Page:Amazing Stories-1929-02.djvu/14
He came and looked at the rope. Then he looked at the canvas sack. The sack lay loose as though the con- tents had escaped. He felt of it and found that it contained three soft, baseball-sized objects. He jumped back and shrank away from it. The time seemed interminable. He waited and waited.
Besides an occasional mumble between the policemen or a short exclamation from Adkins or Beemer, there was no conversation. Beemer watched the rope closely. There was a tense nervous strain created largely by the professor's distracted movements. Then, after what seemed hours, though in reality less than one hour, there were six short tugs on the rope. Adkins threw his switch, and out of the crash and tremor Heagey tumbled out on the floor, all tangled up in coils of rope.
He was breathless, haggard, wild-eyed. He lay for a moment on the floor, panting. Then he sprang up and gazed fiercely, wildly about. He seemed suddenly to perceive where he was. An expression of relief came over his face; he sighed deeply and sank down to a sitting position. He looked exhausted; his clothes were disarranged and ripped in some places, and were covered with dust.
The five people looked at him in silent amazement. He looked from one to the other of them; it was a long time before he spoke.
"Good to be back here. I can hardly believe I'm really back. Never again for me."
"What about Sheila? Where is she?" the professor demanded.
Heagey recoiled as though from some shock. He sank again into profound depression. At first he had seemed a little happy to get back. Apparently Sheila had been forcibly driven out of his mind for the time.
"Let me tell you about it," he began slowly, He seemed not to know just how to proceed. "That is, if I can. I don't even know how to tell it. I know what it must feel like to go insane.
"I heard the switch go down as I gave Adkins the signal. Then it seemed like an elevator starting, and that was all. Until I looked around.
"I was sitting on something that looked like rock or cement. Not far from me was that barrel-like lump of flesh with the two straps around it, just exactly as I had seen it in the laboratory. And then a row of shapes reaching into the dim, blue distance. The nearer ones seemed to be of concrete or cement. You've heard me jeer at the crazy, cubistic and futuristic designs on book wrappers and wall-paper. Well, those are pleasant and harmonious compared with the dizzy, jagged angles, the irregular, zig-zag shapes with peaks and slants. and everything out of sense and reason except perspective. Perspective was still correct. Just a long, straight row fading into the distance. What in the world it could be, I hadn’t the faintest idea. However, I gradually reasoned it out.
"Naturally, since I am a three-dimensional organism, I can only perceive three dimensions. Even out in hyperspace I can only see three dimensions. What I saw must therefore be the spatial cross-section of some sort of buildings. I couldn't see the entire buildings, but merely the cross-section cut by the particular set of coordinates in which I was, Now it occurs to me, that since that barrel-like thing looked exactly the same to me out there as it did in the room here, I must have been in a 'space' or set of coordinates parallel to the ones we are in now.
"Imagine a two-dimensional being, whose life had been confined to a sheet of paper and who could only perceive in two dimensions, suddenly turned loose in a room. He could only see one plane at a time. Everything he saw would be cross-sections of things as we know them. Wouldn't he go crazy? I nearly did.
"I first started out to walk along beside the row of rock-like shapes. Suddenly near me there appeared two spheres of flesh, just like this one we have here. They rapidly increased in size, coalesced into a barrel-shaped thing with a metal-web belt around the middle, and then dwindled quickly; there were three or four smaller gobs of stuff and then ten or a dozen little ones; finally an irregular, blotchy, melon-like thing which quickly disappeared. In fifteen seconds it had all materialized and gone.
"I was beginning to understand the stuff now. Merely some inhabitant or creature of hyperspace going by. As he passed through my particular spatial plane, I saw successive cross-sections of him. Just as though my body were passing through a plane, say feet first: first there would be two irregular circles; then a larger oval, the trunk, with two circles, the arms, at the sides and separate from it; and so on until the top of the head vanished as a small spot.
"I followed down the line of buildings, looking around. Bizarre shapes appeared around me, changing size and shape in the wildest, dizziest, most uncouth ways, splitting into a dozen pieces and coming together into large, irregular chunks, Some seemed to he metal or concrete, some human flesh, naked or clothed. In a few minutes my mind became accustomed to interpreting this passage of fourth-dimensional things through my 'plane' and I studied them with interest. Then I slipped and fell, down. Down I whizzed for a while, and everything about me disappeared.
"I found myself rolling; and sitting up, I locked around again. There was nothing. I still seemed to be on cement or stone; and in all directions it stretched away endlessly into the distance. It was the most disconcerting thing I had ever seen in my life. I was just a speck in a universe of cement pavement. I began to get panicky, but controlled myself and started to walk, feeling the reassuring pull of the rope behind me. I walked nervously and saw nothing anywhere. Evidently I had slipped off my former 'plane' and gotten into a new one. The rope tightened suddenly; perhaps I had reached the end of it. It jerked me back wards and I swung dizzily, my feet hanging loose.
"I swung among millions of small spherical bodies disposed irregularly in all directions about me, even below. They moved gently back and forth in small arcs; and there were large brown bodies
"Why go through it all? I stumbled from one spatial plane into another. Each seemed a totally different