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James W. Loewen is the bestselling and award-winning author of
Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher
Columbus, and Sundown Towns (all published by The New Press) as
well as Teaching What Really Happened, The Mississippi Chinese,
and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He has won the
American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for
Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, the Spirit of America Award
from the National Council for the Social Studies, the Gustavus Myers
Outstanding Book Award, and the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award from
the American Sociological Association. Loewen is professor emeritus
of sociology at the University of Vermont and lives in Washington,
D.C.
 ALSO BY JAMES W. LOEWEN

The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The

“Great Truth” About the “Lost Cause” (editor, with
Edward H. Sebesta)

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get

Wrong

Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher

Columbus

The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White

Mississippi: Conflict and Change (with Charles Sallis

et al.)

Social Science in the Courtroom

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American

Racism
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the
Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited
About Doing History
© 1995, 2007, 2018 by James W. Loewen
Preface © 2018 by James W. Loewen
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the
publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to:
Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

ILLUSTRATION AND TEXT CREDITS

13, National Archives; 15, Smithsonian Institution; 44, Lee Boltin; 49, 58, Library of
Congress; 59, New York Public Library; 109, Library of Congress; 112, Smithsonian
Institution; 115, Library of Congress; 119, D. W. Meinig/Yale University Press; 120, Library
of Congress; 129, Division of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Sites, Georgia Department of
Natural Resources; 133, Amway Environmental Foundation; 169, Scott Nearing; 187,
Collection of architectural toys and games, Canadian Centre for Architecture/Centre
Canadien d’Architecture, Montréal, acquired with the support of Bell Québec; 202,
Mississippi Department of Archives and History; 205, Andrea Ades Vasquez, American Social
History Project; 210, Miller Brewing Co.; 219 (“What Did You Learn in School Today?” by
Tom Paxton), © 1962, 1990 Cherry Lane Music Publ. Co., all rights reserved, used by
permission; 223, Bettmann/Corbis; 246, 247, 248, AP/Wide World Photos; 249 (left) Ronald
L. Haeberle/Life magazine © Time Warner, (right) Bettmann/Corbis; 251, Fred Ward/Black
Star; 272, Walter Reed Army Medical Center; 277, Mother Jones; 283, Boy Scouts of
America; 310, The Norman Rockwell Agency.

Originally published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 1995
This edition published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2018
Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

ISBN 978-1-62097-455-1 (ebook)

CIP data is available

The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and
understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These
books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed
group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent
media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books;
librarians; and above all by our authors.

www.thenewpress.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to all American history teachers
who teach against their textbooks
(and their ranks keep growing)
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO THE FIRST EDITION

THE PEOPLE LISTED BELOW in alphabetical order talked with me,

commented on chapters, suggested sources, corrected my mistakes,
or provided other moral or material aid. I thank them very much.
They are: Ken Ames, Charles Arnaude, Stephen Aron, James Baker,
Jose Barreiro, Carol Berkin, Sanford Berman, Robert Bieder, Bill
Bigelow, Michael Blakey, Linda Brew, Tim Brookes, Josh Brown,
Lonnie Bunch, Vernon Burton, Claire Cuddy, Richard N. Current, Pete
Daniel, Kevin Dann, Martha Day, Margo Del Vecchio, Susan Dixon,
Ariel Dorfman, Mary Dyer, Shirley Engel, Bill Evans, John Fadden,
Patrick Ferguson, Paul Finkelman, Frances FitzGerald, William
Fitzhugh, John Franklin, Michael Frisch, Mel Gabler, James Gardiner,
John Garraty, Elise Guyette, Mary E. Haas, Patrick Hagopian, William
Haviland, Gordon Henderson, Mark Hilgendorf, Richard Hill, Mark
Hirsch, Dean Hoge, Jo Hoge, Jeanne Houck, Frederick Hoxie, David
Hutchinson, Carolyn Jackson, Clifton H. Johnson, Elizabeth Judge,
Stuart Kaufman, David Kelley, Roger Kennedy, Paul Kleppner, J.
Morgan Kousser, Gary Kulik, Jill Laramie, Ken Lawrence, Mary
Lehman, Steve Lewin, Garet Livermore, Lucy Loewen, Nick Loewen,
Barbara M. Loste, Mark Lytle, John Marciano, J. Dan Marshall, Juan
Mauro, Edith Mayo, James McPherson, Dennis Meadows, Donella
Meadows, Dennis Medina, Betty Meggars, Milton Meltzer, Deborah
Menkart, Donna Morgenstern, Nanepashemet, Janet Noble, Roger
Norland, Jeff Nygaard, Jim O’Brien, Wardell Payne, Mark
Pendergrast, Larry Pizer, Bernice Reagon, Ellen Reeves, Joe Reidy,
Roy Rozensweig, Harry Rubenstein, Faith Davis Ruffins, John Salter,
Saul Schniderman, Barry Schwartz, John Anthony Scott, Louis Segal,
Ruth Selig, Betty Sharpe, Brian Sherman, David Shiman, Beatrice
Siegel, Barbara Clark Smith, Luther Spoehr, Jerold Starr, Mark Stoler,
Bill Sturtevant, Lonn Taylor, Linda Tucker, Harriet Tyson, Ivan Van
Sertima, Herman Viola, Virgil J. Vogel, Debbie Warner, Barbara
Woods, Nancy Wright, and John Yewell.
Three institutions helped materially. The Smithsonian Institution
awarded me two senior postdoctoral fellowships. Members of its
staff provided lively intellectual stimulation, as did my fellow fellows
at the National Museum of American History. Interns at the
Smithsonian from the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and
especially Portland State University chased down errant facts. The
flexible University of Vermont allowed me to go on leave to work on
this book, including a sabbatical leave in 1993. Finally, The New
Press, André Schiffrin, and especially my editor, Diane Wachtell,
provided consistent encouragement and intelligent criticism.

TO THE SECOND EDITION

AS I ENDURED THE MORAL and intellectual torture of subjecting
myself to six new high school American history textbooks in 2006–
07, the following assisted in important ways: Cindy King, David
Luchs, Susan Luchs, Natalie Martin, Jyothi Natarajan, the Life Cycle
Institute and Department of Sociology at Catholic University of
America, and Joey the guide dog in training. Many of the folks
thanked for their assistance with the first edition—including those at
The New Press—also helped this time. So did Amanda Patten at
Simon & Schuster.
 CONTENTS

Preface: Lies My Teacher Told Me in the Age of Alternative Facts

Introduction to the Second Edition

Introduction: Something Has Gone Very Wrong
1 Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-making
2 1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus
3 The Truth About the First Thanksgiving
4 Red Eyes
5 “Gone With the Wind”: The Invisibility of Racism in American
History Textbooks
6 John Brown and Abraham Lincoln: The Invisibility of Antiracism
in American History Textbooks
7 The Land of Opportunity
8 Watching Big Brother: What Textbooks Teach About the Federal
Government
9 See No Evil: Choosing Not to Look at the War in Vietnam
10 Down the Memory Hole: The Disappearance of the Recent Past
11 Progress Is Our Most Important Product
12 Why Is History Taught Like This?
13 What Is the Result of Teaching History Like This?
Afterword: The Future Lies Ahead—and What to Do About Them
Notes
Appendix
Index
 PREFACE

LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME IN THE AGE OF ALTERNATIVE FACTS

F
OR YEARS, as I have spoken around the United States about
how we get history wrong, I have promised audiences that
they can buy Lies My Teacher Told Me with no fear that it will
become obsolete. “There will never be a third edition,” I
pledge. The first edition had come out in 1995, based on my
intensive reading of twelve high school U.S. history textbooks. For
the second edition in 2007, I read only six new books, partly owing
to publisher consolidation, but also because reading them is so
tedious. “Nothing could get me to read another dozen high school
history textbooks,” I tell my audiences. “They are just too boring.”
Those statements are serious. Usually I then add, “Took me years of
psychotherapy to get over it the last time.” So this new paperback is
not a third edition. The only new words in it are in this preface. Lies
My Teacher Told Me may have new significance, however, owing to
detrimental developments in America’s recent public discourse.
 I’m not the only reader who hates to read history textbooks. So
do state and local textbook rating committees. Consider this: the
2007 edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me showed that two textbooks,
A History of the United States and America: Pathways to the Present,
were nearly identical for page after page. A year earlier, I had
brought that startling fact to the attention of the New York Times,
resulting in a front-page story, “Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in
Originality.”1 But why was I the only person to note the similarity?
For more than a year before I got them, rating committees across
the nation—statewide in half our states, district-wide in the rest—
supposedly had been reading and rating both books. Why didn’t any
of them notice? Surely because their members—many of whom are
themselves busy high school history teachers—couldn’t bear to read
these ponderous volumes. Most likely they looked over the books but
didn’t actually read them.
Indeed, state and local textbook committees should not select
any 1,200-page hardcover book. As the introduction to the second
edition points out, there is no pedagogical justification for such huge
tomes. Their only reason for being is economic. These textbooks
now retail for more than $100 and cost more than $70 even when
ordered in quantity by states and school districts. It’s easy to
understand why publishers keep on making them. It’s harder to
understand why school districts keep buying them.
Surely the desired end product of high school U.S. history
courses is graduates who can think clearly, distinguish evidence from
opinion, and separate truth from what comedian Stephen Colbert
famously called “truthiness.” Unfortunately, history textbooks and
teachers who teach mainly from them do not help students build
these capabilities. Instead, they impart information.
Mislabeled as “CRITICAL THINKING” in the early pages of the
teacher’s edition of Paul Boyer’s Holt American Nation is this
example: “How many days were in the Tzolkin and the Haab
calendars?” For those of you who have somehow forgotten, these
are two different Mayan calendars. I cannot imagine why Paul Boyer
thinks students need to remember these words, but the teacher’s
edition goes on to provide the answers: “Students should indicate
that the Tzolkin had 260 days and the Haab had 365 days.” That’s all
it says!2
Two obvious questions arise, queries that do reflect thinking:
Why would anyone invent a calendar as “wrong” as the Tzolkin?
How did the Mayans invent a calendar as accurate as the Haab?
Also, did they invent adjustments, like leap year, for even closer
accuracy?
Exploring the first topic might prompt students to relate the
Tzolkin calendar to today’s religious calendars—Jewish, Muslim,
Hindu, and so on. Exploring the second might help students realize
that non-European people long ago, without telescopes and modern
science, nevertheless thought accurately about the world. Absent
any such context, learning these twigs (certainly we are not
encountering a forest or even a tree here) has nothing to do with
developing critical thinking.
Other “critical thinking” exercises in U.S. history textbooks suffer
from a second form of pathetic pedagogy: they merely invite
unsubstantiated speculation. Consider this “CRITICAL THINKING”
item from The Americans: “Why did European explorers believe they
could simply claim lands for their home countries, even though these
lands were already populated?” This is indeed a serious question.
But I doubt that anyone at McDougal Littell really wants students to
buckle down and devote the several days that would be required to
begin a serious answer. I doubt that the five putative authors of the
book have any idea the publisher even posed it.3 Teachers who use
the question, I suspect, simply invite students to opine off the top of
their heads. Critical thinking requires assembling data to back up
one’s opinion. Otherwise students may falsely conclude that all
opinions are somehow equal. Textbooks pose scores of questions
like these. They don’t pose them seriously.
Sometimes the information that textbooks impart is completely
correct. Sometimes it is flatly wrong. And sometimes we—the
community of scholars—just don’t know for sure. The second and
fourth chapters of Lies My Teacher Told Me are filled with examples
of that third kind—“facts” of which we cannot (yet) be sure. Did the
first people in this hemisphere walk across Beringia? Did a horrific
explosion from space decimate the population of North America
13,000 years ago? Did people from Egypt reach the Americas long
before Columbus? Instead of teaching such items as facts or
omitting them as false, textbooks and teachers should present them
as hypotheses. Then students could learn how to marshal evidence
on each side, come to a conclusion, but still reserve room for doubt.
Way back in 1974, I led a group of professors and students at
Tougaloo College to write a new textbook of Mississippi history,
Mississippi: Conflict and Change. Even though we intended it for
ninth graders, we believed our job was to encourage students to
think, not just “learn.” In an early boxed question, we referred
readers to nine maps sprinkled throughout the book, “to try to
answer this question: do soil resources attract industry? If not, try to
discover what does bring about industrial growth.” We went on to
say, “The answer is not easy. Possibly it involves the attitudes of a
society, attitudes based on the kind of society it is; the society itself,
in turn, was based long ago, in part, on the kind of land lying
underneath.” Our hope was to get students thinking about causality
in history, a topic mostly absent from U.S. high school textbooks. We
also intended to increase students’ map literacy, so they could see
how patterns from a shaded map or dot map might relate to a
landform map. Again, nothing like this occurs in any high school
history textbook. They merely ask students to opine.
An early page of Mississippi: Conflict and Change armed readers
with ten “Questions to Ask of Historical Sources.” We pointed out
that writers’ ideologies and locations in social structure usually
influence what they write. At the same time, we noted, any author
may write the truth, so the reader “must sift through his/her words,
separating truth from falsehood. These questions can help:

1. When and where did the author live?

2. For what purpose did s/he write? What audience did s/he
have in mind?
 3. What was the author’s social class?
4. What was his/her race? sex? age?
5. What were his/her basic assumptions about black people?
about white people? about Indians or others?
6. What was his/her ideology?
7. Does s/he cite facts to support his/her conclusions?
8. Does what s/he says about Mississippi seem to be true from
your own experience?
9. How do his/her conclusions compare with those of other
authors you have read? Is s/he biased?
10. Is what s/he is talking about relevant to your life and to
present-day society?”

Some of the above queries are at least mildly subversive. They

suggest readers should not only examine what an author wrote, but
also why. Four decades later, U.S. history textbooks still do not
provide students with similar tools for critical thinking. Textbooks
avoid provocative words like “ideology,” which means one’s
understanding of how the social world works.
Textbook authors also never invite students to critique their own
work. Again, our Mississippi textbook shows this can be done. For
example, we noted that only four of our twenty-five mini-biographies
were of women. “Has the book therefore been guilty of
discrimination against women?” we then asked. Such a question
implies that students can think for themselves, which then helps
them learn to do so. When students are not asked to assess, but
only to remember, they do not learn how to assess or how to think
for themselves.
I give these examples not to tout an old book, now out of print,
but to show that textbooks could help students develop critical
reading skills. Even before the web, when the mainstream media
were the main sources of news, students needed to read critically.
All too often reporters simply wrote stories based on press releases
by people in office. If a controversy erupted, newspapers did take
care to quote people on both sides, and TV news show hosts would
interview one person from each side. As usually performed, this
practice implied that the two points of view were basically equal,
morally and factually. Only a handful of newspapers and almost no
television stations did actual investigative journalism to disprove
false claims. Such “reporting” did not help readers become astute
sifters of information, because sometimes only one side was right.
My use of the past tense in the previous paragraph does not
mean that this shallow means of presenting “news” has stopped. On
the contrary, in two ways the web has made things worse. First, it
has jeopardized the finances of newspapers. When retailers found
they could reach potential customers more cheaply online, many
decreased advertising in newspapers. The country’s largest online
store, Amazon, rarely advertises in print. At the same time,
subscription revenue plummeted. When readers found they could
get headlines, sports news, crossword puzzles, and their horoscopes
online, many stopped subscribing to newspapers. As a result,
newspapers have had to shrink their staffs, especially their reporters
and editors, so even less investigative journalism now gets done. As
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump and inventor of the
term “alternative facts,” put it, “I’m old enough to remember when
news stations reported the news and didn’t just have a parade of
pundits going out there and opinionating.”4
Moreover, television news programs have learned that booking
flamboyant extremists on each side makes for more entertaining
viewing, hence higher ratings, than serious journalism. Again, this
means less real news gets presented, and the various viewpoints
that remain seem to be presented as moral and factual equivalents.5
Second, the plethora of outlets on the web means that people
can get news stories, including “fake news,” otherwise known as
hoaxes, that suit them. If they are left-wing, they can subscribe to
Daily Kos and Huffington Post. If they are right-wing, they can
subscribe to Breitbart or the Drudge Report.6 Less often do they
subscribe to outlets that provide several points of view. As a result,
their thinking rarely gets challenged, so they become still less likely
or able to assess information critically.
 I write during Donald Trump’s presidency. Even on clear matters
of public record, such as the size of the crowd that attended his
inauguration, President Trump has lied. To many Americans his lying
does not seem to matter. During the campaign, former Republican
campaign worker Salena Zito wrote famously and accurately that
“his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”7 This interesting
response diminishes the importance of truth in our culture. “They all
lie,” some Americans say, referring to politicians and also to the
media. Consequently there is no such thing as truth, so you might as
well simply believe (or choose not to question) the candidate or
news source that you like best. Cynicism has replaced skepticism.
Instead of truth and falsehood, there are facts and “alternative
facts,” to quote Conway. Luckily, some investigative journalism still
gets done.
The morning after the president’s inauguration, Trump’s press
secretary, Sean Spicer, apparently on order from the president, said,
“That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period.”
Kellyanne Conway defended the claim, using the phrase “alternative
facts.” The reporter questioning her responded, “Alternative facts are
not facts. They’re falsehoods.” The photos below offer evidence. This
was the first of many clashes between the new administration and
the media.
 The photo at left shows the crowd for Obama’s first inauguration,
January 20, 2009. At right is the crowd for Trump’s, January 20,
2017. (The curved roadway at the right, visible in both photos, offers
a consistent point of reference8.) Experts concluded that Trump’s
crowd was about a third as large as Obama’s.9
Trump and his supporters are hardly the first to decry the media.
George Washington complained that newspapers were trying “to
destroy the confidence which it is necessary the people should place
. . . in their public servants.”
As early as 1894, a cartoon by Frederick Burr Opper was accusing newspapers of printing
“fake news.”10

The masterminds of our war in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson and

Richard Nixon, tried to manipulate the media, which usually worked,
notoriously about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when they got
newspapers to report on enemy ship movements that didn’t exist.
That manipulation undermined the public’s confidence in the media
after the truth came out. Johnson and Nixon also tried to suppress
the media, also usually successfully, which again undermined the
media after the truth came out. When that did not work, both, along
with Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, attacked the media as
biased, wrong, and anti-American.11

Attacks on the media have also been common outside the federal
government. By 1960, John Birch Society members and others on
the right were disparaging “the mainstream liberal press.” For
decades many black intellectuals complained that the media shows
only what its white overseers let it show. Since Marx and Engels,
many leftists have claimed that the only ideas that get a media
platform in a capitalist society are the ideas of the capitalist class.
More recently, leftists have decried the “corporate overlords” of the
media, pointing to NBC’s ownership by General Electric, a key player
in the military-industrial complex, as an example.
Inadvertently, many academics have compounded the problem.
In a triumph of “postmodern thinking,” many historians now claim
there is no such thing as truth, or that “truth is socially constructed,”
as I have heard many a graduate student say.12 Writing in the
Chronicle of Higher Education, Leon Botstein, president of Bard
College, identified this trend in current thought, noting that “this
notion that there is no legitimate basis for privileging one point of
view over another now holds a good deal of sway.”13
When people say to me that there’s no such thing as truth, I
sometimes reply with a little shtick: “Right! And the Civil War began
in 1876, in Nevada. It grew from a pay dispute between the Union
Pacific Rail Road and its Chinese workers.”
“B-but that’s not true!” comes the reply.
“Bingo!” There is a bedrock of fact. The Civil War did not start in
1876 in Nevada, but in 1861 in South Carolina. It had nothing to do
with any railroad or Chinese Americans.
My example is too easy, some claim. It relies on wrong details,
while there is room for nuance and argument when it comes to
matters of interpretation. Sometimes this can be true, but Chapter 5
tells of perhaps a harder question, often considered a matter of
interpretation: Why did southern states secede, leading to the Civil
War? I have posed that question to audiences across the United
States. Four answers always emerge: for slavery, for states’ rights,
because of the election of Lincoln, and owing to issues about tariffs
and taxes. Then I ask them to vote for their best single answer.
Results have been remarkably uniform across the country. About 20
percent vote for slavery, 60 to 70 percent for states’ rights, 2 percent
for the election of Lincoln, and 10 to 18 percent for tariffs and taxes.
If we did history by majority vote, states’ rights would be the clear
winner.
In the world of evidence, however, states’ rights is the clear loser.
As Chapter 5 shows, when they left the Union, southern states said
nothing about states’ rights, or at least nothing positive. “Our
position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,”
announced Mississippi, and every other state said the same thing.
The evidence is clear and comes from many sources: secession was
all about slavery (and the ideology, white supremacy, that underlies
and rationalizes it). Those who say “states’ rights” are 180º wrong.
Evenhandedness is not appropriate. Evenhandedness is bad history.
So is throwing up our hands and saying, with “neopragmatic”
philosopher Richard Rorty, often cited by postmodern historians, “We
should drop the idea of truth.”14
There is no simple rule, like evenhandedness, to employ. There is
no shortcut to amassing evidence and assessing it. When
confronting a claim about the distant past or a statement about what
happened yesterday, students—indeed, all Americans—need to
develop informed skepticism, not nihilistic cynicism.
The problems we have pointed to with the media, elected
officials, websites, and academics all make it particularly hard to be
thoughtful about society today. Consequently, the education
Americans get in K–12 history, civics, and social studies classes is
more important now than ever.
Unfortunately, textbooks—as well as those teachers who teach
them, rather than teaching history while using them—aren’t up to
the task. About how people first got to the Americas, for example,
textbooks and teachers could let students marshal evidence on
behalf of one or another idea. The topic comes at the beginning of
the school year, which is fortunate, because students could then
build on these skills as they move on to the next topic and the next.
Instead, textbooks present “the answer” to “learn.” Authors who
have not bothered to keep up with the literature in archaeology and
the other relevant disciplines nevertheless pretend to know: people
walked across the Bering Strait during the last ice age, when the
ocean level had dropped. Even though most archaeologists have
moved on from that answer, history textbooks still tell students to
memorize it.
We must do better, and we can.
Decades ago, in Mississippi, I learned that history can be a
weapon. It had been used against my students, to keep them in
“their place.” (Chapter 5 tells this incident.) When I moved to
Vermont, I came to see that false history was a national problem,
not just a southern one. Mississippi exemplified the problem in more
extreme form, but the problem was national.
Since then, I have come to two additional conclusions. First, the
truth can set us free. That is, when we understand what really
happened in the past, then we know what to do to cause our nation
to remedy its problems in the present. The truth is, for example, that
African Americans and Native Americans are not less intelligent than
European Americans and Asian Americans. They test that way, true,
but underlying the disappointing test results are social causes,
including test bias and educational and social inequities, that we can
readily fix. So we do not need to fear the truth.
Second, there is a reciprocal relationship between truth about the
past and justice in the present. When we achieve justice in the
present, remedying some past event or practice, then we can face it
and talk about it more openly, precisely because we have made it
right. It has become a success story. Textbook coverage of the
internment of Japanese Americans during World War II provides an
example. History textbooks of the 1960s typically made no mention
of the subject or dismissed it in a short paragraph. By 2007,
however, they did much better: one book gave it two entire pages
complete with photographs of a camp surrounded by barbed wire.
Surely our passing a law in 1988 apologizing for the “grave injustice”
and paying $20,000 to each survivor of the camps played a role in
this improvement.
Conversely, a topic that is mystified or distorted in our history,
like secession, usually signifies a continuing injustice in the present,
like racism. Telling the truth about the past can help us make it right
from here on.
At least I hope so. That belief has motivated most of my
professional life, including the years I have spent on this book. I
believe that most Americans, once they understand why things are
as they are, will work to foster justice where there was unfairness
and truth where lies prevailed.
 INTRODUCTION

TO THE SECOND EDITION

I really like your book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. I’ve been
using it to heckle my history teacher from the back of the
room.
—HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT1

I just wanted to let you know that I don’t consider Lies My

Teacher Told Me outdated; I really don’t see much
improvement in textbooks at all!
—HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, SHERWOOD, AR2

I was expecting some liberal bullshit, but I thought it was

right on.
—WORKER, BAYER PHARMACEUTICALS, BERKELEY, CA3
R
EADERS NEW TO Lies My Teacher Told Me should go
straight to page one. This introduction tells old friends (and
enemies?) how this edition differs from the first and why it
came to be. Since it came to be largely because reader
response to the first edition was so positive, the
introduction seems self-congratulatory to me—another reason to skip
it. Lies My Teacher Told Me does take readers on a voyage of
discovery through our past, however, and some readers may want to
learn of the reactions of fellow passengers.
From the first day, readers made Lies a success. As its name
implies, The New Press was a small fledgling publisher without an
advertising budget; word of mouth caused Lies to sell. The book first
created a stir on the West Coast. “Although the book is considered
controversial by some, libraries in Alameda County [California] can’t
keep it on their shelves,” reported an article at California State
University at Hayward. A high school student wrote to the editor of
the San Francisco Examiner: “I was a poor (D-plus) student in
history until I read People’s History of the United States and Lies My
Teacher Told Me. After reading those two books, my GPA in history
rose to 3.8 and stayed there. If you truly want students to take an
interest in American history, then stop lying to them.”4 An early
review in the San Francisco Chronicle called Lies “an extremely
convincing plea for truth in education,” and my book spent several
weeks on the Bay Area bestseller list in 1995.5
Independent bookstores—the kind whose owners and clerks read
books and whose customers ask them for recommendations—spread
the buzz across North America. “Turns American history upside
down,” wrote “Joan” of Toronto in 1995 in a column called “Best New
Books Recommended by Leading Independent Bookstores.” “A
landmark book,” she went on, “a must read, not only for teachers of
history and those who write it, but for any thinking individual.”6 The
Nation, a national magazine, said that Lies “contains so much history
that it ends up functioning not just as a critique but also as a kind of
counter-textbook that retells the story of the American past.” Soon
Lies reached the bestseller lists in Boston; Burlington, Vermont; and
other cities. It was also a bestseller for the History and Quality
Paperback Book Clubs. In paperback, Lies went through more than
sixty printings at Simon & Schuster. From the launch of Amazon.com,
Lies has been the sales leader in its category (historiography). So far
as I can tell, Lies is the bestselling book by a living sociologist.7
Counting all editions, including Recorded Books, sales of the first
edition totaled about a million copies.
I wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me partly because I believed that
Americans took great interest in their past but had been bored to
tears by their high school American history courses. Readers’
reactions confirmed this belief. Their responses were not only wide,
but deep. “My history classes in high school, I found, were not
important to me or my life,” e-mailed one reader from the San
Francisco area, because they “did not make it relevant to what was
happening today.” Some adult readers had always blamed
themselves for their lack of interest in high school history. “For all
these years (I am forty-nine), I have had the opinion that I don’t like
history,” wrote a woman from Utah, “when in truth, what I don’t like
is illogic, or inconsistency. Thank you for your work. You have
changed my life.”
Many readers found the book to be a life-changing experience. A
forklift operator in Ohio, a forty-seven-year-old housewife in Denver,
a “do-gooder” in upstate New York were inspired to finish college or
graduate school and change careers by reading this book. “Words
cannot describe how much your book has changed me,” wrote a
woman from New York City. “It’s like seeing everything through new
eyes. The eyes of truth as I like to call it.” While readers repeat
adjectives like “shocked,” “stunned,” and “disillusioned,” many have
also found Lies to be uplifting.
To be sure, not every reaction was positive. Although one reader
“never could decide whether you were a Socialist or a Republican,”
others thought they could and that Lies suffers from a leftward bias.
“Marxist/hippie/socialist/anti-American/anti-Christian” commented
one reader at Amazon.com, who would be shocked to learn my real
feelings about capitalism. “What a piece of racist trash,” said an
anonymous postcard from El Paso. “Take your sour mind to Africa
where you can adjust that history.”
That was, of course, a white response—a very white response.
Very different has been the reaction from “Indian country.” A reader
who I infer is part-Indian wrote:

Your book Lies My Teacher Told Me, and especially the chapter “Red Eyes,” has
had an unprecedented effect on how I view the world. I have never felt
inclined to write a letter of approval for anything I’ve read before. Your
description of the Indian experience in the United States and, more
importantly, the concept of a syncretic American society has subtly, but
powerfully, changed my understanding of my country, and, in fact, my own
ancestry.

If, as Lies My Teacher Told Me shows, history is the least-liked

subject in American high schools, it is positively abhorred in Indian
country. There it is the record of five centuries of defeat. Yet,
properly understood, American history is not a record of Native
incompetence but of survival and perseverance. From speaking
before Native audiences in six states, I have come to understand to
what extent false history holds Native Americans down. I now
believe that only when they accurately understand their past—
including their recent past—will young American Indians find the
social and intellectual power to make history in the twenty-first
century. That understanding must include the concept of syncretism
—blending elements from two different cultures to come up with
something new. Syncretism is how cultures typically change and
survive, and all Americans need to understand that Native American
cultures, too, must change to survive. Natives as well as non-Natives
often labor under the misapprehension that “real” Indian culture was
those practices that existed before white contact. Actually, real
Indian culture is still being produced—by sculptors like Nalenik
Temela (page 133), musicians like Keith Secola, and American Indian
parents everywhere.
Lies has also enjoyed huge success among African Americans. In
the fall of 2004, for example, it reached number three on the
bestseller list of Essence magazine and was the only book on that
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Beyond the
stars
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Beyond the stars

Author: Ray Cummings

Illustrator: Jack Gaughan

Release date: February 9, 2024 [eBook #72913]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ace Books Inc, 1963

Credits: Marcia Brooks, Greg Weeks, Alex White & the online
Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at
http://www.pgdpcanada.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEYOND THE

STARS ***
 BEYOND THE STARS

BY RAY CUMMINGS

Ace Books Inc.

1120 Avenue of the Americas
 New York 36, N.Y.

Copyright ©, 1963, by Ace Books, Inc.

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any

evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

An Ace Book, by arrangement with

Gabrielle Cummings Waller.

Magazine version serialized in Argosy All-Story Magazine.

To
Donald A. Wollheim

With affectionate regard and appreciation

of his loyal friendship through the years.

Printed in U.S.A.
 RAY CUMMINGS’

novels in Ace editions:

THE MAN WHO MASTERED TIME (D-173)

BRIGANDS OF THE MOON (D-324)
BEYOND THE VANISHING POINT (D-331)
WANDL THE INVADER (D-497)
THE SHADOW GIRL (D-535)

ONE OF THEIR ATOMS—OUR UNIVERSE!

“The scene outside my window was a chaos: showers of
white sparks were rushing at us. I tried to shout a warning,
but instead I laughed with a touch of madness. I realized
then that these sparks were really stars—and they were
passing through us. I could see their luminous white points
beaming within the vehicle as the stream flowed through.
These stars were mere electrons and our vehicle
comparatively was a puff of vapor.”

Racing through the vast depths of space in a vehicle

larger than the universe itself—a fantastic concept and one
that only the mind of a master pioneering science-fiction
writer could conceive and then translate into a classic tale
of exciting adventure in a cosmos BEYOND THE STARS.
 Beyond the Stars

I
“CALLING FOR HELP!”
There is a saying in the Service that when Liner 40 N runs late
the whole world waits. It may be true enough; I suppose it is. But to
me, as Commander 3 of Liner 40 N on that night in May, 1998, it
was a particularly annoying truth.
For I was running late; at the Azores I was a good twenty-eight
minutes behind where I should have been, and it hardly made things
any easier for me to contemplate an impatient world awaiting me.
All the way from Madrid our port meter 8 had been giving
trouble. Then at 15 W. I had no sooner left the coast than a surge of
wind from the northwest had swung down upon us, and I lost a
good eight minutes trying unsuccessfully to climb over it. A mood of
ill-nature possessed me. I was just twenty-four years old, the
youngest of the three commanders who alternated on successive
flights of the 40 N; this was only my seventh circle since promotion
from the small equatorial liner of the East, and running the famous
40 N late under the eyes of a disapproving world disgruntled me.
At Meridian 45 W. the connecting Director at New York called me
up. The Northern Express, flying north on Meridian 74 W., was
already at New York waiting for me. The Director wasn’t very
pleasant about it. If I held up the express in its flight over the Pole
and down 106 E., every connection in the Eastern Hemisphere would
be disarranged.
The mercurial screen on my desk glowed with its image of the
director’s reproving face.
“You can’t expect McIleny to make up your lost time,” he told me.
“Not on a night like this. The Bureau reports head winds for him all
up to Baffin Land.”
 “I’m having a few head winds myself,” I retorted.
But I grinned, and he caught my grin, and smiled back at me.
“Do the best you can,” he said. And disconnected.
I made no ocean stops; but the director at 55 was a fussy fellow.
I was due to pass him at ten thousand feet, to clear the north-south
lanes for the non-stop Polar freighters; and with this wind and the
fog which was now upon me I knew I would receive a sharp rebuke
from 55 if I passed too high.
A hum sounded at one of the dozen mercurial screens beside me.
Director 55 already annoyed! But it was not he. The small rectangle
of screen glowed with its formless silver blurs, took form and color. A
girl’s face, ash-blond hair wound around her forehead, her white
throat, with the square neck of a pale-blue jacket showing. And her
earnest azure eyes searching mine, lighting with recognition as on
her own screen she caught my image. Alice!
My annoyance at the threatened director’s call-down died. I
seized my headphone, heard her voice.
“Len?”
“Yes, Alice.”
“I’ve been trying to get you all the way from Greenwich. They
wouldn’t let me through, not until I told them it was important—I
had to get you.” She spoke fast against the moment when the Vocal
Traffic Timer would cut her off. “Len, grandfather wants you to come
up and see us. At once—when you’re through with this circle. Will
you?”
She saw the question on my lips.
“Don’t ask me now—no time, now, Len. But it’s important, and
grandfather . . . do you know where I can find Jim? We want him
too, you and Jim.”
“He’s in the Anglo-Detective Division, London Air Service, New
York Branch.”
“Yes, I know. But he’s in the air tonight. How can I get him?” Her
smile was whimsical. “When I asked for a tracer, the Timer over
there told me to get the hell off the air. I guess he thought I wanted
to find Jim just to tell him I loved him.”
Her image blurred.
 The Mid-Atlantic Timer’s voice broke in. “Fifteen seconds. Last
call.”
“I’ll get Jim,” I said hastily. “Bring him with me. Soon as we can
get there.”
“Yes. We’re waiting for you. And Len, you won’t need to sleep
first. You can sleep after you get here. And tell Jim—”
A click silenced her. The screen went dark.
What could she want of me? It was pleasant to have seen and
heard from her, this granddaughter of old Dr. Weatherby. In the
stress of getting my appointment and continuous examinations and
tests between voyages, I had not seen Alice since leaving the
Equatorial Run. Nor Jim Dunkirk either.
I went after him now. The tracers could not rebuff me as they
did Alice. They found him at last—at 120°E., 85°N. He was coming
up over the Pole, and down Baffin Bay making for New York. His jolly
face, with its ever present grin and the shock of fiery red hair above
it, glowed on my screen.
“Well, Len, say, it’s great to see you!”
“Alice just called me—Alice Weatherby. Doc wants us both—you
and me—something important. Wants to see us. You off at New
York?”
“You bet,” he grinned. “Had a chase down through Tibet; every
cursed murderer thinks the grand idea is for him to swoop it for
Lhasa and parts unknown. I have one here, now. When I get him in
his airy cage I’m off duty for a while. Alice wants us?”
“Yes. I don’t know what for. She didn’t have a chance to—”
“Fifteen seconds. Last call.”
“The infernal bedamned it is!” came Jim’s belligerent voice.
“Last call, Liner 40 N—limit ninety seconds by general orders.”
The Timer was imperturbably impersonal.
But not Jimmy Dunkirk. “You cut me off,” he roared. “I’ll have the
General Inspector tell you who you are in thirty seconds. This is
Chief Dunkirk, Patrol Liner A 22, Anglo-Detective Division. I’ve got a
murderer here—understand? A murderer! Important official
business.”
 With the Timer cowed, Jimmy would have talked all night. But I
was on duty.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll call you at your office after you get in.”
“Old Weatherby wants us?”
“Yes. Off, Jim.”

It was well toward dawn when I hooked up with him; together

we flew up the river, where on the Tappan Zee, at the northern
borders of the city, Dr. Weatherby had his home.
Alice was under the landing stage when we descended in the
hand lift.
“Len, Jim, I’m glad to see you.” She gave each of us one of her
cool white hands. “Grandfather is waiting to—Jim, let go of my hand;
you’re squeezing my fingers. That hurts!”
He flung it away. He had always done that with Alice, to devil her.
“Next time,” she said soberly, “you bow to me. That’s all.”
He laughed gleefully. “Right. Sure, that’s safer when you look so
pretty.”
She was indeed pretty. A tall, slender girl—an inch taller than
Jim. Big, serious blue eyes she had, and that braided mass of ash-
blond hair. She was dressed now in a pale blue jacket like a tunic, to
her thighs, and long silver stockings from beneath the China-silk
trousers that flared above her knees.
She smiled at Jim. “I’d never take you seriously. Dolores says—”
Jim sobered. “Dolores.”
“Dolores is waiting to see you both. She’s very excited.”
Dolores, the little sister of Alice. I never saw her without a pang.
In this great age of science she is a pathetic example of what
science cannot do.
Our wonderful, marvelous age of science! We pride ourselves on
it. But this girl had been born blind, and she was one of those rare
cases where all the learned surgeons of our learned world could not
bring the light to her.
Jim called, “ ’Lo there, Dolores.”
“Jimmy! Is that you? I’m so glad to see you!”
 See him! There was, to me, a grim pathos in her conventional
words.
“Len is here too, Dolores,” Alice said gently.
“Len? Oh, how do you do, Len?” Her hand reached and touched
my hair in recognition. Then she turned back to Jim. “I’m glad you’re
here, Jimmy. They told me you were coming.”
He swept her up, whirled her through the air like a child, and set
her gasping upon her feet.
“Well, well, how’s my little friend Dolores, huh? Want to do that
again? Come on!” He whirled her again and panted. “Getting too big
. . . all grown up. Say, Len, she’s prettier every day, isn’t she?”

Dr. Weatherby was seventy-five years old at this time when he

sent for Jim and me. He met us on the lower terrace of his home. He
was a squat, powerfully thick-set figure, with long ape-like arms and
a thick back slightly humped.
His head was overlarge, made to seem larger by its great mass
of iron-gray hair. His face, large of feature, was unlined, save by the
marks of character stamped upon it. A kindly face it was, smiling
with friendship, but always stern in repose.
“Well, my boys, you came promptly,” he greeted us. “That’s fine.
Come in.” His huge hands gripped us with a strength that made Jim
pretend to wince and grin mockingly at Alice. “Come in. We’ll sit in
the garden upstairs.”
He led us up the inclines through his rambling house and to its
roof, where in the starlight we sat on leafy couches in a garden
blooming with flowers, shrubs and coned ferns.
It was about an hour before dawn, cloudless, moonless—a
brilliant firmament of gems strewn upon their purple velvet. Venus
was rising now to be the morning star and herald the dawn; red
Mars, lying opposite and low, glowed like the ashless end of a
cigarro.
Below us over the parapet of roof was the crowded countryside,
wan and still in the starlight, with the thread of river beyond—a river
of silver with the blue-white lights of its boats skimming the surface.
A few planes were overhead, the small local airline from Albany
skimming past with a whir of its fans.
Dr. Weatherby chatted with us, rebuked me smilingly for running
the 40 N late, and listened gravely, with occasional interested
questions, to Jim’s vivid account of his world chase after the
murderer, while Dolores snuggled up against him, thrilled, and
timidly held his hand.
“Well, well, you boys do have an interesting life. Youth coming
forward. Youth can do anything—the world waits on youth.”
“It did tonight,” said Alice, with a sly glance at me.
I wondered what Dr. Weatherby wanted us for. He had not hinted
at it. He had spoken of a morning meal, and then we must have
some sleep.
Then, abruptly he said, “I should not have sent for you unless it
was important. It is. The fact that I need you—” He stopped as
suddenly as he had begun.
I don’t know why a great tenseness should have fallen upon us
all. But it did. I felt it. And in the insuing silence little Dolores left Jim
and crept to her grandfather, leaning against him.
I began, lamely, “We came, of course—”

Dr. Weatherby was staring off at the stars moodily, with a look so
far away I could have fancied he was gazing, not at the stars, but
beyond them. And then he tore himself back, and smiled, lighting a
cigarro, flipping the torch at me and asking me to step on it.
“I have so much to tell you,” he said. “I hardly know how or
where to begin. You know, of course, something of my life, my work.
“Leonard, and you, Jim, I believe you’re familiar in a general way
with what the physicists think of the atom? Radiant matter—these
electro-rays that seem to solve everything and yet only add to the
mystery?
“You know that savants would tell us that space is curved; so
Einstein told us years ago? Well, I will tell you this. To-morrow, after
you have slept, I believe I can make clear to you the real
construction of our material universe.”
 His hand checked us. “I have been working since 1970 along
these lines. Alice recently has been helping me. And then Dolores—
“This child here, in the dark, it has been given her to see things
denied to our science. Years and years ago a scientist proclaimed
that thoughts themselves are a mere vibration, like light and heat
and sound, and all these mysterious rays and flying electrons—
electricity itself. They are all the same, though we name them
differently.”
He had been talking swiftly, but quietly. “Tell them, Dolores.”
“A big open space,” she said slowly. “Mountains and a broad
valley. A cliffside. People there on a ledge. A young man and a
young woman, very white and pale, with blood on the man’s face.
They were standing on a height, with a dark cavern behind them.
“Other people, or monsters down in the valley: something vague
but horrible as a nightmare with a nameless horror. And the man
was calling, Help. Not the word. I could not hear that, but I knew.
Calling to me. He keeps on calling. I can hear him so often. Calling
to me!”
She said it so strangely. At once it seemed uncanny, weird,
almost gruesome. A thrill very akin to fear ran over me. This was not
science. But Dr. Weatherby’s calm, precise voice was scientific
enough.
“That was several years ago. We have found since that she is
receiving thought-vibrations, not from here on earth, not from the
planets, or the stars, but from beyond the stars. The greater realms
out there, suspected to exist for so long, which now I know and can
prove to exist!”
His voice had risen in an excitement, an exaltation. He went on
more swiftly, “But all that is nothing. I wanted you to come here and
help me. Dolores has had thoughts from out there beyond the stars
. . . and her own answering thoughts have been answered.
Communication!
“Oh, I have guarded against delusion! I have sent messages
through Dolores of scientific import, and been answered with
scientific thoughts all beyond this child’s comprehension.
Communications with the great unknown—the infinity of distance
unfathomable.
“That started a year ago. Now I have done more. I have learned
how to get there. I can transport myself, my girls and you! I am
ready to make the journey now. That is why I want you, and need
you. We are going. We want you to come with us, out beyond the
stars!”

II
THE DEAD WHITE THING
“In the plan of the universe,” said Dr. Weatherby, “we find a
conception gigantic, infinite, and yet it all has a simplicity. I want
most earnestly to have you understand me, Leonard and Jim.”
He gazed at us with a gentle smile. We had had our morning
meal, and had slept long and heavily, and now it was evening
twilight. We sat in the big livingroom on the lower floor of the
Weatherby home. Dolores, as before, cuddled against her
grandfather’s side. Alice busied about the house, but presently she
joined us. Dr. Weatherby’s manner was as earnest as his words. He
added, looking at me, “I want to be very clear, Leonard. This thing
that we are to do—this journey, in which if you will not join me I
shall make alone—”
“By the infernal, you won’t make it alone while I’m alive,” Jim
cried. “The detective service loses its best tracker, beginning right
away!”
Dr. Weatherby held out his hand. “My boy!” He could say no
more. And on Dolores’ face was a radiance. Then Dr. Weatherby
turned to me.
“And you, Leonard—will you go?”
The direct question startled me.
Would I go out there into eternity? Beyond the stars, into eternal
time, and over space unfathomable, to encounter what now no
human mind could grasp? But, like Jim, I was practically alone in the
world and I was free to make any decision without fear of hurting
others.
Nevertheless, to give up my commission, as youngest
commander of the great 40 N, to disappear, lose all I had earned,
gave me pause. To return, perhaps never. Wanderers beyond the
stars! Was this not, perhaps, too bold a thing for human endeavor?
I heard my voice saying quietly, “Why, of course I’m going with
you, Dr. Weatherby.”
I was aware that Alice had come in to sit beside me, her cool
white hand impulsively pressing mine. And Dolores was saying,
“Alice, they’re going! Isn’t that wonderful? We’re all going, just as
soon as we can get ready!”

“A strange simplicity,” Dr. Weatherby was saying. “First, let me

make this clear: when I say universe—the construction of our
universe—I mean everything that exists, or has, or will exist, the
smallest entity of our infinitesimal atomic world to the greatest
conception of what may lie beyond the stars. Does that sound
complicated? Let me say again, it is simple.”
He leaned toward us, with his thick, strong hands gripped in his
lap. “I want you to realize first that we are dealing with infinities.
The human mind is so finite, so limited. You must cast off most of
your instinctive methods of reasoning. You understand me?”
“We’ll try,” I said.
He nodded and went on.
“Conceive a void of nothingness. No space, no time, no material
bodies. Just nothing. That was the beginning. Do not try to wonder
when it was. A billion years ago . . . a billion billion. Not at all. You
must not think of when, because when implies time. There was no
time. There could be no time without material bodies to create
movement and events. For time in itself is nothing but the
measurement between events.
“We have then, a nothingness. A vortex. A whirlpool.”
“A vortex of nothingness?” I exclaimed.
“Exactly. Why, back in the 1920’s, Leonard, scientists recognized
that the basic entities of matter were only whirlpools. They hoped
then to find some fundamental substance, like ether. But there is
none.
“A whirlpool, by its very motion, simulates substance. And, in the
last analysis, that is all which exists—an apparent solidity. Divide
anything, probe into anything, you find only a motion of something
else smaller which is apparently real. But then take that smaller
thing. Divide it. You find more empty spaces, more nothingness. And
other yet smaller things in violent motion.
“Why, Leonard, don’t you realize that’s what puzzled scientists?
From 1900 on, they puzzled over it. They found a solid bar of iron to
be composed of molecules. They said: ‘Oh yes, we understand. This
solidity of iron is only apparent. It really consists of molecules of iron
with empty spaces in between them, and the molecules are in
motion.’
“But then, Leonard—this was way back—they suddenly found
that the reality of the molecule was only apparent. It was just like
the iron! Empty spaces, with atoms in motion. Ah, at last they had
got to the bottom of it. Atoms.
“But then they found that an atom was no more a solidity than
the molecule, or the iron bar. Still other spaces, with other vibrating
particles. And fatuously they said: ‘We have found electrons,
revolving around a central nucleus.’ But that meant nothing, and at
last they began to realize it.
“Let your mind leap beyond all that, Leonard. It is too fatuous to
think that each division of matter is the last, simply because you
cannot make another division. Let’s go back to that original vortex of
nothingness. It created an apparent solidity, exactly as the vibrating
molecules of iron create iron. That’s clear, isn’t it?”
“But,” said Jim, “how small is this smallest vortex?”
Dr. Weatherby laughed. “It has no size. It is infinitely small. An
abstract quality, beyond human conception. If you try to name its
size, then no longer is it infinitely small. It is not the smallest vortex;
there is no such thing. It is the infinitely small vortex, which is very
different.
“Conceive, then, this vortex, which creates an apparently solid
particle of matter. I call this particle an intime. This intime, in turn,
with myriads of its fellows clustering about it, vibrating with empty
nothingness between, creates another, larger entity—another
apparently solid substance. And so on up to what we now call an
electron.”
“Well,” I said, “between the intime and the electron, how many
separate densities might there be?”
“An infinite number,” he replied smilingly. “A number that cannot
be conceived. Each has distinct characteristics, just as iron differs
from lead or gold.”
He paused a moment, but none of us said anything. “With this
conception,” he went on, “we can build the definition that a material
substance is a density of other substances. It maintains its separate
existence by virtue of having around its exterior an emptiness
greater than the emptiness of its interior. Think of that a moment.
“The earth itself is such a density. The space around it is greater
than any of the spaces within its molecules, its atoms, its electrons—
down to its finitely small intimes—to the ultimate nothingness of
which it is composed.
“That is our earth. It is in movement. And another density near it
we call Venus, and another Mars, vibrating with a space between
them. All our starry universe; you see, Leonard?”
My mind leaped with the thrill of it. The great vault of the
heavens with its myriad whirling stars shrank before my far-flung
imagination into a tiny space teeming with its agitated particles!
Dr. Weatherby added gently, “A fragment of iron is
microscopically no different in structure from our starry universe.
The distances between our heavenly bodies compared to the size of
them are quite the same as the distances between electrons, or
intimes, compared to their size. You get my point?”
“I do,” Jim exclaimed. “What we call the sky would seem a solid
mass of matter—like a fragment of iron—to some greater
viewpoint?”
“Exactly. Our microscopes show nothing which is actually more
solid than the sky itself. From here, on earth, to the Milky Way is to
us a tremendous distance. But suppose that we were so gigantic—so
vast in comparative size—that we needed a powerful microscope
even to perceive that space. What would we see? A multiplicity of
vibrating particles! And without the microscope the whole space
would seem solid. We could call it . . . well, say a grain of gold.”
For a moment we were silent. There was to all this an awesome
aspect. Yet its actual simplicity was overwhelming.
Dolores said timidly, “It seems strange that so simple a thing
should have been unknown for so long.”
“Not at all,” said Dr. Weatherby. “The knowledge came step by
step. It is only the final conception which seems so startling. To me
it is the logical, inevitable conclusion. How could the facts be
otherwise?
“Always, therefore, we have conceived ourselves and our earth to
be some masterful dividing line between what is smaller and what is
larger than ourselves. That is fatuous.
“We call the one our microscopic world. The other our
astronomical world. And we sit between them, puzzling over their
difference! They are both one, and we are in them—a mere step of
the ladder.”
“It makes me feel very small,” said Alice.
“Or large,” I said. “According to the viewpoint.”
I added to Dr. Weatherby, “I realize now why no size, no motion,
no time, nor density can be absolute. Everything must be relative to
something else.”
“Exactly,” he nodded.
Jim was puzzling. “This voyage we’re going to make—beyond the
stars. How are we going to make this trip? What in? By what
method? By the nine airy demons, Dr. Weatherby, there’s an awful
lot you haven’t told us yet!”
“Not so much,” said Dr. Weatherby smilingly.
“Because,” I interposed, “you don’t need to know very much,
Jim.”
“We’re going in a projectile,” said Dolores. “At least they say it
looks like a projectile.”
“Like Mallen’s moon rocket of 1989,” Tim exclaimed.
Dr. Weatherby shook his head. “The various anti-gravity methods
devised so far would help us very little, except Elton’s electronic
neutralization of gravity. I use that principle merely in starting the
flight. A trip to the moon, such as Mallen’s rocket made, had nothing
in common with this journey of ours.”
“They say Mallen is going himself next year—to Mars,” Alice
remarked.
“Let’s see our projectile,” Jim demanded.
“In a moment,” Dr. Weatherby said. “There is, first, one
conception I want to make sure you have grasped. Forget our earth
now. Forget yourself. Conceive the material universe to be a vast
void in which various densities are whirling.
“From the infinitely small to the infinitely large, they are of every
size and character. Yet all are inherently the same, merely apparently
solid. I will ask you, Leonard, this space between the earth and Mars
—of what would you say it is composed?”
I hesitated. “Nothingness,” I ventured finally.
“No!” he exclaimed warmly. “There is where you fail to grasp my
fundamental conception. The void of space itself is a mass of
particles, a mass of densities, of every possible size and character.
“The earth is one; a wandering asteroid is another. And meteors,
meteorites, down to the smallest particles of dust. And still smaller,
are the particles of light, far flung everywhere through space. Other
entities are again still smaller—call them intimes—down in size to
infinity.
“Space then, you must realize, is not empty. The emptiness, the
nothingness, is only the infinitely small. Ah, I see now that you begin
to understand!”
I said slowly, “I’m imagining space as . . . as a jelly. Unsolid,
because we ourselves are more solid, and it seems unsolid to us. But
. . . if we were less dense, and larger . . . gigantic—” I stopped.
“That,” said Dr. Weatherby, “is precisely the point of view I’ve
wanted you to get. You can understand now why to beings of some
greater outside realm all our interstellar space would shrink into
apparent solidity, and they would call it an atom.

“Conceive yourself now a scientist of that vast universe outside.

You are living on a density—a great conglomeration of particles
clinging together—and you call it your earth.
“One tiny particle of your earth is beneath your microscope. You
call that particle a grain of gold. You examine it. You find it is not
solid. You see ‘empty spaces.’ They are not really empty, but the
particles of matter swimming in them are too small for you to see.
But you do see what you call molecules of gold.
“You increase the power of your microscope. You examine just
one molecule of this gold. Now you see more supposedly empty
spaces, with smaller whirling entities which you choose to call
atoms.
“You examine one atom. The same result and you call the still
smaller particles electrons. Down and down—who can say how far?
Until, at last, you are looking into one intime. You see yet smaller
particles whirling in space. That is the space between our stars!
“And these whirling points of light—perhaps you can distinguish
no more than a million of them. They are the million largest,
brightest of our stars. You cannot see our own sun; it is too small.
Or our earth—too small. And too dark.
“But if you did see our earth, and were a fatuous scientist, you
might say, ‘Ah, at last I have seen the smallest thing!’ Which is
amusing, because our earth has a good many rocks composing it.
And each rock goes down to pebbles, grains of sand, molecules,
atoms, electrons—to infinity.
“Do you get the conception now? This whole universe we see
and feel from here on earth, from a greater viewpoint would all
shrink into a tiny, apparently solid particle.”
“I can visualize it,” I said. “It’s stupendous.”
But Jim interposed, “This trip we are to make—”
Alice interrupted him, explaining, “Grandfather has been making
tests. We have several models; he saved one of them to show you.
We can see it now?” She looked inquiringly at her grandfather.
Dr. Weatherby rose to his feet. “We’ll try it now. I’ll show you the
model and we’ll send it . . . away.
“Come,” he added. “When you see it start, you will understand.”
We left the house. Night had closed down, a soft, cloudless night.
Never had I seen the stars so brilliant.
 Dr. Weatherby led us up a path, beneath spreading trees, past
gardens of flowers, past his lake with its pool and a cascading brook
for its outlet down the hillside to the Hudson; past the shadowy
landing stage where high overhead my plane lay moored; up the
slope of a hill to a long, narrow outbuilding.
Jim and I had noticed this building when we landed at dawn. It
was new to us, erected during the year or so since we had last been
here.
“My workshop,” Dr. Weatherby said as we approached it.

I gazed at it curiously. It was a single-story building, without

windows, flat-roofed and no more than twenty feet high. In width,
possibly thirty feet, but it was at least five times that long.
It lay crosswise on the hill. At a glance I could not guess of what
materials it might be constructed. Wood, stone, metal—it seemed
none of these. Its aspect was whitish, not silvery, or milky; rather
was it a dead flesh white, with a faintly lurid cast of green to it.
In the starlight it lay silent and unlighted. But there seemed to it
a glow, as though it were bathed in moonlight. And then I saw that
the glow was inherent in it, almost a phosphorescence. Abruptly I
felt that there was something uncanny, unnatural about this
structure.
I made no comment. But I saw surprise on Jim’s face, and at the
lower end of the building where there appeared to be a door, he
stopped, irresolute.
“Is . . . is the projectile in here?”
“Yes,” said Alice. “Inside. But we’re going to the test room first,
aren’t we, Grandfather?”
We went through a door and along a narrow passage. It was
dimly illumined by small blue vacuum tubes overhead. I found
myself with Dolores.
“It’s very wonderful,” she said. “You will see, very soon. Oh, yes,
where is Jim? I want Jim to see it.”
“You’re not afraid, Dolores? Afraid of this voyage they talk
about?”
“Afraid? Oh, no!”
 The passageway widened. “Here is Jim,” I said. “Jim, stay with
Dolores. She wants to show you this . . . this thing we’ve come to
see.”
We entered a room some thirty feet square. Dr. Weatherby
switched on the lights. There were furniture, rugs, small tables of
apparatus, instruments, and banks of vacuum tubes on tripods
standing about, with wires in insulated cables connecting them. The
cables littered the floor, like huge snakes.
Dr. Weatherby drew aside a portiere which cut off a corner of the
room. Lying on a large table, flooded with a vacuum light from
above, was a model of this building we were in. It was about two
feet wide, by ten feet long—the same dead white, uncanny-looking
structure. A thought sprang to my mind. Was this building we were
in itself the projectile? I think I murmured the question, for Dr.
Weatherby smiled.
“No. Here is a small replica of the vehicle.”
He unbolted the roof of the model. Resting inside was a tiny,
dead white object some six inches long, cigarro-shaped, but with a
pointed end and blunt stern. It rather suggested the ancient sub-sea
vessels.
It had fin-shaped projections, like very small wings for its slow
transit through air. A tiny tower was forward, on top, and there were
bull’s-eye windows lining the sides and in every face of the octagon
tower.
Dr. Weatherby pointed out all these details to us, speaking in his
low, earnest voice. “I’m wondering, Leonard, and you, Jim, if you’re
familiar with Elton’s principle of the neutralization of gravity?”
“No,” I said, and Jim shook his head. “Not in detail.”
In 1988 Elton perfected it. I knew of it only as an electronic
stream of radiant matter which when directed against a solid
substance, destroyed—or partially destroyed—the attraction of that
other substance for the earth.
“I’ll explain it when we get in the vehicle itself,” Dr. Weatherby
said.
He was connecting wires to the little model building on the table;
and he closed its roof, and opened a wide doorway at its end. “I am
going to charge this small building with the Elton current. The
electronic stream will carry that tiny projectile with it.
“This will be the same as the start of our own voyage, Leonard,
except that with this model, I have intensified the rapidity of the
successive changes. What happens here in minutes, will take us
hours. Sit down over there, all of you.”

We ranged ourselves in the gloom across the room. The model of

the building, with its end doorway open like an airplane hangar, was
pointing past us. Jim and I sat together, with Alice near me, and
Dolores by Jim. He put his arm around her.
A moment, and then Dr. Weatherby touched a switch. The room
was plunged into darkness. From the table came a low electrical
hum.
I strained my eyes. A glow was over there. It brightened. The
little building on the table was glowing with a faint, blue-white light.
A minute passed, or it might have been ten minutes. I do not know.
The hum of the Elton current intensified; a whir, then a faint,
very tiny screaming throb. The building was now outlined
completely: a luminous white, shot through with a cast of green, and
red and yellow sparks snapping about it. From where I sat I could
see partially into its opened doorway, as the interior was not dark. It
was glowing inside, and now I became aware of a very faint red
stream, like light, pouring from the doorway, crossing the room,
spreading like a fan.
It was the Elton ray, escaping its bonds, its tiny particles plunging
outward with the speed of light, or more. The red glow struck the
blank, dead white wall of our room, stained the wall with its red
sheen. Sparks were snapping in the air around me. To my nostrils
came a faint, sulphurous smell. My skin was prickling.
“Look,” whispered Alice.
The opposite wall where the red ray was striking, now seemed
glowing of itself, a blank, opaque wall, stained red by the billions of
imponderable particles bombarding it.
But it was no longer an opaque wall. Of itself it was now glowing,
becoming translucent, transparent! The stars! Through the wall I
could see the placid night outside, the dark hillside, the stars!
I felt Alice’s hand gripping my arm. From the glowing model on
the table, the tiny vehicle was issuing. The dead white thing. It came
very slowly, floating out the doorway, as though drawn by the red
diverging stream of light.
Slowly it passed me, ascending a trifle, no longer dead white, for
it was transfigured—alive now, shimmering, its outlines wavy, unreal.
It moved a trifle faster, came to the wall of the room, passed
through it.
“Watch,” breathed Alice.
The vehicle—that tiny oblong shape smaller than my hand—was
outside over the treetops, plunging onward in the red stream of
light. Yet at that distance I could see it plainly, its image as large as
when it was a few feet from my face.
And suddenly I realized I was staring after a thing gigantic. It
showed now far over the hilltop. I could have sworn it was but some
great air liner. A patch of stars was blotted out behind it.
Another moment; the silver thing off there was far away. Was it
as far as the moon? It was larger now than the moon would have
seemed, hanging out there!
I watched. I could still see it as plainly as when it started. But
then suddenly came a change. Its image became fainter, thinner,
and rapidly expanding. There was a faint image of it out there in the
heavens, an image larger than the hillside.
There was an instant when I fancied that the image had
expanded over all the sky—a wraith, a dissipating ghost of the
projectile.
It was gone. The stars gleamed alone in the deep purple of the
night.
A click sounded. The hum of the Elton ray died into silence. The
luminous wall of the room sprang into opaque reality.
I sat up, blinking, shivering, to find Dr. Weatherby standing
before me.
“That, Leonard, is the start. Shall we see the vehicle itself?”
 III
LAUNCHED INTO SPACE!
We were to leave at dawn, and during that night a thousand
details ended our attention: Jim’s resignation from the service, which
he gave to the superior through verbal traffic department without so
much as a word of explanation; my own resignation, leaving the
post of Commander 3 of the 40 N temporarily to Argyle.
Temporarily! With what optimism I voiced it! But there was a
queer pang within me, an exaltation—which I think was as well a
form of madness—was upon us all. This thing we were about to do
transcended all our petty human affairs.
I was standing at the door of the workshop, gazing at a tree. Its
leaves were waving in a gentle night breeze, which as I stood there
fanned my hot, flushed cheeks with a grateful coolness. I found Alice
beside me.
“I’m looking at that tree,” I said. “Really, you know I’ll be sorry to
leave it. These trees, these hills, the river—I wouldn’t like to leave
our earth and never come back, Alice. Would you?”
“No,” she said. Her hand pressed mine; her solemn blue eyes
regarded me. She was about to add something else, but she
checked herself. A flush rose to her cheeks; it mantled the whole
column of her throat with red.
“Alice?”
“No,” she repeated. “We’ll come back, Len.”
Dr. Weatherby called us. And Jim shouted, “This infernal
checking! Len, come here and do your share. We’re going at dawn.
Don’t you know that?”

I shall not forget the first sight I had of the vehicle. It lay in the
great main room of the workshop. A hundred feet long, round like a
huge cigarro, a dead white thing, lying there in the glow of the blue
tubes.
Even in its silent immobility, there seemed about it a latent
power, as though it were not dead, but asleep—a sleeping giant,
resting quiescent, conscious of its own strength.
And there was about it too, an aspect almost infernal in its sleek,
bulging body, dead-white like bloodless flesh, in its windows, staring
like bulging, thick-lensed eyes. I felt instinctively a repulsion, a
desire to avoid it. I touched it finally; its smooth side was hard and
abnormally cold. A shudder ran over me.
But after a time these feelings passed. I was absorbed in
examining this thing which was to house us, to bear us upward and
away.
Within the vehicle was a narrow corridor down one side. Corridor
windows opened to the left. To the right were rooms. Each had a
window opening to the side, a window in the floor beneath, and in
the roof above.
There was a room for Jim and me, another for Dolores and Alice,
and one for Dr. Weatherby. An instrument and chart room forward,
with a tower room for keeping a lookout, and a galley with a new
Maxton electronic stove, fully equipped. And other rooms—a food
room, and one crowded with a variety of apparatus: air purifiers,
Maxton heaters and refrigerators, piping the heat and cold
throughout the vehicle. There was a score of devices with which I
was familiar, and another score which were totally strange.
Dr. Weatherby already had the vehicle fully equipped and
provisioned. With a tabulated list of its contents, he and Jim were
laboriously checking the items to verify that nothing had been
overlooked.
“I don’t want to know how it works,” Jim had said. “Not ’til after
we start. Let’s get going. That’s the main idea.”
Then Alice took the list. She and Jim went from room to room.
Dolores stood a moment in the corridor, as Dr. Weatherby and I
started for the instrument room.
“Jim! Oh Jim, where are you?”
“He and Alice are farther back, Dolores,” I said. “In the galley, I
think. Don’t you want to come forward with us?”
“I guess not. I’ll go with Jim.”
She joined them and I heard her say, “Oh, I’m glad to find you,
Jim. I was a little frightened, just for a moment. I thought something
was wrong here on board.”
I turned and followed Dr. Weatherby to the instrument room.

We stood before an instrument board of dials and indicators, with

wires running upward to a score of gleaming cylindrical tanks
overhead. A table was beside us, with a switchboard less
complicated in appearance than I have seen in the navigating cages
of many small liners.
There were chairs, a narrow leather couch across the room, and
another table littered with charts and star-maps. And above it was a
shelf, with one of the Grantline comptometers, the mathematical
sensation of some years back. It was almost a human mathematical
brain.
Under its keys the most intricate problem of calculus was
automatically resolved, as surely as an ancient adding machine did
simple arithmetic.
Dr. Weatherby began to show me the workings of the vehicle. “I
need only give you the fundamentals, Leonard. Mechanically my
apparatus here is fairly complicated. But those mere mechanics are
not important or interesting. I could not teach you now, in so short a
time, how to rectify anything which went mechanically wrong. I shall
do the navigating.
“Indeed, as you will see presently, there is very little navigating
involved. Mostly at the start—we must only be sure we collide with
nothing and disturb nothing. When once we are beyond these
planets, these crowding stars, there will be little to do.”
I shook my head. “The whole thing is incomprehensible, Dr.
Weatherby. That flight of your little model was almost gruesome.”
“Sit down, Leonard. I don’t want it to be gruesome. Strange, yes;
there is nothing stranger, God knows, than this into which, frankly, I
stumbled during my researches. I’ll try to make the fundamentals
clear. It will lose its uncanny aspect then. You will find it all as coldly
scientifically precise as your navigation of the Fortieth North
parallel.”
He lighted my cigarro. “This journey we are about to make,” he
resumed, “involves but two factors. The first is the Eltonian principle
of the neutralization of gravity. Sir Isaac Newton gave us fairly
accurate formulae for the computation of the force of gravity.
Einstein revised them slightly, and attempted to give an entirely
different conception of celestial mechanics.
“But no one—except by a rather vague theory of Einstein’s—has
ever told us what gravity really is. What is this force—what causes
this force—which makes every material body in the universe attract
every other body directly in proportion to the mass and inversely as
the square of the distance between them?
“Leonard, I think I can make it clear to you. There is passing
between every material body, one with another, a constant stream of
minute particles. A vortex of rotating particles loses some on one
side, which fly off at a tangent, so to speak, and perhaps gains some
upon the other side.
“Seventy-five years ago—about the time I was born, Leonard—
they were talking of ‘electrons’, ‘radiant energy’, ‘positive and
negative disembodied electricity.’ All different names for the same
thing. The same phenomenon.
“All substance is of a very transitory reality. Everything is in a
constant state of change. A substance builds up, or it breaks down.
Or both simultaneously; or sometimes one and then the other.”
“Electricity—” I began.
“Electricity,” he interrupted, “as they used to know it, is in reality
nothing but a concentrated stream of particles—electrons, intimes,
call them what you will—moving from one substance to join another.
Lightning is the same thing. Such a stream of articles, Leonard, is a
tangible manifestation of gravitational force. They had it right before
them, unrecognized. They called it, ‘magnetic force,’ which meant
nothing.
“How do these streams create an attractive force? Conceive the
earth and the moon. Between them flow a myriad stream of
infinitesimal particles. Each particle in itself is a vortex—a whirlpool.
The tendency of each vortex is to combine with the one nearest to
it.
“They do combine, collide, whirl together and split apart. The
whole, as a continuous, violently agitated stream, produces a
continuous tendency toward combination over all the distance from
the earth to the moon. The result—can’t you see it?—must be a
force, an inherent tendency pulling the earth and moon together.
“Enough of such abstract theory! A while ago, I charged that
little model of this building with an Elton ray. The model, and this
building itself, are built of an ore of electrite, the one hundred and
fortieth element, as they called it when it was isolated a few years
ago.
“You saw the model of the building glow? Electrons and intimes
were whirling around it. The force communicated to the tiny
projectile lying inside. In popular language, ‘its gravity was
destroyed.’ Technically it was made to hold within itself its inherent
gravitation and the gravitation of everything else was cut off. It was,
in the modern sense, magnetized, in an abnormal condition of
matter.”
I said, “There was a red ray from the little building. The projectile
seemed to follow it.”
“Exactly,” he exclaimed. “That was the Elton Beta ray. It is flung
straight out, whereas the Alpha ray is circular. The Beta is a stream
of particles moving at over four hundred thousand miles a second.
More than twice the speed of light!”
He chuckled. “When they discovered that, Leonard, the Einstein
theories held good no longer. The ray bombarded and passed
through the electric wall of the room, and the projectile went with it,
drawn by it, sucked along by the inherent force of the flying
whirlpools. The projectile with its infinitely greater mass than the
mass of the flying particles of the ray, picked up speed slowly. But its
density was lessening.
“As it gained velocity, it lost density. Everything does that,
Leonard. I intensified the rapidity of the changes, as I told you. We
shall take it slower. Hours, for what you saw in minutes.”
He tossed away his cigarro and stood up over the instrument
table. “When we start, Leonard, here is exactly what will happen.
Our gravity will be cut off. Not wholly, I have only gone to extremes
in describing the theory.
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