VIII.

Six mighty rotating currents of electricity impinged simultaneously

upon the spherical hull of _Skylark Two_ and she disappeared utterly.

No exit had been opened and the walls remained solid, but where the

forty-foot globe of arenak had rested in her cradle an instant before

there was nothing. Pushed against by six balancing and gigantic

forces, twisted cruelly by six couples of angular force of unthinkable

magnitude, the immensely strong arenak shell of the vessel had held

and, following the path of least resistance--the only path in which

she could escape from those irresistible forces--she had shot out of

space as we know it and into the impossible reality of that hyperspace

which Seaton's vast mathematical knowledge had enabled him so dimly to

perceive.

As those forces smote his vessel, Seaton felt himself compressed. He

was being driven together irresistibly in all three dimensions, and

in those dimensions and at the same time he was as irresistibly being

twisted--was being corkscrewed in a monstrously obscure fashion which

permitted him neither to move from his place nor to remain in it. He

hung poised there for interminable hours, even though he knew that the

time required for that current to build up to its inconceivable value

was to be measured only in fractional millionths of a single second.

Yet he waited strainingly while that force increased at an all but

imperceptible rate, until at last the vessel and all its contents were

squeezed out of space, in a manner somewhat comparable to that in which

an orange pip is forced out from between pressing thumb and resisting

finger.

At the same time Seaton felt a painless, but unutterably horrible,

transformation of his entire body--a rearrangement, a writhing,

crawling distortion; a hideously revolting and incomprehensibly

impossible extrusion of his bodily substance as every molecule, every

atom, every ultimate particle of his physical structure was compelled

to extend itself into that unknown new dimension.

He could not move his eyes, yet he saw every detail of the grotesquely

altered space ship. His Earthly mentality could not understand anything

he saw, yet to his transformed brain everything was as usual and quite

in order. Thus the four-dimensional physique that was Richard Seaton

perceived, recognized, and admired as of yore his beloved Dorothy, in

spite of the fact that her normally solid body was now quite plainly

nothing but a three-dimensional surface, solid only in that logically

impossible new dimension which his now four-dimensional brain accepted

as a matter of course, but which his thinking mentality could neither

really perceive nor even dimly comprehend.

He could not move a muscle, yet in some obscure and impossible way

he leaped toward his wife. Immobile though tongue and jaws were, yet

he spoke to her reassuringly, remonstratingly, as he gathered up her

trembling form and silenced her hysterical outbursts.

"Steady on, dear, it's all right--everything's jake. Hold everything,

dear. Pipe down, I tell you! This is nothing to let get your goat. Snap

out of it, Red-Top!"

"But, Dick, it's--it's just--"

"Hold it!" he commanded. "You're going off the deep end again. I can't

say that I expected anything like this, either, but when you think

about things it's natural enough that they should be this way. You

see, while we've apparently got four-dimensional bodies and brains

now, our intellects are still three-dimensional, which complicates

things considerably. We can handle things and recognize them, but we

can't think about our physical forms, understand them, or express them

either in words or in thoughts. Peculiar, and nerve-wracking enough,

especially for you girls, but quite normal--see?"

"Well, maybe--after a fashion. I was afraid that I had really gone

crazy back there, at first, but if you feel that way, too, I know

it's all right. But you said that we'd be gone only a skillionth of a

second, and we've been here a week already, at the very least."

"All wrong, dear--at least, partly wrong. Time does go faster here,

apparently, so that we seem to have been here quite a while; but as

far as our own time is concerned we haven't been here anywhere near a

millionth of a second yet. See that plunger? It's still moving in--it

has barely made contact. Time is purely relative, you know, and it

moves so fast here that that plunger switch, traveling so fast that the

eye cannot follow it at all ordinarily, seems to us to be perfectly

stationary."

"But it _must_ have been longer than that, Dick! Look at all the

talking we've done. I'm a fast talker, I know, but even I can't talk

that fast!"

"You aren't talking--haven't you discovered that yet? You are thinking,

and we are getting your thoughts as speech; that's all. Don't believe

it? All right; there's your tongue, right there--or better, take your

heart. It's that funny-looking object right there--see it? It isn't

beating--that is, it would seem to us to take weeks, or possibly

months, to beat. Take hold of it--feel it for yourself."

"Take _hold_ of it! My own heart? Why, it's inside me, between my

ribs--I couldn't, possibly!"

"Sure you can! That's your intellect talking now, not your brain.

You're four-dimensional now, remember, and what you used to call your

body is nothing but the three-dimensional hypersurface of your new

hyperbody. You can take hold of your heart or your gizzard just as

easily as you used to pat yourself on the nose with a powder puff."

"Well, I won't, then--why, I wouldn't touch that thing for a million

dollars!"

"All right; watch me feel mine, then. See, it's perfectly motionless,

and my tongue is, too. And there's something else that I never

expected to look at--my appendix. Good thing you're in good shape, old

vermiform, or I'd take a pair of scissors and snick you off while I've

got such a good chance to do it without--"

"Dick!" shrieked Dorothy. "For the love of Heaven--"

"Calm down, Dottie, calm down. I'm just trying to get you used to this

mess--I'll try something else. Here, you know what this is--a new can

of tobacco, with the lid soldered on tight. In three dimensions there's

no way of getting into it without breaking metal--you've opened lots

of them. But out here I simply reach _past_ the metal of the container,

like this, see, in the fourth dimension? Then I take out a pinch of the

tobacco, so, and put it into my pipe, thus. The can is still soldered

tight, no holes in it anywhere, but the tobacco is out, nevertheless.

Inexplicable in three-dimensional space, impossible for us really to

understand mentally, but physically perfectly simple and perfectly

natural after you get used to it. That'll straighten you out some,

perhaps."

"Well, maybe--I guess I won't get frantic again, Dickie--but just the

same, it's altogether too perfectly darn weird to suit me. Why don't

you pull that switch back out and stop us?"

"Wouldn't do any good--wouldn't stop us, because we have already had

the impulse and are simply traveling on momentum now. When that is used

up--in some extremely small fraction of a second of our time--we'll

snap back into our ordinary space, but we can't do a thing about it

until then."

* * * * *

"But how can we move around so fast?" asked Margaret from the

protecting embrace of the monstrosity that they knew to be Martin

Crane. "How about inertia? I should think we'd break our bones all to

pieces."

"You can't move a three-dimensional body that fast, as we found out

when the force was coming on," Seaton replied. "But I don't think that

we are ordinary matter any more, and apparently our three-dimensional

laws no longer govern, now that we are in hyperspace. Inertia is based

upon time, of course, so our motion might be all right, even at that.

Mechanics seem to be different here, though, and, while we seem solid

enough, we certainly aren't matter at all in the three-dimensional

sense of the term, as we used it back where we came from. But it's all

over my head like a circus tent--I don't know any more about most of

this stuff than you do. I thought, of course--if I thought at all,

which I doubt--that we'd go _through_ hyperspace in an instant of time,

without seeing it or feeling it in any way, since a three-dimensional

body cannot exist, of course, in four-dimensional space. How did we get

this way, Mart? Is this space coexistent with ours or not?"

"I believe that it is." Crane, the methodical, had been thinking

deeply, considering every phase of their peculiar predicament.

"Coexistent, but different in all its attributes and properties.

Since we may be said to be experiencing two different time rates

simultaneously, we cannot even guess at what our velocity relation is,

in either system of coördinates. As to what happened, that is now quite

clear. Since a three-dimensional object cannot exist in hyperspace, it

of course cannot be thrown or forced through hyperspace.

"In order to enter this region, our vessel and everything in it had to

acquire the property of extension in another dimension. Your forces,

calculated to rotate us here, in reality forced us to assume that extra

extension, which process automatically moved us from the space in which

we could no longer exist into the only one in which it is possible for

us to exist. When that force is no longer operative, our extension into

the fourth dimension will vanish and we shall as automatically return

to our customary three-dimensional space, but probably not to our

original location in that space. Is that the way you understand it?"

"That's a lot better than I understood it, and it's absolutely right,

too. Thanks, old thinker! And I certainly hope we don't land back there

where we took off from--that's why we left, because we wanted to get

away from there. The farther the better," Seaton laughed. "Just so we

don't get so far away that the whole Galaxy is out of range of the

object-compasses we've got focused on it. We'd be lost for fair, then."

"That is a possibility, of course." Crane took the light utterance far

more seriously than did Seaton. "Indeed, if the two time rates are

sufficiently different, it becomes a probability. However, there is

another matter which I think is of more immediate concern. It occurred

to me, when I saw you take that pinch of tobacco without opening the

tin, that everywhere we have gone, even in intergalactic space, we have

found life, some friendly, some inimical. There is no real reason to

suppose that hyperspace is devoid of animate and intelligent life."

"Oh, Martin!" Margaret shuddered. "Life! Here? In this horrible, this

utterly impossible place?"

"Certainly, dearest," he replied gravely. "It all goes back to

the conversation we had long ago, during the first trip of the

old _Skylark_. Remember? Life need not be comprehensible to us to

exist--compared to what we do not know and what we can never either

know or understand, our knowledge is infinitesimal."

She did not reply and he spoke again to Seaton:

"It would seem to be almost a certainty that four-dimensional life

does in fact exist. Postulating its existence, the possibility of an

encounter cannot be denied. Such beings could of course enter this

vessel as easily as your fingers entered that tobacco can. The point

of these remarks is this--would we not be at a serious disadvantage?

Would they not have fourth-dimensional shields or walls about which we

three-dimensional intelligences would know nothing?"

"Sweet spirits of niter!" Seaton exclaimed. "Never thought of that at

all, Mart. Don't see how they could--and yet it does stand to reason

that they'd have some way of locking up their horses so they couldn't

run away, or so that nobody else could steal them. We'll have to do a

job of thinking on that, big fellow, and we'd better start right now.

Come on--let's get busy!"

Then for what seemed hours the two scientists devoted the power

of their combined intellects to the problem of an adequate

fourth-dimensional defense, only and endlessly to find themselves

butting helplessly against a blank wall.

Baffled, they drifted on through the unknowable reaches of hyperspace.

All they knew of time was that it was hopelessly distorted; of space

that it was hideously unrecognizable; of matter that it obeyed no

familiar laws. They drifted, and drifted--futilely, timelessly,

aimlessly, endlessly--