You’ve seen pictures of the Great Nebula in Andromeda?-a giant spiral of two curving arms, seen at an angle. Of all the lovely things in the sky it is the most beautiful. This was like that.
Only we weren’t seeing a photograph nor even by telescope; we were so close (if “close” is the word) that it stretched across the sky twice as long as the Big Dipper as seen from home-so close that I saw the thickening at the center, two great branches coiling around and overtaking each other. We saw it from an angle so that it appeared elliptical, just as M31 in Andromeda does; you could feel its depth, you could see its shape.
Then I knew I was a long way from home. That was home, up there, lost in billions of crowded stars.
It was some time before I noticed another double spiral on my right, almost as wide-flung but rather lopsided and not nearly as brilliant-a pale ghost of our own gorgeous Galaxy. It slowly penetrated that this second one must be the Greater Magellanic Cloud-if we were in the Lesser and if that fiery whirlpool was our own Galaxy. What I had thought was “The Milky Way” was simply a milky way, the Lesser Cloud from inside.
I turned and looked at it again. It had the right shape, a roadway around the sky, but it was pale skim milk compared with our own, about as our Milky Way looks on a murky night. I don’t know how it should look, since I’d never seen the Magellanic Clouds; I’ve never been south of the Rio Grande. But I did know that each cloud is a galaxy in its own right, but smaller than ours and grouped with us.
I looked again at our blazing spiral and was homesick in a way I hadn’t been since I was six.
Peewee was huddling to the Mother Thing for comfort. She made herself taller and put an arm around Peewee. (“There, there, dear! I felt the same way when I was very young and saw it for the first time.”)
“Mother Thing?” Peewee said timidly. “Where is home?”
(“See the right half of it, dear, where the outer arm trails into nothingness? We came from a point two-thirds the way out from the center.”
“No, no! Not Vega. I want to know where the Sun is!”
(“Oh, your star. But, dear, at this distance it is the same.”)
We learned how far it is from the Sun to the planet Lanador 167,000 light-years. The Mother Thing couldn’t tell us directly as she did not know how much time we meant by a “year”-how long it takes Terra to go around the Sun (a figure she might have used once or not at all and as worth remembering as the price of peanuts in Perth). But she did know the distance from Vega to the Sun and told us the distance from Lanador to Vega with that as a yardstick-six thousand one hundred and ninety times as great. 6190 times 27 light-years gives 167,000 light-years. She courteously gave it in powers of ten the way we figure, instead of using factorial five (1x2x3x4x5 equals 120) which is how Vegans figure. 167,000 light-years is 9.82 x 1017 miles. Round off 9.82 and call it ten. Then -1,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles -is the distance from Vega to Lanador (or from the Sun to Lanador; Vega and the Sun are back-fence neighbors on this scale.)
A thousand million billion miles.
I refuse to have anything to do with such a preposterous figure. It may be “short” as cosmic distances go, but there comes a time when the circuit breakers in your skull trip out from overload.
The platform we were on was the roof of an enormous triangular building, miles on a side. We saw that triangle repeated in many places and always with a two-armed spiral in each corner. It was the design the Mother Thing wore as jewelry.
It is the symbol for “Three Galaxies, One Law.”
I’ll lump here things I learned in driblets: The Three Galaxies are like our Federated Free Nations, or the United Nations before that, or the League of Nations still earlier; Lanador houses their offices and courts and files-the League’s capital, the way the FFN is in New York and the League of Nations used to be in Switzerland. The cause is historical; the people of Lanador are the Old Race; that’s where civilization began.