XIV.

Seaton's glance leaped to his beloved Dorothy. Drooping yet rigid

she stood there, unmoving, corpselike. Accustomed now to seeing

four-dimensional things by consciously examining only their

three-dimensional surfaces, he perceived instantly the waxen, utterly

inhuman vacuity of her normally piquant and vivacious face--perceived

it, and at that perception went mad.

Clutching convulsively the length of hyperchain by which he had swung

into the control room he leaped, furious and elementally savage.

So furious was his action that the chain snapped apart at the wall of

the control room; so rapid was it that the hyperguard had no time to

move, nor even to think.

That guard had been peacefully controlling with his trident the

paralyzed prisoner. All had been quiet and calm. Suddenly--in an

instant--had appeared the two monstrosities who had been taken to the

capital. And in that same fleeting instant one of the monsters was

leaping at him. And ahead of that monster there came lashing out an

enormous anchor chain, one of whose links of solid steel no ordinary

mortal could lift; an anchor chain hurtling toward him with a velocity

and a momentum upon that tenuous hyperworld unthinkable.

The almost-immaterial flesh of the hyperman could no more withstand

that fiercely driven mass of metal than can a human body ward off an

armor-piercing projectile in full flight. Through his body the great

chain tore; cutting, battering, rending it into ghastly, pulpily

indescribable fragments unrecognizable as ever having been anything

animate. Indeed, so fiercely had the chain been urged that the metal

itself could not stand the strain. Five links broke off at the climax

of the chain's black-snakelike stroke, and, accompanying the bleeding

scraps of flesh that had been the guard, tore on past the walls of the

space ship and out into the hypervoid.

The guard holding his tridents in Crane and Shiro had not much more

warning. He saw his fellow obliterated, true; but that was all he lived

to see, and he had time to do exactly nothing. One more quick flip of

Seaton's singularly efficient weapon and the remains of that officer

also disappeared into hyperspace. More of the chain went along, this

time, but that did not matter. Dropping to the floor the remaining

links of his hyperflail, Seaton sprang to Dorothy, reaching her side

just as the punishing trident, released by the slain guard, fell away

from her.

She recovered her senses instantly and turned a surprised face to the

man, who, incoherent in his relief that she was alive and apparently

unharmed, was taking her into his arms.

"Why, surely, Dick, I'm all right--how could I be any other way?" she

answered his first agonized question in amazement. She studied his worn

face in puzzled wonder and went on: "But you certainly are not. What

has happened, dear, anyway; and how could it have, possibly?"

"I hated like sin to be gone so long, Dimples, but it couldn't be

helped." Seaton, in his eagerness to explain his long absence, did not

even notice the peculiar implications in his wife's speech and manner.

"You see, it was a long trip, and we didn't get a chance to break away

from those meat hooks of theirs until after they got us into their city

and examined us. Then, when we finally did break away, we found that we

couldn't travel at night. Their days are bad enough, with this thick

blue light, but during the nights there's absolutely no light at all,

of any kind. No moon, no stars, no nothing--"

"Nights! What are you talking about, Dick, anyway?" Dorothy had been

trying to interrupt since his first question and had managed at last to

break in. "Why, you haven't been gone at all, not even a second. We've

all been right here, all the time!"

"Huh?" ejaculated Seaton. "Are you cuckoo, Red-Top, or what--"

"Dick and I were gone at least a week, Dottie," Margaret, who had been

embracing Crane, interrupted in turn, "and it was awful!"

"Just a minute, folks!" Seaton listened intently and stared upward.

"We'll have to let the explanations ride a while longer. I thought

they wouldn't give up that easy--here they come! I don't know how long

we were gone--it seemed like a darn long time--but it was long enough

so that I learned how to mop up on these folks, believe me! You take

that sword and buckler of Peg's, Mart. They don't look so hot, but

they're big medicine in these parts. All we've got to do is swing them

fast enough to keep those stingaroos of theirs out of our gizzards

and we're all set. Be careful not to hit too hard, though, or you'll

bust that grating into forty pieces--it's hyperstuff, nowhere near

as solid as anything we're used to. All it'll stand is about a normal

fly-swatting stroke, but that's enough to knock any of these fan-tailed

humming birds into an outside loop. Ah, they've got guns or something!

Duck down, girls, so we can cover you with these shields; and, Shiro,

you might pull that piece of chain apart and throw the links at

them--that'll be good for what ails them!"

The hypermen appeared in the control room, and battle again was

joined. This time, however, the natives did not rush to the attack

with their tridents; nor did they employ their futile rays of death.

They had guns, shooting pellets of metal; they had improvised

crossbowlike slings and catapults; they had spears and javelins made

of their densest materials, which their strongest men threw with all

their power. But pellets and spears alike thudded harmlessly against

four-dimensional shields--shields once the impenetrable, unbreakable

doors of their mightiest prison--and the masses of metal and stone

vomited forth by the catapults were caught by Seaton and Crane and

hurled back through the ranks of the attackers with devastating effect.

Shiro also was doing untold damage with his bits of chain and with such

other items of four-dimensional matter as came to hand.

Still the hypermen came pressing in, closer and closer. Soon the three

men were standing in a triangle, in the center of which were the women,

their flying weapons defining a volume of space to enter which meant

hideous dismemberment and death to any hypercreature. But on they came,

willing, it seemed, to spend any number of lives to regain their lost

control over the Terrestrials; realizing, it seemed, that even those

supernaturally powerful beings must in time weaken.

* * * * *

While the conflict was at its height, however, it seemed to Seaton that

the already tenuous hypermen were growing even more wraithlike; and

at the same time he found himself fighting with greater and greater

difficulty. The lethal grating, which he had been driving with such

speed that it had been visible only as a solid barrier, moved more

and ever more slowly, to come finally to a halt in spite of his every

effort.

He could not move a muscle, and despairingly he watched a now

almost-invisible warden who was approaching him, controlling trident

outthrust. But to his relieved surprise the hyperforceps did not touch

him, but slithered _past him_ without making contact; and hyperman and

hyperweapon disappeared altogether, fading out slowly into nothingness.

Then Seaton found himself moving in space. Without volition he was

floating across the control room, toward the switch whose closing

had ushered the Terrestrials out of their familiar space of three

dimensions and into this weirdly impossible region of horror. He was

not alone in his movement. Dorothy, the Cranes, and Shiro were all in

motion, returning slowly to the identical positions they had occupied

at the instant when Seaton had closed his master switch.

And as they moved, they _changed_. The _Skylark_ herself changed, as

did every molecule, every atom of substance, in or of the spherical

cruiser of the void.

Seaton's hand reached out and grasped the ebonite handle of the switch.

Then, as his entire body came to rest, he was swept by wave upon wave

of almost-unbearable relief as the artificial and unnatural extension

into the fourth dimension began to collapse. Slowly, as had progressed

the extrusion into that dimension, so progressed the de-extrusion from

it. Each ultimate particle of matter underwent an indescribable and

incomprehensible foreshortening; a compression; a shrinking together;

a writhing and twisting reverse rearrangement, each slow increment of

which was poignantly welcome to every outraged unit of human flesh.

Suddenly seeming, and yet seemingly only after untold hours, the return

to three-dimensional space was finished. Seaton's hand drove through

the remaining fraction of an inch of its travel with the handle of

the switch; his ears heard the click and snap of the lightning-fast

plungers driving home against their stop blocks--the closing of the

relay switches had just been completed. The familiar fittings of the

control room stood out in their normal three dimensions, sharp and

clear.

Dorothy sat exactly as she had sat before the transition. She was

leaning slightly forward in her seat--her gorgeous red-bronze hair

in perfect order, her sweetly curved lips half parted, her violet

eyes widened in somewhat fearful anticipation of what the dimensional

translation was to bring. She was unchanged--but Seaton!

He also sat exactly as he had sat an instant--or was it a

month?--before; but his face was thin and heavily lined, his

normally powerful body was now gauntly eloquent of utter fatigue.

Nor was Margaret in better case. She was haggard, almost emaciated.

Her clothing, like that of Seaton, had been forced to return to a

semblance of order by the exigencies of interdimensional and intertime

translation, and for a moment appeared sound and whole.

The translation accomplished, however, that clothing literally felt

apart. The dirt and grime of their long, hard journey and the sticky

sap of the hyperplants through which they had fought their way had

of course disappeared--being four-dimensional material, all such had

perforce remained behind in four-dimensional space--but the thorns and

sucking disks of the hypervegetation had taken toll. Now each rent and

tear reappeared, to give mute but eloquent testimony to the fact that

the sojourn of those two human beings in hyperland had been neither

peaceful nor uneventful.

Dorothy's glance flashed in amazement from Seaton to Margaret, and she

repressed a scream as she saw the ravages wrought by whatever it was

that they had gone through.

But Seaton's first thought was for the bodiless foes whom they might

not have left behind. "Did we get away, Mart?" he demanded, hand still

upon the switch. Then, without waiting for a reply, he went on: "We

must've made it, though, or we'd've been dematerialized before this.

Three rousing cheers! We made it--we made it!"

For several minutes all four gave way to their mixed but profound

emotions, in which relief and joy predominated. They had escaped from

the intellectuals; they had come alive through hyperspace!

"But Dick!" Dorothy held Seaton off at arm's length and studied his

gaunt, lined face. "Lover, you look actually thin."

"I _am_ thin," he replied. "We were gone a week, we told you. I'm just

about starved to death, and I'm thirstier even than that. Not being

able to eat is bad; but going without water is worse, believe me! My

whole insides feel like a mess of desiccated blotters. Come on, Peg;

let's empty us a couple of water tanks."

They drank; lightly and intermittently at first, then deeply.

At last Seaton put down the pitcher. "That isn't enough, by any means;

but we're damp enough inside so that we can swallow food, I guess.

While you're finding out where we are, Mart, Peg and I'll eat six or

eight meals apiece."

* * * * *

While Seaton and Margaret ate--ate as they had drunk, carefully, but

with every evidence of an insatiable bodily demand for food--Dorothy's

puzzled gaze went from the worn faces of the diners to a mirror which

reflected her own vivid, unchanged self.

"But I don't understand it at all, Dick!" she burst out at last.

"_I'm_ not thirsty, nor hungry, and I haven't changed a bit. Neither

has Martin; and yet you two have lost pounds and pounds and look as

though you had been pulled through a knot hole. It didn't seem to us as

though you were away from us all. You were going to tell me about that

back there, when we were interrupted. Now go ahead and explain things,

before I explode. What happened, anyway?"

Seaton, hunger temporarily assuaged, gave a full but concise summary of

everything that had happened while he and Margaret were away from the

_Skylark_. He then launched into a scientific dissertation, only to be

interrupted by Dorothy.

"But, Dick, it doesn't sound reasonable that all that could _possibly_

have happened to you and Peggy without our even knowing that any time

at all had passed!" she expostulated. "We weren't unconscious or

anything, were we, Martin? We knew what was going on all the time,

didn't we?"

"We were at no time unconscious, and we knew at all times what was

taking place around us," Crane made surprising but positive answer. He

was seated at a visiplate, but had been listening to the story instead

of studying the almost-sheer emptiness that was space. "And since it is

a truism of Norlaminian psychology that any lapse of consciousness, of

however short duration, is impressed upon the consciousness of a mind

of even moderate power, I feel safe in saying that for Dorothy and me,

at least, no lapse of time did occur or could have occurred."

"There!" Dorothy exulted. "You've got to admit that Martin knows his

stuff. How are you going to get around that?"

"Search me--wish I knew." Seaton frowned in thought. "But Mart chirped

it, I think, when he said 'for Dorothy and me, at least,' because

for us two time certainly lapsed, and lapsed plenty. However, Mart

certainly _does_ know his stuff; the old think tank is full of bubbles

all the time. He doesn't make positive statements very often, and when

he does you can sink the bank roll on 'em. Therefore, since you were

both conscious and time did not lapse--for you--it must have been time

itself that was cuckoo instead of you. It must have stretched, or must

have been stretched, like the very dickens--for you.

"Where does that idea get us? I might think that their time was

intrinsically variable, as well as being different from ours, if it

was not for the regular alternation of night and day--of light and

darkness, at least--that Peg and I saw, and which affected the whole

country, as far as we could see. So that's out.

"Maybe they treated you two to a dose of suspended animation or

something of the kind, since you weren't going anywhere--Nope, that

idea doesn't carry the right earmarks, and besides it would have

registered as such on Martin's Norlaminianly psychological brain. So

that's out, too. In fact, the only thing that could deliver the goods

would be a sta--but that'd be a trifle strong, even for a hyperman, I'm

afraid."

"What would?" demanded Margaret. "Anything that you would call strong

ought to be worth listening to."

"A stasis of time. Sounds a trifle far-fetched, of course, but--"

"But phooey!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Now you _are_ raving, Dick!"

"I'm not so sure of that, at all," Seaton argued stubbornly. "They

really understand time, I think, and I picked up a couple of pointers.

It would take a sixth-order field--That's it, I'm pretty sure, and that

gives me an idea. If they can do it in hypertime, why can't we do it in

ours?"

"I fail to see how such a stasis could be established," argued Crane.

"It seems to me that as long as matter exists time must continue, since

it is quite firmly established that time depends upon matter--or rather

upon the motion in space of that which we call matter."

"Sure--that's what I'm going on. Time and motion are both relative.

Stop all motion--relative, not absolute motion--and what have you? You

have duration without sequence or succession, which is what?"

"That would be a stasis of time, as you say," Crane conceded, after due

deliberation. "How can you do it?"

"I don't know yet whether I can or not--that's another question.

We already know, though, how to set up a stasis of the ether along

a spherical surface, and after I have accumulated a little more

data on the sixth order it should not be impossible to calculate a

volume-stasis in both ether and sub-ether, far enough down to establish

complete immobility and local cessation of time in gross matter so

affected."

"But would not all matter so affected assume at once the absolute zero

of temperature and thus preclude life?"

"I don't think so. The stasis would be sub-atomic and instantaneous,

you know; there could be no loss or transfer of energy. I don't see how

gross matter could be affected at all. As far as I can see it would

be an absolutely perfect suspension of animation. You and Dot lived

through it, anyway, and I'm positive that that's what they did to you.

And I still say that if anybody can do it, we can."

"'And that,'" put in Margaret roguishly, "as you so feelingly remark,

'is a cheerful thought to dwell on--let's dwell on it!'"

"We'll do that little thing, too, Peg, some of these times; see if we

don't!" Seaton promised. "But to get back to our knitting, what's the

good word, Mart--located us yet? Are we, or are we not, heading for

that justly famed distant Galaxy of the Fenachrone?"

"We are not," Crane replied flatly, "nor are we heading for any other

point in space covered by the charts of Ravindau's astronomers."

"Huh? Great Cat!" Seaton joined the physicist at his visiplate, and

made complete observations upon the few nebulae visible.

He turned then to the charts, and his findings confirmed those of

Crane. They were so far away from our own Galaxy that the space in

which they were was unknown, even to those masters of astronomy and of

intergalactic navigation, the Fenachrone.

"Well, we're not lost, anyway, thanks to your cautious old bean."

Seaton grinned as he stepped over to an object-compass mounted upon the

plane table.

* * * * *

This particular instrument was equipped with every refinement known

to the science of four great Solar Systems. Its exceedingly delicate

needle, swinging in an almost-perfect vacuum upon practically

frictionless jeweled bearings, was focused upon the unimaginable

mass of the entire First Galaxy, a mass so inconceivably great that

mathematics had shown--and even Crane would have stated as a fact--that

it would affect that needle from any point whatever, however distant,

in universal space.

Seaton actuated the minute force which set the needle in motion, but

it did not oscillate. For minute after minute it revolved slowly but

freely, coming ultimately to rest without any indication of having

been affected in the least by any external influence. He stared at

the compass in stark, unbelieving amazement, then tested its current

and its every other factor. The instrument was in perfect order and

in perfect adjustment. Grimly, quietly, he repeated the oscillatory

test--with the same utterly negative result.

"Well, that is eminently, conclusively, definitely, and unqualifiedly

that." He stared at Crane, unseeing, his mind racing. "The most

sensitive needle we've got, and she won't even register!"

"In other words, we are lost." Crane's voice was level and calm.

"We are so far away from the First Galaxy that even that compass,

supposedly reactive from any possible location in space, is useless."

"But I don't get it, at all, Mart!" Seaton expostulated, paying no

attention to the grim meaning underlying his friend's utterance. "With

the whole mass of the Galaxy as its object of attachment that needle

absolutely will register from a distance greater than any possible

diameter of the super-universe--" His voice died away.

"Go on; you are beginning to see the light," Crane prompted.

"Yeah--no wonder I couldn't plot a curve to trace those Fenachrone

torpedoes--our fundamental assumptions were unsound. The fact simply

is that if space is curved at all, the radius of curvature is vastly

greater than any figure as yet proposed, even by the Fenachrone

astronomers. We certainly weren't out of our own space a thousandth of

a second--more likely only a couple of millionths--do you suppose that

there really are folds in the fourth dimension?"

"That idea has been advanced, but folds are not strictly necessary, nor

are they easy to defend. It has always seemed to me that the hypothesis

of linear departure is much more tenable. The planes need not be

parallel, you know--in fact, it is almost a mathematical certainty that

they are _not_ parallel."

"That's so, too; and that hypothesis would account for everything, of

course. But how are--"

"What _are_ you two talking about?" demanded Dorothy. "We simply

couldn't have come that far--why, the _Skylark_ was stuck in the ground

the whole time!"

"As a physicist, Red-Top, you're a fine little beauty-contest winner."

Seaton grinned. "You forget that with the velocity she had, the _Lark_

couldn't have been stopped within three months, either--yet she seemed

to stop. How about that, Mart?"

"I have been thinking about that. It is all a question of relative

velocities, of course; but even at that, the angle of departure of the

two spaces must have been extreme indeed to account for our present

location in three-dimensional space."

"Extreme is right; but there's no use yapping about it now, any more

than about any other spilled milk. We'll just have to go places and do

things; that's all."

"Go where and do what?" asked Dorothy pointedly.

"Lost--lost in space!" Margaret breathed.

As the dread import of their predicament struck into her consciousness

she had seized the arm rests of her chair in a spasmodic clutch; but

she forced herself to relax and her deep brown eyes held no sign of

panic.

"But we have been lost in space before, Dottie, apparently as badly as

we are now. Worse, really, because we did not have Martin and Dick with

us then."

"'At-a-girl, Peg!" Seaton cheered. "We may--be lost--guess we are,

temporarily, at least--but we're not licked, not by seven thousand rows

of apple trees!"

"I fail to perceive any very solid basis for your optimism," Crane

remarked quietly, "but you have an idea, of course. What is it?"

"Pick out the Galaxy nearest our line of flight and brake down for

it." Seaton's nimble mind was leaping ahead. "The _Lark's_ so full

of uranium that her skin's bulging, so we've got power to burn. In

that Galaxy there are--there _must_ be--suns with habitable, possibly

inhabited, planets. We'll find one such planet and land on it. Then

we'll do with our might what our hands find to do."

"Such as?"

"Along what lines?" queried Dorothy and Crane simultaneously.

"Space ship, probably--_Two's_ entirely too small to be of any account

in intergalactic work," Seaton replied promptly. "Or maybe fourth-,

fifth- and sixth-order projectors; or maybe some kind of an ultra-ultra

radio or projector. How do I know, from here? But there's thousands of

things that maybe we can do--we'll wait until we get there to worry

about which one to try first."