Seeking Help with Gray Lensman Quote
I am home battling an interminable cold, and trying to write some history.
I need help from someone who has a copy of Doc Smith's Gray Lensman. I can't find mine. I did find some scraps of text online.
I need a citation, including publisher, year, and page number, for a passage in Chapter 10 about the dreaded negasphere:"The spherical framework was unchanged, the machines were still carrying easily their incredible working load. Material--any and all kinds of stuff--was still disappearing; instantaneously, invisibly, quietly, with no flash or fury to mark its passing.
"But at the center of that massive sphere there now hung poised a . . . a something. Or was it a nothing? Mathematically, it was a sphere, or rather a negasphere, about the size of a baseball; but the eye, while it could see something, could not perceive it analytically. Nor could the mind envision it in three dimensions, for it was not essentially three-dimensional in nature. Light sank into the thing, whatever it was, and vanished. The peering eye could see nothing whatever of shape or of texture; the mind behind the eye reeled away before infinite vistas of nothingness."
Can you help?
(A page number from the October 1939-January 1940 Astounding serial would also suffice.)
I need help from someone who has a copy of Doc Smith's Gray Lensman. I can't find mine. I did find some scraps of text online.
I need a citation, including publisher, year, and page number, for a passage in Chapter 10 about the dreaded negasphere:"The spherical framework was unchanged, the machines were still carrying easily their incredible working load. Material--any and all kinds of stuff--was still disappearing; instantaneously, invisibly, quietly, with no flash or fury to mark its passing.
"But at the center of that massive sphere there now hung poised a . . . a something. Or was it a nothing? Mathematically, it was a sphere, or rather a negasphere, about the size of a baseball; but the eye, while it could see something, could not perceive it analytically. Nor could the mind envision it in three dimensions, for it was not essentially three-dimensional in nature. Light sank into the thing, whatever it was, and vanished. The peering eye could see nothing whatever of shape or of texture; the mind behind the eye reeled away before infinite vistas of nothingness."
Can you help?
(A page number from the October 1939-January 1940 Astounding serial would also suffice.)