_The Reversible Equation_
Despair, however, is a luxury. Necessity is a stimulus. With the
parchings of thirst and the gnawings of hunger, the two young people
ceased swearing and weeping. Phil got up and paced about and sat down
again. Ione's tears stopped and dried, and she sat and thought.
In the back of her mind there had been forming a vague sort of an
idea, which had signalled ahead of itself that there was hope. She sat
there and desperately drove her reason to its utmost efforts, to find
that idea and bring it to the surface of consciousness. Hand to hand
fights with wild animals, battles between ships of the line, vicious
duels between ace-aviators in the clouds are tense fights; but they
cannot compare in anxious difficulty with the struggle to bring up an
unformed idea out of the subconscious mind--especially when one knows
that the idea is there, and that it must be found to save one's life.
"Ione!" exclaimed Phil. It was the first time he had used the name.
"What is the matter? You are as tense as a--"
"Ah!" cried Ione, springing up. "Tense! Tensors! I have it!"
Phil gazed at her in alarm. She laughed; at first it was a strained
laugh, but gradually it melted into her sunny one.
"No, I'm not crazy. I knew there was a way out, and I've been trying
to reason it out. How simple. You remember the little jolts when you
pulled at the vines and when you kicked the funny animal? Tensors.
Matter and space are so closely interrelated that you can't move
matter in or out of space without causing disturbance, recoils, and
tremors in space. Those bits of matter were small, and produced only a
slight disturbance. It takes about a hundred pounds of lead to swing
this segment--"
"Oho! Got you!" exclaimed Phil. "Not so dumb! The safe!"
"Yes. The safe!" Ione cried.
"Throw it off and watch us swing, eh? What would happen?"
"I might calculate it if I knew the weight of the safe."
"No calculating when I'm around," Phil said. "It couldn't make things
any worse. Try it first and calculate afterwards."
* * * * *
They got behind the safe and pushed, and their combined strength
against it was about as effective as it would have been in moving the
Peoples' Gas Building. They sat down again in despair.
"Suppose we _could_ budge it," Ione said. "All we could do would be to
push it around, this piece of matter we are on. That wouldn't help.
We've got to get it out of space. We can't push it hard enough to do
that. It's got to be shot out suddenly--"
"And we haven't got a gun handy," Phil remarked droopingly.
"Not exactly a gun. A sort of sling--"
Phil leaped to his feet.
"A sling. Why! To be sure! The vines!"
Without another word, both of them got up and ran. They hastened in a
direction opposite to the one they had at first taken on their trip of
exploration, and this brought them first past the "space" of the
Tinkertoy-like animals. As they went by, several of these beasts
darted at them, one of them snapping at Ione's heels. She uttered a
scream, causing Phil to turn about and kick right and left among them.
He drove them back and escaped from them, rejoining Ione.
"Wait," he said, when they reached the vines. "Remember those wooden
balls. If I could get a few to throw at those critters--"
In a moment they were off, and finally arrived at the point from which
they first saw the balls. Odd it seemed, how they hung suspended in
space, thousands of them, all sizes. Phil reached out and grasped one
about the size of a baseball and drew it toward himself. He felt a
dizzy lurch and heard Ione scream.
"Let go!" she screamed again.
When he suddenly realized what was going on, he found himself
prostrate on the ground, with Ione across him, her arms about his
knees.
"Do you realize," she panted, disentangling herself, "that you were
pulling yourself out of this space into that one?"
"Thanks!" said Phil. "Never say die. More careful this time, and a
smaller one."
* * * * *
He reached out and grasped a ball smaller than a golf-ball, and pulled
carefully, keeping an eye upon Ione. There was resistance to his pull,
but gradually the ball came. It seemed heavy. There was a crack as of
breaking wood, and he fell backward, with a wave of nausea sweeping
strongly over him. He gazed in amazement at a heavy wooden stick that
he held in his hands. The only thing about it that suggested the ball
for which he had reached was its diameter.
"Can't understand it, but appreciate it just the same," he said. He
broke the stick in two, and had two excellent clubs.
"Simple," Ione replied. "The balls are cross-sections of these trees
or sticks which grow in a 'space' at right angles to our own; and we
only see their three-dimensional cross-sections."
"Yes," said Phil. "Cabbages and kings. I'm for you and the party."
A short walk brought them to the "space" of the vines. After testing
the matter out carefully, they found that they could each pull two of
them at a time. The vines stretched amazingly when they found those
whose far ends were fixed firmly in the tangle, permitting them to
carry their own ends along with them toward the safe. Phil wound his
vines around his left arm and stuck one club through his belt. The
other he got ready for the wooden animals.
He needed it. The size of the pack was doubled, and he rapped them
till his hand was numb before he and Ione got by. Their vines drew out
thin, but held until they were firmly tied about the safe. They went
back after four more.
"I should judge," said Phil, "that by the time we get thirty or forty,
the elastic pull will be strong enough to drag the safe back with
them as they snap back home."
* * * * *
Trip after trip they made, fighting the wooden animals with their
clubs each time. Their clothes were torn, and their legs bleeding;
their throats were dry and lips cracked. The hard animals seemed to
have a persistent, mechanical ferocity that was undismayed by
hammering with the clubs and by repeated repulses. Phil could not seem
to hurt them; he merely knocked them away. Finally, on the ninth trip,
Ione collapsed when she reached the safe. As she fell, the elasticity
of the vines began slowly to drag her back with them. Phil was forced
to sit across her knees while he tied his own vines about the safe.
Then he released her and added her vines to the great cable about the
safe.
An overbold hard animal rattled up and snapped at her. Goaded to fury,
Phil swung at it with his club and hurled it through the air. He could
feel the lurch as it left his space and entered another. Then he
pushed with his mightiest effort against the safe. It budged, and slid
a few inches. He used his stick as a lever. It moved again, a little
faster. Ione struggled to her feet and tried to help, but her efforts
were ineffectual.
With one arm about her, Phil pried again under the safe, knowing that
another trip after vines was out of question. Another animal snapped
at their heels. For a while, it was kick backwards, then a shove at
the safe. Each time the safe moved. The sight of its movement revived
Ione, so that she was able to push also. Gradually it acquired a
steady motion, pulled by the contraction of the vines; its progress
soon became faster and faster. Phil was about to follow it and give it
another push, when Ione drew him back.
Suddenly they experienced a sinking sensation and a fearful vertigo.
The snapping animals faded. Ahead of them was the forest of vines, and
they saw the safe hurled into it, crashing, plunging into the tangled
mass. The whole view crumpled and moved upwards like a swirl of leaves
in a wind, and then vanished with a snap.
* * * * *
They were sick and dizzy, but tremendously curious to see everything.
The water, the cubistic cliffs, the vast space full of balls, all
curiously blurred, appeared in succession. There were blank spaces and
then blurred sights of things which they did not recognize, never
having seen them before. Then the dizziness and the nausea abated, and
ahead of them was a vast yellow blue, a huge nebula, and in it were
double-colored suns and ringed planets with swarms of moons; this
glorious sight remained for many seconds, as they gazed at it in
panting astonishment, half reclining on the concrete; and then it
faded. Again the nausea came on; again the succession of blurred
views. Eventually the myriad spheres, the water with the leviathans,
the forest of vines, each succeeding scene grew more blurred. Their
nausea was correspondingly increased, till they were forced to lie
down on the ground from illness.
When their giddiness abated, there were blurring views again. There
was an impression as though the speed of a train were decreasing as
one looks out of the window. And how one view held for several
seconds, a vast and wild mountain-range with glaciers and snow peaks
by moonlight. When this faded gradually, the scenes began to flick by,
more and more rapidly, and grew blurred. Phil and Ione were attacked
by nausea until, again, they had to lie down. After that came the
familiar succession: the wooden animals, the tangle of vines, the vast
sea, the spheres, and more blurred scenes. Then came a pause, with
the nebula and the glorious suns swinging into view once again.
"Oh, I understand!" Ione exclaimed; "We're swinging. The safe was so
heavy that we swung too violently, too far, and back again--"
"And we keep going till it knocks us out, or till the old cat dies,"
added Phil.
* * * * *
However, they found that after a number of repetitions of the same
program, their giddiness was becoming less; and instead of lying down
in the middle of the swing, they could look about. Then it occurred to
Phil to time the interval between the nebula and the mountain-range.
When the exact halfway point was determined, and after several more
swings, they could see dimly the windows and machinery of Tony's
laboratory flash by when they passed the middle.
"I don't mean to be a crepe-hanger, but how do you know we will stop
at the right point?" Phil asked.
"I don't," replied Ione cheerfully. "But mathematics says so. A freely
oscillating segment of space would naturally come to equilibrium in a
position parallel to the rest of its own space, would it not?"
There came a swing when they did not reach the nebula on the one hand
and the mountain-range on the other. After that, views dropped off
from either end of the swing quite rapidly, and before many minutes,
they looked into Tony's laboratory a large portion of the time. For
many seconds the laboratory held; then it would gradually fade, and
reappear again, only to fade into empty nothingness all around.
"The old cat's dead," Phil finally announced.
They sat and stared about them as the laboratory held steady and no
further intervening periods of blankness intervened. They both sighed
deeply and slumped over on the ground to rest.
"Bang! bang! bang!"
* * * * *
Some sort of hammering woke them up. They looked about them in a daze.
It was broad daylight, and things looked queer in the laboratory.
There was a smell of scorched rubber and hot oil. Great loops of wire
sagged down from above. Several nondescript heaps stood about that
might once have been machinery, but now suggested melting snow-men,
all fused into heaps. At a table sprawled a queer, misshapen figure
that suggested human origin. Both of its hands were burned to cinders
to the elbows. Great holes were scorched into the clothes. But the
face was recognizable. Tony's playthings had got him at last.
"Looks like something's happened in here!" Phil gasped, in amazement.
"I'll bet it has, too," Ione exclaimed. "This is the first time it
occurred to me that our recoil from throwing the safe overboard and
the oscillation of our space-segment must have created a tremendous
electrical field in the tetra-ordinate apparatus. The reaction is
reversible, you see. The field swings the space-segment, or the
swinging of the space-segment creates the field. And the field was too
much for Tony."
At this point the door fell under the blows of the police, and the
raiding squad rushed into the room.
* * * * *
End of Project Gutenberg's The Einstein See-Saw, by Miles John Breuer