The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Dawson, living with the enemy tribe, had learned raiding tricks, and had known how to tempt an enemy by offering hope of plunder. By feigning a mortal wound, he had played the game as his brothers in raiding would have played it: and at the most he could not have hoped for more than a horse, and the weapons of the supposedly greedy and reckless one whose loot hunger had driven out ordinary caution. Moonlight on Verrill’s face had given Dawson his moment of triumphant recognition—and then, sudden death which he might otherwise have avoided.

  The irony of all this passed through Verrill’s mind during the moments which elapsed before he could recover sufficiently from shock to speak. Teeth chattering from the deadly chill which took hold of him, he said, “Physician, heal thyself.”

  He knew he was beyond mending. He knew also that he had long drawn-out hours of agony ahead of him. Falana knew, without being told, that she would soon be alone; that she would never board the long gleaming shell on the take-off ramp of the trading-post to go with him to the home of the gods. Since he was shivering, she wrapped a shawl about him, and waited for him to tell her what else to do.

  The shift of the moon thinned the shadows that had tricked first one and then another of those who had met in that rocky angle. Verrill pointed to the kit, and told her how to load the hypo. He had done this himself, many times, for those he knew he could not save. They lasted just as long, but avoided consciousness and pain. This had won him esteem. And now he was to learn how good his work had been.

  His vision began to play tricks, and his memory also, but he was sure that the white orb shimmering, rising from behind a distant crest, was Venus, beginning her term as morning star. Seen through that thin mountain air, Venus was an expanding splendor, and memories danced: memories of Linda, blurred with the memories of all other Venusian women, perfumed and sleek and all bejeweled. They were shapes of the mind, rather than a semblance to the eye; for at the same time, he saw clearly where he was, and who was beside him. And he was glad that it was Falana.

  Falana peeled off her jacket and blouse. She cut a long strand of hair, and despite the biting wind that lashed her from shoulder to hip she shaped a loop, using two long hairs to suspend the Fire of Skanderbek from about her throat.

  She knelt, posed by sure instinct, head flung back, and the monstrous ruby all ablaze against her white skin. The lower end of the six-sided crystal barely dipped into the shadow of her breasts.

  The Venusian images of memory were blotted out, and with them, the great white orb as well. Falana became all women in one, yet remaining all the while wholly herself.

  Verrill’s face, or her own instinct, told her when to end the tableau. She slipped into her jacket and went into the shadow beside him. She caught him in her arms, to pillow him better than had the rocks and the saddle-bags that had softened them. And then Verrill went on his long road, and entirely content, for he had in his way done with the Fire of Skanderbek as he had planned.

  Not long after sunrise, a handful of Ardelan’s men came along from the new valley. They had routed the raiders. Somewhere, they told Falana, there had been several shots, which had alerted them.

  “The shots Verrill fired,” they concluded, having seen and understood from the face of things.

  She gave them no time to wonder about her presence. “He was going to stay for days and days with the people Ardelan was sending into the new valley. I made him take me with him. So I was here when he killed his enemy, the one with whom he had a feud.”

  Despite their grief at losing their doctor, the mountaineers forgot none of their ways. Methodically, they took the gear from the dead horse, and stripped the dead enemy, leaving nothing but vulture bait. And among the things they found in his clothes was the Fire of Skanderbek.

  “The gods told Verrill,” Falana said. “But not all, and not in time. Only enough to send him where he would meet the thief.”

  They studied his face, and one said, “It is clear that the gods welcomed him when he took their road.”

  Later, Ardelan himself joined them. He heard, he saw, and then he said, “We will bury Verrill by those others who have guarded the Fire of Skanderbek. He saved many lives for us, as Skanderbek did in the old days.”

  And this was done, with no one wondering at Kwangtan’s death. Some said that the spirit of the priest had guided Verrill to overtake the looter. Falana heard the legend grow, and could not tell what Ardelan really thought. Whatever his thought, the chief kept it to himself, until, days later, he said to Falana, “Verrill’s son will be a great man among us, to watch the Fire of Skanderbek, and teach us the way of the gods.”

  Which seemed reasonable enough to Falana, who had command of more miracles than any man.

  ESCAPE FROM HYPER-SPACE

  Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1951.

  CHAPTER I

  Sunset glow, enhancing the copper glint of Marcia’s hair, overlaid her smooth skin with a rosy patina. It gave, by contrast, depth and darkness to her greenish eyes. The Arizona desert’s magic gave Marcia every advantage, and so did the hostess gown she wore as she stretched out in the chrome and plastic chaise longue of the sun parlor overlooking the recently completed installation set up to investigate space curvature.

  Marcia’s curvature was strictly tridimensional, and her mind at the time went no further than domestic science, and an installation for her and Bill Corbin. He had been talking about such a project for a long time now, but mainly in terms of obstacles.

  “Oh, Bill, will our wedding be on the day we qualify for the old-age pension? Let’s take our chances! You’ve been promoted twice by Kosmic Associates, and you’ve won that fellowship, and now there’s this project! After all, the only real security is death, and I’d rather be alive and gambling.”

  Bill Corbin, as far as his mind was concerned, agreed heartily. He was tall, rugged, and looked as if grappling with a Numidian lion was his idea of light exercise. He had keen eyes, craggy features, and a purposeful look which would have kept him from winning any beauty contests. He readily won, however, the confidence of everyone but himself.

  Corbin’s scientific precision was actually an expression of his obsessive demand for established security. He was afraid of a world which had become increasingly insecure. However, Marcia’s voice and presence tempted him. For a moment he wavered. She held her breath. Then realism, Corbin’s idea of realism, counterattacked. He glanced at his watch, wiped the lipstick smudge from his face, and stepped to the door. There he paused to say, “I’ll see if I can get Gale to commit himself as to how long this project will last.”

  “I’ll be sitting up late, darling,” she said. “Stop in for coffee.”

  Whenever a coyote howled, Marcia shivered and enjoyed an ecstasy of horror at the ghoulish cry, being quite sure she was safe. And the eerie sound made her more avid for kisses. Corbin would be back.

  But as he left, Marcia’s slow, speculative smile promised more than arms and shoulders whitened by moonlight. One more jolt would crack Corbin’s mania for security. Marcia, certain from the first that Lester Gale’s scientific methods extended to women and the practical things of life, had decided that his maneuvering for her favor could be used against him.

  Lester Gale, Ph.D., Sc.D., had been very happy about Marcia’s coming to Wittenburg to stay with friends, only forty miles from the installation, in order not to be separated from Corbin. Gale, the director of the project, had wangled a job for Marcia, as statistician. He had done this as soon as government funds had permitted air-conditioned living quarters for employees. However, much Gale may have fooled Corbin, he had fooled Marcia not at all. Now she saw her chance to make Gale serve her most important purpose.

  Corbin, setting out afoot for the installation, looked out over the desert, and at iron purple peaks rimmed as with liquid fire. The steel towers of the transmission line made black patterns against the sullen red
of the sky. They dwarfed the grotesque saguaros which raised multiple arms, in quasi-human semblance. This was empty desert, far as the eye could see, yet of a nature other than that of normal space.

  Months previous, Kosmic Associates, Inc., had sent Corbin to find out why the geodetic survey was going haywire. It had been a terrific blow to his already crumbling sense of security when he was compelled to recognize that only an abnormal curvature of space would make theodolites and Invar tapes perform so inconsistently. The government thereupon took over, which resulted in an Authority, and a Project, with Lester Gale as director.

  A 220,000 volt power line from the hydro-electric plant at an irrigation dam, a hundred miles away, furnished energy for what had become the main object of the project: to apply electromagnetic force to demonstrate the unitary field theory by modifying the existing space warp.

  * * * *

  Gale was still on duty when Corbin entered the installation. The chief had a beaked nose, and angular features. His eyes were deep set, under brows as black as his wiry hair. His presence was sufficiently dramatic for him to dispense with the gestures and poses of showmanship. He looked the part he played.

  “Watch out for dielectric failure, Bill,” he warned, and sniffed the acrid air to point the advice. “Can’t cut in the next stage of amplification till we’re sure the insulation can take it.”

  As Corbin went with Gale to make the rounds of the inductances and capacitors which kept each other balanced, there were queer stirrings in the very center of his brain. These were not response to the hum of laminations. If anything, they were his reaction to the interference beat of the magnetic resonators which amplified the impulses.

  The regenerative principle of the old-fashioned radio heterodyne was used. Successive magnetic impulses, achieving resonance, delivered an impact thousands of times more effective than could all the power fed in through the heavy transmission line.

  For a moment, Corbin and Gale paused to watch the electrical brain into which statisticians were funneling data from the survey.

  Day and night, crews in the field re-measured the base line. Those with theodolites read angles of the base triangles, and of each successive triangle, all the way to the outer limit of the survey net. The observations were sent in by radio.

  These data, punched on cards, went into the calculator. The electric brain whirred. Pilot lights blinked. The note of gears and solenoids rose in pitch.

  Gale snatched the printed record.

  “Error’s getting bigger. It’s now fifteen seconds of arc on the primary. Forty seconds on the secondary. One minute and nine seconds on the tertiary net. We’re changing the curvature of local space.”

  The instruments at the primary space were changed by the local curvature. Thus no comparison scale brought to that spot could help. It would be altered, in relation to local space. But the outer nets, thirty miles distant, were not changing at the same rate. It was this difference in change which gave the clue to the curvature. It suggested that what appeared to be open desert, with the normal three dimensions, contained a four-dimensional continuum: with time, in either case, the final additional dimension.

  Gale nodded contentedly. “Frankly, I have been worried. Suppose it had not turned out this way?”

  “Two of us would be permanently looking for jobs,” Corbin answered, with horror that came right from the central core.

  By impressing magnetic force upon the region, they were doing more than merely altering a previously existing space warp. They were demonstrating that Maxwell’s equations did coordinate with those which Weyl and Eddington had developed as the basis of the unitary field theory: space, time, gravitation, magnetism, interchangeable and equivalent, not on paper, but in actual fact.

  “What,” demanded Corbin, “will happen when we cut in the final stage?”

  Gale gave him a patronizing slap on the shoulder. “The crack in space won’t be big enough for the installation to fall through. Doubt even if there’ll be an earthquake! Be seeing you.”

  * * * *

  Once his chief left, Corbin resumed his rounds of supervision. The reports had left his brain all awhirl with non-Euclidean geometry. The world tensor, under Eddington’s system, had a symmetrical component which included space, time, and gravitation; its anti-symmetrical governed the electro-magnetic. And now, electro-magnetic impacts were acting on the time-space-gravitational field thus far held to be unrelated to the former, except in remote theory. He tried to visualize the hyper-space which was being warped.

  He began with the tesseract: a four-dimensional solid consisting of eight cubes so joined together as to enclose a portion of hyper-space—and identical, except for the extra dimension, with the way six squares enclose the cube, any cube at all. Each cube, in four-dimensional space, would be joined to the others by its six square faces. The whole process of visualizing was to picture these cubes so related, locked together and of different sizes when viewed tri-dimensionally, but separated and all of the same size when viewed in hyperspace.

  There was something stimulating about the vibration frequency of the entire installation. For an instant, he had almost “constructed” the tesseract; but he backed away from the, verge of success.

  “Blow my damned head wide open, if I’d succeeded,” he grumbled, wryly, and went to examine the next set of calculator reports.

  Returning to the master panel, near the poles of the resonator, he noted that the glass bays of the building were shimmering. Blurred images appeared. He closed his eyes, put the heels of his hands against them, cupping the eyeball. He bathed his eyes, and went back, refreshed. The images were less blurred. There was motion, and where none should be. He pounced to the intercom phone; then drew back.

  “Let Gale do his own finding out!” he muttered.

  Corbin put on his jacket and stepped out into the desert chill. He would instead give Marcia a first look. He would say nothing, and see whether she saw anything odd about that window.

  He would surprise Marcia.

  Which was precisely what he did.

  It was much nearer midnight than Corbin had realized in his preoccupation. Since she had said she would be sitting up late, he had, way back in his mind, the imprint of her words. Preoccupied with composing the casual invitation which would avoid warning her that something unusual awaited her reaction, he barged into the solarium. He had no thought of knocking until he got to the inner door.

  But the solarium was occupied.

  The geometry of the two on the chaise longue was symmetrical and non-Reimannian. Marcia was being thoroughly kissed. Whatever she murmured, it was not an equation. Then she let out a yeep, and Gale bounced up from the clinch.

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  Corbin’s reflexes were perfect. In a flicker, Gale was down, and trying to unscramble himself from a smoking stand. Marcia was on her feet, and smoothing out her robe.

  “Get on your feet you meat head, and keep your hands off!” Corbin shouted.

  Marcia intervened. “Oh, Bill, don’t! It was just one of those impulsive things. It doesn’t mean anything, darling. Don’t, he’ll fire you for sure,” she added, being certain now that she had finally goaded him into recklessness.

  “Then I’ll get my money’s worth,” Corbin countered, and moved in to make a job of smacking Gale around the place.

  Having achieved her purpose, Marcia clung to Corbin, hampering him, and pleading for both to keep what heads they might still have.

  Gale, unsteady on his feet, blinked and said, “It seems we are both off base, Corbin. Marcia is quite wrong. I shall not dismiss you. Let us keep this between ourselves.”

  Corbin said, “That’s decent of you. We were both off base.”

  Marcia exclaimed, “Oh, I never imagined it was so late!” But she had a contented expression; she felt better, having seen it so clearly proved that some
thing could make Corbin forget security. Being that something gave her a splendid inner glow.

  Yet she was sorry Corbin had not been fired. Once he found the process painless, he would be freed of his phobia.

  Gale said, “Marcia, why don’t you go with me and Bill to the installation. There will be—ah, something notable to see.”

  “You saw?” Corbin demanded. “The windows?”

  Gale nodded. “I hesitated to tell you. For fear that you’d be influenced by suggestion. It had me keyed up as though I’d been drinking. I’d like to have Marcia join us. She has a more detached viewpoint.”

  This, Corbin told himself, as the three went to the installation, was his superior’s attempt to make amends, to apologize, to explain. Corbin, remembering his own excitement, realized how surmise and incredulity, evoking so much more than one could express, would make it natural enough to grab an armful of congenial women as an outlet. The whole business was beyond the scope of rational science.

  Presently, Marcia faced the glass bay. “I do see something,” she declared. “But all hazy. And the perspective is wrong.”

  “Maybe,” said Gale, “it is a form of mirage. Magnetic impulses reflecting from the mountains, and activating some constituent of the glass. With some of the geometrical solids actually illusion.”

  Corbin stepped up between the poles of the resonator, at Gale’s suggestion that the overhead fluorescent tubes might be contributing something to the odd pattern of terrain and architecture. When Marcia would have joined him, Gale laid a detaining hand on her arm.

  “That glass may be under electrostatic stress,” he warned, and then, “Bill, I’d not get too close.”

  Corbin had the feeling that gravitational pull was changing. He had the sensation of leaning; the perpendicular to which he was accustomed seemed to have shifted. He became light-headed.

  He was about to draw back when there was a blinding flash. At the same time, he had sensations of intense cold, and of biting, dry heat.