Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, page 44
“Ned, think back. Don’t you remember what happened in the Museum of Industrial Arts and Sciences?”
“I never heard of the place.”
“But you just now spoke to Joan. You spoke to Joan out of the darkness.”
“Joan? I . . . yes, the name is familiar. I have a feeling that if she spoke to me I would know her.”
“Don’t you remember my leaving you and crawling up toward the stars?” Temple prodded.
“You . . . you climbed up and saw the stars?”
“Yes, and crawled back into darkness. I spoke to you there, and you answered me. Now I’m going to raise my voice and try to speak to Joan. Joan,” he called. “Joan, can you hear me?”
“Oh, darling, where are you?”
“We’re in a boat with paddle wheels steaming up the Orinoco River —in South America,” he added, to make sure that she would not misunderstand him.
“Darling, climb up the stairs again. You can, can’t you?” “No. There are no longer any stairs.”
“But I climbed up, darling. Just now. Ralph, we are in the center of a strange new star cluster. All the stars are different.”
Temple scarcely heard her. He was staring out the open port at something black and ungainly that had emerged from the rain forest and was winging its way toward the ship.
It was not a bird, but a flying reptile with membraneous wings that looked—he caught his breath—that looked exactly like a pterodactyl!
Someone was screaming in the darkness. “Oh, don’t let it touch me. Keep it off, keep it away from me.”
Temple dragged himself forward on his hands and knees, his heart hammering against his ribs. One of the schoolgirls was down on the floor, and an enormous, shadowy something was bending over her. An enormous carapaced something that bore a terrifying resemblance to a giant water bug.
Fiercely Temple grappled with it. There was a long-drawn, plaintive wail, and the thing flaked away in his clasp, leaving his fingers locked together.
A match flared, and Joan came into view, her brows raised and her eyes searching his face.
Temple looked down at the thing. It wasn’t. That is to say, there was a negation of light on the floor which could have been made by something vanishing. Only that, and nothing more.
But the schoolgirl was in his arms, and her companions were clustering about him.
“No wonder you came back,” Joan almost hissed. She backed away from him, her eyes blazing.
The match went out.
Impatiently Temple untangled the cool, clinging arms of a girl of perhaps eighteen from about himself.
“Joan, I found myself on my hands and knees in the darkness. I heard this young lady scream and saw something—”
“You did? I saw nothing.”
“Oh, but there was a something,” the girl sobbed. “He saved my life.”
Temple felt around beneath him until he located a chair. He sat down.
“Joan, I think I can explain everything,” he said.
“Ralph Temple, I don’t care to listen,” came out of the darkness.
“You ought to listen,” the schoolgirl sobbed. “I’ll listen. What is it, Ralph?”
“Ralph. Of all the gall!”
“Joan, listen to me. You know what happens if you travel with the speed of light?”
“I know. A lot of silly children get romantic notions about a man old enough to be a grandfather.”
“Joan, I am thirty-seven,” Temple reminded her. “And I’m not getting any older. Ned is fifteen years younger, and at any moment I may be a youngster myself. I think we ought to know where we stand. There may be surprises ahead for all of us.”
“You mean, Ned went back in time? But if we were just traveling with the speed of light we’d be the same forever. We wouldn’t even be moving about where . . . wherever we are. But we are moving about. Therefore we must be traveling a little faster than the speed of light. We must— No, wait a minute.”
She paused an instant, then resumed. “I was a problem child in physics at Vassar, but I seem to remember that only time on earth would stand still. If you moved with the speed of light and looked back at earth, everything would appear to be standing still. If you moved faster, events on earth would unhappen.”
“That’s right,” Temple said. “People who don’t think things through imagine that events would repeat themselves in little jerks. Come to a head, so to speak, and then unwind feet foremost. Actually they would unhappen continuously, roll backward until all history repeated itself in reverse.”
“But only on earth,” Joan reminded him. “We could observe that reversal only by moving away from earth in the direction of motion faster than light. And we could move about and grow older while watching it if we were traveling in a time machine. Our motion would not be relative in relation to the machine. That seems sort of tautological but you get what I mean.”
“I get what you mean,” Temple said. “And without realizing it you’ve put your finger on the crux of our predicament. We don’t know what reality would be like in a higher dimension than we can perceive with our limited endowments of sight, touch, and hearing, but it seems unlikely that a time machine would just move away from earth with the speed of light.
“If it did that, it would be merely a space traveler. It could only rope in space-time by exceeding the speed of light, and even then a reversal of entropy would not throw us back into our own pasts on earth. We’d just be in limbo somewhere in the rind of the continuum, or, if you prefer, outside the Universe of Stars.”
“What are you driving at, Ralph?”
“Simply this. I believe Morrison was merely speaking figuratively when he talked about traveling with the speed of light. I believe that we are in limbo as far as the physical universe is concerned, but following along a fifth- or possibly sixth-dimensional time track which takes in practically everything.
“I think we’re in it up to our necks. I think it includes all the timeframes produced in the physical universe by motion in space, and a lot of other frames as well.
“I think we’re inside the Universe of Stars, and outside it, and back with ourselves yesterday, and catching up with ourselves tomorrow. I think we’re in a topsy-turvy world where anything could happen.”
“Ralph!”
“Well, I was in two places at the same time, and I climbed up and looked at the changing stars over a stairway that comes and goes. And although Ned is back in the past, it’s an abnormal past in half a dozen respects. In the first place, it’s unraveling in the direction of the future, which is the way it wouldn’t unravel if we were traveling away from it in the direction of motion. In the second place, something has interfered with the molecular flow of the water outside the boat, and I saw something that looked like a pterodactyl come flapping out of the rain forest.
“In the third place, although I can move back where Ned is, I don’t grow younger when I move back, and I can remember things that he has forgotten. In the fourth place, we can talk to one another across time, and if you know anything about acoustics I don’t need to point out that you can’t do that ordinarily. In the fifth place, the thing that came in just now from outside flaked away when I clasped it, and couldn’t have been—”
Temple leaped back with a choking gasp. Another shape was coming toward him through the darkness, a faintly luminous shape that bore a terrifying resemblance to a magnified body louse.
“How would you like to have twenty toes instead of ten?” Temple asked. “How would you like to turn around and meet yourself—yesterday?”
“Huh?” the old man muttered, stroking his thin beard. “What say, youngster?”
“Grandpop, I’m not a youngster. I will be forty-four come midsummer. But I was a youngster, a green kid of twenty-two, when I picked up this scar.”
As he spoke, Temple opened his hand and exposed a palm which was all knots and livid creases.
“Aye, I was young myself once, son,” the old man said, and there was a dignity in his gaze which had not been there a moment before.
Temple elevated his fishing rod and leaned forward on the black wharf. He hoped they’d catch something. The flats were supposed to be running. Up and down the wharf other fishermen were pulling them in, but he hadn’t had a bite for hours.
The blue sunlight seemed to deepen about him as he parried the old man’s stare. “There was too much life on that planet, grandpop,” he said. “It filled the hollows and windy places, and dripped down into the sea.”
The old man nodded, his bleary gaze traveling to an orange-red bobber far out on the flaking tide. “The third planet from the sun, you say, in a system with nine planets?”
“That’s right, grandpop. Nine planets—one very small, four a little larger, or a little smaller than Kamith, three quite huge, and one larger than all the rest put together. One of the huge ones was encircled by a series of wide, flat rings—two luminous and one smoky, with dark bands separating them.”
“There is a planet like that in the Rugol system,” the old man said.
“I know. But this system was close to the center of the known universe and had a quite ordinary sun. In density, size, and luminosity quite ordinary.” “Hm-m-m.”
“But that third planet was not ordinary, grandpop. It was more remarkable in some respects than the ringed planet. It was as though— well, you know what happens when you overfertilize a garden plot?”
The old man nodded. “I have loved flowers all my life,” he said.
“We think we know what parasitism is, but we don’t. We don’t at all. On Kamith we have a few plants which suck the juices from other plants, a few animals which prey on other animals. But on that planet—ugh.”
He leaned forward and spat into the flaking tide. “There was too much life on that planet, grandpop, but there was also something else. Courage outlasting the vehicle that gave it birth, human thought surviving the brain from which it came.”
Temple scrutinized the horizon somberly for an instant, his fingers tightening on the cork handle of his fishing rod.
“Grandpop, I think we must accept the theory that life evolves along parallel lines everywhere in the Universe of Stars,” he said. “Before we invented space-time machines we thought our sun with its five planets was a stellar anomaly, but we know now that there are other planetary systems scattered throughout space, other cool worlds capable of supporting life.
“The blue sun that warms Kamith is not the only life-giver. The giant red suns on the rim of space have their Kamiths, too, their inhospitable outer planets, and there are suns no larger than planets, with satellites so small that—”
“In fifteen minutes I’ve got to wind up my reel,” the old man prodded. “My daughter goes off the handle when I’m late for supper.”
“Well, we were there in one of those backward-forward jobs that set your teeth on edge when you’re deep in the continuum, and make you wish that time-space machines had never been invented,” Temple said. “We had come out on the bleak, northern plains of a continent shaped like a swollen question mark.
“We set electrostatic surveyors to work the instant we emerged, and blocked in the outlines of the entire land mass on our geodesic screen. A little to the southeast of us there was a long, straight river opening into a shallow bay, and a little to the northwest were five large lakes that looked on the screen like sausages strung on a wire.
“But of course small, cool, inner planets are pretty much the same the universe over, and in general the topography didn’t differ much from . . . well, from back there.”
He twisted his shoulders about and gestured toward the rolling farm country behind him.
“How many were in the party with you?” asked the old man.
“There were fifteen of us, grandpop. We were there on an assignment which took in nearly every branch of natural science.”
“Interstellar Survey, eh?”
“That’s right, grandpop. The Survey has been limping along without me for thirteen years now, but I was a promising youngster in those days and knew more about field theory than my chief.”
“I cornered the market once,” the old man said. “Now they don’t even remember me down on the Street.”
“The Survey remembers me, all right,” Temple said. “But I inherited fifty thousand a few years ago and decided to become a gentleman of leisure. Right after the crash I tried to get back, but, hell—there were six thousand young upstarts lined up ahead of me.”
“With a little foresight, a man can live on very little,” the other said.
Temple nodded. “I’ve learned how to economize. But to get back to this little inner planet. Everything was covered over with an oozy coating of life. It was like jelly, and it took different shapes—”
“Could you maybe describe it without adjectives, son? My daughter gets on a high horse when I’m late for—”
“Well, think of a china cabinet filled with bric-a-brac. The cabinet is the skeleton of some animal dead a hundred thousand years. The bric-a-brac is the slime building up into cubes, octahedrons, icosahedrons, stellated dodecahedrons, and so on. We even encountered a few snub cubes.
“In case you don’t know, a snub cube is a thirty-eight-faced figure having at each corner four triangles and one square. Six faces belong to the cube proper, eight to the coaxial octahedron, and the remaining twenty-four to no regular solid.”
“Ouch, son. I’ve never had no regular schooling in mathematics.”
“What I’m trying to say, grandpop, is that this slimy, primitive life seemed to conform to the laws of crystallization. We found crystallographic axes of reference when we studied the stuff, but of course the more complicated polyhedrons would have baffled a crystallographer. About the most complicated example of crystalline growth is a scalenohedron built up of rhombohedra.”
“That’s what I’ll be eating for supper tonight, boy, if you don’t get on with it.”
“Well, I’m convinced that the stuff was alive in a protoplasmic sense, for there was a dumbbell shape that traveled around like a rhizopod as well as long ribbons of slime which feasted on the polyhedrons and dripped and drooled all over the landscape. Most of the polyhedrons had an eaten-away look, and of course kept dissolving back into structureless slime.
“If it wasn’t for your daughter I could ramble on for hours, because it was the strangest kind of life imaginable. It was life which sustained itself by preying on the more complicated aspects of itself, if you get what I mean.”
“You mean it built itself up into something, got tired of being eaten alive by itself, and dissolved back into slime.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Temple said.
“But, son, why didn’t it eat itself altogether up?”
Temple shrugged. “Perhaps it reproduced by absorbing solar radiations as well as featsting on itself,” he said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“You were saying, son—”
“Well, when we stumbled on the huge, corrugated cylinder we thought at first it was just the skeleton of one of the old backboned animal forms that had roamed that planet once—another china cabinet. Joan was so sure it was a china cabinet that she started scraping off the jellylike coating of polyhedrons with a stick, and—”
“Joan?” the old man wanted to know.
“She was our geologist. A silly little thing. A strawberry-blond geolo-gist.”
“When I was twenty,” the old man said, “I liked blondes, brunettes, and redheads. How could she be on the Survey if she wasn’t bright?”
“Oh, she was bright enough when she forgot that she was a woman. But when she accidentally remembered, her I. Q. of one hundred and fifty went into eclipse—”
“You were saying—”
“When Joan scraped off the polyhedrons and exposed a corrugated expanse of gleaming metal she leaped back into my arms and held on tight to me.
“I was plenty startled myself. The cylinder was about one-fourth the size of our backward-forward jeep, and there was a little projecting knob at one end. At first glance it looked large enough to hold five or six people, if you packed them in tight.
“Actually, it was large enough to hold a round dozen standing about in groups. It’s hard to realize how much room there is inside a really large cylinder unless you shut your eyes and run an imaginary line parallel to itself through the circumference of a curve. I mean, you have to sort of construct another cylinder in your mind’s eye.”
“Son, my daughter—”
Temple nodded. “You’ve asked me to hurry this along, so I’ll skip over how we felt inside ourselves and concentrate on what happened inside the cylinder.”
