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
coordinates. 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, Martini” 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. Their four-dimensional brains in
their now four-dimensional bodies told them that such extra-dimensional bulwarks and
safeguards must, and in fact did, exist; that they were not only possible, but necessary in
the humanly incomprehensible actuality in which the Terrestrials now found themselves:
but still the immaterial and thus unaltered intelligences of the human beings, utterly unable
to cope with any save three-dimensional concepts, failed miserably to envisage anything
which promised to be of the slightest service.
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 . . .
9 MASTER OF EARTH
The take-off of Norlamin’s second immense space ship was not at all like that of its first.
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 portentous launching. 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 overwhelming 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 cooperation 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. May the Unknowable Force direct your minor, forces to the successful conclusion of
your task. If, however, it is graven upon the sphere that you are to pass in this venture,
you may pass in all tranquility, for I affirm in the name of all Norlamin that this problem
shall not be laid aside short of complete solution. For all my race I bid you farewell.”
“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 Seat, 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 open 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 patch of
luminosity.
For days communication with Rovol had been difficult, since as the limit of projection was