied together in shoals of hundreds or even a thousand. Here and there a leviathan made progress amid encircling satellites. These minute satellite nebulae constituted a race apart. Of one individual I shall say much at a later stage. Like their larger companions they were destined in the fullness of time to crumble into stars; but they would form not huge galaxies but the crowded swarms which we call the globular clusters.

Already the normal nebulae were very diverse. Some were greater, some smaller; some mere smudges of mist, some compact and formal. Each feathery ball, I noticed, was slowly shrinking. And as it shrank, it whirled more rapidly. And as it whirled, it was flattened. And as the flattening continued, there appeared in the centre a bright and swollen core. The outer parts of the nebula were flung by their own movement far out into space; but seemingly the tugging core still kept a hold on them, so that they developed into an attenuated disc around the heart of the nebula, and were torn into streamers and spreading convolutions. So might a dancer, pirouetting, halo her bright head with far-flung, tangled whirls.

Such at least was the form of these nebulae that were too far apart to distort one another. But those that were members of compact groups expressed by their very deformity their dependence upon one another. As woodland trees mould one another, so these great clouds, though at a distance of several light-years, moulded one another with their tidal sway.

It was an unearthly but a rich and subtle spectacle that now confronted me on every side. With slow rhythmic movements, the airy creatures floated around me delicately featured with many colours imperceptible to the normal human eye.