THE WORLD IN THE RING
The Chemist paused and relighted his cigar. "Perhaps you have some
questions," he suggested.
The Doctor shifted in his chair.
"Did you have any theory at this time"--he wanted to know--"about the
physical conformation of this world? What I mean is, when you came out
of this tunnel were you on the inside or the outside of the world?"
"Was it the same sky you saw overhead when you were in the forest?"
asked the Big Business Man.
"No, it was what he saw in the microscope, wasn't it?" said the Very
Young Man.
"One at a time, gentlemen," laughed the Chemist. "No, I had no
particular theory at this time--I had too many other things to think of.
But I do remember noticing one thing which gave me the clew to a fairly
complete understanding of this universe. From it I formed a definite
explanation, which I found was the belief held by the people
themselves."
"What was that?" asked the Very Young Man.
"I noticed, as I stood looking over this broad expanse of country before
me, one vital thing that made it different from any similar scene I had
ever beheld. If you will stop and think a moment, gentlemen, you will
realize that in our world here the horizon is caused by a curvature of
the earth below the straight line of vision. We are on a convex surface.
But as I gazed over this landscape, and even with no appreciable light
from the sky I could see a distance of several miles, I saw at once that
quite the reverse was true. I seemed to be standing in the center of a
vast shallow bowl. The ground curved upward into the distance. There was
no distant horizon line, only the gradual fading into shadow of the
visual landscape. I was standing obviously on a concave surface, on the
inside, not the outside of the world.
"The situation, as I now understand it, was this: According to the
smallest stature I reached, and calling my height at that time roughly
six feet, I had descended into the ring at the time I met Lylda several
thousand miles, at least. By the way, where is the ring?"
"Here is it," said the Very Young Man, handing it to him. The Chemist
replaced it on his finger. "It's pretty important to me now," he said,
smiling.
"You bet!" agreed the Very Young Man.
"You can readily understand how I descended such a distance, if you
consider the comparative immensity of my stature during the first few
hours I was in the ring. It is my understanding that this country
through which I passed is a barren waste--merely the atoms of the
mineral we call gold.
"Beyond that I entered the hitherto unexplored regions within the atom.
The country at that point where I found the forest, I was told later, is
habitable for several hundred miles. Around it on all sides lies a
desert, across which no one has ever penetrated.
"This surface is the outside of the Oroid world, for so they call their
earth. At this point the shell between the outer and inner surface is
only a few miles in thickness. The two surfaces do not parallel each
other here, so that in descending these tunnels we turned hardly more
than an eighth of a complete circle.
"At the city of Arite, where Lylda first took me, and where I had my
first view of the inner surface, the curvature is slightly greater than
that of our own earth, although, as I have said, in the opposite
direction."
"And the space within this curvature--the heavens you have
mentioned--how great do you estimate it to be?" asked the Doctor.
"Based on the curvature at Arite it would be about six thousand miles in
diameter."
"Has this entire inner surface been explored?" asked the Big Business
Man.
"No, only a small portion. The Oroids are not an adventurous people.
There are only two nations, less than twelve million people all
together, on a surface nearly as extensive as our own."
"How about those stars?" suggested the Very Young Man.
"I believe they comprise a complete universe similar to our own solar
system. There is a central sun-star, around which many of the others
revolve. You must understand, though, that these other worlds are
infinitely tiny compared to the Oroids, and, if inhabited, support
beings nearly as much smaller than the Oroids, as they are smaller than
you."
"Great Caesar!" ejaculated the Banker. "Don't let's go into that any
deeper!"
"Tell us more about Lylda," prompted the Very Young Man.
"You are insatiable on that point," laughed the Chemist. "Well, when we
left the sleigh, Lylda took me directly into the city of Arite. I found
it an orderly collection of low houses, seemingly built of uniformly
cut, highly polished gray blocks. As we passed through the streets, some
of which were paved with similar blocks, I was reminded of nothing so
much as the old jingles of Spotless Town. Everything was immaculately,
inordinately clean. Indeed, the whole city seemed built of some curious
form of opaque glass, newly scrubbed and polished.
"Children crowded from the doorways as we advanced, but Lylda dispersed
them with a gentle though firm, command. As we approached the sort of
castle I have mentioned, the reason for Lylda's authoritative manner
dawned upon me. She was, I soon learned, daughter of one of the most
learned men of the nation and was--handmaiden, do you call it?--to the
queen."
"So it was a monarchy?" interrupted the Big Business Man. "I should
never have thought that."
"Lylda called their leader a king. In reality he was the president,
chosen by the people, for a period of about what we would term twenty
years; I learned something about this republic during my stay, but not
as much as I would have liked. Politics was not Lylda's strong point,
and I had to get it all from her, you know.
"For several days I was housed royally in the castle. Food was served me
by an attendant who evidently was assigned solely to look after my
needs. At first I was terribly confused by the constant, uniform light,
but when I found certain hours set aside for sleep, just as we have
them, when I began to eat regularly, I soon fell into the routine of
this new life.
"The food was not greatly different from our own, although I found not a
single article I could identify. It consisted principally of vegetables
and fruits, the latter of an apparently inexhaustible variety.
"Lylda visited me at intervals, and I learned I was awaiting an audience
with the king. During these days she made rapid progress with my
language--so rapid that I shortly gave up the idea of mastering hers.
"And now, with the growing intimacy between us and our ability to
communicate more readily, I learned the simple, tragic story of her
race--new details, of course, but the old, old tale of might against
right, and the tragedy of a trusting, kindly people, blindly thinking
others as just as themselves.
"For thousands of years, since the master life-giver had come from one
of the stars to populate the world, the Oroid nation had dwelt in peace
and security. These people cared nothing for adventure. No restless
thirst for knowledge led them to explore deeply the limitless land
surrounding them. Even from the earliest times no struggle for
existence, no doctrine of the survival of the fittest, hung over them as
with us. No wild animals harassed them; no savages menaced them. A
fertile boundless land, a perfect climate, nurtured them tenderly.
"Under such conditions they developed only the softer, gentler qualities
of nature. Many laws among them were unnecessary, for life was so
simple, so pleasant to live, and the attainment of all the commonly
accepted standards of wealth so easy, that the incentive to wrongdoing
was almost non-existent.
"Strangely enough, and fortunately, too, no individuals rose among them
with the desire for power. Those in command were respected and loved as
true workers for the people, and they accepted their authority in the
same spirit with which it was given. Indolence, in its highest sense the
wonderful art of doing nothing gracefully, played the greatest part in
their life.
"Then, after centuries of ease and peaceful security, came the
awakening. Almost without warning another nation had come out of the
unknown to attack them.
"With the hurt feeling that comes to a child unjustly treated, they all
but succumbed to this first onslaught. The abduction of numbers of their
women, for such seemed the principal purpose of the invaders, aroused
them sufficiently to repel this first crude attack. Their manhood
challenged, their anger as a nation awakened for the first time, they
sprang as one man into the horror we call war.
"With the defeat of the Malites came another period of ease and
security. They had learned no lesson, but went their indolent way,
playing through life like the kindly children they were. During this
last period some intercourse between them and the Malites took place.
The latter people, whose origin was probably nearly opposite them on the
inner surface, had by degrees pushed their frontiers closer and closer
to the Oroids. Trade between the two was carried on to some extent, but
the character of the Malites, their instinctive desire for power, for
its own sake, their consideration for themselves as superior beings,
caused them to be distrusted and feared by their more simple-minded
companion nation.
"You can almost guess the rest, gentlemen. Lylda told me little about
the Malites, but the loathing disgust of her manner, her hesitancy, even
to bring herself to mention them, spoke more eloquently than words.
"Four years ago, as they measure time, came the second attack, and now,
in a huge arc, only a few hundred miles from Arite, hung the opposing
armies."
The Chemist paused. "That's the condition I found, gentlemen," he said.
"Not a strikingly original or unfamiliar situation, was it?"
"By Jove!" remarked the Doctor thoughtfully, "what a curious thing that
the environment of our earth should so affect that world inside the
ring. It does make you stop and think, doesn't it, to realize how those
infinitesimal creatures are actuated now by the identical motives that
inspire us?"
"Yet it does seem very reasonable, I should say," the Big Business Man
put in.
"Let's have another round of drinks," suggested the Banker--"this is dry
work!"
"As a scientist you'd make a magnificent plumber, George!" retorted the
Big Business Man. "You're about as helpful in this little gathering as
an oyster!"
The Very Young Man rang for a waiter.
"I've been thinking----" began the Banker, and stopped at the smile of
his companion. "Shut up!"--he finished--"that's cheap wit, you know!"
"Go on, George," encouraged the other, "you've been thinking----"
"I've been tremendously interested in this extraordinary story"--he
addressed himself to the Chemist--"but there's one point I don't get at
all. How many days were you in that ring do you make out?"
"I believe about seven, all told," returned the Chemist.
"But you were only away from us some forty hours. I ought to know, I've
been right here." He looked at his crumpled clothes somewhat ruefully.
"The change of time-progress was one of the surprises of my adventure,"
said the Chemist. "It is easily explained in a general way, although I
cannot even attempt a scientific theory of its cause. But I must confess
that before I started the possibility of such a thing never even
occurred to me."
"To get a conception of this change you must analyze definitely what
time is. We measure and mark it by years, months, and so forth, down to
minutes and seconds, all based upon the movements of our earth around
its sun. But that is the measurement of time, not time itself. How would
you describe time?"
The Big Business Man smiled. "Time," he said, "is what keeps everything
from happening at once."
"Very clever," laughed the Chemist.
The Doctor leaned forward earnestly. "I should say," he began, "that
time is the rate at which we live--the speed at which we successively
pass through our existence from birth to death. It's very hard to put
intelligibly, but I think I know what I mean," he finished somewhat
lamely.
"Exactly so. Time is a rate of life-progress, different for every
individual and only made standard because we take the time-duration of
the earth's revolution around the sun, which is constant, and
arbitrarily say: 'That is thirty-one million five hundred thousand odd
seconds.'"
"Is time different for every individual?" asked the Banker
argumentatively.
"Think a moment," returned the Chemist. "Suppose your brain were to work
twice as fast as mine. Suppose your heart beat twice as fast, and all
the functions of your body were accelerated in a like manner. What we
call a second would certainly seem to you twice as long. Further than
that, it actually would be twice as long, so far as you were concerned.
Your digestion, instead of taking perhaps four hours, would take two.
You would eat twice as often. The desire for sleep would overtake you
every twelve hours instead of twenty-four, and you would be satisfied
with four hours of unconsciousness instead of eight. In short, you would
soon be living a cycle of two days every twenty-four hours. Time then,
as we measure it, for you at least would have doubled--you would be
progressing through life at twice the rate that I am through mine."
"That may be theoretically true," the Big Business Man put in.
"Practically, though, it has never happened to any one."
"Of course not, to such a great degree as the instance I put. No one,
except in disease, has ever doubled our average rate of life-progress,
and lived it out as a balanced, otherwise normal existence. But there is
no question that to some much smaller degree we all of us differ one
from the other. The difference, however, is so comparatively slight,
that we can each one reconcile it to the standard measurement of time.
And so, outwardly, time is the same for all of us. But inwardly, why, we
none of us conceive a minute or an hour to be the same! How do you know
how long a minute is to me? More than that, time is not constant even in
the same individual. How many hours are shorter to you than others? How
many days have been almost interminable? No, instead of being constant,
there is nothing more inconstant than time."
"Haven't you confused two different issues?" suggested the Big Business
Man. "Granted what you say about the slightly different rate at which
different individuals live, isn't it quite another thing, how long time
seems to you. A day when you have nothing to do seems long, or, on the
other hand, if you are very busy it seems short. But mind, it only
_seems_ short or long, according to the preoccupation of your mind. That
has nothing to do with the speed of your progress through life."
"Ah, but I think it has," cried the Chemist. "You forget that we none of
us have all of the one thing to the exclusion of the other. Time seems
short; it seems long, and in the end it all averages up, and makes our
rate of progress what it is. Now if any of us were to go through life in
a calm, deliberate way, making time seem as long as possible, he would
live more years, as we measure them, than if he rushed headlong through
the days, accomplishing always as much as possible. I mean in neither
case to go to the extremes, but only so far as would be consistent with
the maintenance of a normal standard of health. How about it?" He turned
to the Doctor. "You ought to have an opinion on that."
"I rather think you are right," said the latter thoughtfully, "although
I doubt very much if the man who took it easy would do as much during
his longer life as the other with his energy would accomplish in the
lesser time allotted to him."
"Probably he wouldn't," smiled the Chemist; "but that does not alter the
point we are discussing."
"How does this apply to the world in the ring?" ventured the Very Young
Man.
"I believe there is a very close relationship between the dimensions of
length, breadth, and thickness, and time. Just what connection with them
it has, I have no idea. Yet, when size changes, time-rate changes; you
have only to look at our own universe to discover that."
"How do you mean?" asked the Very Young Man.
"Why, all life on our earth, in a general way, illustrates the
fundamental fact that the larger a thing is, the slower its
time-progress is. An elephant, for example, lives more years than we
humans. Yet how quickly a fly is born, matured, and aged! There are
exceptions, of course; but in a majority of cases it is true.
"So I believe that as I diminished in stature, my time-progress became
faster and faster. I am seven days older than when I left you day before
yesterday. I have lived those seven days, gentlemen, there is no getting
around that fact."
"This is all tremendously interesting," sighed the Big Business Man;
"but not very comprehensible."