Part 2

The next instant we were sailing over a parched and blazing desert, a glaring waste of jagged lava that stretched away on every side through a shimmering haze of heat. Black basalt cliffs jutted up here and there, warped and eroded by scorching winds.

Dora and I looked at each other dumbly.

"We got away," Dora said. "But what sort of dimension is _this_? Where are we, Jerry?"

It was a good question. Judging from the landscape the collapsing Di-tube could have shunted us straight into the ash-bin of hell. There wasn't a twinkle of water anywhere, not a wisp of cloud nor a flutter of bird in the sky. Just a vast wind-swept desolation, parching to a sandy crisp under a flaming sun.

I was fumbling for an answer when Dora caught my arm. "Look, Jerry--there, over the horizon. Isn't that smoke?"

I looked and it was--a thin white streamer of smoke rising across the badlands, wavering at the top like the crooking of an enigmatic finger.

"We may as well investigate," I said, heeling the gyro toward it. "If it means another danger we might as well face it now as later."

But it wasn't another alien menace.

It was a sheep camp at the edge of the lava beds not far from San Rafael, New Mexico. The Mexican herder ran like a jackrabbit when we swooped down, never having seen a gyro before, but at Acomita--over on the Pueblo Indian reservation--we found a government agent who gave us our bearings and brought us up to date.

After what we had been through, it was only a minor shock to learn that it wasn't 1982 any longer. It was 1985 and the Blazers had been gone for so long that they were practically forgotten. Doc Maxey explained later, when we showed up with a small army of telepaper reporters at his Connecticut home, that our being caught in the collapsing Di-field had somehow distorted the time values involved and had shunted us three years into the future.

We took his word for it.

"The proponents of the circular-universe theory were more right than they knew," Doc said, beaming and waggling his beard. "There would seem to be only three major planes of existence, each existing in a state of reciprocal contiguity to the other two.

"I suspect also that spherical space is actually a unilateral continuum of three layers, restricting lateral transit to one direction in much the same fashion as a rectifying crystal governs the flow of electrons. That would explain why the Twisters could force entrance to the Blazers' dimension, once you destroyed the strain-bubble in superspace, but could not enter our plane from their own subspatial continuum."

"It's all physics to me," I said, holding Dora's hand and feeling almost safe again. "Only one thing worries me--did the Blazers lose the rhubarb we ran out on or will we have them back in our hair again some day?"

Doc gave me a startled squint and fuzzed his beard goatishly. "Get that model generator out of the gyro," he ordered, sounding like his old self. "We'll never know what the situation really is unless we reactivate the Di-tube and--"

"And start that ratrace again?" I yelled. I could see the whole crazy business happening over and over in a sort of vicious cosmic circle, and the thought made my scalp crawl. "Over my dead body you will!"

Dora and I had planned to find a minister next but the big moment had to wait. I had one final adjustment to make on that infernal Di-tube model first.

I made it on the spot--with a large sledgehammer.

* * * * *

_Dr. Einstein has received a multitude of well-deserved honors but as far as we know science fiction has yet to do him direct homage. And surely he rates it--for had he not, some sixty years ago, come up with his full-born theory of the fourth dimension (and won worldwide publicity for said dimension) STF would have been deprived of one of its basic staples. Without the fourth (and fifth, sixth, seventh and so on) dimension, authors of speculative fantasy would have been left stumbling amid the distorted metaphysics of their Gothic forerunners--and would thereby have been constantly at war with the clergy. Thanks to Dr. Einstein they can roam the dimensions at will, threatened by no purgatory except that of creative writing itself or of the possibility of a rejection slip._