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!”
8 INTO THE FOURTH DIMENSION
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 din-Ay 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 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, girl, 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 too perfectly outrageous!” Dorothy had been on the verge of
hysteria, but she regained a measure of her customary spirit under Seaton’s
ministrations. “In some ways it seems to be all right, but it’s so . . . so . . . oh, I can’t . . .”
“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
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, Dot-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 id 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, 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 yin
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