Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
‘Not the slightest. Perhaps one lifetime, perhaps many – who knows? However, rest assured that it shall be solved, and that the condition shall be dealt with in the manner which shall best serve the interest of humanity as a whole.’
‘But good God!’ exclaimed DuQuesne. ‘In the meantime, what of Seaton and Crane?’ He was now speaking his true thoughts. Upon this, his first encounter, he could in nowise understand the deep, calm, timeless trend of mind of the Norlaminians; not even dimly could he grasp or appreciate the seemingly slow but inexorably certain method in which they pursued relentlessly any given line of research to its ultimate conclusion.
‘If it should be graven upon the Sphere that they shall pass they may – and will – pass in all tranquility, for they know full well that it was not in idle gesture that the massed intellect of Norlamin assured them that their passing should not be in vain. You, however, youths of an unusually youthful and turbulent race, could not be expected to view the passing of such a one as Seaton from our own mature viewpoint.’
‘I’ll tell the universe that I don’t look at things the way you do!’ barked DuQuesne scathingly. When I go back to Earth – if I go – I shall at least have tried. I’ve got a life-sized picture of myself standing idly by while someone else tries for seven hundred years to decipher the indecipherable!’
‘There speaks the impetuousness of youth,’ the old man chided. ‘I have told you that we have proved that at present we can do nothing whatever for the occupants of
Skylark Two
. Be warned, my rash young friend; do not tamper with powers entirely beyond your comprehension.’
‘Warning be damned!’ DuQuesne snorted. We’re shoving off. Come on, Loring – the quicker we get started the better our chance of getting something done. You’ll be willing to give me the exact bearing and the distance, won’t you Rovol?’
‘We shall do more than that, son,’ the patriarch replied, while a shadow came over his wrinkled visage. ‘Your life is your own, to do with as you see fit. You have chosen to go in search of your friends, scorning the odds against you. But before I tell you what I have in mind, I must try once more to make you see that the courage which dictates the useless sacrifice of a life ceases to be courage at all, but becomes sheerest folly.
‘Since we have had sufficient power several of our youths have been
studying the fourth dimension. They rotated many inanimate objects into that region, but could recover none of them. Instead of waiting until they had derived the fundamental equations governing such phenomena they rashly visited that region in person, in a vain attempt to achieve a short cut to knowledge. Not one of them has come back.
‘Now I declare to you in all solemnity that the quest you wish to undertake, involving as it does not only that entirely unknown region but also the equally unknown sixth order of vibrations, is to you at present utterly impossible. Do you still insist upon going?’
‘We certainly do. You may as well save your breath.’
‘Very well; so be it. Frankly, I had but little hope of swerving you from your purpose by reason. But before you go we shall supply you with every resource at our command which may in any way operate to increase your infinitesimal chance of success. We shall build for you a duplicate of Seaton’s own
Skylark Three
, equipped with every device known to our science, and we shall instruct you fully in the use of those devices before you set out.’
‘But the time … DuQuesne began to object.
‘A matter of hours only,’ Rovol silenced him. ‘True, it took us some little time to build
Skylark Three
, but that was because it had not been done before. Every force employed in her construction was of course recorded, and to reproduce her in every detail, without attention or supervision, it is necessary only to thread this tape, thus, into the integrator of my master keyboard. The actual construction will of course take place in the area of experiment, but you may watch it, if you wish, in this visiplate. I must take a short series of observations at this time. I will return in ample time to instruct you in the operation of the vessel and of everything in it.’
In stunned amazement the two men stared into the visiplate, so engrossed in what they saw there that they scarcely noticed the departure of the aged scientist. For before their eyes there had already sprung into being an enormous structure of laced and latticed members of purple metal, stretching over two miles of level plain. While it was very narrow for its length, yet its fifteen hundred feet of diameter dwarfed into insignificance the many outlandish structures nearby, and under their staring eyes the vessel continued to take form with unbelievable rapidity. Gigantic girders appeared in place as though by magic; skin after skin of thick, purple inoson was welded on; all without the touch of a hand, without the thought of a brain, without the application of any visible force.
‘Now you can say it, Doll; there’s no spy ray on us here. What a break – what a break!’ exulted DuQuesne. ‘The old fossil swallowed it bodily, hook, line, and sinker!’
‘It may not be so good, though, at that, chief, in one way. He’s going to watch us, to help us out if we get into a jam, and
with that infernal telescope, or whatever it is, the Earth is right under his nose.’
‘Simpler than taking milk away from a blind kitten,’ the saturnine chemist gloated. ‘We’ll go out to where Seaton went, only farther – out beyond the reach of his projector. There, completely out of touch with him, we’ll circle around the galaxy back to Earth and do our stuff. Easier than dynamiting fish in a bucket – the old sap’s handing me everything I want, right on a silver platter!’
Six mighty rotating currents of electricity impinged simultaneously upon the spherical hull of
Skylark Two
and she disappeared utterly. No exit had been opened and the walls remained solid, but where the forty-foot globe of arenak had rested in her cradle an instant before there was nothing. Pushed against by six balancing and gigantic forces, twisted cruelly by six couples of angular force of unthinkable magnitude, the immensely strong arenak shell of the vessel had held and, following the path of least resistance – the only path in which she could escape from those irresistible forces – she had shot out of space as we know it and into the impossible reality of that hyperspace which Seaton’s vast mathematical knowledge had enabled him so dimly to perceive.
As those forces smote his vessel, Seaton felt himself compressed. He was being driven together irresistibly in all three dimensions, and in those dimensions at the same time he was as irresistibly being twisted – was being corkscrewed in a monstrously obscure fashion which permitted him neither to move from his place nor to remain in it. He hung poised there for interminable hours, even though he knew that the time required for that current to build up to its inconceivable value was to be measured only in fractional millionths of a single second.
Yet he waited strainingly while that force increased at an all but imperceptible rate, until at last the vessel and all its contents were squeezed out of space, in a manner somewhat comparable to that in which an orange pip is forced out from between pressing thumb and resisting finger.
At the same time Seaton felt a painless, but unutterably horrible, transformation of his entire body – a rearrangement, a writhing, crawling distortion; a hideously revolting and incomprehensibly impossible extrusion of his bodily substance as every molecule, every atom, every ultimate particle of his physical structure was compelled to extend itself into
that unknown new dimension.
He could not move his eyes, yet he saw every detail of the grotesquely altered spaceship. His Earthly mentality could not understand anything he saw, yet to his transformed brain everything was as usual and quite in order. Thus the four-dimensional physique that was Richard Seaton perceived, recognized, and admired as of yore his beloved Dorothy, in spite of the fact that her normally solid body was now quite plainly nothing but a three-dimensional surface, solid only in that logically impossible new dimension which his now four-dimensional brain accepted as a matter of course, but which his thinking mentality could neither really perceive nor even dimly comprehend.
He could not move a muscle, yet in some obscure and impossible way he leaped toward his wife. Immobile though tongue and jaws were, yet he spoke to her reassuringly, remonstratingly, as he gathered up her trembling form and silenced her hysterical outbursts.
‘Steady on, girl, it’s all right – everything’s jake. Hold everything, dear. Pipe down, I tell you! This is nothing to let get your goat. Snap out of it, Red-Top!’
‘But, Dick, it’s … it’s too perfectly outrageous!’ Dorothy had been on the verge of hysteria, but she regained a measure of her customary spirit under Seaton’s ministrations. ‘In some ways it seems to be all right, but it’s so … so … oh, I can’t …’
‘Hold it!’ he commanded. ‘You’re going off the deep end again. I can’t say that I expected anything like this, either, but when you think about things it’s natural enough that they should be this way. You see, while we’ve apparently got four-dimensional bodies and brains now, our intellects are still three-dimensional, which complicates things considerably. We can handle things and recognize them, but we can’t think about physical forms, understand them, or express them either in words or in thoughts. Peculiar, and nerve-wracking enough, especially for you girls, but quite normal – see?’
‘Well, maybe – after a fashion. I was afraid that I had really gone crazy back there, at first, but if you feel that way, too, I know it’s all right. But you said that we’d be gone only a skillionth of a second, and we’ve been here a week already, at the very least.’
‘All wrong, Dot – at least, partly wrong. Time does go faster here, apparently, so that we seem to have been here quite a while; but as far as our own time is concerned we haven’t been here anywhere near a millionth of a second yet. See that plunger? It’s still moving in – it has barely made contact. Time is purely relative, you know, and it moves so fast here that that plunger switch, traveling so fast that the eye cannot follow it at all ordinarily, seems to us to be perfectly stationary.’
‘But it
must
have been longer than that, Dick! Look at all the talking we’ve done. I’m a fast talker, I know, but even I can’t talk that fast!’
‘You aren’t talking – haven’t you discovered that yet? You are thinking,
and we are getting your thoughts as speech; that’s all. Don’t believe it? All right; there’s your tongue, right there – or better, take your heart. It’s that funny-looking object right there – see it? It isn’t beating – that is, it would seem to us to take weeks, or possibly months, to beat. Take hold of it – feel it for yourself.’
‘Take
hold
of it! My own heart? Why, it’s inside me, between my ribs – I couldn’t possibly!’
‘Sure you can! That’s your intellect talking now, not your brain. You’re four-dimensional now, remember, and what you used to call your body is nothing but the three-dimensional hypersurface of your new hyperbody. You can take hold of your heart or your gizzard just as easily as you used to pat yourself on the nose with a powder puff.’
‘Well, I won’t, then – why, I wouldn’t touch that thing for a million dollars!’
‘All right; watch me feel mine, then. See, it’s perfectly motionless, and my tongue is, too. And there’s something else that I never expected to look at – my appendix. Good thing you’re in good shape, old vermiform, or I’d take a pair of scissors and snick you off while I’ve got such a good chance to do it without …’
‘Dick!’ shrieked Dorothy. ‘For the love of Heaven …’
‘Calm down, Dottie, calm down. I’m just trying to get you used to this mess – I’ll try something else. Here, you know what this is – a new can of tobacco, with the lid soldered on tight. In three dimensions there’s no way of getting into it without breaking metal – you’ve opened lots of them. But out here I simply reach
past
the metal of the container, like this, see, and put it into my pipe, thus. The can is still soldered tight, no holes in it anywhere, but the tobacco is out, nevertheless. Inexplicable in three-dimensional space, impossible for us really to understand mentally, but physically perfectly simple and perfectly natural after you get used to it. That’ll straighten you out some, perhaps.’
‘Well, maybe – I guess I won’t get frantic again, Dickie – but just the same, it’s altogether too perfectly darn weird to suit me. Why don’t you pull that switch back out and stop us?’
‘Wouldn’t do any good – wouldn’t stop us, because we have already had the impulse and are simply traveling on momentum now. When that is used up – in some extremely small fraction of a second of our time – we’ll snap back into our ordinary space, but we can’t do a thing about it until then.’
‘But how can we move around so fast?’ asked Margaret from the protecting embrace of the monstrosity that they knew to be Martin Crane. ‘How about inertia? I should think we’d break our bones all to pieces.’
‘You can’t move a three-dimensional body that fast, as we found out when the force was coming on,’ Seaton replied. ‘But I don’t think that we are ordinary matter any more, and apparently our three-dimensional laws no longer govern, now that we are in hyperspace. Inertia is based
upon time, of course, so our motion might be all right, even at that. Mechanics seem to be different here, though, and, while we seem solid enough, we certainly aren’t matter at all in the three-dimensional sense of the term, as we used it back where we came from. But it’s all over my head like a circus tent – I don’t know any more about most of this stuff than you do. I thought of course – if I thought at all, which I doubt – that we’d go
through
hyperspace in an instant of time, without seeing it or feeling it in any way, since a three-dimensional body cannot exist, of course, in four-dimensional space. How did we get this way, Mart? Is this space coexistent with ours or not?’
‘I believe that it is.’ Crane, the methodical, had been thinking deeply, considering every phase of their peculiar predicament. ‘Coexistent, but different in all its attributes and properties. Since we may be said to be experiencing two different time rates simultaneously, we cannot even guess at what our velocity relation is, in either system of coordinates. As to what happened, that is now quite clear. Since a three-dimensional object cannot exist in hyperspace, it of course cannot be thrown or forced through hyperspace.