and you have a hypersphere. You already have created this. You have bent
time and space around a mass to create a hypersphere, a miniature universe.
Now all you have to do is rotate the hypersphere through five-dimensional
space.”
“But you’d have to be in five-dimensional space to do that,” objected Gary.
“No, you wouldn’t,” contended the old man. “Scattered throughout
three-dimensional space are ether eddies and time faults and space traps –
call them anything you like. They are a common phenomena and they’re
nothing more, when you come right down to it, than isolated bits of
four-dimensional space scattered around through three-dimensional space.
The same thing would apply to a fifth dimension in the fourth dimension.”
“But how,” asked Caroline, “would one go about it? How would one rotate a
hypersphere through the fifth dimension?”
Again Gary had that sense of confusion as the thoughts of the ancient one
swept over him, thoughts that translated themselves into symbols and
equations and brackets of mathematics that it seemed impossible any man
could know.
“Gary,” gasped Caroline, “have you a pencil and some paper?”
Gary fumbled in his pocket and found an old envelope and a stub of pencil.
He handed them to her.
“Please repeat that very slowly,” she said, smiling at the old man.
Gary watched in amazement as Caroline, slowly and carefully, jotted down
the formulas, equations, symbols – carefully checking and going over them,
checking and rechecking so there could be no mistake.
“It will take power,” she said. “Tremendous power. I wonder if the
Engineers can supply it.”
“They have magnetic power,” said Gary. “They ought to be able to give you
all you need.”
The old man’s eyes were twinkling. “I am remembering the Hellhounds,” he
said. “The ones who would have the universe destroyed. I cannot seem to
like them. It seems to me that something should be done about them.”
“But what?” asked Gary. “They seem to be all-powerful. By the time we get
back they may have battered the city into a mass of ruins.”
The oldster nodded almost sleepily, but his eyes were glowing.
“We have had ones like that in our history,” he said. “Ones who overrode
the nations and imposed their will, standing in the way of progress. But
always someone found something that would break them. Someone found a
greater weapon or a greater strength and they went their way. Their names
and works were dust and they were forgotten and the civilization that they
sought to mold to their own selfish ends went on as if they had never
been.”
“But I don’t see…” began Gary, and then suddenly he did – as clearly as
light. He smote his knee and yelled his enthusiasm.
“Of course,” he cried. “We have a weapon. A weapon that could wipe them
out. The fifth-dimensional energy!”
“Certainly you have,” said the old man.
“That would be barbarous,” protested Caroline.
“Barbarous!” shouted Gary. “Isn’t it barbarous to want to see the universe
destroyed so the Hellhounds can go back to the beginning and take it over,
control it, dominate it, take over galaxy after galaxy as a new universe is
born? Shape it to their needs and desires. Hold in thrall every bit of life
that develops on every cooling planet. Become the masters of the universe.”
“We must hurry, then,” said Caroline. “We must get back. Minutes count. We
still may be able to save the Engineers and the universe, wipe out the
Hellhounds.”
She rose impatiently to her feet.
The old man protested. “You would go so soon?” he asked. “You would not
stay and eat with me? Or tell me more about this place at the edge of the
universe? Or let me tell you strange things that I know you would be glad
to hear?”
Gary hesitated. “Maybe we could stay a while,” he suggested.
“No,” said Caroline. “We must go.”
“Listen,” said Gary to the old man, “why don’t you come along with us? We’d
be glad to have you. We could use you in the fight. There are things that
you could tell us that would help.”
The old man shook his bead. “I cannot go,” he said. “For, you see, you are
right. I may be only a shadow. A very substantial shadow, perhaps, but
still just a shadow of probability. You can come to me, but I can’t go back
with you. If I left this planet I might puff into nothingness, revert to
the non-existence of the thing that never was.”
He hesitated. “But there’s something,” he said, “that makes me suspect I am
not a shadow… that this is actuality, that the Earth will follow the
course history tells me it has followed.”
“What is that?” asked Gary.
“It is a thing,” the old man said, “that I cannot tell you.”
“Perhaps we can come back and see you again,” said Caroline. “After all
this trouble is over.”
“No, my child,” he said. “You will never come, for ours are lives that
never should have met. You represent the beginning and I represent the end.
And I am proud that the Earth’s last man could have been of service to one
of the beginners.”
They fastened down their helmets and walked toward the door.
“I will walk with you to your ship,” said the old man. “I do not walk a
great deal now, for the cold and the thin air bother me. I must be getting
old.”
Their feet whispered through the sand and the wind keened above the desert,
a shrill-voiced wind that played an eternal overture for the stage of
desolation old Earth had become.
“I live with ghosts,” said the old man as they walked toward the ship.
“Ghosts of men and events and great ideals that built a mighty race.
“Probably you wonder that I resemble a man so much. Perhaps you thought
that men, in time to come, would evolve into specialized monstrosities –
great, massive brains that had lost the power of locomotion, or bundles of
emotional reactions, unstable as the very wind, or foolish philosophers,
or, worse yet, drab realists. But we became none of these things. We kept
our balance. We kept our feet on the ground when dreams filled our heads.”
They reached the ship and stood before the opened outer valve.
The old man waved a hand toward the mighty metal building.
“The proudest city Man ever built,” he said. “A city whose fame spread to
the far stars, to distant galaxies. A city that travelers told about in
bated whispers. A place to which came the commerce of many solar systems,
ships from across far inter-galactic space. But now it is crumbling into
dust and ruin. Soon the desert will claim it and the wind will sing a death
dirge for it and little, furry animals will burrow in its bones.”
He turned to them and Gary saw a half-mystic light shining in his eyes.
“Thus it is with cities,” he said, “but Man is different. Man marches on
and on. He outgrows cities and builds others. He outgrows planets. He is
creating a heritage, a mighty heritage that in time will make him the
master of the universe.
“But there will be interludes of defeat. Times when it seems that all is
lost – that Man will slip again to the primal savagery and ignorance. Times
when the way seems too hard and the price too great to pay. But always
there will be bugles in the sky and a challenge on the horizon and the
bright beckoning of ideals far away. And Man will go ahead, to greater
triumphs, always pushing back the frontiers, always moving up and outward.”
The old man turned around and headed back toward the doorway in the
building. He went without a word of farewell and his sandaled feet left a
tiny, ragged trail across the shifting sand.
Chapter Thirteen
THE black tunnel of the space-time wheel ended and the ship was in normal
space again. Normal, but not right.
Gary, hunched over the controls, heard Caroline’s quick gasp of surprise.
“There’s something wrong!” she cried.
There was a world, but it was not the planet of the Engineers. No great
city grew upon it from horizon to horizon. Instead of three blue suns,
there was one and it was very large and red, a dull brick red, and its rays
were so feeble that one could stare straight into it and at the edges it
seemed that one could see straight through the fringe of gases.
There was no Hellhounds fleet, no flashing ships of the defender… no war.
There was peace upon this world… a quiet and deadly peace. The peace,
thought Gary, of the never-was, the peace of all-is-over.
It was a flat splotched world with a leprous look about it, not gray, but
colored as a child with water paints might color a paint book page when he
was tired and all the need of accuracy and art were things to be forgotten.