Part 2

"The success of the Plan depends on my staying," Carl replied, his voice shaken with the emotion of the moment. "The time machine is constructed in connection with the tri-matter block so that nothing in either of the other two universes can enter it. After you enter, it must be sealed from this side for the period of time travel, so that nothing can enter from this side until it is time for you to come back. I, and my aides, must remain to do that."

"Your sacrifice is greater than mine," Hute said simply.

"It is very little compared to what you are sacrificing," Carl said, smiling, with a trace of amused contempt carefully hidden in the back of his eyes.

Hute took his hand from Carl's shoulder and gravely shook hands with Carl's aides. It was his simple gesture of reward for their great sacrifice. They would die with the gratifying knowledge that the Leader himself had taken their hand and shaken it in gratitude at a service well performed.

Then he squared his massive shoulders and stepped onto the tri-matter slab--and vanished. One by one the members of his general staff followed.

When the last of them stepped into thin air above the softly glowing square, Carl walked over to a switch board and pulled the disconnects that broke the surge of power playing over the room.

His pale assistants watched, hypnotized.

Carl smiled at them encouragingly. He glanced at his watch and estimated the time left.

"Another hour at the most now," he said quietly. "It could come any second."

The wooden walls of the room closed them in with brooding foreboding. A heavily barred window brought a view of the steel bridge that led to the city.

A large clock on the wall became the center of attention. A red second hand moved with slowly deliberate swiftness around the dial.

And in the center of the waiting group the luminous square built flush with the wooden floor waited too, its face inscrutible, its substance anchored in three roots of Being.

An electrical tension was building up around the hushed group of scientists. Vague stirrings of cold light rippled the surface of the square block of tri-matter.

"The cleavage is beginning," Carl said quietly. "When I say the word step through. The entropy shift must be just right or we'll find ourselves with Hitle and his gang. Now!"

As one man the group stepped onto the block and vanished. An instant later the holocaust broke loose.

* * * * *

Carl Grinch stood before the tribunal of the United Nations of the planet Amba. Video cameras pointed at him from every direction. The audience room was filled to overflowing with officials, and over the whole planet people had paused in their work to watch him and listen to his words.

"We, of Aleme," he was saying. "Dared not openly defy Hute Hitle. He was too strongly entrenched. Unless we obeyed his orders to the letter we were executed; and a dead man cannot serve the interests of all Amba. My researches gave me the plan I had been looking for.

"As you all know, time travel was discovered many centuries ago. It amounted to nothing more than perfect stasis. A person could travel forward in time to any period, but not backward. The time machine in marching forward existed at every instant, and was therefore always present to the view of outsiders.

"My researches made possible sideways travel in time. By means of a device that used fabulous amounts of power, I was able to gather matter from two other universes existing in the same space as our own, but with different time co-ordinates. I proved to Hitle that in one of these other universes he could escape the destruction he planned, and then return to a torn world and fulfill his destiny as ruler of the planet.

"I told him nothing but the truth. Because of that he believed me. If I had told him one lie he would have seen through the whole thing.

"In order for you to understand just what happened, and why Amba was not destroyed when he pressed the buttons that started the atom bombs on their journeys of destruction, I must tell you a little of the basic nature of reality. Our universe is at all times and in every respect a root of a cubic equation. It has long been known that space is curved. Being curved, it is not the expression of linear equations, but of equations of some higher order. It had never been determined if that order was quadratic, cubic or higher. I determined that it was cubic.

"To tell you how I solved the constants of the equation would be to go into material too complicated for any but the expert, so I'll skip that. When I solved that, though, I was able to calculate the field necessary to create a bridge from this root of the equation to the other two, gather substances from those two, blend the substances, and create a natural bridge. I did that. BUT instead of blending substance from our own universe with the other two, I kept the field going. The field acted as a bridge, and when the disconnects were broken that bridge vanished, leaving only a bridge between the other two universes.

"Now while the field lasted, all three roots were blended into the Whole, or cubic equation. In plain language, all three universes within the limits of the field were identical. So it was a simple matter to get Hute and his general staff to carry out their plans in one of the other universes rather than this one, and then escape into a time machine in the third universe.

"After they did that I merely pulled the disconnects and destroyed the field that linked our universe temporarily with the one where the destruction went on according to plan. When Hitle and his men wake up a few centuries from now they will find that things went according to plan. They will find their destruction and their bands of savages to rule, if they can rule them. But their threat to us is gone. We are rid of them for good."

The chairman cleared his throat importantly as Carl paused.

"But what of the people in this other universe,--the ones who were destroyed by the bombs let loose there? And their descendents who will survive until the day Hitle returns to force his will on them?"

Carl smiled broadly.

"They were destroyed, sir," he answered. "According to plan. That is the truth. But is isn't ALL of the truth. You see, the cubic equation that connects this universe of ours with the other two has only ONE real root. The other two are imaginary. That is what I didn't tell Hitle. The number one is a cube root of itself, and represents our own universe. The field set up by the machine was literally another cube root of one acting on our universe as a factor, transposing its forms into an imaginary universe. There Hitle succeeded in his conquest of all Amba. It was not the conquest he figured on however, because events are merely single values that fit the cubic equation,--never the equation itself. What Hitle did not know was that no one can ever succeed at conquest, but only at what might more accurately be termed the cube root of conquest.

"And in his case that cube root of conquest was imaginary, represented by the number, (a minus one half, plus the square root of a minus three fourths.) Cube that quantity yourself! You will get one for the answer. Square that quantity and you will get the third cube root of unity. Blend or multiply the two together and you get unity, which is reality in our plane of the omniverse. Multiply unity by one of the two imaginary cube roots of one, and you transform the one, or our reality, into an imaginary plane. Try it. Get a piece of paper and work it for yourself! And study the metaphysical applications of the relationships of the three cube roots of unity,--the relationship of mind, imagination, and reality, the relationships of the positive, the negative, and the neutral units of matter;--and wonder!"

End of Project Gutenberg's Cube Root of Conquest, by Roger Phillips Graham