room became dark the screen lit up with a bright but misty gray glow.
"Close the door." The director did so, though unbeknownst to the Arkentons he locked it as well. Once the room was in total darkness, the screen glowed more brightly. And in the few moments it took Carroway to walk back, it had grown brighter still.
"It must take some time for the charge to build up enough to collect sufficient tachyons," Kathleen suggested. "Ted, see if you can find some label tape and a marker." She turned the third dial counterclockwise, turning down the brightness. They could hear Carroway open and fish around in a drawer, then a light came on as he found and activated a flashlight. A few minutes later he returned with a roll of white fabric tape and a black permanent marker.
Kathleen quickly ripped off three pieces and applied them to the faces of the dials; on the third she wrote "Brite". Meanwhile, Jeremiah continued to turn the brightness down more.
Carroway strained his eyes. "I don't see anything." The screen still displayed just a featureless mass of ash-gray light.
"Try reducing the brightness further," Kathleen said; "try to get the background darker."
Jeremiah nodded, spinning the dial more rapidly, and the glow faded faster. Once it had disappeared entirely, however, a faint sprinkling of tiny specks appeared, and as their eyes grew accustomed to the low light, the specks grew brighter and more numerous.
Once again, Kathleen was the first to voice their mutual thought: "They're stars!" Even as the seconds passed, more and more appeared, as the Milky Way itself became dimly visible and an occasional meteor streaked across the screen.
The tension of the moment released as Kathleen and Carroway cheered and hugged one another, but Jeremiah stayed quiet and still, concentrating on the screen. With his left hand he began to adjust the second dial. Instantly, the view zoomed forward at a dizzying rate. Turning more slowly, the three of them watched as first stars, then galaxies, then whole clusters of galaxies flash by them. Jeremiah paused long enough to allow Kathleen to write "Zoom" on the dial.
"Could you tape down the lever?" He indicated the deadman switch.
"Do you think that's a good idea?"
"It's getting fatiguing holding it down; if we have to, we should be able to tear away the tape quickly enough."
Kathleen gave him a look that indicated she wasn't as sure as he was, but she voiced no objection and complied.
Jeremiah waited until she had finished before he resumed their "journey". Yet no matter how deep they seemed to look, only black space remained in front of them as all objects disappeared off the rim of the lens around them.
"Can't you focus in on something?" Carroway said in an impatient tone.
"Even a regular telescope has to be pointed at an object to look right at it," Kathleen replied, "and this device is bolted to the floor." She pointed at the base of the structure. "We'll just have to hope we get lucky."
As the minutes passed, the view continued to zoom deeper into space. When Jeremiah had turned the dial ten times fully around he stopped. He sat for a moment, looking at a curious galaxy in the upper left quadrant of the screen. It was globular, with only the barest wisp of a disk, but two columns of glowing material spewed out from opposite ends, over distances at least three times the galaxy's diameter.
"What is it?" Kathleen asked.
Jeremiah pointed at the galaxy, his voice hushed even for him. "That's a quasar. I remember seeing radio telescope images of it taken by NASA. I don't remember its designation, but its distance was estimated to be some twenty billion light years away. That puts it on the edge of the known universe."
"That's impossible!" Carroway breathed. "I can still see more galaxies beyond it!" And indeed the screen appeared filled with a myriad of hazy patches.
"Apparently, what we call the universe must be just a small portion of a greater cosmos."
"Then why can't we see them with our regular telescopes?"
"It's only been twenty billion years since the Big Bang," Kathleen said, irritation tingeing her voice despite her awe. "There hasn't been enough time for the light to reach us."
"Then how can we see them now?"
"We are viewing with tachyons traveling at infinite speed," Jeremiah said. "They were already here moments after they first formed."
"We need a new name for this," Carroway mumbled to himself. "A macroscope; yes, that's what we'll call it." He then fell silent as he amused himself with his own thoughts.
Jeremiah continued to turn the zoom dial. After a few minutes more, when the dial had been turned a dozen more times, a cluster of galaxies appeared in the exact center of the screen. As the view closed in, the individual galaxies resolved themselves, then a single galaxy from the bunch grew larger as they approached it.
"It looks strangely fuzzy," Carroway remarked in an absent manner. Jeremiah reached over to the first dial and turned it. At first the image fuzzed even more, but when he reversed direction the galaxy suddenly leapt out in sharp detail. Kathleen wrote "Focus" on that dial.
Jeremiah began turning the zoom dial again. Soon they had passed the border of the galaxy and were delving deeply inside its disk. They passed by massive suns and through glowing clouds, skirted the edges of flashing pulsars, and even flew above a supernova. Deeper they went, and a solar system appeared. They passed through a cometary cloud, then a belt of planetoids, before sailing past majestic gas giants surrounded by stately rings. They encountered a belt of asteroids next, before entering a region of solid dwarf worlds. One hove into view, a world of green and brown land, blue oceans, and white clouds, with a single large moon in orbit around it.
"My god," Carroway whispered, and Kathleen was speechless, but Jeremiah nodded in an almost gleeful manner.
"A parallel earth."
For indeed, the continent they saw looked almost exactly like North America. Turning the dial more, Jeremiah moved in closer, but then he stopped. Where the major cities would have been on Earth--New York, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and the rest--were craters, and moving amongst them, clearly visible even from their relatively high altitude, were gargantuan creatures busily constructing cyclopean towers.
Jeremiah hesitated for a moment, then reached over to the brightness dial and turned it counterclockwise; the image first dimmed slightly, then disappeared altogether.
"What are you doing?" Carroway said as Jeremiah got up out of the chair. His face appeared as expressionless as ever, but his hands shook slightly and an odd look of dread filled his hard eyes. Kathleen's face looked pale and she walked into her husband's arms for comfort.
"We've seen enough for today," he said as Kathleen buried her head in his chest.
"What do you mean?" Carroway said. "We've made a momentous discovery here; for the first time we can prove that not only are there earth-like planets out in space, but other civilized races as well. We can't stop now--"
"Yes!" Jeremiah said with unexpected force, then he continued more quietly. "We can and we should. We need to study this device thoroughly, to understand how it works. We have to be able to prove what it can do before we can announce any results using it. And we need to figure out how to protect ourselves; if we cannot, then we need to destroy it."
"Destroy it?!" Carroway virtually shrieked. "Never! Out of my way; if you're too timid to reap the reward fate has handed you, then I will claim it!" And before Jeremiah could stop him, he threw himself into the chair and spun the brightness dial clockwise as fast as he could.
The screen came back on almost immediately, dimly at first, but quickly brightening. Pulling his wife with him, Jeremiah hurried around to the front of the device, putting the structure and the back of the lens between the two of them and the frenzied Carroway.
"Yes, I see them!" He sounded giddy, as if drunk. "I'm going in closer." Turning the zoom dial, he peered intently at the screen, his face livid in the gray glow.
"God Lord!" Despite his words he grinned in ecstasy. "They are marvelous! Each one's got to be as big as an ocean liner
." He turned the dial some more, as a puzzled look came over him.
"I...I can't tell what they are, exactly. They look like some kind of cross between an octopus, a jellyfish, and a slug, but with spines and frills and eyestalks and...other things I can't describe in mixed company. I'm going to zero in on one...my god, it's huge! Wait, it's turning in my direction...I'm going to get a good look at its head." He just about giggled as he spoke.
Jeremiah and Kathleen stood frozen, horrified yet fascinated at the same time. "Yes," Carroway continued, grinning again, "one of the eyestalks is looking right at me. Wait...now it's...it's coming towards me." He frowned as his voice sounded concerned. "It's almost as if it can...see me."
Breaking out of her spell, Kathleen said, "It can see you!" There was an edge of panic in her voice.
Carroway glanced towards her briefly before looking back at the screen. "That's impossible." But both his expression and voice seemed uncertain.
"No," Jeremiah said, "it isn't! Remember, transcendental tachyons occupy all points on their trajectory simultaneously. At the same time they are here, they are also there! The creatures can see you through them!"
Finally comprehending what that meant, Carroway screamed as a look of pure terror crossed his face.
"Shut it off!" Kathleen said, but she spoke too late. Even as Carroway reached over to tear away the tape holding the deadman switch down, a mass of feelers erupted out of the lens