hy all the hard work? They couldn't do as good
a job as an experienced astronomer, so they decided to limit their
observations to those necessary to retrace their path to Earth.

"But we want to investigate for planets to land on, don't we?" asked
Morey.

"Sure," agreed Fuller. "But do we have to hunt at random for them? Can't
we look for stars like our own sun? Won't they be more apt to have
planets like Sol's?"

"It's an idea," replied Morey.

"Well, why not try it then?" Fuller continued logically. "Let's pick out
a G-0 type sun and head for it."

They were now well out toward the edge of the Galaxy, some thirty
thousand light years from home. Since they had originally headed out
along the narrow diameter of the lens-shaped mass of stars that forms
our Island Universe, they would reach the edge soon.

"We won't have much chance of finding a G-0 this far out," Arcot pointed
out. "We're about out of stars. We've left most of the Galaxy behind
us."

"Then let's go on to another of the galactic nebulae," said Morey,
looking out into the almost unbroken night of intergalactic space. Only
here and there could they see a star, separated from its nearest
neighbor by thousands of light years of empty space.

"You know," said Wade slowly, "I've been wondering about the progress
along scientific lines that a race out here might make. I mean, suppose
that one of those lonely stars had planets, and suppose intelligent life
evolved on one of those planets. I think their progress would be much
slower."

"I see what you mean," Arcot said. "To us, of Earth, the stars are
gigantic furnaces a few light years away. They're titanic tests tubes of
nature, with automatic reading devices attached, hung in the sky for us
to watch. We have learned more about space from the stars than all the
experiments of the physicists of Earth ever secured for us. It was in
the atoms of the suns that we first counted the rate of revolutions of
the electrons about their nuclei."

"Couldn't they have watched their own sun?" Fuller asked.

"Sure, but what could they compare it with? They couldn't see a white
dwarf from here. They couldn't measure the parallax to the nearest star,
so they would have no idea of stellar distances. They wouldn't know how
bright S Doradus was. Or how dim Van Maanen's star was."

"Then," Fuller said speculatively, "they'd have to wait until one of
their scientists invented the telectroscope."

Arcot shook his head.