The professor's huge curvature suddenly bounced up and down as he waddled away. "Shut up! Stop talking! Get busy! The Crannan Foundation has all the supplies we need. We start tomorrow night."
Jerry subsided and went to work. The three suits were prepared by early dawn. But the three suits were only two when Crabbe and his assistant met in the laboratory that night. The professor glared at Blake. "What do you mean by hiding the third suit?"
"Search me. Why the dickens would I want to hide it?"
Crabbe glowered at the vortex. "I suppose next you'll tell me it just walked into the vortex of its own accord. Confound it, I hate mysteries. You and I have the only keys to the laboratory except the one in the Directors' safe. Did you make a thorough search of the laboratory?"
"No. I just got here before you did. But I distinctly remember leaving the three suits assembled on the table-top. Say — maybe something came through the vortex — "
“—and took one of the suits? Phooey!" The professor snorted. "Anything that came through would have its own suit to protect it from our atmosphere. It wouldn't have any use for one of our suits."
"But I would!" a voice chimed in brightly from behind them.
They whirled around. A weird encasement, a cross between a diving suit and a space suit, enclosed a figure just coming out of a dark room closet at one end of the laboratory. The voice came clearly through a device built into the helmet. But all they could see of the figure was a small, belligerent nose and brown eyes with a gleam in them.
"Thief. I order you to get out of my suit immediately," Crabbe roared.
"I order you to stop screaming," mimicked the malicious voice of Leora Crannan. "Besides, I'm not a thief. My grandfather established this Foundation, and my father's one of the Directors. Their money runs — "
"But my brains built the suit. And the vortex. Blake and I are going into it."
"Go ahead, so am I," she continued blithely toward the vortex. "In case you didn't know it, sound-recorders were built into the walls of all the laboratories years ago. The Foundation's Directors know about your plans, and I'm going along."
"See here, Lee, we can't let you!"
"I forbid you to enter my vortex!"
"Since when did anybody obtain exclusive rights to a hole, especially a hole in space?" Leora inquired sweetly, answering Crabbe, and stepped into the vortex.
"Oh, good Lord, she means it," Jerry frowned. "Get going. We'll have to pile into our suits and scram after her right away or we'll lose her."
As they worked feverishly, they saw a strange phenomenon. Leora, in the vortex, receded into the far distance, and drew closer to their eyes. It was a queer, dual illusion, of infinite distance as extreme closeness, with Leora departing toward them.
She paused, however, and looked toward them, just as they were entering the vortex, and just as they feared she would pass above or below the range of vision. Her courage weakened when she found herself alone in the vortex, but when she saw Crabbe and Jerry on the trail, she resumed her way.
"Snap this strap into one of your belt-rings, Jerry!" Crabbe had directed before they left the valve, or airlock, leading into the gigantic tube which housed the vortex. "I foresee difficulties in keeping ourselves together otherwise — we are about to come into personal contact with ‘i’".
Now, inside the vortex, the prophesy of the rotund scientist was amply fulfilled. The two men could see each other, it is true, and they could see the strap connecting them; but ordinary directional perception was entirely meaningless in this new and startling continuum. The strap stretched an infinity of distance, yet a distance inexplicably approaching zero as a limit; and when they attempted to approach each other that strap tightened, forcing them apart! They could dimly see the laboratory through a glaring haze, its every familiar line weirdly distorted into an incomprehensible perspective; but they had little time to stare.
"Jerry, help!" Leora's shriek reached their ears before they could ponder even briefly their unwonted sensations. "I took one step — one motion, anyway — toward the door I came through and it disappeared! I can just barely see you now, but I'm afraid to move toward you for fear you'll disappear too. What'll I do?"
"Do nothing whatever," Crabbe instructed her, coolly. "While neither the purely mechanical brain of a statistician nor the puny brain of a woman could be expected to understand the fact, this region is characterized by the actuality of ‘i”; which you, Jerry, at least, know to be the square root of minus one. Therefore, the line of sight and all other vectors must be corrected by that amount. Since it is of course impossible for Miss Leora to determine the true direction, I shall move toward her, towing you by the strap."
He moved off at an inexplicable angle, and in a moment Leora was clinging frantically to Jerry's arm.
"But now what'll we do?" she wailed. "We can't see the door, lab, or anything!"
"Elementary, my dear child, elementary," soothed Crabbe, loftily. "It is simply a matter of latitudes and departures, which I have already computed mentally, with sufficient exactitude. Come with me; I can find the way back very easily."
He moved along another sense-wrenching line, and soon an opening did indeed appear — but it was not the three-dimensional airlock separating the vortex from the astrophysical laboratory. Instead there was revealed beyond that portal an infinity of purplish-green light filled with matters which their minds failed to grasp; and through that opening there rushed out, past them and through them, a torrent of something that was both invisible and impalpable, yet at the same time as tangible as solid iron!
"Ah, yes — no fact and no statement is entirely true," mimicked the irrepressible Jerry. "Not even the one that you were able to find your way back quite easily!"
"A mere detail," the Professor airily waved one grotesquely mittened hand. "Not being a statistician, it is not surprising that I overlooked the negative root. That, however, is a trifle, to be corrected at will. But now that I am here, what a contribution to science I can make by analyzing and reporting upon this extra-dimensional universe tapped by my vortex!"
Now at the very orifice of the vortex, a scene spread before them at sight of which even the supremely egotistical Crabbe was awed to silence — a scene in essence, in fact, and in detail to human intelligence incomprehensible — paradox made manifest and material! And gradually something inherent in the stream rushing down the sinuous tube endowed their minds with a superhuman clarity and scope of perception. They gradually became cognizant of an entire universe, macroscopic and microscopic. Galaxies, solar systems, planets, molecules, atoms and electrons, each with its teeming billions of intelligent entities — down to the ultimately tiny building blocks of the ether itself, whose existence Crabbe's vast mathematical knowledge had enabled him so dimly to comprehend —all these things were spread before them in the one space and at the same time; nor, with all their newly acquired knowledge, could the three intruders perceive where they themselves stood in the fantastic scheme of this unbelievable cosmos; whether they were in fact larger than this entire outlandish super-universe or whether they actually were insignificant motes upon the surface of one of the tiniest of its electron worlds! Nor could they understand their motion through this strange continuum, which they knew to be an Earthly vacuum. Certainly they did not walk; nor did they fly; nor soar — but at will they moved, and indeed, sometimes involuntarily.
Thus they now moved through the orifice, and saw that its lip was surrounded by massed and tiered mechanisms, each of which was directing flaming forces against the vortex — forces which clawed and tore at the structure in mad abandon, but which as yet had made no headway against the powerful generators which had brought it into being.
"Ah, I understand it all!" Crabbe exclaimed. "The vortices of the nebulae are tunnels into the beyond — tunnels built by the intelligent beings of this cosmos. As the spill-ways of our terrestrial dams allow the escape of superfluous water, so these tunnels carry away something — probably excess energy �
� which our universe receives as incipient matter. Our vortex has punctured something which should have remained whole, and they are attempting to repair the breach!"
"But suppose they fix it?" Leora cried, apprehensively. "Then we won't be able to get back home, ever!"
"Oh, I wouldn't say that . . ."
Jerry's reassurance was interrupted rudely by an invisible force, which swept the three visitors through the "air" and held them immovably poised before a towering, monstrously jointed creature or structure of multi-colored metal. Simultaneously a thunderously silent voice reverberated in their brains:
"Who are you? Whence came you? Why?
"Aha!" The Intelligence had probed their minds and now impressed a thought upon them: "From the Lower Energy Levels, eh? Know, feeble intellects, that such intrusion is intolerable!"
The attention of the Intelligence released the interlopers as suddenly as it had seized them; but they felt and understood its voiceless command to the operators of the mechanisms upon the brink of the vortex:
"This opening was driven up to our universe by certain semi-intelligent entities of the Second Level. Assemble a force X72B31Q45 and pull it out bodily!"
As the new force came into being, ever more violently flaming streamers of coruscant energy raved from the massed projectors ringing the pit's mouth; leaping in ever more frenzied incandescence upon the madly vibrating vortex through which the three hapless human beings had come.
"Lower Energy Levels, eh! Feeble intellects, eh!" The vast convolutions of Professor Crabbe's encasement vibrated shudderingly to the fury that stirred within him. "Let them assemble their forces and try it against those of my vortex. Let them . . ."
"Silence!" boomed the soundless voice of the Intelligence near whose massive mechanical form they still hovered. "And note you, apostles of ignorance, you are spared only that you may observe the destruction of your puny handiwork."
"Bah!" snorted the professor.
He subsided, quivering with new-born apprehension, as the roaring forces at the lip of the vortex filled all space with the beating of their massed energies. The Intelligence, neglecting them as of no immediate account, faded into distant nearness.
"They are succeeding," wailed Leora. "Look, Jerry — Professor — the hole is closing in. We'll never get back."
What she said was not precisely descriptive of the actual happenings. The massed mechanisms rimming the vortex had taken on tangential positions and each of the myriad number had become a flaming and steaming nozzle, pouring off into surrounding space vast columns of velocity energy. The vortex itself, propelled as by the reaction jets of a huge turbine wheel, was speeding up its normal rate of rotation with incredible acceleration. As they watched, it spun ever more swiftly until the whole was a flaring, blurred mass.
"Fireworks," grunted Jerry. "Reminds me of a gigantic pinwheel."
"Can't you be serious?" moaned Leora. "Can't you see what is happening? They'll drive it so fast it'll be bound to blow up — "
"Nonsense!" blurted Crabbe. "Energy is indestructible."
"And no fact or statement is entirely true," began Jerry. A dig administered judiciously in his ribs by Leora prevented his further badgering of the professor.
Incomprehensively now, the vortex, instead of expanding due to the centrifugal forces of its spinning, was contracting in size. It was closing in, as Leora had originally stated. At the same time it drew nearer to the position of the three adventurers in the purple-green infinity. The hot breath of the mad energies forced them back.
"And now," blared the unheard voice of the Intelligence, "your worthless existences shall end with the intruding mechanism you have blunderingly contrived."
"Ah," breathed the professor, grasping Jerry and the girl. "This way."
He propelled them along a line that was neither straight nor curved, a line that followed no earthly equation or form. There was a thump as of the warping of the very universe and they were in a new and alarming environment. For a moment all was utter blackness, utter nothingness, then in the dim distance a pinpoint of brilliant light appeared. Jerry, suddenly aware that the girl was pressing close to his side, felt the uncontrollable trembling of her slight form.
"Now we've lost it all," she cried.
Professor Thaddeus Crabbe had lost some of his pomposity of manner. "Wait," he advised in tones almost humble.
The light-speck increased in brilliance and drew swiftly nearer. Then with sudden, soundless magnificence it burst, showering the vast darkness with blazing fragments. Jerry muttered, "More fireworks."
The myriads of light-flecks came to rest, studding the distant vastness with stars, constellations, nebulae. They were in a new and unknown universe, as cut off from their own sphere of existence and from the strange universe they had just left as if they had indeed ceased to exist at all as human entities.
Leora gulped audibly but, gamely, did not cry out her fears.
"Somewhere off there," remarked the professor, with a hint of helplessness in his voice, "is our own universe, our vortex — I do insist they could not have destroyed it — our laboratory. Somehow we shall reach it — them."
"The Foundation," suggested Jerry, unable to resist the gibe.
His remark brought forth no retort, which was something most unusual for the rotund man of science at his side. Evidently the situation was more serious than they had bargained for.
Leora, in a voice grave but steady, spoke: "Somewhere, you said, Professor. Somehow. Have you any plans?"
"It calls for much thought, careful thought," Crabbe admitted. "Calculations of a most involved sort must be made and great care taken to insure their accuracy."
"On the sound-recorders in your laboratory," Leora said with seeming irrelevancy, "were certain words of yours having to do with truth. Curved truth, I believe — "
Jerry chuckled. "Twisted truth."
"I'm serious," the girl reproved, "what I'm getting at is this theory of the curvature of space, even this space we're in. Couldn't we follow a curved line and return to our starting point in that way?"
"A woman's mind — " began the Professor in his old manner. But he immediately subdued his tones and continued more respectfully: "It is the only way possible, my dear young lady; we must return along a curved line. But the distances involved are unthinkably great, running into thousands and thousands of light years. Besides — "
A thundering yet soundless voice from out of nowhere mocked him, the voice of the Intelligence: "Besides, ignorant one, the great curved lines of space do not return to their starting points. Not precisely, due to external forces beyond your puny comprehension, and the gap between the misplaced ends of the great circle you would need to follow is still too great for you to cross. Try, if you will, foolish intruders; you can never return."
The Intelligence ceased to be near, and only three small figures remained, huddled together in an emptiness, an immensity beyond parallel. They felt no sensation of weight. They might be motionless. They might — it was more likely — be sweeping through sheer vastness in some colossal orbit which in a thousand years or so might bring them near a giant sun. And then the slowly leaking gases from their suits would make a cometary tail to the tiny mass of their bodies. There was no star they could recognize as nearer than any other. There was no possible source of help or rescue. And they had no more of life remaining to them than there was oxygen in the pitifully small tanks strapped to their backs.
There was a bump against Jerry's helmet. Leora had put her own into contact with his so to speak, since the breath-diaphrams were useless in the vacuum of this space. "Jerry, I — don't like that Intelligence. I think he's mean!"
"I suppose," said Jerry philosophically, "mosquitoes sometimes think humans are mean, when they run against a window screen. I'm afraid he wins the argument, though. I began to get all mixed up just about the time the Professor began to move sidewise in order to go up, and forward to go down, and backwards to go sidewise, and around in circles
to get ahead . . . Say!"
"What?" Leora's voice was tiny, through the metallic helmets, but it was definitely doleful, if still game. "What, Jerry?"
"The Professor was doing something impossible, then! Wait a minute! Let me get him in on this! Professor!"
He tugged at the strap that bound him to the professor. The scientist's helmet crashed into his with a thunderous sound.
"Idiot!" snapped the Professor. "You nearly smashed my helmet! What is it?"
"I've thought of the way to get home!"
"A statistician doesn't think," said the Professor testily. "I have calculated that sooner or later we must reach our own universe, by the sheer operation of the laws of probability. I am calculating the most probable time."
"We started out with oxygen for maybe three hours. Does that sound promising?"
"No! It will be of the order of millions of years. Or billions."
"Interesting, but impractical," said Jerry. "Now listen to me. You walked about and moved in the direction you wanted to go, back there, by working with the square root of minus one. But you didn't anticipate having to use that, did you?"
"Of course not! But I saw the conditions and understood them."
"You understood them!" repeated Jerry, in satisfaction. "That's the point. I did too for a while. I saw clearly that time is only a dimension, that the future and the past are one, and that all things and times coexist. I knew it perfectly, then. But not having a brain trained to register such things, I remember it now as I might a dream, with very essential elements left out. Has any of it slipped away from you?"
"Of course not! Why should it?"
"It shouldn't," agreed Jerry absorbedly, "because your mind is trained to handle just facts as mathematical abstractions, and they should be utterly clear when they're concrete. Which gives us our break!"
The Professor's voice sounded suspicious:
"Now what are you getting at?"
"Simply this," said Jerry. "We're in a three-dimensional space again, and of sheer habit we think in three-dimensional terms. I can't really think in any other. But back there we were in a space of an infinite number of dimensions, and we thought in multi-dimensional terms. We saw all space and time at once. Now, I can't, but you ought to be able to think in that same multi-dimensional fashion now, if you deliberately try to. And if you do it — "
The Lost Master - The Collected Works Page 10
