the ability to
see that star had been accepted as the proof of good vision.

Then Gershom went on to the other constellations, and talked of suns
of the first and second magnitude, and pointed out Sirius, in whose
honor great temples had once been built in Egypt, and Arcturus, the
same old Arcturus that a Hebrew poet by the name of Job had sung
about, and Vega and Capella and Rigel, which he said sent out eight
thousand times more light than our sun, and is at least thirty-four
thousand times as big.

But it only made me dizzy and staggered my mind. I couldn't comprehend
the distances he was talking about. I just couldn't make it, any more
than a bronco that had been used to jumping a six-barred gate could
vault over a windmill tower. And I had to tell Gershom that it didn't
do a bit of good informing me that Sirius was comparatively close to
us, as it stood only nine light-years away. I remembered how he had
explained that light travels one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles
a second, and that there are thirty million seconds in a year, so that
a light-year is about five and a half million million of miles. But
when he started to tell me that some of the so-called photographic
stars are thirty-two thousand light-years away from us my imagination
just curled up and died. It didn't mean anything to me. It couldn't. I
tried in vain to project my puny little soul through all that space.
At first it was rather bewildering. Then it grew into something
touched with grandeur. Then it took on an aspect of awfulness. And
from that it grew into a sort of ghastliness, until the machinery of
the mind choked and balked and stopped working altogether, like an
overloaded motor. I had to reach out in the cold air and catch hold of
Gershom's arm. I felt a hunger to cling to something warm and human.

"We call this world of ours a pretty big world," Gershom was saying.
"But look at Betelgeuse up there, which Michelson has been able to
measure. He has, at least, succeeded in measuring the angle at the eye
that Betelgeuse subtends, so that after estimating its parallax as
given by a heliometer, it's merely a matter of trigonometry to work
out the size of the star. And he estimated Betelgeuse to be two
hundred and sixty million miles in diameter. That means it would take
twenty-seven million of our suns to equal it in bulk. So that this big
world of ours, which takes so many weeks to crawl about on the fastest
ships and the fastest t