Part 7
"We shall do more than that, son," the Green 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 make 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 near by, 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!"
VIII.
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 and 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 space ship. 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, dear, 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 just--"
"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 our 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, dear--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, in the fourth dimension? Then I take out a pinch of the tobacco, so, 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 coördinates. 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.
"In order to enter this region, our vessel and everything in it had to acquire the property of extension in another dimension. Your forces, calculated to rotate us here, in reality forced us to assume that extra extension, which process automatically moved us from the space in which we could no longer exist into the only one in which it is possible for us to exist. When that force is no longer operative, our extension into the fourth dimension will vanish and we shall as automatically return to our customary three-dimensional space, but probably not to our original location in that space. Is that the way you understand it?"
"That's a lot better than I understood it, and it's absolutely right, too. Thanks, old thinker! And I certainly hope we don't land back there where we took off from--that's why we left, because we wanted to get away from there. The farther the better," Seaton laughed. "Just so we don't get so far away that the whole Galaxy is out of range of the object-compasses we've got focused on it. We'd be lost for fair, then."
"That is a possibility, of course." Crane took the light utterance far more seriously than did Seaton. "Indeed, if the two time rates are sufficiently different, it becomes a probability. However, there is another matter which I think is of more immediate concern. It occurred to me, when I saw you take that pinch of tobacco without opening the tin, that everywhere we have gone, even in intergalactic space, we have found life, some friendly, some inimical. There is no real reason to suppose that hyperspace is devoid of animate and intelligent life."
"Oh, Martin!" Margaret shuddered. "Life! Here? In this horrible, this utterly impossible place?"
"Certainly, dearest," he replied gravely. "It all goes back to the conversation we had long ago, during the first trip of the old _Skylark_. Remember? Life need not be comprehensible to us to exist--compared to what we do not know and what we can never either know or understand, our knowledge is infinitesimal."
She did not reply and he spoke again to Seaton:
"It would seem to be almost a certainty that four-dimensional life does in fact exist. Postulating its existence, the possibility of an encounter cannot be denied. Such beings could of course enter this vessel as easily as your fingers entered that tobacco can. The point of these remarks is this--would we not be at a serious disadvantage? Would they not have fourth-dimensional shields or walls about which we three-dimensional intelligences would know nothing?"
"Sweet spirits of niter!" Seaton exclaimed. "Never thought of that at all, Mart. Don't see how they could--and yet it does stand to reason that they'd have some way of locking up their horses so they couldn't run away, or so that nobody else could steal them. We'll have to do a job of thinking on that, big fellow, and we'd better start right now. Come on--let's get busy!"
Then for what seemed hours the two scientists devoted the power of their combined intellects to the problem of an adequate fourth-dimensional defense, only and endlessly to find themselves butting helplessly against a blank wall.
Baffled, they drifted on through the unknowable reaches of hyperspace. All they knew of time was that it was hopelessly distorted; of space that it was hideously unrecognizable; of matter that it obeyed no familiar laws. They drifted, and drifted--futilely, timelessly, aimlessly, endlessly--
IX.
When _Skylark Three_ left Norlamin in pursuit of the fleeing vessel of Ravindau, the Fenachrone scientist, the occasion had been made an event of world-wide interest. From their tasks everywhere had come the mental laborers to that stupendous event. To it had come also, practically en masse, the "youngsters" from the Country of Youth; and even those who, their life work done, had betaken themselves to the placid Nirvana of the Country of Age returned briefly to the Country of Study to speed upon its epoch-making way that stupendous messenger of civilization.
But in sharp contrast to the throngs of Norlaminians who had witnessed the take-off of _Three_, Rovol alone was present when DuQuesne and Loring wafted themselves into the control room of its gigantic counterpart. DuQuesne had been in a hurry, and in the driving urge of his haste to go to the rescue of his "friend" Seaton he had so completely occupied the mind of Rovol that that aged scientist had had no time to do anything except transfer to the brain of the Terrestrial pirate the knowledge which he would so soon require.
Of the real reason for this overweening haste, however, Rovol had not had the slightest inkling. DuQuesne well knew what the ancient physicist did not even suspect--that if any one of several Norlaminians, particularly one Drasnik, First of Psychology, should become informed of the proposed flight, that flight would not take place. For Drasnik, that profound student of the mind, would not be satisfied with DuQuesne's story without a thorough mental examination--an examination which, DuQuesne well knew, he could not pass. Therefore Rovol alone saw them off, but what he lacked in numbers he made up in sincerity.
"I am very sorry that the exigencies of the situation did not permit a more seemly leave-taking," he said in parting, "but I can assure you of the coöperation of every one of us whose brain can be of any use. We shall watch you, and shall aid you in any way we can."
"Farewell to you, Rovol, my friend and my benefactor, and to all Norlamin," DuQuesne replied solemnly. "I thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you have done for us and for Seaton, and for what you may yet be called upon to do for all of us."
He touched a stud and in each of the many skins of the great cruiser a heavy door drove silently shut, establishing a manifold seal.
His hand moved over the controls, and the gigantic vessel tilted slowly upward until her narrow prow pointed almost directly into the zenith. Then, easily as a wafted feather, the unimaginable mass of the immense cruiser of space floated upward with gradually increasing velocity. Faster and faster she flew, out beyond measurable atmospheric pressure, out beyond the outermost limits of the Green System, swinging slowly into a right line toward the point in space where Seaton, his companions, and both their space ships had disappeared.
On and on she drove, now at high acceleration; the stars, so widely spaced at first, crowding closer and closer together as her speed, long since incomprehensible to any finite mind, mounted to a value almost incalculable. Past the system of the Fenachrone she hurtled; past the last outlying fringe of stars of our Galaxy; on and on into the unexplored, awesome depths of free and absolute space.
Behind her the vast assemblage of stars comprising our island universe dwindled to a huge, flaming lens, to a small but bright lenticular nebula, and finally to a mere point of luminosity.
For days communication with Rovol had been difficult, since as the limit of projection was approached it became impossible for the most powerful forces at Rovol's command to hold a projection upon the flying vessel. In order to communicate, Rovol had to send out a transmitting and receiving projection.
As the distance grew still greater, DuQuesne had done the same thing. Now it was becoming evident, by the wavering and fading of the signals, that even the two projections, reaching out toward each other though they were, would soon be out of touch, and DuQuesne sent out his last message:
"There is no use in trying to keep in communication any longer, as our beams are falling apart fast. I am on negative acceleration now, of an amount calculated to bring us down to maneuvering velocity at the point to which the inertia of _Skylark Two_ would have carried her, without power, at the time when we shall arrive there. Please keep a listening post established out this way as far as you can, and I will try to reach it if I find out anything. If I fail--good-by!"
"The poor, dumb cluck!" DuQuesne sneered as he shut off his sender and turned to Loring. "That was so easy that it was a shame to take it, but we're certainly set to go now."
"I'll say so!" Loring agreed enthusiastically. "That was a nice touch, chief, telling him to keep a lookout out here. He'll do it with forces, of course, not in person; but at that it'll keep him from thinking about the Earth until you're all set."
"You've got the idea, Doll. If they had any suspicion at all that we were heading back for the Earth they could block us yet, easily enough; but if we can get back inside the Solar System before they smell a rat it will be too late for them to do anything."
He rotated his ship through an angle of ninety degrees upon her longitudinal axis and applied enough downward acceleration to swing her around in such an immense circle that she would approach the Galaxy from the side opposite to that from which she had left it.
* * * * *
Then, during days that lengthened into weeks and months of dull and monotonous flight, the two men occupied themselves, each in his own individual fashion. There was no piloting to do and no need of vigilance, for space to a distance of untold billions of miles was absolutely and utterly empty.
Loring, unemotional and incurious, performed what simple routine housekeeping there was to do, ate, slept, and smoked. During the remainder of the time he simply sat still, stolidly doing nothing whatever until the time should come when DuQuesne would tell him to perform some specific act.
DuQuesne, on the other hand, dynamic and energetic to his ultimate fiber, found not a single idle moment. His newly acquired knowledge was so vast that he needs must explore and catalogue his own brain, to be sure that he would be able instantly to call upon whatever infinitesimal portion of it might be needed in some emergency.
The fifth-order projector, with its almost infinitely complicated keyboard, must needs be studied until its every possible resource of integration, permutation, and combination held from him no more secrets than does his console from a master of the pipe organ. Thus it was that the Galaxy loomed ahead, a stupendous lens of flame, before DuQuesne had really realized that the long voyage was almost over.
To his present mentality, working with his newly acquired fifth-order projector, the task of locating our Solar System was but the work of a moment; and to the power and speed of his new space ship the distance from the Galaxy's edge to the Earth was merely a longish jaunt.
When they approached the Earth it appeared as a softly shining, greenish half moon. With fleecy wisps of cloud obscuring its surface here and there, with gleaming ice caps making of its poles two brilliant areas of white, it presented an arrestingly beautiful spectacle indeed; but DuQuesne was not interested in beauty. Driving down from the empty reaches of space north of the ecliptic, he observed that Washington was in the morning zone, and soon his great vessel was poised motionless, invisibly high above the city.