‘Yes indeed. Not “how”, maybe, but I can do it. I’ve done it more than once. I’ll show you.’ He drifted away towards one side of the great room where several sets of deKalbs, large and small, were mounted, with their controls, on temporary guys. ‘This fellow over on the end, it just came in today. Broke down. I’ll give it Gramps Schneider’s hocus-pocus and fix it. Wait a minute. I forgot to turn on the power.
He returned to the central ring which constituted his usual locus and switched on the beamcaster. Since the ship itself effectively shielded anything in the room from outer radiation, he had installed a small power plant and caster similar in type to NAPA’s giant ones; without it he would have had no way to test the reception of the deKalbs
He rejoined Grimes and passed down the line of deKalbs, switching on the activizing circuits. All save two began to display the uncouth motions he had begun to think of as the Schneider flex. ‘That one on the far end,’ he remarked, ‘is in operation but doesn’t flex. It has never broken down, so it’s never been treated. It’s my control; but this one’ – he touched the one in front of him – ‘needs fixing. Watch me.
‘What are you going to do?
‘To tell the truth, I don’t quite know. But I’ll do it.’ He did not know. All he knew was that it was necessary to gaze down the antennae, think about them reaching into the Other World, think of them reaching for power, reaching – The antennae began to squirm
‘That’s all there is to it – strictly between ourselves. I learned it from Schneider.’ They had returned to the centre of the sphere, at Grimes’s suggestion, on the pretext of wanting to get a cigarette. The squirming deKalbs made him nervous, but he did not want to say so
‘How do you explain it?
‘I regard it as an imperfectly understood phenomenon of the Other Space. I know less about it than Franklin knew about lightning. But I will know- I will! I could give Stevens a solution right now for his worries if I knew some way to get around your problem too.
‘I don’t see the connexion.
‘There ought to be some way to do the whole thing through the Other Space. Start out by radiating power into the Other Space and pick it up from there. Then the radiation could not harm human beings. It would never get at them; it would duck around them. I’ve been working on my caster, but with no luck so far. I’ll crack it in time.
‘I hope you do. Speaking of that, isn’t the radiation from your own caster loose in this room?
‘Yes.
‘Then I’ll put on my shield coat. It’s not good for you either.
‘Never mind. I’ll turn it off.’ As he turned to do so there was the sound of a sweet, chirruping whistle. Baldur barked. Grimes turned to see what caused it
‘What,’ he demanded, ‘have you got there?
‘Huh? Oh, That’s my cuckoo clock. Fun, isn’t it?’ Grimes agreed that it was, although he could not see much use for it. Waldo had mounted it on the edge of a light metal hoop which spun with a speed just sufficient to produce a centrifugal force of one g
‘I rigged it up,’ Waldo continued, ‘while I was bogged down in this problem of the Other Space. Gave me something to do.
‘This “Other Space” business – I still don’t get it.
‘Think of another continuum much like our own and superposed on it the way you might lay one sheet of paper on another. The two spaces aren’t identical, but they are separated from each other by the smallest interval you can imagine – coextensive but not touching – usually. There is an absolute one-to- one, point-for-point correspondence, as I conceive it, between the two spaces, but they are not necessarily the same size or shape.
‘Hey? Come again – they would have to be.
‘Not at all. Which has the larger number of points in it? A line an inch long, or a line a mile long?