Man—(man) n. pl. men (men) l. An individual intelligent life-form.

2. All intelligent life-forms, collectively. 3. (Obsolete) A male adult Terran.

4. (Obsolete) A member of the species homo sapiens.

--United Galactic Federation Issue Dictionary, Terran Edition

I

The little red light shouldn't have been shining. But it was.

A minute ago the captain of the starship Infinity had been scanning the control panel with his main eye, and resting with his extended module on the bridge. Then the sensors had informed him that there was an object in front of the powerful vessel.

Nothing was supposed to exist in hyperspace. It was defined as NON-space.

Captain Nealve stood up and stretched the long, trim, powerful muscles in his six tentacle-legs. He pushed a button on the instrument panel before him. The message on the view-screen read NXT, QNV…OBJECT IS TOO BIG TO MEASURE WITH PRESENT SENSOR…FIELD INCREASE TO C3…END.

After several more tries, Nealve gave up for “lunch.”

II

Actually, Nealve was a plant, in the sense that he got his energy from photosynthesis, so he didn't eat lunch. But other crew members did. There was another plant on board, like himself. So he and Zyfito would talk and laugh with the others, animals, at lunch time.

The Sirian was exclaiming, “I always thought there was something damn funny about Sector MGT9! How come there are no stars?”

“Maybe there are, but they're too distant to detect,” countered Lisa, a Terran.

“That's ridiculous,” explained Mezar, who loved a good argument. “It—oh, hello, Captain.”

Nealve smiled, given that it was a human expression. “Hello, enjoying your lunch?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke? Of course not,” laughed the crablike being, as he crammed more food into his mouths. “Why can't they serve something decent?”

The Terran was laughing so hard that she nearly fell out of her seat. “Let's get back to business,” she suggested. “What's this thing made out of?”

“Perhaps it is Lox,” cracked Nealve, observing for the thousandth time the humor response that so interested him.

III

Nealve loped down the corridor on six legs. He was confronted with a glistening white wall. He pressed a button and he was in the bridge, filled with bright blinking lights and busy people. He came down the middle until he was at the gracefully arched module support. Stepping on a metal plate on the gleaming arch, he let it carry him upward towards the star-broken blackness of the bridge's clear domed top. He was gently propelled through the automatic sliding doors, through the hexagonal doorway and into his strangely contorted chair. He pressed the switch marked “sensor.” After going through everything the giant computer had, he had still drawn a blank. It was REALLY strange.

IV

What was out there? It was thrilling, yet inwardly disturbing, to run up against something so totally unknown. If the computer couldn't analyze it—and it was the first time the computer had failed—observation was necessary. Sorting through the essential data he had about his crew, Nealve selected Zyfito for the job.

V

The sled's spotlights glinted off something ahead. “Mezar requesting manual over-ride of ship's force-field surrounding airlock 8.”

“Granted.”

Inside of a circular area the shine disappeared. He activated the drive motor and directed the sled through.

Although he could not be sure (it might have been an illusion) it seemed to Mezar that the Infinity was rotating ever so slowly, almost undetectably, as it hung like a spindle in space. She was symmetrical, with a long slender neck flaring out at one end to support the bullet-shaped life-section. By a tremendous application of will power, Mezar swung the sled around and left the view. He leaned against the acceleration, aiming at the starless part of space. The object was so impenetrably black that he had to watch the sensor to see if he was near it. Suddenly, there it was, and he had to activate a retro-thrust motor. It caught him off-balance, and he spun around hard, slowing on the accelerator to control his momentum.

He got the sled turned around right and continued under low acceleration, creeping along until he bumped the object. He still could not see it, and for an instant he wondered if he was blind. The grapple wouldn't stick—as though there was nothing there. He reached into a compartment of the sled and pulled out a tractor grapple—a thick disk about half a milli in diameter. Also he removed a dimensional matter/energy converter. He placed the grapple on the deck of the sled and the M/E converter on top of that. He then touched a contact switch on the side of the grapple, and the converter was held immovably in place of a tractor field. He activated the converter and a microscopic amount of ship's waste was converted directly to pure heat energy and played on a spot on the wall. As soon as the wall became glowing, he would take a spectroscopic reading of it.

It didn't take him long to discover that the wall was not glowing. He turned off the converter and approached the wall. Mezar noticed that the temperature gauge of his pressure suit registered a tremendous heat increase in the space around him. But the heat reading of the wall showed it at ABSOLUTE ZERO. The wall had not conducted any of the heat at all! It was NON-MATERIAL!

VI

The room was an octagon of silver-shining steel. Along the walls were protrusions; small modules containing controls capable of conjuring up any reference needed. In the center of the room a flat black oblong lay, topped by a chromium slab: the conference table.

Nealve pressed a button on the table next to him. This triggered a signal in the translators of the top officers.

With a hum, the massive doors opened. Nealve ran to the board and withdrew the information the sensors had obtained on the wall now before the ship. That latest message had been NXT7QNY SHAPE OF OBJECT—SPHERE. 20097481 Z'S DIAMETER END.

Nealve was stunned. THAT WAS BIGGER THAN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE!

He had new instructions fed in. POSITION S.S. INFINITY / NXT7QNU. Again he watched the sequence of green lights blink across the four million modules. This time the blue light flashed. The figures were even more startling. What they boiled down to was that the S.S. Infinity was twenty A's inside the sphere. The United Galactic Federation Starship Infinity had run into the edge of the Universe.

“The end of Man is in sight,” Zyfito broke the silence to proclaim.

“And just what do you mean by that?” Lisa asked.

“This: in 1950 the Mainoids built their first starship. With it, we traveled to Sirius and established contact with the Sirians. They practically went wild at our technology, and when offered the chance to become part of our government, they accepted. That was the beginning of the United Galactic Federation. After that we invited all civilized worlds to join us. Now we have become intergalactic. What will we do next?”

“Just keep on organizing, I suppose.”

“Forever? The Universe is only 20.097,481 Z's in diameter, remember?”

“Well, what WILL we do next?”

Zyfito shifted comfortably. “Perhaps some Second Step in progress is necessary.”

VII

Noron walked over, shoved his television camera into Zyfito's face, and demanded, “What's this nonsense I've been hearing about first steps and second steps?”

Zyfito frowned. He wished as hard as he could that Noron would go away, but it didn't help. He wanted to just sit here in the lounge and think. “So who wants to know?”

“I do! It's my ship, isn't it?” replied Noron.

“No, it isn't,” Zyfito exploded. “It's Captain Nealve's ship, and I wish you'd get that through that safety deposit box you call a skull!" (Noron had a robotic body.)

Ignoring the outburst, Noron said, “So okay…will you answer my question?”

“It's just an idea. It seems like man has evolved. Exploring the Universe is the first step. Now he has to stop and move in an altogether different direction.”

“Boy, that's stupid.”

VIII

The dimensium crystal glowed dully in the dark. The sub-light drive engines forced the starship on. The speed built, built! The magnetic field surrounding the ship, pulling it towards the crystal, tightened. The crystal glowed brilliantly. The ship strained to accelerate into the black of space. The drives reached their limit and the magnetic field burst into space. Suddenly the infinite color spectrum of hyperspace tore open and the ship crashed through.

Onward!

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