innocent of even a single hair. Across the space that separated them, Gary
felt the force of piercing eyes that stared out from under shaggy eyebrows.
“We’re looking for someone,” said Gary, “to give us information.”
“Come in,” shrieked the thought of the old man. “Come in. Do you want me to
catch my death of cold holding the door open for you?”
Gary grasped Caroline by the hand. “Come on,” he said.
At a trot, they crossed the room, ducked through the door. They heard the
door slam behind them and turned to look at the old man.
He stared back at them. “You are human beings,” said his thoughts. “People
of my own race. But from long ago.”
“That’s right,” said Gary. “From many millions of years ago.”
They sensed something that almost approached disbelief in the old man’s
thoughts.
“And you seek me?”
“We seek someone,” said Gary. “Someone who may tell us something that may
save the universe.”
“Then it must be me,” said the old man, “because I’m the only one left.”
“The only one left!” cried Gary. “The last man?”
“That’s right,” said the old man, and he seemed almost cheerful about it.
“There were others but they died. All men’s life spans must sometime come
to an end.”
“But there are others,” persisted Gary. “You can’t be the last man left
alive.”
“There were others,” said the old one, “but they left. They went to a far
star. To a place prepared for them.”
A coldness gripped Gary’s heart.
“You mean they died?”
The old man’s thoughts were querulous and impatient.
“No, they did not die. They went to a better place. To a place that has
been prepared for them for many years. A place where they could not go
until they were ready.”
“But you?” asked Gary.
“I stayed because I wanted to,” said the old man. “Myself and a few others.
We could not forsake Earth. We elected to stay. Of those who stayed all the
others have died and I am left alone.”
Gary glanced around the room. It was tiny, but comfortable. A bed, a table,
a few chairs, other furniture he did not recognize.
“You like my place?” asked the old man.
“Very much,” said Gary.
“Perhaps,” said the old man, “you would like to take off your helmets. It’s
warm in here and I keep the atmosphere a little denser than it is outside.
Not necessary that I do so, of course, but it is more comfortable. The
atmosphere is getting pretty thin and hard to breathe.”
They unfastened their helmets and lifted them off. The air was sharp and
tangy, the room was warm.
“That’s better,” said Caroline.
“Chairs?” asked the old man, pointing out a couple.
They sat and he lowered his old body into another.
“Well, well,” he said, and his thoughts had a grandfatherly touch about
them, “humans of an earlier age. Splendid physical specimen, the two of
you. And fairly barbaric still – but the stuff is in you. You use your
mouths to talk with and man hasn’t talked with other than his thoughts for
thousands and thousands of years. That in itself would set you pretty far
back.”
“Pretty far is right,” said Gary. “We are the first humans who ever left
the solar system.”
“That is far,” said the old man. “Far, far…”
His sharp eyes watched them closely. “You must have an interesting story,”
be suggested.
“We have,” said Caroline and swiftly they told it to him, excitedly, first
one and then the other talking, adding in details, explaining situations,
laying before him the problems which they faced.
He listened intently, snapping questions now and then, his bright old eyes
shining with the love of adventure, the wrinkles in his face taking on a
kind benevolence as if they might be children, home from the first day of
school, telling of all the new wonders they had met.
“So you came to me,” he said. “You came trundling down a crazy timepath to
seek me out. So that I could tell you the things you need to know.”
Caroline nodded. “You can tell us, can’t you?” she asked. “It means so much
to us – so much to everyone.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” said the old man. “If the universe had come to an end,
I wouldn’t be here. You couldn’t have come to me.”
“But maybe you aren’t real,” said Caroline. “Maybe you are just a shadow. A
probability…”
The oldster nodded and combed his beard with gnarled fingers. The breath
wheezed in his mighty chest.
“You are right,” he agreed. “I may be only a shadow. This world of mine may
be no more than a shadow-world. I sometimes wonder if there is any reality
at all – if there is anything but thought. Whether it may not be that some
gigantic intelligence has dreamed all these things we see and believe in
and accept as real… if the giant intelligence may not have set mighty
dream stages and peopled them with actors of his imagination. I wonder at
times if all the universes may be nothing more than a shadow show. A
company of shadowy actors moving on a shadow stage.”
“But you can tell us,” pleaded Caroline. “You will tell…”
His old eyes twinkled. “I will tell you, yes, and gladly. Your fifth
dimension is eternity. It is everything and nothing… all rolled into one.
It is a place where nothing has ever happened and yet, in a sense, where
everything has happened. It is the beginning and the end of all things. In
it there is no such thing as space or time or any other phenomena which we
attribute to the four-dimensional continuum.”
“I can’t understand,” said Caroline, lines of puzzlement twisting her face.
“It seems so hopeless, so entirely hopeless. Can it be explained by
mathematics?”
“Yes,” said the old man, “but I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand. The
mathematics necessary to explain it weren’t evolved until just a few
thousand years ago.”
He stroked the beard down smoothly over his pouter-pigeon chest.
“I do not wish to make you feel badly,” he declared, “but I can’t see how
you would have the intelligence to grasp it. After all, you are a people
from an earlier age, an almost barbaric age.”
“Try her,” growled Gary.
“All right,” said the old man, but there was a patronizing tone to his
thoughts.
Gary gained a confused impression of horrific equations, of bracketed
symbols that built themselves into a tangled and utterly confused structure
of meaning – a meaning that seemed so vast and all-inclusive that his mind
instinctively shuddered away from it.
Then the thoughts were gone and Gary’s mind was spinning with them, with
the vital forcefulness that he had guessed and glimpsed behind the symbolic
structure that had been in the mathematics.
He looked at Caroline and saw that she was puzzled. But suddenly a look of
awe spread over her face.
“Why,” she said, and hesitated slightly, “…. why, the equations cancel,
represent both everything and nothing, both zero and the ultimate in
everything imaginable.”
Gary caught a sense of surprise and confusion that flashed through the mind
of their host.
“You understand,” said the faltering thought. “You grasp the meaning
perfectly.”
“Didn’t I tell you,” said Gary. “Of course, she understands.” ‘
Caroline was talking, almost as if she were talking to herself, talking her
thoughts aloud. “That means the energy would be timeless. It would have no
time factor, and since time is a factor in power, its power would be almost
infinite. There’d be no stopping it, once it started.”
“You are right,” said the old man. “It would be raw, created energy from a
region where four-dimensional laws are no longer valid. It would be
timeless and formless.”
“Formless,” said Caroline. “Of course, it would be formless. It wouldn’t be
light, or heat, or matter, or motion, or any other form of energy such as
we know. But it could be anything. It would be waiting to become something.
It could crystallize into anything.”
“Good Lord,” said Gary, “how could you handle stuff like that? Your
hyperspheres wouldn’t handle it. It could mold space itself. It could
annihilate time.”
Caroline looked at him soberly.
“If I could create a fifth-dimensional trap,” she said, “if I could trap it
in the framework of the medium from which it came. Don’t you see that such
a framework would attract it, would gather it in and hold it. Like a
battery holds energy. Like water seeking its own level and coming to rest.”
“Sure,” agreed Gary, “if you could create a fifth-dimensional trap. But you
can’t. It’s eternity. The dimension of eternity. You can’t go fooling
around with eternity.”
“Yes, she can,” said the old man.
The two of them stared at him, not believing.
“Listen closely,” said the oldster. “By rotating a circle through three
dimensions you create a sphere. Rotate the sphere through four dimensions