by Earl
The girl stepped out with an expression of annoyance, slamming the door. “Not a thing,” she snapped. “He refused to talk and just hurried me out. All this long trip and waste of time for nothing! I could scratch his face!”
“I knew your—er—feminine wiles wouldn’t work,” commented Hale. “Not with him. Geniuses aren’t human. He’s at the verge of some almighty experiment, and won’t talk till the strain of it is over. Why not join me in a wait and then we can both tackle him afterward?”
The girl’s face suddenly changed. “Maybe we’d better go! Dr. Vance said it might be a dangerous experiment. He wouldn’t say in what way, but he said the further away I went the better. Somehow”—her face became a little frightened—“I know he meant every word!”
“Say, he really did scare you!” laughed Hale. “But he just wanted to make sure we’d stay away—”
“No, it is going to be a dangerous experiment!” breathed Lona Darson. “I—I just know!”
“Now what’s that—feminine intuition?” Hale became serious. “Well, I’m going to stay and find out. It has something to do with his Fifth Dimension theory, and that’s news, which is my business.” He set his jaw firmly.
“I’m with you,” said the girl, after a slight hesitation. “Where to?” she asked as Hale led the way between the trees over a matting of dead leaves and wild grasses.
“We’ll get as close to the lab as possible, without being seen. Maybe we can find out what’s going on.”
THEY came to the edge of the tree patch and peered over a fringe of bushes. The old hunting lodge that was now a laboratory was no more than a hundred feet ahead, across the clearing. It looked like a miniature castle. But unlike a castle, it housed the most modern scientific apparatus available and one of the greatest minds the world had ever known. What mysterious research was being conducted in its enigmatic interior?
“See that tower?” pointed Hale. “I’m dead certain it’s the king-pin of Dr. Vance’s experiment.”
Perhaps thirty feet high, a skeleton tower of steel reared over the flat roof. At its top was a small platform on which had been constructed something, protected from the elements by a large tarpaulin. A heavy rubber-coated cable hung down to the roof. “Look!” whispered Lona.
A trap door in the roof at the base of the tower had clattered open. The scientist’s assistant, Hans, bobbed up out of it. Agile as a monkey, he clambered up the steel ladder at the side of the tower and reached the platform. He pulled off the tarpaulin and set it to one side.
The affair revealed made no recognizable pattern to the two watchers—coils, tubes, gleaming mirrors and an intricate system of wiring that snaked about seemingly in haphazard fashion. It was no more informative than the inside of a ten-tube radio. Hans bent over it and his hands reached to various parts, apparently making adjustments.
“What do you know about the Fifth Dimensional Continuum theory?” Hale asked the girl abruptly.
Lona screwed up her face thoughtfully. “Only that it’s a theory of co-existing worlds in a universe of five dimensions, whatever that means. Dr. Vance has taken de Sitter’s world-lines and Einstein’s space-time continuum and gone them one better by saying that the fifth dimension is a sort of mental plane. All objects must have length, breadth, thickness, time-value, and mental-value—that is, a sort of psychic-dimension, without which the object becomes non-existent. I’ve looked over some of the mathematics, as much as I could safely digest, and it really looks sound—don’t you think?”
The reporter looked at the girl in surprise. “Yes—oh, yes,” he agreed, wondering if that was a look of faint amusement in her eyes. He did not continue the subject. He had a hearty suspicion that she knew plenty about the theory and could go off the deep end and leave him stranded.
He glanced at his watch. “About a half hour to wait yet, before he starts anything. We can take it easy till then.” He spied a patch of grass and stretched himself out on it lazily.
Lona stood hesitantly, glancing at the laboratory. “Aren’t we rather close? Suppose there were an—an explosion? Skip it,” she added hastily at his look of scorn. She sat down with her back against a tree. By mutual consent, their conversation turned to other things and both of them relaxed from a feeling of tension over what might be going on at the laboratory.
Insects buzzed around them and birds twittered in the trees. A soft breeze kept the sun-heated air from becoming uncomfortable. It was pastoral and quiet, and Hale began to feel at peace with all the world. It was pleasant to just lie there and talk aimless things with a girl like Lona, and to watch the changing expressions in her blue eyes—
SUDDENLY this peaceful universe was shattered. Like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky, the bull-throated roar of a Diesel generator throbbed from the direction of the laboratory. Behind this sounded a shrill high whine from the top of the tower. The cryptic apparatus there suddenly burst out in a rainbow flood of radiance that bathed all the surrounding area in a ghastly phosphorescent glow, stronger than sunlight.
All this had happened in seconds. Hale had struggled on his elbow, paralyzed by the sudden pandemonium of light and sound. Lona had turned pale, in a frozen attitude of panic.
When Hale did try to get to his feet, he was thrown flat by a sudden pitching of the ground. Lona gave a sharp scream.
Then the universe seemed to go utterly to pieces. The ground dipped and swayed sickeningly. Trees danced at insane angles and the sun overhead darted in a crazy circle. It was as though earth had been uprooted from its orbit and flung pell-mell through space.
Hale’s sensations were varied and all-frightening. First he had the feeling that he was hanging upside down, on a surface that was no longer the ground, and that he would fall—into the sky. Then he was being turned inside-out, like a glove. His final sensation was that he was traveling at blinding speed, far, far faster than light! And all the while something hammered his brain relentlessly, till it ached frightfully.
In a blurred, distorted vision of a whirling world falling apart, Hale dimly made out the body of Lona Darson, arms and legs twisted in impossible ways. He saw the agony on her face. Desperately he tried to crawl to her, to help and protect her in some way. His clawing fingers failed to move his body over the pulsating, careening ground. Panting, sweating, he cursed aloud. He could not hear his own voice in a hellish bedlam of cracklings and thunders as though the earth were splitting in two.
This holocaust went on for an eternity—or was it just seconds?
But suddenly it was all over. The ground became still and firm again. The noises vanished into an aching stillness. Hale looked around in bewilderment. All was normal again, as it had been before. The trees that had seemed to bend and break were upright. Nowhere was the ground disturbed. Nothing had changed. His own body, that he imagined might be little more than a dying pulp, was whole and sound and unscratched.
He had seen the world around him blasted and torn, and yet here it was—in one piece! Hale scratched his head. Had it been just a vivid nightmare?
Then, with a cry, he sprang to the side of Lona, seeing now that she was unconscious. He chafed her wrists. In a moment, her eyes opened. Bewilderment flooded them as she looked around incredulously. She sat up, looking at her arms as though wondering why they weren’t broken in several places.
“W-what happened?” she gasped. “I thought I saw”—horror shone from her eyes—“the world collapsing. But now it’s all—like before!”
“Not even a bump on us,” nodded Hale. “It’s the craziest experience I ever had. I could swear I saw you twisted in a way you couldn’t be twisted unless you were a rag-doll or had rubber bones. Yet here you are—”
They stared at each other, completely baffled.
Lona’s eyes suddenly narrowed. “Perhaps,” she said slowly, “it was all in our minds—purely a mental experience. We just thought we saw all those terrible things happen.”
“Dr. Vance’s experiment must be the answer,” returned Hal
e. “Come on, let’s take a look at that tower—”
They felt peculiarly light as they rose to their feet and stepped to the edge of the bushes. They looked out and gasped.
The laboratory was not there!
IN ANOTHER DIMENSION!
IN ITS place, taking up about the same area, was simply a stretch of dark, purplish ground, overgrown with tall, lacey plants like ferns. All else was the same in the clearing—even the pump was there—but the building, its tower, all its contents, and its two occupants, were gone.
“For Pete’s sake!” said Hale in a strangled voice. “For Pete’s sake!”
Lona trembled against him like a frightened rabbit. “Gone!” she gasped, “as though something had wrenched his whole laboratory right off the earth!”
Hale closed his eyes and told himself not to be a damned fool and believe the laboratory wasn’t there. Then he opened them hopefully.
“It is gone!” he said. “But where and how? You can’t just take a big thing like that and whisk it away.”
“Do you suppose,” whispered Lona, “that Dr. Vance somehow transported himself to—the Fifth Dimensional Continuum?” Hale started, for the thought had just then occurred to him. “If that’s his way of proving there’s a Fifth Dimension—by going off to it—he’s welcome to it.” He coughed a little and pulled the girl back suddenly. “Say, there’s some kind of strong gas coming from there—maybe it’s poison. We’d better leave.”
Throats tickling, they retreated toward their cars. Lona sniffed at the gases and her face became puzzled. She stared around thoughtfully.
“Man, what a story this is going to be!” Hale was saying, “Scientist and laboratory vanish in thin air! This is better than I bargained for. Wait’ll I get my hands on a typewriter—”
“HANS! Hans, do you see it?—the world of the Fifth Dimensional Continuum around us!”
Dr. Simon Vance, in his laboratory, was more excited than his assistant had ever seen him. But the assistant was excited too. His eyes glued to a window, he was looking out at the other worldy terrain outside that had replaced the normal surroundings into which the building had originally been set.
“It’s weird!” said the usually phlegmatic Hans, eyes popping.
He saw a smooth, level stretch of dark, purplish terrain, thickly grown with un-nameable vegetation. It was like a jungle of the Carboniferous period—primeval, menacing, inimical.
And yet it was something utterly alien—something earth had never seen before, in all its millions of years of life and evolution. The fern-growths were not fern-growths. What seemed to be giant fungi were not fungi. They were spawned from seed and spore unknown to terrestrial conditions.
Hans shuddered, with a chill sense of the completely unearthlike.
The red haze was not just a dank spume from air overladen with gases, refracting the sunlight. It was a noisome chemical gas that earth’s atmosphere had never known. It was a product of some incredible metabolism that the alien flora lived by. They exuded this poisonous gas instead of oxygen. The ground was not common dirt, or sand, or rock. It had the dull luster of wax, and glowed faintly with its own light, especially where the shadows lay under thick branches.
It was almost unbelievable, impossible! It was a segment of the dark and terrible Unknown, hitherto beyond man’s ken. It was something out of the limbo of the normal universe, more alien than the strangest planet of the remotest star could be! It was part of the vast Outworld—the universe of other dimensions.
Gasping, Hans turned away momentarily from the scene, almost on the verge of screeching to make the nightmarish spectacle go away. But the hooks of morbid fascination, stronger than fear, pulled his eyes back again.
Something was moving in that miasmatic jungle—some creature, some horrible spawn of this hyper-alien environment. The willowy bole of a tall fern bent aside as a bulky form slithered past. It was a beast of shocking proportions and protuberances that made no ordinary shape. It had claws and thick legs like a bear. It had the ponderous neck and mane of a lion. It had the jaws of a crocodile. It reared up like a Tyrannosaurus. It had the long, mean horns of a water buffalo. It had three great, gleaming eyes and snorted fiery breath from its flaring nostrils.
It had no earthly counterpart. It was a nameless monster, ferocious, stealthy, ravenous, cunning in its every movement.
Hans turned away, sick to the bottom of his being. Such things were not for earthly eyes to see and understand.
AS Terrance Hale and Lona Darson, hand in hand, moved through the trees toward their parked cars, the girl wrinkled her nose distastefully. Suddenly she paled and tugged forward.
“We’d better hurry,” she exclaimed. “Bromine gas! I remember that odor too well from my course in chem, in college. And—and”—she took another suspicious sniff—“and cyanogen too! Good Lord, Terry—”
“Are they bad stuff?” he asked. Fleetingly, he reflected it was nice to hear her call him Terry for the first time, as though they were old friends.
“Bad!” cried the girl. “Bromine is as bad as chlorine, which they used in the war. Cyanogen is the quickest-acting poison-gas known. They’re both fatal in certain concentrations!”
At the word “fatal,” Hale automatically broke into a run.
“I can’t imagine where those gases came from,” panted Lona. “The laboratory disappearing—two deadly gases in the air—it doesn’t add up to anything reasonable, Terry!”
“We’re not doing any adding right now,” shot back Hale, grimly. “We’re just hopping into our cars and—hello, what—”
They stopped dead, thunderstruck. They had come in view of their cars. Hale’s machine was intact, but Lona’s was only half there. The front half, pointing away from the laboratory-site, had vanished. It looked as though something had sheered through as cleanly as a razor cutting cheese.
And when they looked beyond, horror filled their eyes. It was not the scene that should be there. The trees and bushes were gone! In their place were towering fronds of strange vegetation such as they had seen back where the laboratory should have stood. The road they had driven up ended abruptly, cut off by the waxy-like terrain in which the bizarre vegetation took root.
“W-where’s the rest of your car?” asked Hale rather dumbly. “For Pete’s sake, what’s happened? What is all this, anyway? Lona, have we gone bugs?”
They were almost convinced of it, staring at the nightmarish panorama before them.
“THE world of the Fifth Dimensional Continuum!” Dr. Vance murmured again. “This is the proof of my theory that universes exist side by side in a five-dimensional continuum—like the leaves of a book, or like the peelings of an onion. We have bridged the fifth dimension, by means of our amplified telekinetic force, and reached a new cosmos!”
“It is a terrible one!” said Hans in a half-moan. “I don’t like the looks of it at all, Dr. Vance. It’s frightful and menacing!” The scientist came down to earth. “Oh nuts, man!” he scoffed. “Don’t be a timid mouse. There’s nothing to worry about.” Hans sniffed suddenly, twisting his head. “Gas!” he cried. “We’ll be poisoned!” He glared at the scientist accusingly. “Do you realize what you’ve done? We’re marooned here, trapped! We’ll be poisoned, or attacked by those awful beasts out there . . .” He glanced around wildly, as though seeking some way of escape.
Dr. Vance sniffed at the contaminated air and then strode toward a supply closet, with an almost casual expression. He pulled out two gas-helmets and handed one to his assistant.
“Had you forgotten I was prepared, Hans?” he said easily. “As for those beasts . . . just watch what will happen to them.”
THE front half of the car was nonexistent. The split bole of a huge tree without bark rested against the sheered portion. It looked like the cross-section of two different worlds shoved together. All along the line, grassy ground joined abruptly to purplish, waxy matter.
Terrance Hale and Lona Darson felt a crawling uneasiness, as they stood ther
e, staring.
Suddenly the girl gave out a hysterical screech. “There’s something terribly . . . wrong!” she cried. “Look at the sun, Terry. Why is it so big and blue? What does it all mean?”
Hale glanced up at the sun through his fingers and eyelashes. It was certainly a queer-looking sun, twice as large as it should be, at least, and vividly blue in color. The radiance it shed was of a ghastly tone, bathing their surroundings in abnormal shades that made blues and green: stand out much more sharply than red: and yellows.
Hale suddenly realized the temperature was higher too, and that he had been uncomfortable in the past few minutes since the laboratory had vanished. He swore then, softly and steadily, to give his reeling mind a chance to rationalize. Suddenly hi dashed away and climbed the nearest tree back of them. From its top he looked in all directions.
When he came down and faced Lona his eyes were bleak. “This crazy forest completely surrounds us!” he announced. “We’re in a ring of it about three hundred yards wide!”
He looked carefully at the girl, wondering how she would take it. Her face looked shocked. Trickling sweat had furrowed through powder and rouge. She looked half wilted.
Sensing his reaction, the eternal feminism came to the fore and Lona took a compact out of her purse. She gave a little shriek as she saw her face in the mirror. The: with busy fingers, she repaired the damage A few moments later, she snapped her compact shut. Her manner had changed from near-hysteria to firm courage.
“What magic was that?” asked Hal admiringly. “I thought for a moment you were going to be a weak-sister on me.”
“You men swear when you get you mental breath knocked out. We women powder our noses. Mental uplift. Sam difference.” Lona was almost calm now.
But she had to fight to keep her voice from trembling as she said, “Terry, I don’t think this is our world any more! This is the world of the Fifth Dimensional Continuum!”