A futuristic spaceship flies towards a bright core surrounded by a spiral galaxy, with many other galaxies in the vast darkness of space.

Behind the flying vessel the First Galaxy was a tiny, brightly-shining lens, so far away that such minutiae as individual solar systems were invisible; so distant that even the gigantic masses of its accompanying globular star-clusters were merged indistinguishably into its sharply lenticular shape. In front of her, to right and to left of her, above and beneath her were other galaxies, never explored by man or by any other beings subscribing to the code of Galactic Civilization. Some, edge on, were thin, wafer-like. Others appeared as full disks, showing faintly or boldly the prodigious, mathematically inexplicable spiral arms by virtue of whose obscure functioning they had come into being. Between these two extremes there was every possible variant in angular dispacement. See more