and disappeared.
Seaton turned quickly to his wife, ready to minister again to overstrained nerves, but
much to his surprise he found Dorothy calm and intensely interested.
“Funny-looking things, weren’t they, Dick?” she asked animatedly. “They looked just like
highly magnified chess knights with four hands; or like those funny little sea horses they
have in the aquarium, only on a larger scale. Were those propellers they had instead of
tails natural or artificial -could you tell?”
“Huh? What’re you talking about? I didn’t see any such details as that!” Seaton
exclaimed.
“I couldn’t, either, really,” Dorothy explained, “until after I found out how to look at them. I
don’t know whether my method would appeal to a strictly scientific mind or not. I can’t
understand any of this fourth-dimensional, mathematical stuff of yours and Martin’s,
anyway, so when I want to see anything out here I just pretend that the fourth dimension
isn’t there at all. I just look at what you call the three-dimensional surface and it looks all
right. When I look at you that way, for instance, you look like my own Dick, instead of like
a cubist’s four-dimensional nightmare.”
“You have hit it, Dorothy.” Crane had been visualizing four-dimensional objects as three-
dimensional while she was speaking. “That is probably the only way in which we can
really perceive hyper-things at all.”
“It does work, at that!” Seaton exclaimed. “Congratulations, Dot; you’ve made a
contribution to science but say, what’s coming off now? We’re going somewhere.”
For the Skylark, which had been floating freely in space -a motion which the senses of
the wanderers had long since ceased to interpret as a sensation of falling-had been given
an acceleration. Only a slight acceleration, barely enough to make the floor of the control
room seem “down,” but any acceleration at all in such circumstances was to the
scientists cause for grave concern.
“Nongravitational, of course, or we would have felt it before-what’s the answer, Mart, if
any?” Seaton demanded. “Suppose that they’ve taken hold of us with a tractor and are
taking us for a ride?”
“It would appear that way. I wonder if the visiplates are still practical?” Crane moved
over to number one visiplate and turned it in every direction. Nothing was visible in the
abysmal, all-engulfing, almost palpable darkness of the absolute black outside the hull of
the vessel.
“It wouldn’t work, hardly,” Seaton commented. “Look at our time here-we must be ‘way
beyond light. I doubt if we could see anything, even if we had a sixth-order projector
which of course we haven’t.”
“But how about our light inside here, then?” asked Margaret. “The lamps are burning, and
we can see things.”
“I don’t know, Peg,” Seaton replied. “All this stuff is ‘way past me. Maybe it’s because
the lights are traveling with us-no, that’s out. Probably, as I intimated before, we aren’t
seeing things at all-just feeling them, some way or other. That must be it, I think-it’s sure
that the light-waves from those lamps are almost perfectly stationary, as far as we’re
concerned.”
“Oh, there’s something!” Dorothy called. She had remained at the visiplate, staring into
the impenetrable darkness. “See, it just flashed on! We’re falling toward ground of some
kind. It doesn’t look like any planet I ever saw before, either-it’s perfectly endless and it’s
perfectly flat.”
The others rushed to the plates and saw, instead of the utter blackness of a moment
before, an infinite expanse of level, uncurving hyperland. Though so distant from it that
any planetary curvature should have been evident, they could perceive none. Flat that
land was-a geometrical plane and sunless, but apparently self-luminous; glowing with a
strong, somewhat hazy, violet light. And now they could also see the craft which had
been towing them. It was a lozenge shaped affair, glowing fiercely with the peculiarly livid
“light” of the hyper planet; and was now apparently exerting its maximum tractive effort in
a vain attempt to hold the prodigious mass of Skylark Two against the seemingly slight
force of gravitation.
“Must be some kind of hyper light that we’re seeing by,” Seaton cogitated. “Must be sixth
or seventh-order velocity, at least, or we’d be . . .”
“Never mind the light or our seeing things!” Dorothy interrupted. “We are falling, and we
shall probably hit hard. Can’t you do something about it?”
“Afraid not, Kitten.” He grinned at her. “But I’ll try it – Nope, everything’s dead. No power,
no control, no nothing, and there won’t be until we snap back where we belong. But don’t
worry about a crash. Even if that ground is solid enough to crash us, and I don’t think it
is, everything out here, including gravity, seems to be so feeble that it won’t hurt us any.”
Scarcely had he finished speaking when the Skylark struck -or, rather, floated gently
downward into the ground. For, slight as was the force of gravitation, and partially
counteracted as well by the pull of the towing vessel, the arenak globe did not even
pause as it encountered the apparently solid rock of the surface of the planet-if planet it
was. That rock billowed away upon all sides as the Skylark sank into it and through it, to
come to a halt only after her mass had driven a vertical, smooth-sided well some
hundreds of feet in depth.
Even though the Osnomian metal had been rendered much less dense than normal by its
extrusion and expansion into the fourth dimension, yet it was still so much denser than the
unknown material of the hyper planet that it sank into that planet’s rocky soil as a bullet
sinks into thick jelly.
“Well, that’s that!” Seaton declared. “Thinness and tenuosity, as well as feebleness,
seem to be characteristics of this hypermaterial. Now we’ll camp here peacefully for a
while. Before they succeed in digging us out-if they try it, which they probably will-we’ll
be gone.”
Again, however, the venturesome and impetuous chemist was wrong. Feeble the
hypermen were, and tenuous, but their curiosity was whetted even sharper than before.
Derricks were rigged, and slings; but even before the task of hoisting the Skylark to the
surface of the planet was begun, two of the peculiar denizens of the hyperworld were
swimming down through the atmosphere of the four-dimensional well at whose bottom
the Earth vessel lay. Past the arenak wall of the cruiser they dropped, and into the
control room they floated.
“But I do not understand it at all, Dick,” Crane had been arguing. “Postulating the
existence of a three-dimensional object in four-dimensional space, a four-dimensional
being could of course enter it at will, as your fingers entered that tobacco can. But since
all objects here are in fact and of necessity four-dimensional, that condition alone should
bar any such proceeding. Therefore, since you actually did take the contents out of that
can without opening it, and since our recent visitors actually did enter and leave our
vessel at will, I can only conclude that we must still be essentially three-dimensional in
nature, even though constrained temporarily to occupy four-dimensional space.”
“Say, Mart, that’s a thought! You’re still the champion thinker of the universe, aren’t you?
That explains a lot of things I’ve been worrying myself black in the face about. I think I
can explain it, too, by analogy. Imagine a two-dimensional man, one centimeter wide and
ten or twelve centimeters long; the typical flatlander of the classical dimensional
explanations. There he is, in a plane, happy as a clam and perfectly at home. Then some
force takes him by one end and rolls him up into a spiral, or sort of semisolid cylinder,
one centimeter long. He won’t know what to make of it, but in reality he’ll be a two-
dimensional man occupying three-dimensional space.
“Now imagine further that we can see him, which of course is a pretty tall order, but
necessary since this is a very rough analogy. We wouldn’t know what to make of him,
either, would we? Doesn’t that square up with what we’re going through now? We’d think
that such a thing was quite a curiosity and want to find out about it, wouldn’t we? That, I
think, explains the whole thing, both our sensations and the actions of those sea horses-
huh! Here they are again. Welcome to our city, strangers!”
But the intruders made no sign of understanding the message. They did not, could not,
understand.
Their four-dimensional minds, conceived and reared in hyper-space and knowing nothing
save hyper-things, were of course utterly incapable of receiving or of comprehending any
thoughts emanating from the fundamentally three-dimensional Terrestrials.
The human beings, now using Dorothy’s happily discovered method of dimensional
reduction, saw that the hyper-men did indeed somewhat resemble overgrown sea
horses-the hippocampus heptagonus of Earthly zoology-but sea horses each equipped
with a writhing, spinning, air-propeller tail and with four long and sinuous arms,
terminating in many dexterous and prehensile fingers.
Each of those hands held a grappling trident; a peculiar, four-dimensional hyperforceps