Within the Nebula

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For all that I had visited it many times before, it was with something of awe that I contemplated the great white sun, as our ship flashed on toward it. Its colossal blazing bulk, I knew, was greater far than the whole of our own little solar system, millions of times larger than our own familiar little star, infinitely the most glorious of all the swarming suns. It seemed fitting, indeed, that at Canopus had been located the seat of the great Council of Suns of which I was myself a member, representing our own little solar system in that mighty deliberative body whose members were drawn from every peopled star.

In thoughtful silence I gazed toward the mighty sun ahead, and for a time there was no sound in the bridgeroom except for the deep humming of the ship's generators, whose propulsion-vibrations flung us on through space. Then, against the dazzling glare of the gigantic star ahead, there appeared a tiny black dot, expanding swiftly in size as we raced on toward it. Around and beyond it other dots were coming into view, also, changing as we flashed on to disks, to globes, to huge and swarming planets that spun in vast orbits about their mighty parent sun. And it was toward the largest and inmost of these whirling worlds, the seat of the great Council, that our ship was now slanting swiftly downward.

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