‘Comrade Dragosani!’ the DO’s voice calling from next door shattered his thoughts to shards. ‘I have GREPO HQ in Berlin for you. I’m putting them through now.’
‘Good,’ he called back. ‘And while I’m speaking to them there’s something else you can do. I want the Chateau searched top to bottom. Especially the cellars. To my knowledge there are rooms down there no one ever went into. I want the place turned inside out. Look for bombs, incendiary devices, for anything at all that looks suspicious. I want as many men on it as possible -particularly the ESPers. Understood?’
‘Yes, Comrade, of course.’
‘Very well, now let me speak to these damned Germans.’
It was 3:15 p.m. and Arctic cold in the city cemetery in Leipzig.
Harry Keogh, his overcoat turned up around his ears and a flask of coffee (long empty) in his lap, sat frozen at the foot of August Ferdinand Mobius’ grave and despaired. He had sought to apply his ESPer’s mind -his ‘metaphysical’ talent – to the equally conjectural properties of altered space-time and four-dimensioned topology and failed. Intuition told him it was possible, that he could in fact take a Mobius trip sideways in time,
but the mechanics of the thing were mountain-sized stumbling blocks that he just couldn’t climb. His instinctive or intuitive grasp of maths and non-Euclidean geometry was not enough. He felt like a man given the equation E = me2 and then asked to prove it by producing an atomic explosion – but with his mind alone! How do you go about turning unbodied numbers, pure maths into physical facts? It’s not enough to know that there are ten thousand bricks in a house; you can’t build the house of numbers, you need the bricks! It was one thing for Mobius to send his unbodied mind out beyond the farthest stars, but Harry Keogh was a physical three-dimensional man of living flesh and blood. And just suppose he succeeded and actually discovered how to teleport himself from ‘A’ to some hypothetical ‘B’ without physically covering the space between. What then? Where would he teleport himself to – and how would he know when he was there? It could prove as dangerous as stepping off a cliff to prove the law of gravity!
For days now he’d occupied his mind with the problem to the exclusion of almost everything else. He had taken food and drink and sleep, yes, attending to all of Nature’s needs, but to nothing else. And still the problem remained unsolved, space-time refused to warp for him, the equations remained dark unfathomed squiggles on the now grubby, well-thumbed pages of his mind. A wonderful ambition, certainly – to impose himself physically within a metaphysical frame – but how to go about it?
‘You need a spur, Harry,’ said Mobius, wearily breaking in on his thoughts for what must be the fiftieth time in the last day or so. ‘Personally, I think that’s all that remains. After all, necessity is the mother of invention, you know. So far you know what you want to do – and I for one believe you have the knack, the intuitive ability, even though you haven’t found it yet – but you haven’t a good enough reason for doing it! That’s all you need
now, the right spur. The prod that will make you take the final step.’
Harry gave a mental nod of acknowledgement. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘I know I will do it; it’s just that I … haven’t tried yet? It’s something like giving up smoking: you can but can’t. You probably will when it’s too late, when you’re dying of cancer. Except I don’t want to wait that long! I mean, I have all the maths, all the theory – I have all the ego, really, the intuition – but I haven’t the need, not yet. Or the spur, if you like. Let me tell you what it feels like:
‘I’m sitting in a well-lighted room with a window and a door. I look out the window and it’s dark out there. It always will be. Not night but a stronger darkness that will last for ever. It’s the darkness of the spaces between the spaces. I know there are other rooms out there somewhere. My problem is that I don’t have any directions. If I go out that door I’ll be part of the darkness, surrounded by it. I might not be able to come in again, here or anywhere else. It’s not so much that I can’t go out but more that I don’t want to think about what it’s like out there. Actually, to know it’s there is to know I can go out into it. I feel that the going will just be an extension of the other things I can do, but an untried extension. I’m a chicken in a shell, and I won’t break out until I have to!’