Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, page 28
There was a step around the edge of the building, and they recognized the silhouette of Grandin.
“Let’s ... just not tell them, shall we?” said Pete. “It will be easier on . . . your father and mother if they don’t know.” He glanced down at the repulsive flesh that was himself.
In the darkness Jack swallowed hard and choked back the surging in his throat. He extended a hand. “Yeah, that’s best. We won’t tell ‘em.”
Slowly Pete moved away to enter the building. Grandin came up. “We wondered what had happened to you, Jack. What were you doing out here?”
“Pete and I were just talking. I’m ready to come in now.”
As they moved away from the wall, Jack glanced back at the enormous letters: Pete’s. And at the smaller, defiant boast: Pete Can Fix It.
“You know,” Jack said suddenly. His voice became steady and confident as he stepped forward to match his father’s stride. “You know, somehow I think that maybe Pete can fix it.”
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~ * ~
PART TWO
PARALLEL WORLDS
AN ANALYSIS of stories dealing with alternate or parallel worlds elicits the fact that some science-fiction writers—the earlier ones in particular—conceived of the fourth dimension as a purely spatial extension: an effect they achieved in various odd ways. In stories of this genre, a few examples of which will be found in the following pages, the dimensional concept was like that found in other early tales that did not involve alternate worlds at all. The authors of these stories dabbled in tesseracts (a fourth-dimensional geometrical construction —Robert Heinlein’s “And He Built a Crooked House” is a fine example) ; mirrors (Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” is an enchanting non-science-fiction prototype); or spatial loops through which one could reach into a man’s middle and remove his appendix without cutting him open (Dr. Breuer, represented in this section by “The Gostak and the Doshes,” did a story about exactly that feat some twenty-five years ago; it was called “The Appendix and the Spectacles”) ; and various other nontemporal techniques.
These tales were delightful, but they don’t really fit the pattern of this book. Among the following stories, the one that most clearly exhibits the idea of the fourth dimension as a spatial extension is Dr. Breuer’s ocular concept. Other tales can be considered in that light if you choose, though they can also be viewed as time-difference worlds, or worlds based on different space-time coordinates.
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~ * ~
Peter Cartur
THE MIST
This cold little item (by a gentleman whose real name is not Peter Cartur, though what it is I don’t know) is a good one to introduce you to the Other Worlds that are the business of this section. Of course, not all will be as goosefleshed as this, but it’s at least well to be fore-warned.
~ * ~
THE big man grunted, then spoke slowly. “Can’t do that, mister. I go into town Saturday nights. This is Saturday night.”
The little man on the porch was trembling as he leaned forward, trying to catch the words above the noise of the hounds baying in the side yard. His small, alert face was pale, drawn, his eyes too eager. He gave the appearance of being smaller, somehow, than he should be—as though he were shrunken. His clothes hung on him, too large. His eyes were tired, lost-looking.
“Mr.—Mr. Brown, please listen. If this is real, this time—not a rumor —Please!”
Brown shook his head slowly, his eyes careful.
“But it’s what I’ve searched for, Mr. Brown. You’ve seen it. Others have. You’ve sworn to the truth of it.”
“Sure.” Brown spat, nodded his head. “Sure. And them as says we ain’t are liars for sure.”
“I know. . . . Mr. Brown, I’m an investigator of psychic phenomena—of ghosts and things. I must see that apparition tonight.” The shrunken man closed his eyes for an instant, leaned against the porch post.
“Saturday night.”
“But, Mr. Brown—This will be the last night.”
“Might be here right along, now. I dunno.”
“I know, Mr. Brown.” The little man rubbed at his finger with the big golden ring on it. “I know. Another ten minutes at the most. And I’ve got to—” He stopped, let his eyes beg for him.
“Well, I reckon it’s worth lookin’ at, right enough.”
“You’re—sure of what it looks like?”
“I know what I seen. Golden and glowing, it is. You gotta have dark to see it. Real dark. It don’t move, exactly. Just stays still but sorta shimmies like.”
“That’s it, Mr. Brown. I’ve got to see it!”
“Reckon that’s out, mister. I’m goin’ to town.”
Brown watched the little man’s eyes, saw the pain in them. “Course, if it’s worth somethin’—Reckon it’d have to be for me to stay home Saturday night.”
“It would take a minute—A moment.”
“I gotta be getting along.”
“It’s worth everything to me, Mr. Brown. Everything.”
“How much?”
“I—I don’t have money.”
“Hunh!”
“I begged rides for seven hundred miles to get here.”
Brown shook his head. “Nice ring you got . . . Well, I gotta be gettin’ to town.”
The little man dropped his hand to his side. Then he raised it again. His eyes, too, moved to the curiously shaped ring on his finger.
“I—can’t let you have that.”
Brown shrugged his big shoulders, stepped back and fingered the inside doorknob.
“I gotta lock up now an’ let out the hounds. . . . Don’t be hangin’ around the yard when I let out the hounds.”
“No . . . Wait— You can have the ring.”
Brown closed his eyes. “I don’t know—”
“You can have it.”
The big man opened the screen door, took the ring. He stepped back so the little man could come through the doorway. Brown struck a match, lit the lamp on the table. He turned the ring over and over, very slowly, in his thick fingers. His eyes squinted shrewdly. Golden, but not gold. Too heavy for gold—or any other metal. Much too large for the little man’s fingers. Brown pushed it on his last finger, felt it grip the flesh.
The little man, moving nervously, found the bedroom door.
Brown gave him a rough shove. “Go ahead. You paid, and it ain’t nothin’ to hurt a man.”
But the little man stood aside, let Brown lead the way.
It was a golden blot in the air, shimmering in the center of the bedroom. Eight feet high, perhaps, and about four wide.
Brown laughed coarsely. “Not a spook, is it, mister? I knew it wasn’t. Reckon you was paying for a spook. Course, I didn’t say it was a spook.”
The little man’s face hardened. He looked at Brown appraisingly, sadly. Then he shrugged.
“I can’t quite believe you really walked through that, Brown.”
“Sure.” The big man laughed. “Sure I did. Watch.”
“Wait. I’ll walk with you. Wait!” The little man stepped forward, then, as though still uncertain, put his fingers on Brown’s arm. “All right.”
Together they moved forward into the golden mist.
It was different for the big man—this time. As they entered the mist he felt sharp tingles dance over his skin. Before, there had been nothing but the feel of air. He started to step back, was stopped by surprising strength from the little man. Brown was forced forward.
The tingling was almost unbearable. It seemed to come in hot flashes, now, from the finger that wore the ring. Brown hurried, trying to get back to the familiar bedroom.
They stepped out of the mist.
There was no familiar bedroom. The house was gone, and with it the night.
Daylight. Daytime on a countryside where the grass was blue as Brown had never seen it, and where trees were slender, unbranched needles reaching for an orange sky. A sky in which Brown could see three gigantic suns.
The big man ripped free, swore, spun back to face the mist. The little man shook his head.
“We just made it, Brown. The mist is gone.”
The little man was changing. He seemed to grow, fill out his clothes. “I’m sorry, Brown. I couldn’t get through except with the ring—or with someone wearing the ring. . . . That meant it had to be you.”
“This is crazy. Where—” The big man stopped, looked again at the suns. He rubbed his forehead.
“Home. My home. . . . Find another mist while you wear the ring. Then go home ... to your home.”
“But—a mist?”
“You’ll hear rumors. Wild tales. We have stories of ghosts here, too. Be an investigator. Track down those rumors.”
“But—”
“Good luck, Brown.”
The little man turned quickly, began walking across the strange blue grass. Once he looked back, saw Brown staring helplessly after him. He hesitated for an instant, then hurried on. In a moment he was among the needle trees, then out of Brown’s sight.
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~ * ~
Miles J. Breuer, M.D.
THE GOSTAK AND THE DOSHES
Once in a long while, when browsing through the files of the older science-fiction magazines, one finds a neglected gem that sheds a bright and pleasant light, unlike a high proportion of the stories published at the time, which can only be described as turgid. The following tale, though perhaps a bit overwritten (Dr. Breuer was not a professional writer), combines an amiably bizarre imagination with a strong feeling for social criticism.
If Ogden and Richards, famed originators of certain aspects of modern semantic theory, have never read this story before, they will be pleasantly surprised, I think, should they read it here. It shows what you really can do if you honestly set out, as a patriotic gostak, to distim the doshes!
~ * ~
Let the reader suppose that somebody states: “The gostak distims the doshes.” You do not know what this means, nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we know that the doshes are distimmed by the gostak. We know that one distimmer of the doshes is a gostak. If, moreover, doshes are galloons, we know that some galloons are distimmed by the gostak. And so we may go on, and so we often do go on.—Unknown writer quoted by Ogden and Richards, in The Meaning of Meaning Co., 1923; also by Walter N. Polakov in Man and His Affairs Wilkins, 1925.
~ * ~
“WHY! That is lifting yourself by your own bootstraps!” I exclaimed in amazed incredulity. “It’s absurd.”
Woleshensky smiled indulgently. He towered in his chair as though in the infinite kindness of his vast mind there were room to understand and overlook all the foolish little foibles of all the weak little beings that called themselves men. A mathematical physicist lives in vast spaces where a light-year is a footstep, where universes are being born and blotted out, where space unrolls along a fourth dimension on a surface distended from a fifth. To him, human beings and their affairs do not loom very important.
“Relativity,” he explained. In his voice there was a patient forbearance for my slowness of comprehension. “Merely relativity. It doesn’t take much physical effort to make the moon move through the tree-tops, does it? Just enough to walk down the garden path.”
I stared at him, and he continued: “If you had been born and raised on a moving train, no one could convince you that the landscape was not in rapid motion. Well, our conception of the universe is quite as relative as that. Sir Isaac Newton tried in his mathematics to express a universe as though beheld by an infinitely removed and perfectly fixed observer. Mathematicians since his time, realizing the futility of such an effort, have taken into consideration that what things ‘are’ depends upon the person who is looking at them. They have tried to express common knowledge, such as the law of gravitation, in terms that would hold good for all observers. Yet their leader and culminating genius, Einstein, has been unable to express knowledge in terms of pure relativity; he has had to accept the velocity of light as an arbitrarily fixed constant. Why should the velocity of light be any more fixed and constant than any other quantity in the universe?”
“But what’s that got to do with going into the fourth dimension?” I broke in impatiently.
He continued as though I hadn’t spoken.
“The thing that interests us now, and that mystifies modern mathematicians, is the question of movement, or, more accurately, translation. Is there such a thing as absolute translation? Can there be movement—translation—except in relation to something else than the thing that moves? All movement we know of is movement in relation to other objects, whether it be a walk down the street or the movement of the earth in its orbit around the sun. A change of relative position. But the mere translation of an isolated object existing alone in space is mathematically inconceivable, for there is no such thing as space in that sense.”
“I thought you said something about going into another universe—” I interrupted again.
You can’t argue with Woleshensky. His train of thought went on without a break.
“By translation we understand getting from one place to another. ‘Going somewhere’ originally meant a movement of our bodies. Yet, as a matter of fact, when we drive in an automobile we ‘go somewhere’ without moving our bodies at all. The scene is changed around us; we are somewhere else; and yet we haven’t moved at all.
“Or suppose you could cast off gravitational attraction for a moment and let the earth rotate under you; you would be going somewhere and yet not moving—”
“But that is theory; you can’t tinker with gravitation—”
“Every day you tinker with gravitation. When you start upward in an elevator, your pressure, not your weight, against the floor of it is increased; apparent gravitation between you and the floor of the elevator is greater than before—and that’s like gravitation is anyway: inertia and acceleration. But we are talking about translation. The position of everything in the universe must be referred to some sort of coordinates. Suppose we change the angle or direction of the coordinates: then you have ‘gone somewhere’ and yet you haven’t moved, nor has anything else moved.”
I looked at him, holding my head in my hands.
“I couldn’t swear that I understand that,” I said slowly. “And I repeat that it looks like lifting yourself by your own bootstraps.”
The homely simile did not dismay him. He pointed a finger at me as he spoke. “You’ve seen a chip of wood bobbing on the ripples of a pond. Now you think the chip is moving, now the water. Yet neither is moving; the only motion is of an abstract thing called a wave.
“You’ve seen those ‘illusion’ diagrams—for instance, this one of a group of cubes. Make up your mind that you are looking down upon their upper surfaces, and indeed they seem below you. Now change your mind and imagine that you are down below, looking up. Behold, you see their lower surfaces; you are indeed below them. You have ‘gone somewhere,’ yet there has been no translation of anything. You have merely changed coordinates.”
“Which do you think will drive me insane more quickly—if you show me what you mean, or if you keep on talking without showing me?”
“I’ll try to show you. There are some types of mind, you know, that cannot grasp the idea of relativity. It isn’t the mathematics involved that matters; it’s just the inability of some types of mental organization to grasp the fact that the mind of the observer endows his environment with certain properties which have no absolute existence. Thus, when you walk through the garden at night the moon floats from one treetop another. Is your mind good enough to invert this: make the moon stand still and let the trees move backward? Can you do that? If so, you can ‘go somewhere’ into another dimension.”
Make up your mind that you are looking down upon the upper surfaces of the cubes, and indeed they seem below you. Now change your mind, and imagine that you are looking up. Behold, you see their lower surfaces
Woleshensky rose and walked to the window. His office was an appropriate setting for such a modern discussion as was ours—situated in new, ultramodern building on the university campus, the varnish glossy, the walls clean, the books neatly arranged behind clean glass, the desk in most orderly array; the office was just as precise and modern and wonderful as the mind of its occupant.
“When do you want to go?” he asked.
“Now!”
“Then I have two more things to explain to you. The fourth dimension is just as much here as anywhere else. Right here around you and me things exist and go forward in the fourth dimension; but we do not see them and are not conscious of them because we are confined to our own three. Secondly: If we name the four coordinates as Einstein does, x, y, z, and t, then we exist in x, y, and z and move freely about in them, but are powerless to move in t. Why? Because t is the time dimension; and the time dimension is a difficult one for biological structures that depend on irreversible chemical reactions for their existence. But biochemical reactions can take place along any one of the other dimensions as well as along t.
