Part 12

Then Seaton found himself moving in space. Without volition he was floating across the control room, toward the switch whose closing had ushered the Terrestrials out of their familiar space of three dimensions and into this weirdly impossible region of horror. He was not alone in his movement. Dorothy, the Cranes, and Shiro were all in motion, returning slowly to the identical positions they had occupied at the instant when Seaton had closed his master switch.

And as they moved, they _changed_. The _Skylark_ herself changed, as did every molecule, every atom of substance, in or of the spherical cruiser of the void.

Seaton's hand reached out and grasped the ebonite handle of the switch. Then, as his entire body came to rest, he was swept by wave upon wave of almost-unbearable relief as the artificial and unnatural extension into the fourth dimension began to collapse. Slowly, as had progressed the extrusion into that dimension, so progressed the de-extrusion from it. Each ultimate particle of matter underwent an indescribable and incomprehensible foreshortening; a compression; a shrinking together; a writhing and twisting reverse rearrangement, each slow increment of which was poignantly welcome to every outraged unit of human flesh.

Suddenly seeming, and yet seemingly only after untold hours, the return to three-dimensional space was finished. Seaton's hand drove through the remaining fraction of an inch of its travel with the handle of the switch; his ears heard the click and snap of the lightning-fast plungers driving home against their stop blocks--the closing of the relay switches had just been completed. The familiar fittings of the control room stood out in their normal three dimensions, sharp and clear.

Dorothy sat exactly as she had sat before the transition. She was leaning slightly forward in her seat--her gorgeous red-bronze hair in perfect order, her sweetly curved lips half parted, her violet eyes widened in somewhat fearful anticipation of what the dimensional translation was to bring. She was unchanged--but Seaton!

He also sat exactly as he had sat an instant--or was it a month?--before; but his face was thin and heavily lined, his normally powerful body was now gauntly eloquent of utter fatigue. Nor was Margaret in better case. She was haggard, almost emaciated. Her clothing, like that of Seaton, had been forced to return to a semblance of order by the exigencies of interdimensional and intertime translation, and for a moment appeared sound and whole.

The translation accomplished, however, that clothing literally felt apart. The dirt and grime of their long, hard journey and the sticky sap of the hyperplants through which they had fought their way had of course disappeared--being four-dimensional material, all such had perforce remained behind in four-dimensional space--but the thorns and sucking disks of the hypervegetation had taken toll. Now each rent and tear reappeared, to give mute but eloquent testimony to the fact that the sojourn of those two human beings in hyperland had been neither peaceful nor uneventful.

Dorothy's glance flashed in amazement from Seaton to Margaret, and she repressed a scream as she saw the ravages wrought by whatever it was that they had gone through.

But Seaton's first thought was for the bodiless foes whom they might not have left behind. "Did we get away, Mart?" he demanded, hand still upon the switch. Then, without waiting for a reply, he went on: "We must've made it, though, or we'd've been dematerialized before this. Three rousing cheers! We made it--we made it!"

For several minutes all four gave way to their mixed but profound emotions, in which relief and joy predominated. They had escaped from the intellectuals; they had come alive through hyperspace!

"But Dick!" Dorothy held Seaton off at arm's length and studied his gaunt, lined face. "Lover, you look actually thin."

"I _am_ thin," he replied. "We were gone a week, we told you. I'm just about starved to death, and I'm thirstier even than that. Not being able to eat is bad; but going without water is worse, believe me! My whole insides feel like a mess of desiccated blotters. Come on, Peg; let's empty us a couple of water tanks."

They drank; lightly and intermittently at first, then deeply.

At last Seaton put down the pitcher. "That isn't enough, by any means; but we're damp enough inside so that we can swallow food, I guess. While you're finding out where we are, Mart, Peg and I'll eat six or eight meals apiece."

* * * * *

While Seaton and Margaret ate--ate as they had drunk, carefully, but with every evidence of an insatiable bodily demand for food--Dorothy's puzzled gaze went from the worn faces of the diners to a mirror which reflected her own vivid, unchanged self.

"But I don't understand it at all, Dick!" she burst out at last. "_I'm_ not thirsty, nor hungry, and I haven't changed a bit. Neither has Martin; and yet you two have lost pounds and pounds and look as though you had been pulled through a knot hole. It didn't seem to us as though you were away from us all. You were going to tell me about that back there, when we were interrupted. Now go ahead and explain things, before I explode. What happened, anyway?"

Seaton, hunger temporarily assuaged, gave a full but concise summary of everything that had happened while he and Margaret were away from the _Skylark_. He then launched into a scientific dissertation, only to be interrupted by Dorothy.

"But, Dick, it doesn't sound reasonable that all that could _possibly_ have happened to you and Peggy without our even knowing that any time at all had passed!" she expostulated. "We weren't unconscious or anything, were we, Martin? We knew what was going on all the time, didn't we?"

"We were at no time unconscious, and we knew at all times what was taking place around us," Crane made surprising but positive answer. He was seated at a visiplate, but had been listening to the story instead of studying the almost-sheer emptiness that was space. "And since it is a truism of Norlaminian psychology that any lapse of consciousness, of however short duration, is impressed upon the consciousness of a mind of even moderate power, I feel safe in saying that for Dorothy and me, at least, no lapse of time did occur or could have occurred."

"There!" Dorothy exulted. "You've got to admit that Martin knows his stuff. How are you going to get around that?"

"Search me--wish I knew." Seaton frowned in thought. "But Mart chirped it, I think, when he said 'for Dorothy and me, at least,' because for us two time certainly lapsed, and lapsed plenty. However, Mart certainly _does_ know his stuff; the old think tank is full of bubbles all the time. He doesn't make positive statements very often, and when he does you can sink the bank roll on 'em. Therefore, since you were both conscious and time did not lapse--for you--it must have been time itself that was cuckoo instead of you. It must have stretched, or must have been stretched, like the very dickens--for you.

"Where does that idea get us? I might think that their time was intrinsically variable, as well as being different from ours, if it was not for the regular alternation of night and day--of light and darkness, at least--that Peg and I saw, and which affected the whole country, as far as we could see. So that's out.

"Maybe they treated you two to a dose of suspended animation or something of the kind, since you weren't going anywhere--Nope, that idea doesn't carry the right earmarks, and besides it would have registered as such on Martin's Norlaminianly psychological brain. So that's out, too. In fact, the only thing that could deliver the goods would be a sta--but that'd be a trifle strong, even for a hyperman, I'm afraid."

"What would?" demanded Margaret. "Anything that you would call strong ought to be worth listening to."

"A stasis of time. Sounds a trifle far-fetched, of course, but--"

"But phooey!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Now you _are_ raving, Dick!"

"I'm not so sure of that, at all," Seaton argued stubbornly. "They really understand time, I think, and I picked up a couple of pointers. It would take a sixth-order field--That's it, I'm pretty sure, and that gives me an idea. If they can do it in hypertime, why can't we do it in ours?"

"I fail to see how such a stasis could be established," argued Crane. "It seems to me that as long as matter exists time must continue, since it is quite firmly established that time depends upon matter--or rather upon the motion in space of that which we call matter."

"Sure--that's what I'm going on. Time and motion are both relative. Stop all motion--relative, not absolute motion--and what have you? You have duration without sequence or succession, which is what?"

"That would be a stasis of time, as you say," Crane conceded, after due deliberation. "How can you do it?"

"I don't know yet whether I can or not--that's another question. We already know, though, how to set up a stasis of the ether along a spherical surface, and after I have accumulated a little more data on the sixth order it should not be impossible to calculate a volume-stasis in both ether and sub-ether, far enough down to establish complete immobility and local cessation of time in gross matter so affected."

"But would not all matter so affected assume at once the absolute zero of temperature and thus preclude life?"

"I don't think so. The stasis would be sub-atomic and instantaneous, you know; there could be no loss or transfer of energy. I don't see how gross matter could be affected at all. As far as I can see it would be an absolutely perfect suspension of animation. You and Dot lived through it, anyway, and I'm positive that that's what they did to you. And I still say that if anybody can do it, we can."

"'And that,'" put in Margaret roguishly, "as you so feelingly remark, 'is a cheerful thought to dwell on--let's dwell on it!'"

"We'll do that little thing, too, Peg, some of these times; see if we don't!" Seaton promised. "But to get back to our knitting, what's the good word, Mart--located us yet? Are we, or are we not, heading for that justly famed distant Galaxy of the Fenachrone?"

"We are not," Crane replied flatly, "nor are we heading for any other point in space covered by the charts of Ravindau's astronomers."

"Huh? Great Cat!" Seaton joined the physicist at his visiplate, and made complete observations upon the few nebulae visible.

He turned then to the charts, and his findings confirmed those of Crane. They were so far away from our own Galaxy that the space in which they were was unknown, even to those masters of astronomy and of intergalactic navigation, the Fenachrone.

"Well, we're not lost, anyway, thanks to your cautious old bean." Seaton grinned as he stepped over to an object-compass mounted upon the plane table.

* * * * *

This particular instrument was equipped with every refinement known to the science of four great Solar Systems. Its exceedingly delicate needle, swinging in an almost-perfect vacuum upon practically frictionless jeweled bearings, was focused upon the unimaginable mass of the entire First Galaxy, a mass so inconceivably great that mathematics had shown--and even Crane would have stated as a fact--that it would affect that needle from any point whatever, however distant, in universal space.

Seaton actuated the minute force which set the needle in motion, but it did not oscillate. For minute after minute it revolved slowly but freely, coming ultimately to rest without any indication of having been affected in the least by any external influence. He stared at the compass in stark, unbelieving amazement, then tested its current and its every other factor. The instrument was in perfect order and in perfect adjustment. Grimly, quietly, he repeated the oscillatory test--with the same utterly negative result.

"Well, that is eminently, conclusively, definitely, and unqualifiedly that." He stared at Crane, unseeing, his mind racing. "The most sensitive needle we've got, and she won't even register!"

"In other words, we are lost." Crane's voice was level and calm. "We are so far away from the First Galaxy that even that compass, supposedly reactive from any possible location in space, is useless."

"But I don't get it, at all, Mart!" Seaton expostulated, paying no attention to the grim meaning underlying his friend's utterance. "With the whole mass of the Galaxy as its object of attachment that needle absolutely will register from a distance greater than any possible diameter of the super-universe--" His voice died away.

"Go on; you are beginning to see the light," Crane prompted.

"Yeah--no wonder I couldn't plot a curve to trace those Fenachrone torpedoes--our fundamental assumptions were unsound. The fact simply is that if space is curved at all, the radius of curvature is vastly greater than any figure as yet proposed, even by the Fenachrone astronomers. We certainly weren't out of our own space a thousandth of a second--more likely only a couple of millionths--do you suppose that there really are folds in the fourth dimension?"

"That idea has been advanced, but folds are not strictly necessary, nor are they easy to defend. It has always seemed to me that the hypothesis of linear departure is much more tenable. The planes need not be parallel, you know--in fact, it is almost a mathematical certainty that they are _not_ parallel."

"That's so, too; and that hypothesis would account for everything, of course. But how are--"

"What _are_ you two talking about?" demanded Dorothy. "We simply couldn't have come that far--why, the _Skylark_ was stuck in the ground the whole time!"

"As a physicist, Red-Top, you're a fine little beauty-contest winner." Seaton grinned. "You forget that with the velocity she had, the _Lark_ couldn't have been stopped within three months, either--yet she seemed to stop. How about that, Mart?"

"I have been thinking about that. It is all a question of relative velocities, of course; but even at that, the angle of departure of the two spaces must have been extreme indeed to account for our present location in three-dimensional space."

"Extreme is right; but there's no use yapping about it now, any more than about any other spilled milk. We'll just have to go places and do things; that's all."

"Go where and do what?" asked Dorothy pointedly.

"Lost--lost in space!" Margaret breathed.

As the dread import of their predicament struck into her consciousness she had seized the arm rests of her chair in a spasmodic clutch; but she forced herself to relax and her deep brown eyes held no sign of panic.

"But we have been lost in space before, Dottie, apparently as badly as we are now. Worse, really, because we did not have Martin and Dick with us then."

"'At-a-girl, Peg!" Seaton cheered. "We may--be lost--guess we are, temporarily, at least--but we're not licked, not by seven thousand rows of apple trees!"

"I fail to perceive any very solid basis for your optimism," Crane remarked quietly, "but you have an idea, of course. What is it?"

"Pick out the Galaxy nearest our line of flight and brake down for it." Seaton's nimble mind was leaping ahead. "The _Lark's_ so full of uranium that her skin's bulging, so we've got power to burn. In that Galaxy there are--there _must_ be--suns with habitable, possibly inhabited, planets. We'll find one such planet and land on it. Then we'll do with our might what our hands find to do."

"Such as?"

"Along what lines?" queried Dorothy and Crane simultaneously.

"Space ship, probably--_Two's_ entirely too small to be of any account in intergalactic work," Seaton replied promptly. "Or maybe fourth-, fifth- and sixth-order projectors; or maybe some kind of an ultra-ultra radio or projector. How do I know, from here? But there's thousands of things that maybe we can do--we'll wait until we get there to worry about which one to try first."

XV.

Seaton strode over to the control board and applied maximum acceleration. "Might as well start traveling, Mart," he remarked to Crane, who had for almost an hour been devoting the highest telescopic power of number six visiplate to spectroscopic, interferometric, and spectrophotometric studies of half a dozen selected nebulae. "No matter which one you pick out we'll have to have quite a lot of positive acceleration yet before we reverse to negative."

"As a preliminary measure, might it not be a good idea to gain some idea as to our present line of flight?" Crane asked dryly, bending a quizzical glance upon his friend. "You know a great deal more than I do about the hypothesis of linear departure of incompatible and incommensurable spaces, however, and so perhaps you already know our true course."

"Ouch! Pals, they got me!" Seaton clapped a hand over his heart; then, seizing his own ear, he led himself up to the switchboard and shut off the space drive, except for the practically negligible superimposed thirty-two feet per second which gave to the _Skylark's_ occupants a normal gravitational force.

"Why, Dick, how perfectly silly!" Dorothy chuckled. "What's the matter? All you've got to do is to--"

"Silly, says you?" Seaton, still blushing, interrupted her. "Woman, you don't know the half of it! I'm just plain dumb, and Mart was tactfully calling my attention to the fact. Them's soft words that the slatlike string bean just spoke, but believe me, Red-Top, he packs a wicked wallop in that silken glove!"

"Keep still a minute, Dick, and look at the bar!" Dorothy protested. "Everything's on zero, so we must be still going straight up, and all you have to do to get back somewhere near our own Galaxy is to turn it around. Why didn't one of you brilliant thinkers--or have I overlooked a bet?"

"Not exactly. You don't know about those famous linear departures, but I do. I haven't that excuse--I simply went off half cocked again. You see, it's like this: Even if those gyroscopes could have retained their orientation unchanged through the fourth-dimensional translation, which is highly improbable, that line wouldn't mean a thing as far as getting back is concerned.

"We took one gosh-awful jump in going through hyperspace, you know, and we have no means at all of determining whether we jumped up, down, or sidewise. Nope, he's right, as usual--we can't do anything intelligently until he finds out, from the shifting of spectral lines and so on, in what direction we actually are traveling. How're you coming with it, Mart?"

"For really precise work we shall require photographs of some twenty hours' exposure. However, I have made six preliminary observations, as nearly on rectangular coördinates as possible, from which you can calculate a first-approximation course which will serve until we can obtain more precise data."

"All right! Calcium H and calcium K--Were they all type G?"

"Four of them were of type G, two were of type K. I selected the H and K lines of calcium because they were the most prominent individuals appearing in all six spectra."

"Fine! While you're taking your pictures I'll run them off on the calculator. From the looks of those shifts I'd say I could hit our course within five degrees, which is close enough for a few days, at least."

Seaton soon finished his calculations. He then read off from the great graduated hour-space and declination-circles of the gyroscope cage the course upon which the power bar was then set, and turned with a grin to Crane, who had just opened the shutter for his first time exposure.

"We were off plenty, Mart," he admitted. "The whole gyroscope system was rotated about ninety degrees minus declination and something like plus seven hours' right ascension, so we'll have to forget all our old data and start out from scratch with the reference planes as they are now. That won't hurt us much, though, since we haven't any idea where we are, anyway.

"We're heading about ten degrees or so to the right of that nebula over there, which is certainly a mighty long ways off from where I thought we were going. I'll put on full positive and point ten degrees to the left of it. Probably you'd better read it now, and by taking a set of observations, say a hundred hours apart, we can figure when we'll have to reverse acceleration.

"While you're doing that I thought I'd start seeing what I could do about a fourth-order projector. It'll take a long time to build, and we'll need one bad when we get inside that Galaxy. What do you think?"

"I think that both of those ideas are sound," Crane assented, and each man bent to his task.

* * * * *

Crane took his photographs and studied each of the six key nebulae with every resource of his ultrarefined instruments. Having determined the _Skylark's_ course and speed, and knowing her acceleration, he was able at last to set upon the power bar an automatically varying control of such a nature that her resultant velocity was directly toward the lenticular nebula nearest her former line of flight.

That done, he continued his observations at regular intervals--constantly making smaller his limit of observational error, constantly so altering the power and course of the vessel that the selected Galaxy would be reached in the shortest possible space of time consistent with a permissible final velocity.

And in the meantime Seaton labored upon the projector. It had been out of the question, of course, to transfer to tiny _Two_ the immense mechanism which had made of _Three_ a sentient, almost a living, thing; but, equally of course, he had brought along the force-band transformers and selectors, and as much as possible of the other essential apparatus. He had been obliged to leave behind, however, the very heart of the fifth-order installation--the precious lens of neutronium--and its lack was now giving him deep concern.

"What's the matter, Dickie? You look as though you had lost your last friend." Dorothy intercepted him one day as he paced about the narrow confines of the control room, face set and eyes unseeing.

"Not quite that, but ever since I finished that fourth-order outfit I've been trying to figure out something to take the place of that lens we had in _Three_, so that I can go ahead on the fifth, but that seems to be one thing for which there is absolutely no substitute. It's like trying to unscrew the inscrutable--it can't be done."

"If you can't get along without it, why didn't you bring it along, too?"

"Couldn't."

"Why?" she persisted.

"Nothing strong enough to hold it. In some ways it's worse than atomic energy. It's so hot and under such pressure that if that lens were to blow up in Omaha it would burn up the whole United States, from San Francisco to New York City. It takes either thirty feet of solid inoson or else a complete force-bracing to stand the pressure. We had neither, no time to build anything, and couldn't have taken it through hyperspace even if we could have held it safely."

"Does that mean--"

"No. It simply means that we'll have to start at the fourth again and work up. I did bring along a couple of good big faidons, so that all we've got to do is find a planet heavy enough and solid enough to anchor a full-sized fourth-order projector on, within twenty light-years of a white dwarf star."

"Oh, is that all? You two'll do that, all right."

"Isn't it wonderful the confidence some women have in their husbands?" Seaton asked Crane, who was studying through number six visiplate and the fourth-order projector the enormous expanse of the strange Galaxy at whose edge they now were. "I think maybe we'll be able to pull it off, though, at that. Of course we aren't close enough yet to find such minutiae as planets, but how are things shaping up in general?"

"Quite encouraging! This Galaxy is certainly of the same order of magnitude as our own, and--"