sword and buckler of Peg’s, Mart. They don’t look so hot, but they’re big medicine in
these parts. All we’ve got to do is swing them fast enough to keep those stingaroos of
theirs out of our gizzards and we’re all set. Be careful not to hit too hard, though, or you’ll
bust that grating into forty pieces -it’s hyperstuff, nowhere near as solid as anything
we’re used to. All it’ll stand is about normal fly-swatting stroke, but that’s enough to
knock any of these fantailed bumming birds into an outside loop. Ah, they’ve got guns or
something! Duck down, girls; so we can cover you with these shields; and, Shiro, you
might pull that piece of chain apart and throw the links at them-that’ll be good for what
ails them!”
The hypermen appeared in the control room, and battle again was joined. This time,
however, the natives did not rush to the attack with their tridents; nor did they employ
their futile rays of death. They had guns, shooting pellets of metal; they had improvised
cross-bowlike slings and catapults; they had spears and javelins made of their densest
materials, which their strongest men threw with all their power. But pellets and spears
alike thudded harmlessly against four-dimensional shields-shields once the impenetrable,
unbreakable doors of their mightiest prison-and the masses of metal and stone vomited
forth by the catapults were caught by Seaton and Crane and hurled back through the
ranks of the attackers with devastating effect. Shiro also was doing untold damage with
his bits of chain and with such other items of four-dimensional matter as came to hand.
Still the hypermen came pressing in, closer and closer. Soon the three men were
standing in a triangle, in the center of which were the women, their flying weapons
defining a volume of space to enter which meant hideous dismemberment and death to
any hypercreature. But on they came, willing, it seemed, to spend any number of lives to
regain their lost control over the Terrestrials; realizing, it seemed, that even those
supernaturally powerful beings must in time weaken.
While the conflict was at its height, however, it seemed to Seaton that the already
tenuous hypermen were growing even more wraithlike; and at the same time he found
himself fighting with greater and greater difficulty. The lethal grating, which he had been
driving with such speed that it had been visible only as a solid barrier, moved more and
ever more slowly, to come finally to a halt in spite of his every effort.
He could not move a muscle, and despairingly he watched a now almost-invisible warden
who was approaching him, controlling trident out thrust. But to his relieved surprise the
hyperforceps did not touch him, but slithered past him without making contact; and
hyperman and hyperweapon disappeared altogether, fading out slowly into nothingness.
Then Seaton found himself moving in space. Without volition he was floating across the
control room, toward the switch whose closing had ushered the Terrestrials out of their
familiar space of three dimensions and into this weirdly impossible region of horror. Nor
was he alone in his movement. Dorothy, the Cranes, and Shiro were all in motion, return-
ing slowly to the identical positions they had occupied at the instant when Seaton had
closed his master switch.
And as they moved, they changed. The Skylark herself changed, as did every molecule,
every atom of substance, in or of the spherical cruiser of the void.
Seaton’s hand reached out and grasped the ebonite handle of the switch. Then, as his
entire body came to rest, he was swept by wave upon wave of almost-unbearable relief
as the artificial and unnatural extension into the fourth dimension began to collapse.
Slowly, as had progressed the extrusion into that dimension, so progressed the de-
extrusion from it. Each ultimate particle of matter underwent an indescribable and
incomprehensible foreshortening; a compression; a shrinking together; a writhing and
twisting reverse rearrangement, each slow increment of which was poignantly welcome
to every outraged unit of human flesh.
Suddenly seeming, and yet seemingly only after untold hours, the return to three-
dimensional space was finished. Seaton’s hand drove through the remaining fraction of
an inch of its travel with the handle of the switch; his ears heard the click and snap of the
plungers driving home against their stop blocks-the closing of the relay switches had just
been completed. The familiar fittings of the control room stood out in their normal three
dimensions, sharp and clear.
Dorothy sat exactly as she had sat before the transition. She was leaning slightly forward
in her seat-her gorgeous red-bronze hair in perfect order, her sweetly curved lips half
parted, her violet eyes widened in somewhat fearful anticipation of what the dimensional
translation was to bring. She was unchanged-but Seaton!
He also sat exactly as he had sat an instant-or was it a month?-before; but his face was
thin and heavily lined, his normally powerful body was now gauntly eloquent of utter
fatigue. Nor was Margaret in better case. She was haggard, almost emaciated. Her
clothing, like that of Seaton, had been forced to return to a semblance of order by the
exigencies of interdimensional and inter-time translation, and for a moment appeared
sound and whole.
The translation accomplished, however, that clothing literally fell apart. The dirt and grime
of their long, hard journey and the sticky sap of the hyperplants through which they bad
fought their way bad of course disappeared-being four-dimensional material, all such had
perforce remained behind in four-dimensional space-but the thorns and sucking disks of
the hypervegetation had taken toll. Now each rent and tear reappeared, to give mute but
eloquent testimony to the fact that the sojourn of those two human beings in hyperland
had been neither peaceful nor uneventful.
Dorothy’s glance flashed in amazement from Seaton to Margaret, and she repressed a
scream as she saw the ravages wrought by whatever it was that they had gone through.
She could not understand it, could not reconcile it with what site herself had experienced
while in the hyper-space-hyper-time continuum, but moved by the ages-old instinct of all
true women, she reached out to take her abused husband into the shelter of her arms.
But Seaton’s first thought was for the bodiless foes whom they might not have left
behind.
“Did we get away, Mart?” he demanded, hand still upon the switch. Then, without waiting
for a reply, he went on: “We must’ve made it, though, or we’d’ve been dematerialized
before this. Three rousing cheers! We made it-we made it!”
For several minutes all four gave way to their mixed but profound emotions, in which
relief and joy predominated. They had escaped from the intellectuals; they had come
alive through hyper-space!
“But Dick!” Dorothy held Seaton off at arm’s length and studied his gaunt, lined face.
“Lover, you look actually thin.”
“I am thin,” he replied. “We were gone a week, we told you. I’m just about starved to
death, and I’m thirstier even than that. Not being able to eat is bad; but going without
water is worse, believe me! My whole insides feel like a mess of desiccated blotters.
Come on, Peg; let’s empty us a couple of water tanks.”
They drank; lightly and intermittently at first, then deeply.
At last Seaton put down the pitcher. “That isn’t enough, by any means; but we’re damp
enough inside so that we can swallow food, I guess. While you’re finding out where we
are, Mart, Peg and I’ll eat six or eight meals apiece.”
While Seaton and Margaret ate-ate as they had drunk, carefully, but with every evidence
of an insatiable bodily demand for food-Dorothy’s puzzled gaze went from the worn faces
of the diners to a mirror which reflected her own vivid, unchanged self.
“But I don’t understand it at all, Dick!” she burst out at last. “I’m not thirsty, nor hungry,
and I haven’t changed a bit. Neither has Martin; and yet you two have lost pounds and
pounds and look as though you bad been pulled through a knot hole. It didn’t seem to us
as though you were away from us at all. You were going to tell me about that back
there, when we were interrupted. Now go ahead and explain things, before I explode.
What happened, anyway?”
Seaton, hunger temporarily assuaged, gave a full but concise summary of everything that
had happened while he and Margaret were away from the Skylark. He then launched into
a scientific dissertation, only to be interrupted by Dorothy.
“But, Dick, it doesn’t sound reasonable that all that could possibly have happened to you
and Peggy without our even knowing that any time at all had passed!” she expostulated.
“We weren’t unconscious or anything, were we, Martin? We knew what was going on all
the time, didn’t we?”
“We were at no time unconscious, and we knew at all times what was taking place
around us,” Crane made surprising but positive answer. He was seated at a visiplate, but