Chapter the Fourth
Except for that one perplexing fact that all these Utopians had apparently a complete command of idiomatic English, Mr. Barnstaple found his vision of this new world developing with a congruity that no dream in his experience had ever possessed. It was so coherent, so orderly, that less and less was it like a strange world at all and more and more like an arrival in some foreign but very highly civilized country.
Under the direction of the brown-eyed woman in the scarlet-edged robe, the Earthlings were established in their quarters near the Conference Place in the most hospitable and comfortable fashion conceivable. Five or six youths and girls made it their business to initiate the strangers in the little details of Utopian domesticity. The separate buildings in which they were lodged had each an agreeable little dressing-room, and the bed, which had sheets of the finest linen and a very light puffy coverlet, stood in an open loggia — too open Lady Stella thought, but then as she said, “One feels so safe here.” The luggage appeared and the valises were identified as if they were in some hospitable earthly mansion.
But Lady Stella had to turn two rather too friendly youths out of her apartment before she could open her dressing-bag and administer refreshment to her complexion.
A few minutes later some excitement was caused by an outbreak of wild laughter and the sounds of an amiable but hysterical struggle that came from Lady Stella’s retreat. The girl who had remained with her had displayed a quite feminine interest in her equipment and had come upon a particularly charming and diaphanous sleeping suit. For some obscure reason this secret daintiness amused the young Utopian extremely, and it was with some difficulty that Lady Stella restrained her from putting the garment on and dancing out in it for a public display. “Then you put it on,” the girl insisted.
“But you don’t understand,” cried Lady Stella. “It’s almost — sacred! It’s for nobody to see — ever.”
“But why?” the Utopian asked, puzzled beyond measure.
Lady Stella found an answer impossible.
The light meal that followed was by terrestrial standards an entirely satisfactory one. The anxiety of Mr. Freddy Mush was completely allayed: there were cold chicken and ham and a very pleasant meat pate. There were also rather coarse-grained but most palatable bread, pure butter, an exquisite salad, fruit, cheese of the Gruyere type, and a light white wine which won from Mr. Burleigh the tribute that “Moselle never did anything better.”
“You find our food very like your own?” asked the woman in the red-trimmed robe.
“Eckquithit quality,” said Mr. Mush with his mouth rather full.
“Food has changed very little in the last three thousand years. People had found out all the best things to eat long before the Last Age of Confusion.”
“It’s too real to be real,” Mr. Barnstaple repeated to himself. “Too real to be real.”
He looked at his companions, elated, interested and eating with appreciation.
If it wasn’t for the absurdity of these Utopians speaking English with a clearness that tapped like a hammer inside his head Mr. Barnstaple would have had no doubt whatever of its reality.
No servants waited at the clothless stone table; the woman in the white and scarlet robe and the two aviators shared the meal and the guests attended to each other’s requirements. Mr. Burleigh’s chauffeur was for modestly shrinking to another table until the great statesman reassured him with: “Sit down there, Penk. Next to Mr. Mush.” Other Utopians with friendly but keenly observant eyes upon the Earthlings came into the great pillared veranda in which the meal had been set, and smiled and stood about or sat down. There were no introductions and few social formalities.
“All this is most reassuring,” said Mr. Burleigh. “Most reassuring. I’m bound to say these beat the Chatsworth peaches. Is that cream, my dear Rupert, in the little brown jar in front of you? . . . I guessed as much. If you are sure you can spare it, Rupert. . . . Thank you.”
Several of the Utopians made themselves known by name to the Earthlings. All their voices sounded singularly alike to Mr. Barnstaple and the words were as clear as print. The brown-eyed woman’s name was Lychnis. A man with a beard who might perhaps, Mr. Barnstaple thought, have been as old as forty, was either Urthred or Adam or Edom, the name for all its sharpness of enunciation had been very difficult to catch. It was as if large print hesitated. Urthred conveyed that he was an ethnologist and historian and that he desired to learn all that he possibly could about the ways of our world. He impressed Mr. Barnstaple as having the easy carriage of some earthly financier or great newspaper proprietor rather than the diffidence natural in our own every-day world to a merely learned man. Another of their hosts, Serpentine, was also, Mr. Barnstaple learnt with surprise, for his bearing too was almost masterful, a scientific man. He called himself something that Mr. Barnstaple could not catch. First it sounded like “atomic mechanician,” and then oddly enough it sounded like “molecular chemist.” And then Mr. Barnstaple heard Mr. Burleigh say to Mr. Mush, “He said ‘physio-chemist,’ didn’t he?”
“I thought he just called himself a materialist,” said Mr. Mush.
“I thought he said he weighed things,” said Lady Stella.
“Their intonation is peculiar,” said Mr. Burleigh. “Sometimes they are almost too loud for comfort and then there is a kind of gap in the sounds.” . . .
When the meal was at an end the whole party removed to another little building that was evidently planned for classes and discussions. It had a semicircular apse round which ran a series of white tablets which evidently functioned at times as a lecturer’s blackboard, since there were black and coloured pencils and cloths for erasure lying on a marble ledge at a convenient height below the tablets. The lecturer could walk from point to point of this semicircle as he talked. Lychnis, Urthred, Serpentine and the Earthlings seated themselves on a semicircular bench below this lecturer’s track, and there was accommodation for about eighty or a hundred people upon the seats before them. All these were occupied, and beyond stood a number of graceful groups against a background of rhododendron-like bushes, between which Mr. Barnstaple caught glimpses of grassy vistas leading down to the shining waters of the lake.
They were going to talk over this extraordinary irruption into their world. Could anything be more reasonable than to talk it over? Could anything be more fantastically impossible?
“Odd that there are no swallows,” said Mr. Mush suddenly in Mr. Barnstaple’s ear. “I wonder why there are no swallows.”
Mr. Barnstaple’s attention went to the empty sky. “No gnats nor flies perhaps,” he suggested. It was odd that he had not missed the swallows before.
“Sssh!” said Lady Stella. “He’s beginning.”
This incredible conference began. It was opened by the man named Serpentine, and he stood before his audience and seemed to make a speech. His lips moved, his hands assisted his statements; his expression followed his utterance. And yet Mr. Barnstaple had the most subtle and indefensible doubt whether indeed Serpentine was speaking. There was something odd about the whole thing. Sometimes the thing said sounded with a peculiar resonance in his head; sometimes it was indistinct and elusive like an object seen through troubled waters; sometimes though Serpentine still moved his fine hands and looked towards his hearers, there were gaps of absolute silence — as if for brief intervals Mr. Barnstaple had gone deaf. . . . Yet it was a discourse; it held together and it held Mr. Barnstaple’s attention.
Serpentine had the manner of one who is taking great pains to be as simple as possible with a rather intricate question. He spoke, as it were, in propositions with a pause between each. “It had long been known,” he began, “that the possible number of dimensions, like the possible number of anything else that could be enumerated, was unlimited!”
Yes, Mr. Barnstaple had got that, but it proved too much for Mr. Freddy Mush.
“Oh, Lord!” he said. “Dimensions!” and dropped his eye-glass and became despondently inattentive.
“For most practical purposes,” Serpentine continued, “the particular universe, the particular system of events, in which we found ourselves and of which we formed part, could be regarded as occurring in a space of three rectilinear dimensions and as undergoing translation, which translation was in fact duration, through a fourth dimension, time. Such a system of events was necessarily a gravitational system.”
“Er!” said Mr. Burleigh sharply. “Excuse me! I don’t see that.”
So he, at any rate, was following it too.
“Any universe that endures must necessarily gravitate,” Serpentine repeated, as if he were asserting some self-evident fact.
“For the life of me I can’t see that,” said Mr. Burleigh after a moment’s reflection.
Serpentine considered him for a moment. “It is so,” he said, and went on with his discourse. Our minds, he continued, had been evolved in the form of this practical conception of things, they accepted it as true, and it was only by great efforts of sustained analysis that we were able to realize that this universe in which we lived not only extended but was, as it were, slightly bent and contorted, into a number of other long unsuspected spatial dimensions. It extended beyond its three chief spatial dimensions into these others just as a thin sheet of paper, which is practically two dimensional, extended not only by virtue of its thickness but also of its crinkles and curvature into a third dimension.
“Am I going deaf?” asked Lady Stella in a stage whisper. “I can’t catch a word of all this.”
“Nor I,” said Father Amerton.
Mr. Burleigh made a pacifying gesture towards these unfortunates without taking his eyes off Serpentine’s face. Mr. Barnstaple knitted his brows, clasped his knees, knotted his fingers, held on desperately.
He must be hearing — of course he was hearing!
Serpentine proceeded to explain that just as it would be possible for any number of practically two-dimensional universes to lie side by side, like sheets of paper, in a three-dimensional space, so in the many-dimensional space about which the ill-equipped human mind is still slowly and painfully acquiring knowledge, it is possible for an innumerable quantity of practically three-dimensional universes to lie, as it were, side by side and to undergo a roughly parallel movement through time. The speculative work of Lonestone and Cephalus had long since given the soundest basis for the belief that there actually were a very great number of such space-and-time universes, parallel to one another and resembling each other, nearly but not exactly, much as the leaves of a book might resemble one another. All of them would have duration, all of them would be gravitating systems —
(Mr. Burleigh shook his head to show that still he didn’t see it.)
— And those lying closest together would most nearly resemble each other. How closely they now had an opportunity of learning. For the daring attempts of those two great geniuses, Arden and Greenlake, to use the —(inaudible)— thrust of the atom to rotate a portion of the Utopian material universe in that dimension, the F dimension, into which it had long been known to extend for perhaps the length of a man’s arm, to rotate this fragment of Utopian matter, much as a gate is swung on its hinges, had manifestly been altogether successful. The gate had swung back again bringing with it a breath of close air, a storm of dust and, to the immense amazement of Utopia, three sets of visitors from an unknown world.
“Three?” whispered Mr. Barnstaple doubtfully. “Did he say three?”
[Serpentine disregarded him.]
“Our brother and sister have been killed by some unexpected release of force, but their experiment has opened a way that now need never be closed again, out of the present spatial limitations of Utopia into a whole vast folio of hitherto unimagined worlds. Close at hand to us, even as Lonestone guessed ages ago, nearer to us, as he put it, than the blood in our hearts —”
(“Nearer to us than breathing and closer than hands and feet,” Father Amerton misquoted, waking up suddenly. “But what is he talking about? I don’t catch it.”)
“— we discover another planet, much the same size as ours to judge by the scale of its inhabitants, circulating, we may certainly assume, round a sun like that in our skies, a planet bearing life and being slowly subjugated, even as our own is being subjugated, by intelligent life which has evidently evolved under almost exactly parallel conditions to those of our own evolution. This sister universe to ours is, so far as we may judge by appearances, a little retarded in time in relation to our own. Our visitors wear something very like the clothing and display physical characteristics resembling those of our ancestors during the Last Age of Confusion. . . .
“We are not yet justified in supposing that their history has been strictly parallel to ours. No two particles of matter are alike; no two vibrations. In all the dimensions of being, in all the universes of God, there has never been and there can never be an exact repetition. That we have come to realize is the one impossible thing. Nevertheless, this world you call Earth is manifestly very near and like to this universe of ours. . . .
“We are eager to learn from you Earthlings, to check our history, which is still very imperfectly known, by your experiences, to show you what we know, to make out what may be possible and desirable in intercourse and help between the people of your planet and ours. We, here, are the merest beginners in knowledge; we have learnt as yet scarcely anything more than the immensity of the things that we have yet to learn and do. In a million kindred things our two worlds may perhaps teach each other and help each other. . . .
“Possibly there are streaks of heredity in your planet that have failed to develop or that have died out in ours. Possibly there are elements or minerals in one world that are rare or wanting in the other. . . . The structure of your atoms (?) . . . our worlds may intermarry (?) . . . to their common invigoration. . . . ”
He passed into the inaudible just when Mr. Barnstaple was most moved and most eager to follow what he was saying. Yet a deaf man would have judged he was still speaking.
Mr. Barnstaple met the eye of Mr. Rupert Catskill, as distressed and puzzled as his own. Father Amerton’s face was buried in his hands. Lady Stella and Mr. Mush were whispering softly together; they had long since given up any pretence of listening.
“Such,” said Serpentine, abruptly becoming audible again, “is our first rough interpretation of your apparition in our world and of the possibilities of our interaction. I have put our ideas before you as plainly as I can. I would suggest that now one of you tell us simply and plainly what you conceive to be the truth about your world in relation to ours.”