Part 2

There was a red line on the dial of the meter at the transmitter.

The purpose of the set-up was obviously to demonstrate that current could be transmitted by radio.

Marvak made a complete examination of the apparatus. He knew what he was doing, all right. You could tell from the way he went over the instruments that he knew his stuff.

"I'm not interested in transmitting just a little power," Marvak said. "If this thing is to be useful, it must be able to send lots of kilowatts through the ether."

"I think," Fradin answered wearily, "it will handle all the power you choose to put into it."

That was the thing Marvak had to know, that the power transmitted would be adequate to keep a plane in the air. If only a little power was transmitted, the invention, from a practical viewpoint, was useless. No dictator would give a cent for it.

Marvak handled the transmitter, Fradin tried to operate the receiver and to stanch the flow of blood from his shoulder at the same time.

Marvak turned a switch, and the power transmitter began to throb under the load. Marvak consulted the meter on the transmitter, then ran across the room to the receiver and examined the meter there.

"You've really got it!" he exulted. "There's enough power flowing through the receiver to keep a plane in the air."

I was sick, sicker than I had ever been. Fradin's invention worked. And when it worked, it spelled our doom. We would be killed, because it worked. How many millions of others would also die, I could not begin to guess.

"One plane is not enough," Marvak said. "It has to be strong enough to supply current to a fleet of planes."

He started triumphantly back to the transmitter.

"I--" Fradin faltered. He started to say something but changed his mind abruptly.

Marvak kicked over the handle of the rheostat that fed current into the transmitter. The transformer groaned. I could see the hand of the meter on the transmitter. It was moving forward as more and more current flowed into that mysterious medium that transmits radio waves.

The needle on the dial touched the red mark.

Then--it happened.

If I live to be a thousand years old I'll never be able to describe adequately what I saw happen, what I heard happen, what I felt happen. It had never happened before.

Something that I can only describe as a lightning flash ran through the room. It was a sharp, tearing crash, similar to the sound you hear when a bolt of lightning hits near you. There was a flash of brilliant light. Thunder seemed to smash my ear drums.

Fradin leaped--but not at Marvak. He leaped at me. The next instant he was grabbing me, shoving me across the room. And all the tortures of hell were breaking loose around that generator.

* * * * *

There was a blasting, howling roar of wind. It was the coldest wind ever. It was, I suspect, the cold of absolute zero that struck through that laboratory.

Out of nowhere, around that transmitter, a hole seemed to appear. It seemed to be torn in space. It was black, with a curiously liquid kind of blackness. It appeared around the transmitter, and Marvak was at the transmitter.

The spy seemed to freeze. A look of amazed fright appeared on his face.

Then he seemed to fall. The transmitter seemed to fall with him. Marvak tried to leap, but the footing seemed to fall away under him. He fell out of sight.

For a mad instant, while Fradin kicked and hauled me away from that transmitter, the laboratory was hideous with the blast of thunder.

Then another murderous crash came, and....

Then there was silence. Utter silence. The only sound was Fradin fighting for his breath. I looked across the room. The transmitter was gone. It just wasn't there any more. Under it, in the floor of the room was a neat, round hole. All the mass of wires that had led into it were neatly severed. Wires came from the transformer to where the hole began, then stopped.

Marvak wasn't there. Marvak was gone.

Suddenly I turned to Fradin. "You--" I gulped. "You were afraid this would happen. My God, man, what was it?"

"It was," he answered, "a hole in the fourth dimension."

Then I got it. He had been trying to tell that convention of radio engineers that radio waves were transmitted through the fourth dimension, not through the "ether." He had been able to prove his point but he had refused because he knew that this would happen.

"But even if radio waves do pass through the fourth dimension, nothing like this has ever happened," I stammered.

"Ordinary broadcasting stations do not put enough power through their transmitters to open this hole," he explained. "It takes power to do it, lots of power. I had calculated how much power it would take. There was a red mark on the input meter of the transmitter. That red line marked the critical point. If more power was put through the transmitter, it would break down the fabric of space between this dimension and the fourth dimension. I knew it would happen. That's why I refused to make a demonstration for the benefit of my skeptical compatriots. If I told them what I had discovered, proved I had discovered it, some fool would be sure to try it, with disastrous results."

"But that cold wind," I protested.

"This particular region opens out into what must be interplanetary space in the fourth dimension. That cold wind was simply the cold of outer space rushing through what was in effect a window."

So that was it. There was a hole in space. And space is cold.

"Marvak!" I said weakly.

"Don't mention him," Fradin shuddered. "He was catapulted into the fourth dimension. He's frozen solid by now."

I guess the human race will never have power by radio. Probably we will be able to get along without it. Atomic power seems to be coming along, and it's safe.

I took Fradin to the hospital. That slug through his shoulder had cost him a lot of blood, but he recovered all right, only to discover that the Institute of Radio Engineers had booted him right out of their organization, for making the preposterous claim that radio waves are transmitted through the fourth dimension instead of through the ether. However, he never cared two whoops in hell about that. He knew what he knew. And he was content with that.