Nonetheless, I am uneasy. I am half-inclined to give up my project and return to the normal and everyday. Not for more than a week have I enjoyed a decent night’s sleep.
All morning I struggled to recall what I had heard about other dimensions, parallel worlds and their possibilities. I could remember nothing definite and began to realize how such specialization as mine could be sadly limiting.
Mike Raglan put down the daybook and walked again to the window. Erik Hokart was not a man given to wild flights of imagination. He was an acknowledged authority in several aspects of electronics, as well as having considerable business acumen. His foresight and his patents had earned him a considerable fortune, all based upon simple logic.
He was not the sort of man to overlook much of anything, and not likely to be tricked. The nearest town was, Mike believed, not closer than eighty or ninety miles, and nobody lived in the vicinity. South of the river there were a couple of trading posts, and some scattered Navajos, but they were a people who minded their own affairs.
So what was happening? Hokart evidently had begun to believe in the existence of a parallel world of some sort, and whatever was going on was important enough to someone to send a goon after Hokart’s daybook.
Where was Erik? Who was the girl who delivered the book? And who was the man who came to retrieve it? What of the kiva?
“I’d better get out there,” Mike Raglan said, speaking aloud. “I’d better get right to the spot. If Erik is not there …”
He spread out a map of the Four Corners area and studied possible routes. Getting to where Hokart was constructing his home was not easy. It was remote country, and although the roads were generally good most of them were unsurfaced. There was no road leading right to Hokart’s place, which was one of the attractions for him. He enjoyed being alone. Erik had, Mike knew, planned on coming and going by helicopter, at least during the construction phases. What materials he would need would be delivered by the same means.
He remembered Erik’s discovery of the mesa. He had been flying low over the area when he saw that flat-topped mesa, different from any around it. The top gave the appearance of having once been cultivated, but long ago. The position, the view in all directions, the isolation of it had immediately seized his attention. From that moment Erik Hokart had thought of no other place. “I can use the native rock,” he had said. “There’s plenty of good building material around the base of the cliff.”
Time was no object and he had resolved to build it himself, as he wished.
Erik had always been one to do things his own way, but this time he had run into something totally unfamiliar, something for which he was not prepared.
Uneasily, Mike ran over the events in his mind. Erik had no friends who were inclined to practical jokes, nor was there anyplace close around where anybody could stay unless willing to camp out under rigorous conditions.
Slowly, thinking all the while, Mike Raglan began putting his gear together. To what he had already assembled he added binoculars. Yet he found himself curiously reluctant to leave Tamarron, knowing that once he returned to the area of Hokart’s house he was committed.
For nearly twenty years he had been investigating mysteries, exposing frauds, venturing into little-known areas of thought, yet this time he felt he was walking on the brink of something to be feared. This was truly the unknown.
Yet why should he feel that way? What evidence did he have?
Sitting down, he wrote a careful outline of what had transpired and what he was about to do. If anything happened to him there must be a record, some evidence he could leave behind. He had a feeling he was going off the deep end. He would leave his notes with the daybook, and leave them in a safe place.
He took up the daybook again.
Was I afraid? Nothing fearsome had happened, yet I was dealing with the unknown, with a whole new set of principles and ideas of which I knew nothing.
I tried to think of it as a hoax, yet I could not. I remembered Mike saying that when dealing with what people called the supernatural, some background in legerdemain was essential. A scientist searches for truth and is not skilled in trickery or deception.
Many things that might seem miraculous can be duplicated by any working magician, as the marvelous is his professional occupation. Those who wish to find miracles are easily imposed upon, for they come with a mind prepared for belief.
Saturday. Again a restless night. There were vague stirrings in the darkness and Chief lay close beside me, occasionally growling, sometimes whining. After awakening in the morning I lay still for some time, thinking. Suddenly, my mind was made up. I was getting out. I would leave today. I would take my personal gear, leave the rest, and simply get out of here.
Knowing Chief, Mike was worried. He was a proud, fierce dog, afraid of nothing, yet now he was acting in ways totally unlike himself. Ordinarily, Chief would have charged anything that came near, be it man, bear, wolf, or whatever. If he was not doing so there was something of which he was afraid, something that disturbed the dog’s deepest instincts.
Suppose Erik was right and he had discovered a way to another dimension? Obviously, the dog had passed through and returned unharmed in any physical way, so a man might do the same thing—a man or a woman. Who was leaving the sunflower insignia? The actual flowers? Who had taken the pencils, and for what reason?
Tomorrow, Mike decided. He would go tomorrow. He would set out bright and early, leaving the daybook and his notes in some secure place. Best of all, he thought, he could mail it to an old friend formerly with the FBI, to be acted upon in case of Mike’s disappearance.
He loaded his four-wheel-drive car with a sleeping bag, some trail rations, extra water, and the extra ammunition he’d brought along. Then he sat down and stared out the window, seeing nothing, not even the snow or the magnificent cliffs that bordered the highway. He saw only himself and what lay ahead. The truth of the matter was, he realized, he did not want to go. Was he losing his zest for adventure? His curiosity about the unknown? Or was he afraid of finding something that would upset his easy world?
From childhood we have learned to adjust ourselves to three dimensions; it is a world we understand, and in which we are at home. New ideas keep invading our complacency, and slowly, steadily, our world has broadened and grown more complex. Once, a man had only to adjust to his small village or town, the people around him, and the street on which he lived. He had to adjust to the power, the king, the lord of the manor—whoever it was who controlled his world. Within these limits he was comfortable.
Soldiers and sailors returned with stories of the far places, of lands different from our own, and slowly the world grew wider. Most of what men heard they only half believed. Then the world began to broaden swiftly. From slow-moving sailing craft to transatlantic steamers and then to flying, men crossed new boundaries.
World War II had taken young Americans to the far corners of the earth, and suddenly farm boys from Kansas or Vermont were talking easily of Burma, Guadalcanal, and Morocco. They were at home in places their fathers could not have found on a world map, and with the end of the war, suddenly, planes were flying everywhere.
People who a few years before might have spent a rare winter in Florida were now doing business in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Oman. Children were growing up who used computers as easily as their fathers had used a fountain pen. Drastic changes were taking place, and the speed of invention and discovery had increased manyfold.
Now we had put a man on the moon, had sent spacecraft to check on the outermost planets—spacecraft that now had gone on into infinite space beyond the solar system. And Einstein and the quantum theory were injecting strange new possibilities into our narrow world.
The man who sat before a television set with a can of beer to watch a football game rarely realized that the world was exploding around him. The convenient horizons were disappearing, and the jobs at which he worked were being eliminated by progress. Changes that had once needed centuries were now happening almost overnight, and the jobs available were calling for greater expertise. The common laborer who had been with us forever was finding himself on skid row with no place to go, and no possibilities of work.