Journey to the Edge
By Peter Lundell
Wilson and Clark gazed through the vast region of empty space. Galaxy chains and clusters stretched across the cosmos. It all looked like delicate jewelry on a black velvet cloth.
Clark sighed. “I wonder if the folks back home will ever see the photos we’ve been transmitting.”
“They will. We must believe they will,” Wilson said.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. I believe.”
“At this point it might not even matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
“We’re so far from anywhere,” Clark said. “It might be pointless to believe in anything anymore.”
“You’re right here. I’m right here. And we may be near our goal.”
“We’ll see.” Clark went back to logging location estimates and traces of gravitational force. “At least we’ve got lots of data on dark matter. But it’s the same as a billion light years ago, which is the same as a billion light years before that, which is the same as—”
“Thank you. I got the idea.” Wilson cataloged photos and measurements. At 186,000 miles per second and ten billion light-years from earth, he dearly hoped they were near their goal.
They were thankful to have avoided a black hole, several nebulas, and the occasional asteroid.
If it hadn’t been for the wormholes, they couldn’t have reached this far. They’d both be happy never to get sucked through another one, yet it would probably be their only hope of ever returning to earth.
Yet they had less and less idea of what they’d return to. Relativity had slowed their aging so much that everyone else they knew would be dead by now. If they did return, they might find The World Space Authority no longer operating. The whole human race could be out of business.
But none of that negated the big questions: Did the Universe have an edge? And what, if anything, was beyond it?
The necessities of recycling oxygen, water, and food limited the spacecraft to two astronauts. Two guys hurtling through empty space, light-years alone. At times it felt as if they were the sum of all of humanity.
Clark had grown more skeptical with each passing light year. He now held to the postulate that gravity curved space back on itself. Thus there would be no edge. Their journey would bend back with the space around them and go on forever.
Wilson chose to believe there was an edge. And by nature edges had two sides. Whenever he wanted a debate, he would say, “Perhaps dark energy will push us to the edge—or beyond it.”
Clark invariably retorted, “Electro-magnetic forces will arc us back, and we won’t even know it.” He often added, “And besides, the universe is expanding; an edge might always keep beyond us.”
“But where is it expanding into?” Wilson wondered.
“We’ll never know.”
And so they hurtled through space.
Wilson increasingly suspected that beyond the things he saw and measured, lay another reality he did not see. He often proposed, but could not verify, this theory. “It’s common sense,” he said.
Clark shook his head. “Common sense and astrophysics don’t always match.”
“For the Universe to exist, there has to be a Creator. Plenty of people back home believe that. And by the laws of physics it does make sense.”
“Admit it. Through all these light years we’ve found no verifying data.”
“True. Yet doesn’t evidence surround us? Galaxy formations, fine-tuned parameters, precision of physical constants—they’re all fingerprints of something beyond.”
But the fingerprints never ended. Light years of traveling in the confined ship through the cosmos, compiling data, and pressing farther and farther into the unknown, took its toll.
Constant night, vast emptiness, and lonely silence sometimes ate at their minds like a slow-growing cancer. So they forgave each other when they argued. And they had forgiven each other this way for years, which outside of the wormholes would have been light-years longer. They agreed to be thankful for that.
Some of their best discussions were about what others called nothing. There was so much of it all around.
Wilson said, “Nothing is considered to be empty space, but empty space is actually something.”
“So?”
“So how can we even define nothing?”
“Got a dictionary?”
“How could anything exist in nothingness?”
“It can’t.”
“Yet it does. Take the nothingness beyond the Universe. The Universe exists in that.”
“We’ll never know.” Clark stared at the control panel, the one thing over which he held any jurisdiction.
The longer the trip lasted, the less Clark was willing to argue.
So Wilson focused on the big questions: If there were an edge, would they reach it? If they did, would they be obliterated? Or would they pass into a vacuum? Or into nothing? Or into somewhere else?
Clark increasingly responded with “Nonsense,” or willful silence. He often gazed out the window and did not speak.
The dark, silent emptiness weighed like lead. Wilson insisted they would reach the edge. To survive, he had to. And he would accept whatever he found.
“Why did I give up everything for this?” Clark muttered.
“Because,” Wilson reminded him, “you said the earth was boring. It did nothing but spin and do laps around the tiny star called the sun.”
“And your intent was more noble.”
“If it’s noble to find an end to what we know and a beginning to what we don’t.”
“What is there to know beyond endless data?”
***
Weeks blurred into months within the blur of years or light years or however they chose to measure time. The two found less and less to say that they had not already said a hundred times before. When they almost stopped talking, Wilson monitored a slowing of their velocity. “Perhaps we’re near the edge.”
“We’re not near anything,” Clark said. “We’re just curving in with the space.”
“You have to believe. Feel how much we’re slowing down. Look at the gauge.”
“Because we’re curving. We’ve wasted our time. Our whole trip has turned into a pursuit of emptiness. We’ll just keep curving and go forever in the opposite direction.”
“Stop it, Clark.”
“And no one will find us.”
“There’s got to be an edge. And we will reach it.”
“We’re going to die.”
“We all have to die sometime.”
“I mean now. We’ll curve with space and never be able to know if there is an edge.”
“No, we won’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
“No, I can’t. But—”
The slowing velocity pulled both of them out of their seats, pressing them forward until they sprawled against the control console and window, like boys in a circus ride who didn’t strap themselves in. Every loose object followed and pressed against them until they slowed to a crawl. The pressure subsided and they climbed back into their seats.
Neither said a word.
The solar power bank registered plenty of energy. Wilson set the power to full thrust. But the ship continued to slow. He pulled back then reset to full thrust. The ship hardly moved.
Clark sat frozen. “We’re going to die.”
“Is it the edge?” Wilson leaded forward. He could see nothing but darkness, not a single star.
The ship stopped. At least that’s what the instruments showed.
Clark stared blankly ahead. “This is impossible.”
“We’ve reached the edge.”
“You can’t see it.”
“Who said we could?”
“Nietzsche was right. ‘Everything becomes and recurs eternally—escape is impossible.’”
“Nietzsche also needed his mother to take care of him.”
“I don’t even want to know what’s there. It will be worse than the darkness we’ve been through.”
“Clark! We may have reached it!”
“I don’t have enough data.”
“Data won’t tell you everything.”
“I don’t want to know what it won’t tell me.”
Wilson sighed. “I’m going out.”
“You’re crazy.”
“After everything you’ve said, what does it matter?”
“Go ahead. I’m not going anywhere.”
Wilson pulled out his space suit, tested the portable life support system, and put it all on.
Clark stood to secure the helmet to the suit. “You won’t last long out there.”
Wilson squinted at the outside temperature gauge. “Is that out of order?”
Clark tapped the meter. It read an impossibly warm 280 on the Kelvin Scale. “See, it’s broken. It has to be. Watch, the whole ship will break down.”
Wilson opened the inner hatch and stepped into the transit chamber. He sealed the inner hatch, secured his tether between the ship and his waist, and opened the outer hatch.
He didn’t sense the normal jolt of near absolute zero temperature around him. Rather, he instantly felt hot and turned down the suit thermostat.
He pressed the hand-controlled jet thrusters attached to the support system. They seemed to work, unlike the ship, and he moved cautiously along the side of the ship toward the blackness.
When he got as far as the ship’s nose, he stopped moving. Pressing the thrust to full throttle, he still didn’t move. He pulled back to low and reached forward.
Something held firm against his hand. A wall perhaps. No, a force field. He could sense the vibration.
This was it—it had to be.
The edge of the Universe.
He had made it. The end of existence. Farther than any human or any creature had ever gone from anywhere. The ultimate frontier, with nothing—absolutely nothing—beyond.
The force field might be impenetrable. Or porous. Or annihilate him.
He had reached finality. Beyond him lay nothing. Or the great mystery beyond the Universe.
Giddy with reaching the outermost threshold, he reached forward again, pressing against the great unknown, the ultimate—
Shuuff!
A porthole opened.
Blinding light burst out.
He gasped and shielded his eyes.
A round window, a hole in the darkness, flooded him with light.
A head appeared. A smiling face, bright like the light around it.
Impossible! was the only thought Wilson could think. He felt himself hyperventilating.
“Hello,” said the bright face.
Wilson tried to scream but exhausted breath was all that came out.
“Don’t panic.”
He had to be hallucinating.
Another bright face appeared beside the first. “We’ve been watching you all along, and I must say we’ve been quite impressed. Some of us didn’t think you’d make it—or that you’d end up like the other fellow in your little tram.”
Wilson knew he must be dying and this was a symptom. How else could he hear them inside the space suit? Maybe it was the effects of the force field. Get back to the ship.
“Oh, don’t go. You’ve come so far.”
Get back now!
“Shall we invite him in?” said one. “Most definitely,” said the other.
Wilson felt himself being pulled backward toward the hole. He aimed himself toward the ship and pressed the jet thrusters full throttle. But the backward pull was greater.
Then he saw his disconnected tether drift like a curling strand of spaghetti back toward the ship. A jolt of ice-cold fear shot through him, and he gathered enough breath to heave a horrified scream.
“Oh, dear. I did tell you not to panic.”
“Fear not!” the other one shouted. Then more quietly, “Perhaps he’ll understand that phrase. We’ve used it plenty of times in the past.”
Wilson, still hyperventilating, found himself turned around and face to face with the two. Now three. Four. Then a dozen bright faces in blinding light.
“You’re an odd one,” said the original face. “You’ve come all this way, and you don’t want to come in.” The others shook or nodded their heads in agreement. “We’re throwing a party just for you. It would be rude not to attend.”
Wilson struggled to form a comprehensible thought. He shut his eyes. His breathing eased. And just to play along he asked, “What about my partner in the ship.”
“He’s already made his choice. He won’t come in.”
Wilson opened his eyes. The porthole and bright faces were still there.
“You, on the other hand, believe.”
The bright ones parted to the right and left. He felt himself pulled through the porthole into what seemed like a palace. As his eyes adjusted, the space appeared so large as to have no ceiling or walls, except for the side along the Universe. They pulled off his helmet and his space suit to let him bask in the warmth. Then they led him toward a banquet table, surrounded by music.
Wilson pinched himself and felt it. He smiled.