Time Travel Omnibus, page 187
“Let us liken man’s life to a tridimensional graph of coordinates. At any given space within this graph is the dot—man. He is the junction point, the meeting place, of his elemental compositories, portions of which have been bounded, stripped from him, by the coordination of higher dimensions. Man, then, is not the complete sum of those things from which he sprung. He is merely the intersecting sections of those three infinities which coordinated to create him! It is my purpose to project, or perhaps unproject, myself down through these dimensions, to solve, if possible, the riddle of man’s beginnings, This I can do with the aid of my Chair.
“In this diary you will find a complete mechanical analysis of the Chair, with schematics of those parts which require special construction. If, as I expect to, I return from my journey, I shall attempt to bring back with me some sort of factual proof from the infra-dimension. If I do not, or cannot, return, I go knowing that this work will be carried on by capable hands.
“And now, my friends and colleagues, au revoir. I go, I hope and believe, into the unidimensional source of all knowledge.”
BRADNER, sitting in the Chair, shuddered momentarily with a chill of apprehension. Suppose he was wrong? Suppose his calculations were in error, and by some strange chance the Chair twisted him into some queer, distorted oddment of the universe? Suppose——He shook his head slightly, and chuckled again. Such nonsense! Of course he was right! And as for danger——
Impulsively, he dug one hooked finger into a button on the Chair’s left arm. A vibration rose from the seat—quivered through his nerves like a jangling, discordant note in music. With his right hand he twisted the vernier.
The vibration increased. The Chair seemed to twist and spin beneath him. A shimmering nebulosity grew before his eyes, and he was whirling, sinking, twisting into a spiral sea of nothingness! The faint humming in his ears rose to a high and piercing scream—long, high, sustained torture! There was a dreadful compression on his body. Darkness gathered before his eyes, writhing darkness curling into impossible forms. Then—silence——
HE WAS a oneness, but not a body. All about him was a sliding kaleidoscope of color and movement—real, tangible, but somehow bounded. There was a peculiar flatness to his surroundings.
His own body was gone, and with it his organs of sensation. He had no eyes with which to see, no lips to taste, no ears or fingers with which to explore the strange dimension into which he had been reduced. And suddenly Old Cautious realized, with a thrill of triumph, that he had been reduced! His intelligence—the entity that was Bradner—had sloughed off the third dimension, and was now in the plane-table land of the second!
A peculiar sentiency substituted for the normal bodily senses. Dimly, Bradner became aware that his oneness stretched, infinitely tenuous and bulkless, into a vast, never-ending plane that cross-sectioned eternity from the farthest star to the edges of time itself. Ridded of his third-dimensional boundary, he had become a single infinite plane in existence!
The swirling, chaotic maze of colors and forms about him were, of course, scenes viewed at too-great speed. Bradner discovered that by an effort of will he could control his speed—or better, the speed of those constants which were in him. of him, and a part of his bi-dimensional, omnipresent self. He concentrated on the task of slowing down the motions that surrounded him, that he might better study a section of them.
The flashing scenes paused, slowed, and became rational. Amazedly, Bradner watched, as, before him, or through him, the flux of time moved. Pictures built up in a cinematic sequence, as his plane moved through time—flat pictures——
Great steaming jungles, riotous with huge, tropical fronds, merged slowly into great cities with towering buildings that mocked the skies. Here a volcanic mountain spewed grisly ash and fiery death on a blood-red world; near by a cold-green glacier ground slowly and inexorably across the wincing face of a grim and desolate world. A stiff-winged monster of steel flapped carelessly over a plain of jet marble; burrowing worms, ichorous and blind, gnawed fretfully at the bowels of a star in some far-forgotten universe.
Bradner’s mind reeled with the immensity of his vision, and, manlike, his thoughts fled to the tiny planet that had mothered him and his kind—earth. And the thought was a contractile occupation of that infinitesimal portion of the infinity that was himself. Swift as thought, the scene shifted to that tiny globe.
BUT what a world! Not one, but a thousand limitless vistas stretched before him in that one small spot. A world peopled sometimes by man. sometimes by a form of mutable plant life, sometimes dominated by a gigantic form of lizard, a highly intelligent elephant creature with minute tusks and a huge, shining brainpan—once, even, by a silicate form of life that grew in crackling subdivision into a mass of angular tetrahedra and spires.
Most often, however, by man. Yet even when Nature’s most successful experiment had become the ruler, there was endless variety. Bradner looked with astounded eyes on a thousand worlds that were, yet were not. Here a mighty Roman civilization ruled proudly over the whole of the terrestrial globe, while on a divergent line of the plane a mighty Spanish empire sent its golden galleons into the far-spread ports of its domain. Carthage, in all its grandeur, formed an enduring pact of peace with a mighty empire of black men from the south; yet near by there was no Carthage and no race of black men—only one vast, wide city alive in a dead world, a city called Bogar, peopled by the blue-eyed, strong-thewed children of the Vikings.
And suddenly Bradner understood!
It was as he had thought. In loosing the bonds of the extending third dimension, he had infinitely widened his scope. He was seeing the probabilities of life! The many, many things that could have happened to the world, had not single events—seemingly unimportant at the time—determined that one point life was to have reached on the tridimensional graph at the time of Bradner’s being!
These plant men, these lizard creatures, this Carthaginian civilization—all might have been! They were permutations of that equation which, slowly but inexorably evolving, had turned to life as it is known to-day. On the instant, Bradner realized that every little thing that transpired in the past, was happening now, was to happen in the future, welded another inescapable figure to the equation of existence.
Had not the Spanish Armada been defeated, the world would have reached the civilization Bradner had seen. Had one wee pebble dropped in the flaming crater of a now extinct volcano at some dim, forgotten moment in history, all life save that of the Bogarian Norsemen would have been swept out of being. Chance, and chance alone, had determined that life should choose one of this infinity of possibilities!
Nor were these figures fantasies! They were real—as real as that other life, in the third dimension, that Bradner had formerly known. They existed on the plane surface of the bidimensional state in much the same manner, Old Cautious reasoned, as a man’s image exists in the reflecting glass of a mirror. That was it! They mirrored life as it was to have been, had the series of coordinates differed!
A curious seething shook Bradner’s extended self. On, then! On to yet another dimension—the single dimension bounded by this plane of possibilities! On to the unidimensional state wherein lay only extension—and the knowledge of all!
Bradner’s body was not—but the sentiency that dictated him still experienced the feel of the Chair, with its control buttons and its vernier. These, too, had become one with the plane of infinite breadth, and the motivation of the Chair’s powers were a thought process rather than a tactile one. Ardently, eagerly, Bradner willed himself to experience the change—the sloughing of the dimension of breadth.
THERE WAS a moment of shearing. It was as though Bradner were being slashed, cut with a razor edge of pain, into an emaciatingly thin line that strained and struggled to maintain its identity. Again that high, shrill screaming sounded in his ears, that grinding sense of compression——Then a sudden, singing sound like the laughter of flame, and a vicious, fast—oh, blindingly fast!—release.
There was nothing! About him there was a vast, aching silence that stirred in indefinable depths. Color was gone, and motion; light, heat and impulse were almost forgotten things. The space wherein he was——Bradner’s mind quivered with a dazed qualm—there was no space! No space and no matter! Just—nothingness!
For an instant Bradner throbbed with anxiety. It was not what he had expected, this! To slough off still another dimension, to become a single, infinitely extending straight line—yes!—To become an uncoordinated line in the graph of existence, stretching endlessly on and on to the farthest barriers of eternity—perhaps even to turn there at infinity with such turning as only the infinite line can know when it meets itself in the beyond—that he had expected! But this——
Frantically, he wrestled with the grim secret. It had an answer somewhere! It had to be logical! Yet logic did not explain this vast, empty, inconceivably silent void of which he had become a part.
There was a seething within him, and sudden color began to coalesce within his own being. Color invisible, but felt because it was of him and a part of him. The color had motion, too, he suddenly perceived—restless, growing, constantly encroaching motion:—swift, flaming spirals; nebulae of motion and incomparable speed—expansion of a sort, reaching toward his limitless boundaries. Bradner felt within himself the birth and the end of all being. He was the unit, one and inseparable, of all things and—of nothing!
And a swift knowledge broke upon him as a bolt of lightning flashes suddenly upon the tiny world that Bradner had once known. Old Cautious had been wrong! Old Cautious had made an error! He had reached the first dimension—yes! But the first dimension was time!
Man, who sought the fourth dimension with eager determination, already lived in it! And he, Bradner, had cast himself down, down, down through the dimensions, until he was one and a part of time itself! In him all things were—the beginning and the ending. In him fiery nebulae were being born, would ultimately burst and form his own universe, and would see life begin. He was—yet he was still to be, and had already been! He was the one who had escaped the limits of his boundaries on the tridimensional graph of life. He was a part of time infinite!
Somewhere within his being was a tiny workshop and a little black diary. At some punctus in himself was his corporeal self starting on the journey into himself as he now was. And thus it would be for all eternity—an endless Bradner seeking the secret of himself in the vast, indefinite reaches of time! Unless——
The great gray void seemed to rock lightly with dancing song as Bradner chuckled. Even a scientist known to his fellows as Old Cautious was not without a sense of humor.
LOST IN TIME
Arthur Leo Zagat
A Warp In Space-Time Catapults Jim Dunning into Another Age four Centuries Hence!
CHAPTER I
The Stratocar
JIM DUNNING gasped in the surge of terrific heat. A vast roaring deafened him. He leaped to the lashed wheel of the Ulysses. In a single motion he loosed the fastenings and threw all the power of his knotted muscles into a desperate twirling of the polished spokes. The deck slanted. The yawl shot about in a foaming half circle and fled like some live, terrified thing from the whirling, topless column of fire that had leaped out of the sea.
Dunning stared, over his shoulder, across the lurid waters that a moment before had been a glassy plain, silvery under the moon of a windless Pacific night. The crimson pillar soared stupendously, the speed of its whirling whipping the ocean into long, blurred spirals of fire.
The tremendous blare of sound leaped suddenly higher in pitch, became a shriek. Something sprang into view at the base of the fiery column, something huge and black and round. On the moment the sea heaved and climbed heavenward till the flame was lashing from within a huge liquid crater. The dark wall of water expanded. A towering wave rushed toward Dunning with incredible speed.
Dunning crouched over the wheel as if to add the naked force of his will to the frantic putt-putt of the Ulysses’ motor. The little vessel darted away like a thoroughbred under the lash. But the towering wave caught up with her, loomed appallingly above her. A briny avalanche crashed down on the doomed craft.
Jim Dunning fought for his life in a seething welter of waters. A hatch-cover, torn from its hinges, thudded against him. With a last, instinctive effort he hauled himself across the cleated plank, clung to it desperately as consciousness left him.
A reckless bet with some of his club members had sent Jim Dunning out from ’Frisco, six weeks before, on his disastrous attempt to cross the Pacific, single-handed, in a thirty-foot, auxiliary-engined yawl. And now in the graying dawn, his still shape floated on the tiny raft amidst a mass of wreckage. About him the vast circle of the horizon enclosed a waste of heaving waters, vacant of any life. Only a light breeze ruffled the sea’s surface, calm again after the sudden disturbance of the night.
Eventually his eyes opened. Hopelessly, he raised his head. A curious object that looked like a large spherical buoy, floating half submerged, met his gaze. But what was a buoy doing here, a thousand miles from the nearest land, in water a half mile deep?
Dunning kicked off his shoes and swam strongly through the cool brine. The great ball hung above him as he floated, its exterior glass-smooth. He swam slowly around it, searching for some projection that would enable him to get to its summit. Inches above the water a threadlike crack showed. It made a rectangle three feet wide by five. Was it an entrance to the interior of the ball whose floating showed it to be hollow? There was no handle, no means of opening it.
Dunning trod water and with the flat of his hand he pushed against the unyielding sector, inward, then side-ward, with no result. In sudden exasperation he drove his fist against the polished surface and yelled: “Open, damn you, open up and let a fellow in!”
AMAZINGLY, the metal moved! Dunning stared as the curved panel jogged inward for an inch, then slid smoothly aside.
“It’s like the Arabian Nights,” he muttered. “I yelled ‘open sesame’ and it opened.” A prickle along his spine did deference to the uncanny happening. Then, oddly enough, he chuckled.
“That’s it! An electric robot. Nothing to be scared of.”
Only a week before Dunning’s departure Tom Barton had demonstrated to him this latest ingenuity of the electrical wizards. It was installed in Barton’s garage, a phono-electric cell so adjusted that at the coded honking of a horn it would set a motor in motion to open the doors. Barton had picked up the idea at the airport; where the same device turned on the floodlights in response to a siren signal from an approaching airplane.
“If honking horns and howling sirens can open doors, why not the human voice? Well, let’s take a look at the Forty Thieves.”
Gripping the opening’s lower edge Dunning leaped out of the water and through the aperture. He was in a confined chamber, its walls and ceiling the vaulted curve of the sphere itself.
Sprawled across the flat floor was a girl, unmoving. Dunning caught his breath at the white beauty framed by long black hair that cascaded along her slim length.
“No!” he groaned. “She can’t be dead!”
Dunning bent over the girl and lifted one limp hand, feeling for a pulse. There was a slow throb. A long whistle of relief escaped him. She was breathing, shallowly but steadily, and her dark lashes quivered a bit where they lay softly against the curve of her pale cheeks.
There was a couch just beyond the girl. He lifted her to it, laid her down. Gently he straightened her robe of some unfamiliar, shimmering material—and whirled to some inimical presence glimpsed from the corner of his eye.
He crouched, his spine tingling with ancestral fear, his brawny arms half curved, his great fists clenched. But the man did not stir. Seated at a desk-like object just beyond the opening, he stared straight before him. It was his uncanny rigidity, the fish-white pallor of his face, that were so menacing. He was dead.
Dunning moved cautiously across the floor toward the seated corpse. It toppled as he reached it, thumped soggily to the floor.
The acrid odor of burned flesh stung Dunning’s nostrils. There was a huge cavity in the cadaver’s chest, its gaping surface blackened and charred by some searing flame!
Dunning swung his back to the wall, and his glance darted about the room.
The dead man and the unconscious girl were the only other occupants of the hemisphere. Had someone killed the man, struck the girl down, and escaped? But how had he managed it? There was no room for an attacker between the body and the contrivance before which it had been seated.
That strange object was of some unfamiliar, iridescent metal. It had somewhat the size and contour of an old-fashioned roll-top desk, minus the side wings. Across the center of the erect portion, where the pigeonholes should be, stretched a long panel of what appeared to be milky-white glass, divided into two portions by a vertical metal strip. Above and below, tangent to the edge of the long panel at the ends of the metal strip, were two round plates of the same clouded glass. In spaces to left and right of these disks were arrayed a number of dial-faces; gauges or indicators of some kind.
On a waist-high, flat ledge were little colored levers, projecting through slitted grooves. From the forward edge of this a metal flap dipped down some four inches. Through this metal flap a hole gaped, its curled edges melted smooth by a flame, by the flame that had killed the man at his feet!
SOMETHING hard thrust into his back.
“Don’t move! Twitch a muscle and you die!”
Dunning froze rigid at the crisp command. That voice from behind, vibrant with threat, was yet unmistakably feminine.
Dunning obeyed. A vague strangeness in the words bothered him. They were oddly accented. The low-timbred, contralto voice was speaking English, but an English queerly changed, glorified in sound, lambent with indefinable majesty.
