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.”