“What do you make of this?” Cushing asked her.
Elizabeth didn’t even look where he was pointing. She just shrugged.
“And the
Lancet?”
She sighed. “I’ve never been up there. It’s some kind of huge sailing ship … a ghost ship, my uncle said. Nobody comes back from up there.”
“What’s up there?”
“Let’s just go,” she said, avoiding the question.
Cushing rolled up the chart and went over to the writing desk. All the papers were covered in weird notations and complex mathematical symbols. Some of it looked like geometry or possibly calculus. There were dozens of pages like this. Cushing was starting to wonder if this guy was just some lost fisherman or possibly something else entirely. He didn’t suppose he’d ever know for sure.
He opened the desk drawers and found a .45 Colt auto. It was well-oiled and maintained. He ejected the magazine from the butt and it was fully-loaded. In the top drawer, there was a letter that went on for several pages in a cramped, economical script.
“Look at this,” he said.
Elizabeth pretended interest. “We’d better go.”
But Cushing wasn’t going. Not yet. He began to read:
December 2, Year Unknown
To whom it may concern,
I, like you, have been trapped in this abominable place for more years than I would care to admit. But unlike you, my exile into this void has been self-imposed. Yes, that is true … I
chose
to come here.
Allow me to explain. I was part of a group of scholars and researchers, yes, mathematicians and physicists and quantum theorists, who had long been aware of the time/space anomalies associated with the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area. Betydon, Connors, Imab, and myself. We had long studied these aberrations … though privately, to avoid the ridicule often associated with such things publicly. Publicly, I say for each of us were at one time involved in what the ONR, the Office of Naval Research, called Project Neptune. Which was and is (I imagine) an ongoing investigation into sundry and shadowy areas of theoretical physics with potential marine/military applications. The group I and the others were involved in were concerned with the aforementioned time/space anomalies. The Neptune Project, of course, is highly classified. But I see no reason not to violate my loyalty oath here. At any rate, our little group studied these things privately after leaving the ONR. We called our little inquiry the Procyon Project. Now, after long years of formulating countless hypotheses (basically, a furtherance of what we had been doing with Neptune), we decided it was time to test our theories. I won’t go into all of it. Just let me say, that we were proven correct and pulled into this place.
Connors died in the Sea of Mists, attacked by some type of sea monster. And the others? Well, I won’t go into it. I’ll only say that we were reconnoitering the Sea of Veils and particularly the S.S. Lancet, a vessel lost in this place in the 1850s and certainly the mother of all cursed ships.
Regardless, I am as surely marooned here as you are.
But what is this place? Where is this place? How can it possibly be? You may well wonder and it has taken me some years to put together the pieces of this puzzle and, even now, much of what I know or think I know is pure speculation ranging from the informed to the fantastic to the downright absurd. Before you toss aside this letter, this confession, and call me a crazy man, I think you owe it to yourself to read on.
First off, understand that if you are here — in this place — then you have undergone what could be deemed hyperdimensional travel. More on that later. No doubt you arrived here by passing into what appeared to be a cloud or fogbank which was luminous. As you may or may not know such phenomena has been reported for a great many years in the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area, a place where curvature of space and time is most pronounced. And your ship or plane was, of course, somewhere in this somewhat vast geographical area. The cloud you saw, were pulled into, was actually a sort of matter-energy vortex, a warp or rift in the space-time continuum. To understand how such a thing could be, let me touch on 4
th
dimensional space a moment. You are probably familiar … or maybe not … with the three dimensions of space — x, y, and z — which are mathematical representations of the perpendicular dimensions of length, width, and depth. Now into this, let us factor in t, which is time, the 4
th
dimension, and is perpendicular to the other three. Time is not lineal, but cyclical, looping over itself. Imagine a helix and you’ll grasp the general idea. Before Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, according to classical mechanics time was an absolute, but we now understand it to be fluid.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, when you passed through said vortex, you were actually passing through the Fourth Dimension. The dimension of time. Though the actual travel time through fourth dimensional space seemed minute to you … you will recall the sudden lack of air, the momentary derangement of gravitational forces as you passed through … probably seconds or minutes at most in your memory, thousands of years may have passed on earth or time may not have passed at all. It may have moved in reverse from your point of entry. Anything is possible.
Trust me, I am doing my utmost not to bore you to tears with celestial mechanics and quantum theory.
Where are you? You are in another spatial dimension, possibly a fractal which, according to non-Euclidian geometry, cannot be assigned a whole number. It would be represented not as the third, fourth, or fifth dimension, but as the 3.5 dimension or the 4.1 dimension etc. At any rate, as I said, you are in a spatial dimension far from home. How far? So very distant it probably could not be measured even in parsecs. Yet … through 4
th
dimensional space … quite close. Einstein explained in his Theory of Relativity that dimensions or worlds could exist side by side, yet be invisible to one another because they occupy different planes of space. But why are they invisible? Probably for the same reason that if you were suddenly transported to, say, the 5
th
dimension … and you may be there now … you would not be aware of it. Why? Because you are a three-dimensional creature who is designed by evolution only to detect the three dimensions of length, width, and depth. You do not have the necessary sensory apparatus to detect anything else. Confused? Excellent. Now this spatial dimension or fractal that you are in is a universe unto itself. In that, yes, you are on a planet which no doubt circles an alien star in some unknown void of space. Likewise, this star … though I’ve never seen it through the cloud cover, but do feel its heat … is part of a galaxy which is part of a universe in some deadend space that can probably only be represented mathematically. You’ve probably seen our two moons, but I believe there is a third. My studies of the orbital paths of the other two suggest a third satellite. No matter. We are on a planet with moons and a star somewhere out there. The day here lasts anywhere from seventy-two to ninety-three hours, the night thirty-six to forty-five. This anomaly may be in flux due to the unstable field of this dimension or due to seasonal changes or, perhaps, because that time in this place is distorted from what we know.
But you’re probably asking yourself how one dimension can possibly link with another. To understand how such things can exist, let us picture the birth of the universe — the so-called Big Bang. Evidence suggests that the universe as we understand it was born out of what physicists call a “singularity”. A speck of infinite density occupying zero volume. Boggles the mind, don’t it? Now in the first split-second of the Big Bang, this point of infinite density — which contained all the mass and energy that would become the universe-underwent an exponential diffusion or expansion, an inflation of sorts. This diffusion or explosion created matter, time, space, energy, everything known and more that aren’t. Now this primordial explosion is not simply three-dimensional, but multi-dimensional, and thus creates not only our universe, but all of multi-dimensional space in one fell swoop. This explosion or implosion, would create an endless number of spatial dimensions … those of real space and those of hyperspace.
Now, if you are from the “modern” world … I use this loosely, as I left earth as such in 1983 … then you are familiar with black holes. A black hole or “singularity” is created when a large star exhausts its nuclear fuel and implodes, collapses into its own intense gravity. This singularity becomes a sort of matter-energy whirlpool which sucks in anything, even light, and cycles it somewhere else. It may implode on our end, but explode open somewhere else. These singularities, in essence, may become wormholes, passages from one spatial dimension to another. Many cosmologists believe that the known universe is but one of countless parallel universes, sort of like an unknown number of soap bubbles suspended in mid-air. Normally, these universes or dimensions would be out of reach of one another, but according to Einstein’s equations, there may be a series of tubes or channels — wormholes — that connect these universes. Technically, these wormholes would be called Einstein-Rosen bridges, tunnels that connect two distant spheres of time-space. And you, my friend, have proven their existence for you have passed through one!
Wormholes. According to the most radical and theoretical particle physics of my day, these wormholes would be composed of a sort of exotic matter, a “negative matter” which is not antimatter, in case you were wondering. This negative matter would possess a naturally powerful antigravity field and it would be this field that would hold these wormholes open forever or for short periods of time. Let me give you the classic wormhole analogy to illustrate this. If the universe was a pear, say, then an ant wanting to travel from the front to the back would have a long trip ahead of him, but if a worm had tunneled through the pear, then the ant could take the shortcut. And, essentially, wormholes are just that: time-space shortcuts.
Now, to simplify things, from here on in, where we are is called Dimension X (to borrow the name of an old radio show). Now I believe that an infinite number of these wormholes were created during the Big Bang. Some have closed up and others are still open and new ones are being created by star implosions all the time. Regardless, even those that have closed are as precarious as earthquake fault lines, in that a certain combination of forces can rip them back open as easily as a poorly-mended hem. Here, in Dimension X, where the energy field is somewhat unstable, these wormholes are something of a naturally-occurring phenomena much like tornadoes. When the proper atmospheric conditions exist, an energy flux of some type here opens one of these wormholes … sometimes to our planet and probably sometimes to many others. So, if you can imagine our dimension and Dimension X lying side by side, grids of a sort composed of perpendicular lines, then you can understand that now and then these lines would, simply by random chance, line up, become parallel to one another and maybe it would be this, more than anything else, that would weaken certain areas of space so that wormholes would be sort of an inevitability.
Okay, so you’ve passed through a wormhole, you’ve experienced what could be called interspatial teleportation through interspace. You have passed from one spatial cycle to another without having to transverse the limitless space itself. If you’ve been paying attention and I hope you have, then you realize that the shortest distance between two points is through the 4
th
dimension. Instead of climbing over a mountain or going around it, you tunneled straight on through. You’ve bypassed the curves. What the vortex did was to propel you like Captain Kirk and his warp drive. Hyperdrive, would be the actual term, passing through the curves of limited three-dimensional space by dropping out of it and then back in somewhere else.
Now what? Well, you’ve made the trip, can you make the trip back? Theoretically, yes. You can return. It will be a matter, I think, of returning to your stepping off point into this world. Which I am certain is somewhere in what I have called the Sea of Mists (see my chart). It really will be a matter of waiting for the wormhole to open and being in the right place at the right time. If it opens, using a boat or plane, I think you can punch your way back through. But, by all means, do not enter a wormhole in any other geographical location or you will find yourself God-knows-where. If my theory is correct, the wormhole that brought you here … all of us here … will only open in that locality. Now beware of one thing. If you are lucky enough to pass through to our world, consider the time distortion factor. Einstein discovered that gravity and other forms of linear acceleration can cause a distortion in the curvature of fourth-dimensional time-space. Essentially, this acceleration can bend time. And you, my friend, accelerated through hyperspace at an impossible speed … well, you may be in for a surprise. What may happen is what’s known as temporal stasis or the slowing down of time. You may return to the world you knew or you may return a million years in the past or future. It’s impossible to say. Conversely, the bending of time may counteract itself when you pass back through.
Again, I’m just guessing.
This brings my little sermon to an end. Once again, I am traveling to the Sea of Veils, to the
Lancet.
Because what the three of us
—
Imab, Betydon, and myself
—
discovered there, was revelatory indeed. When I say that the Lancet is the key, I know of what I speak. If we had had more time … well, no matter. I will go up there again. To satisfy my own scientific curiosity, if nothing else. For that ship holds secrets. And it is, I believe, the focal point for what caused the horrible deaths of Imab and Betydon. For, if you have been here any length of time, you may have felt the presence of another. What this thing is, I cannot say, only that I believe it to be destructive and sentient. Something that may lie dormant or inactive for extended periods of time. A sort of potential energy waiting to spend itself. Lately, I’ve felt it building. I believe it is about to become kinetic.