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—