The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “Why the devil would anyone steal, when you get meals at someone else’s expense?”

  “Money,” she explained, “is surplus energy. For luxuries, you know.”

  “That makes it better,” he said, grimly. “At least I won’t ever be stuck for some unknown woman’s mink coat.”

  “Now you’re catching on. The only way I’d ever have any luxuries, like jewelry, or whatever kind of coat it is you mentioned, would be if I earned it myself. Or if someone who liked me an awful lot would buy it for me.”

  “Who’s this Imbro who saved my hide?”

  “He’s the Prime Bureaucrat.”

  “What’s a Prime Bureaucrat?”

  “Well, first, or head.”

  “How many do they have?”

  “You mean, just all kinds?”

  “That’s right.”

  “There’s a vice-bureaucrat for each day in the year, so the Chief won’t be overworked.”

  “On duty one day a year, they hardly would be.”

  “Oh, each one has a lot of assistants. We have to have so many of them. To keep track of our way of paying for things.”

  “To say nothing of running the crime and punishment department. But where are we going, now?”

  “We’re going to see Imbro. Strangers interest him. He always interviews them. Unless he’s awfully busy.”

  * * * *

  Corbin was in a spacious office of the masonry tower which housed the administration: Imbro had a squarish, benevolent face. His eyes were those of a philanthropist; and his winning smile matched them. However, it was the voice which carried the ultimate charm. Here was a man who could quell revolt by reciting the multiplication tables, or sell fuming nitric acid to a man perishing of thirst.

  For a moment, Corbin had told himself that behind that benignant front, was a self-centered autocrat who enjoyed his pretense of loving the rabble. Then he was ashamed of his suspicion. He could not help but respond to the greeting and the handclasp. Of a sudden, Corbin felt that the craziest tricks of hyper-space were, somehow, sane and right.

  Before he could wonder whether to say, “Sir,” or “Your Excellency,” he learned that no formality was required. One of Imbro’s staff brought a decanter of liquor. Another came with triangular wafers flecked with aromatic seeds. A third set a bowl of grapes, apricots and mulberries on the table.

  “Help yourself, Bill. You, too Lani.” Imbro stepped up the benediction of smile and voice. “Call me Imbro, for short. Well, well, now what have you people been, doing? On your side, I mean.”

  Corbin sketched the electro-magnetic processes in the simplest language at his command. He had the feeling that Imbro had not the foggiest notion of what it was all about, yet the man nodded and beamed his appreciation.

  “So you’re a scientist? Thing for you to do is get an interview with the Bureau of Science. Splendid chap by the name of Asbal is head. You’d better hurry and make a connection. Otherwise, our usual principle of indeterminacy will take charge, and you might find yourself doing manual labor.”

  “I ought to get back to my project in Arizona.”

  Imbro shook his head. “I am sorry, awfully sorry, most sincerely and deeply sorry,” he said, and somehow got Corbin to the verge of tears for having brought such sorrow upon the man. “But it is against public policy for anyone ever to leave. There probably is some young lady who will miss you. That is the sad thing about it. But I see that you’ve already done much better than the average involuntary immigrant.”

  “My return is actually a matter of obligation;” Corbin protested.

  “If you went back,” Imbro pointed out, “you’d become homesick and want to return. And with such a project as the one you’ve been working on, you’d be able to do so. You’d be followed by many of your fellow citizens. You folks as individuals are not bad. Most of you make fine citizens. But you are all so herd-minded that if any number of you arrived in a drove, your worst qualities would take charge, and the best would be submerged.”

  And with that he graciously dismissed Corbin.

  As they left, Lani said, “Bill, there just is no going back. If you are even caught acting as though you were thinking of inventing a way, you would be taken out to have your energy level raised a few stages.”

  “Then what’d happen?”

  She shuddered. “You’d leave here. But you’d not go anywhere else. You’d be atomized or ionized. It’s spectacular as a volcanic eruption. And if you can’t take my word, for it, why not talk to Asbal? He’ll put it into the sort of language you could appreciate.”

  CHAPTER IV

  As a scientist, Corbin was received with great interest. Asbal, a long-nosed, narrow-faced man, with shoulder-length hair, concluded the interview by taking him to the flight station. The chassis of the discs, as Corbin had suspected, were of beryllium alloy. The rotating rim, which floated between flanges of the body, carried vanes operating on the helicopter principle! Repulsion jets produced the rotation.

  “Synthetic fuel,” Asbal explained. “It’s piped from the volcanoes, processed and condensed. Our economy is chemical rather than mechanical. You’ve noticed the wide clearances in what few rotating parts our machines do have. Reciprocating engines would not function. No piston could be fitted to retain pressure. And manifestly, turbines are out of the question.”

  The roar of the jets and the whine of the vanes made further words impossible until their disc was well over the city, and streaking out over the open country. Lifting an observation port in the floor, Asbal signaled for a hovering descent.

  “We’re over the beryllium refinery.”

  “Hot electrolysis?” Corbin hazarded, noting the fuming vats. “How do you generate the power?”

  “Thermo couples. Each volcano is a powerhouse.”

  And as they moved on to the opencast mines, Asbal explained the power transmission system which fed the city. Presently, hovering again, they were low enough for Corbin to get a good look at the pinwheel rotors which actuated a device something like a windlass, its drag-lines pulled the scrapers in the pit. Other cables moved sleds of ore to the refinery.

  Further along the circle which would finally bring them back to the city, Corbin observed how pinwheel and capstan arrangements operated cable-drawn farm implements.

  “The last immigrant,” Asbal continued, “told some monstrous yarns about the degree of precision in your world.”

  “He was probably right. When we get back to the laboratory, I’ll take my watch to pieces and let you see for yourself.”

  “We’ll put it in the museum. Along with the other things that have come to us. While I think of it, there’s an odd construction that just fell into our space; a four-wheeled device, probably for carrying passengers.”

  Further description made it clear that someone’s car had fallen through a space rift. And Corbin told himself that a glance at the registration papers would give him a useful clue as to the extent, in terrestrial terms, of the gap in space.

  Once back at the bureau, Corbin got closer to the real workings of the institution. A large part of Asbal’s staff was busily engaged in calculating the total mass of the continuum, and the distribution of it, so that by making suitable shifts of molten rock, the curvature of the continuum would change to a more stable shape.

  “We don’t have your operational prevision,” Asbal went on. “But we can fuse a mountain and flow it into the areas indicated by the coordinates of this chart. And then we have a permanently established curvature. Relatively permanent, you understand. Whereas, if the power on your side were off, you couldn’t make an impression.”

  By now, Corbin had a glimmering of hope. There was a fighting chance of escape.

  “I gather,” he said, with a touch of challenge in his manner, “that our electromagnetic impulses have put you to the trouble of fusing part of a rang
e. Our way is certainly neater. Furthermore, it is not essential that mechanical precision enters into the work. But if we did take a notion to shifting mountains, we certainly have larger ones and more of them.”

  Asbal was momentarily nettled by this chamber of commerce approach!

  “In proportion to the rest of the mass, yours don’t amount to much.”

  Corbin stepped to a window! “The horizon is as far off here, as it is where I come from,” he declared, with feigned stupidity.

  Asbal snorted derisively. “With all your dabblings in mathematics, you are still bound by hallucinations and illusions. You keep your brains shackled by your senses. Now, our space is infinite in extent, but finite in volume.”

  “What’s that? Infinite in extent, but finite in volume?”

  “Don’t believe it, eh?”

  “Pure nonsense,” Corbin declared.

  Asbal took a crayon and, stepped to a blackboard with cross-ruled lines. He drew a vertical—and a horizontal axis. “Just to keep this simple for you,” he announced, “I won’t use the tri-dimensional graphic method.” Two spaces to the right of the vertical axis he drew another line, parallel to it. Between this and the axis he traced a curve.

  “The curve extends to infinity. Its equation is Y squared equals X cubed, divided by 2a minus X,” Asbal recited, “When X equals 2a, the curve has reached infinity, where it is tangent to the asymptote.” His irony was not heavy enough to make him tell Corbin that the vertical line to the right of the axis was an asymptote. “Very well, rotate the curve about its asymptote!”

  This was easy to visualize. Just as rotating a circle would describe a sphere in space, so would rotation of Asbal’s curve shape a figure somewhat like a turnip, except that instead of being rounded at the leaf-end, it would be shaped as if a second root end were growing out of it, and tapering indefinitely in the opposite direction.

  “The volume of that solid, in case you still don’t recognize it,” Asbal reminded him, now with good-humored malice, “is two pi-squared times a-cubed. As long as a is finite, the volume of the solid is finite. Even though its ends extend to infinity.”

  This was the Cissoid of Diocles, known to terrestrial mathematicians for more than two thousand years. But in snapping at the bait, Corbin had won an advantage.

  “I still think I could figure a better way of keeping your space curvature balanced.”

  Asbal wagged his head. “I’d find it entertaining to have you try. And in case you don’t make good progress, I’ll have you demoted to tending the thermo-couples at the volcanoes. Report for duty in the morning.”

  * * * *

  Corbin told himself as he went to meet Lani that this was a quiet start. Once he had access to the equations of the space-time continuum of Quantum land he could determine the surface which joined it with the world he had left.

  When a plane cut a four-dimensional solid, the intersection is a tri-dimensional solid. Quantum land and the other, the main universe, must have a plane in common, a veil of illusion, which a man could penetrate, if only he knew precisely where the barrier was. While he could not by any of his senses detect it directly, he could, by determining its position in terms of the dimensions he could perceive, guide himself toward it.

  Psychic phenomena, so-called, were merely the doings of entities which, in addition to being of extremely tenuous matter, were able to function in the fourth dimension. Such a creature could, for instance, pass from the inside of a solid sphere to the outside, without piercing the shell. Omelettes could be made without breaking eggs. These barriers were effective only with respect to three dimensions. The fourth was clear and unobstructed.

  His old-time practice of attempting to visualize a tesseract would now stand him in good stead. Once he had the proper equation, and the proper landmarks, he would follow the fourth axis. He would then corner Gale, slug him until he did not know his right name, and then resign before Gale regained sufficient wit to fire him.

  He was as good as certain that Gale had previously stepped up the power sufficiently to have gained a comprehensive view of hyper-space. Once aware of the possibilities, he had then baited Corbin to the focal point of the poles, to dispose of him in a clean and foolproof way.

  Corbin readily accounted for Marcia’s presence. Gale had invited her as a witness, so that whatever she might later say about the quarrel, she would also be compelled to state that Corbin had vanished before her eyes. There would be no network of circumstantial evidence to trap Gale, as well could have been the case had only Gale and Corbin been there at the time.

  After supper, Lani hustled Corbin into a round of the shopping district to build up a wardrobe. Haberdashery covered a range of fancy he had never suspected. “Better fix me up with something like Asbal wears,” he quickly decided. “I’ll get along better that way.”

  Once he had the stuff stowed in his rooms in government quarters, Lani suggested a moonlight stroll among the private residences outside the city walls. Individualism was as conspicuous in architectural fancy as it was in clothing. What caught her fancy was a tile roofed place which reminded him somewhat of a Mediterranean villa, though on a small-scale.

  “This one’s darling, don’t you think?”

  It certainly was, but Lani’s voice had alarming implications. Her cozy tone was seconded by a saucer-eyed expression and a possessive touch. They were no more than comfortably seated under a tree from whose transparent shadows they had a view of the vest-pocket villa when Lani continued, “For the time, we can live in government quarters, but it’d be much nicer here. I know we can buy it without any trouble at all.”

  “I’m a bit new,” Corbin evaded, gropingly, “to plunge into—ah, real estate. Wouldn’t it be better to look around?”

  “Oh, I’ve been busy looking around for some time,” she assured him, brightly. “Just for myself. But with two of us, it’ll be so much easier to pay for. And I don’t think we ought to waste too much time.”

  “You aren’t wasting much time, are you?”

  She did not consider this as a rebuff! “Well, but of course you’d not understand! Remember how they settled that matter of larceny?”

  “Do I! A regular grab-bag.”

  Lani picked it up from there: “Every so often, the Prime Bureaucrat marries off a batch of unattached ones, strictly on the principle of indeterminacy. Whether you draw a prize or a sentence is pretty much a matter of chance.”

  “When’s the next raffle?” he demanded, apprehensively.

  “There’s not too much time to waste, Bill. You and I have had a lot in common, right from the start. You could do a great deal worse, and you’re very likely to.”

  “That leopard was moving pretty rapidly,” he admitted, reminiscently. “And so were you. But there’s a lot in what you say. I could do much worse. And you have a lovely—ah, disposition, too.”

  While somewhat short of an ardently romantic declaration, Corbin’s words brought a happy light to Lani’s face. She snuggled up, and kissed him very successfully on the very first attempt. “Bill,” she went on, breathlessly, “I know why you’re squeamish about the idea. You’re planning escape back to your own world. Otherwise you wouldn’t for an instant have thought of running the chance of having some unattached hag dumped on you. Would you?”

  “Truth of it is, darling, from the minute I arrived here, you’ve been the only woman I’ve noticed.”

  “That is a sweet thing to say, Bill, even if it is not strictly true. But you are planning to leave. And you mustn’t. It is dangerous. They’ll catch you, and—well, I told you, didn’t I?”

  Corbin sighed. “Even if I weren’t, you’d stick to your notion and act as though I were.”

  To Lani, all this was as good as an admission. “I could help you escape, you know.”

  “Because of your job in the political bureau?”

  She nodde
d. “By misplacing papers that would handicap you, and showing you those that would help. And I will help, if you promise to take me with you. And another thing, if we get this lovely little villa, Asbal will be convinced you appreciate your opportunities here. He’ll be thrown off guard.”

  Lani had a peculiar flavor of charm that could not be spoiled by pointed realism. It should have jarred, but it did not.

  “Suppose,” he proposed, “that we take time to know each other a little better?”

  “You’ve got an earth woman on the brain. Don’t tell me you haven’t! Oh, all right. Most immigrants do have. It does take them time to get adjusted. You’re so right, darling. It would be better if we waited for a while. But we can buy the villa, can’t we? Just in case my helping doesn’t do any good?”

  “You’d really like to leave here with me?”

  “It’d be thrilling. I’d love a world where there isn’t so much change all the time.”

  And, remembering how Marcia had been quite engrossed in swapping kisses with Gale, he began to see a very good reason for taking Lani with him when he followed the fourth axis. While he was by no means so narrow-minded as to condemn human impulse, the fact remained that Marcia must have been attracted by Gale; and her taste was revolting. So he got a comfortable armful of Lani, and listened to her blend of plans for housekeeping, and for travel.

  CHAPTER V

  From a slow-moving disc, Corbin charted the area in which he had entered hyper-space. Not far from there was the spot where the car had materialized. This he plotted on the sheet. Later, back at the science building, he examined the vehicle which Asbal had put into the museum. It was a late model Ford convertible, registered in the name of Henry Briggs, of Wittenburg. Judging from the book of field notes, the vehicle had been used by one of the surveying crew in the primary network, only a few miles from the installation.

  From these data, Corbin had to solve his problem. His work was analogous to navigation. While Panama and Ceylon, for instance, were both on the ninth parallel of latitude, the shortest distance between those points was not that parallel, but a line which went as far north as the twenty-second parallel before bending southward again to touch Ceylon.