Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  Phil gazed at her in alarm. She laughed; at first it was a strained laugh, but gradually it melted into her sunny one.

  "No, I'm not crazy. I knew there was a way out, and I've been trying to reason it out. How simple. You remember the little jolts when you pulled at the vines and when you kicked the funny animal? Tensors. Matter and space are so closely interrelated that you can't move matter in or out of space without causing disturbance, recoils, and tremors in space. Those bits of matter were small, and produced only a slight disturbance. It takes about a hundred pounds of lead to swing this segment--"

  "Oho! Got you!" exclaimed Phil. "Not so dumb! The safe!"

  "Yes. The safe!" Ione cried.

  "Throw it off and watch us swing, eh? What would happen?"

  "I might calculate it if I knew the weight of the safe."

  "No calculating when I'm around," Phil said. "It couldn't make things any worse. Try it first and calculate afterwards."

  * * * * *

  They got behind the safe and pushed, and their combined strength against it was about as effective as it would have been in moving the Peoples' Gas Building. They sat down again in despair.

  "Suppose we could budge it," Ione said. "All we could do would be to push it around, this piece of matter we are on. That wouldn't help. We've got to get it out of space. We can't push it hard enough to do that. It's got to be shot out suddenly--"

  "And we haven't got a gun handy," Phil remarked droopingly.

  "Not exactly a gun. A sort of sling--"

  Phil leaped to his feet.

  "A sling. Why! To be sure! The vines!"

  Without another word, both of them got up and ran. They hastened in a direction opposite to the one they had at first taken on their trip of exploration, and this brought them first past the "space" of the Tinkertoy-like animals. As they went by, several of these beasts darted at them, one of them snapping at Ione's heels. She uttered a scream, causing Phil to turn about and kick right and left among them. He drove them back and escaped from them, rejoining Ione.

  "Wait," he said, when they reached the vines. "Remember those wooden balls. If I could get a few to throw at those critters--"

  In a moment they were off, and finally arrived at the point from which they first saw the balls. Odd it seemed, how they hung suspended in space, thousands of them, all sizes. Phil reached out and grasped one about the size of a baseball and drew it toward himself. He felt a dizzy lurch and heard Ione scream.

  "Let go!" she screamed again.

  When he suddenly realized what was going on, he found himself prostrate on the ground, with Ione across him, her arms about his knees.

  "Do you realize," she panted, disentangling herself, "that you were pulling yourself out of this space into that one?"

  "Thanks!" said Phil. "Never say die. More careful this time, and a smaller one."

  * * * * *

  He reached out and grasped a ball smaller than a golf-ball, and pulled carefully, keeping an eye upon Ione. There was resistance to his pull, but gradually the ball came. It seemed heavy. There was a crack as of breaking wood, and he fell backward, with a wave of nausea sweeping strongly over him. He gazed in amazement at a heavy wooden stick that he held in his hands. The only thing about it that suggested the ball for which he had reached was its diameter.

  "Can't understand it, but appreciate it just the same," he said. He broke the stick in two, and had two excellent clubs.

  "Simple," Ione replied. "The balls are cross-sections of these trees or sticks which grow in a 'space' at right angles to our own; and we only see their three-dimensional cross-sections."

  "Yes," said Phil. "Cabbages and kings. I'm for you and the party."

  A short walk brought them to the "space" of the vines. After testing the matter out carefully, they found that they could each pull two of them at a time. The vines stretched amazingly when they found those whose far ends were fixed firmly in the tangle, permitting them to carry their own ends along with them toward the safe. Phil wound his vines around his left arm and stuck one club through his belt. The other he got ready for the wooden animals.

  He needed it. The size of the pack was doubled, and he rapped them till his hand was numb before he and Ione got by. Their vines drew out thin, but held until they were firmly tied about the safe. They went back after four more.

  "I should judge," said Phil, "that by the time we get thirty or forty, the elastic pull will be strong enough to drag the safe back with them as they snap back home."

  * * * * *

  Trip after trip they made, fighting the wooden animals with their clubs each time. Their clothes were torn, and their legs bleeding; their throats were dry and lips cracked. The hard animals seemed to have a persistent, mechanical ferocity that was undismayed by hammering with the clubs and by repeated repulses. Phil could not seem to hurt them; he merely knocked them away. Finally, on the ninth trip, Ione collapsed when she reached the safe. As she fell, the elasticity of the vines began slowly to drag her back with them. Phil was forced to sit across her knees while he tied his own vines about the safe. Then he released her and added her vines to the great cable about the safe.

  An overbold hard animal rattled up and snapped at her. Goaded to fury, Phil swung at it with his club and hurled it through the air. He could feel the lurch as it left his space and entered another. Then he pushed with his mightiest effort against the safe. It budged, and slid a few inches. He used his stick as a lever. It moved again, a little faster. Ione struggled to her feet and tried to help, but her efforts were ineffectual.

  With one arm about her, Phil pried again under the safe, knowing that another trip after vines was out of question. Another animal snapped at their heels. For a while, it was kick backwards, then a shove at the safe. Each time the safe moved. The sight of its movement revived Ione, so that she was able to push also. Gradually it acquired a steady motion, pulled by the contraction of the vines; its progress soon became faster and faster. Phil was about to follow it and give it another push, when Ione drew him back.

  Suddenly they experienced a sinking sensation and a fearful vertigo. The snapping animals faded. Ahead of them was the forest of vines, and they saw the safe hurled into it, crashing, plunging into the tangled mass. The whole view crumpled and moved upwards like a swirl of leaves in a wind, and then vanished with a snap.

  * * * * *

  They were sick and dizzy, but tremendously curious to see everything. The water, the cubistic cliffs, the vast space full of balls, all curiously blurred, appeared in succession. There were blank spaces and then blurred sights of things which they did not recognize, never having seen them before. Then the dizziness and the nausea abated, and ahead of them was a vast yellow blue, a huge nebula, and in it were double-colored suns and ringed planets with swarms of moons; this glorious sight remained for many seconds, as they gazed at it in panting astonishment, half reclining on the concrete; and then it faded. Again the nausea came on; again the succession of blurred views. Eventually the myriad spheres, the water with the leviathans, the forest of vines, each succeeding scene grew more blurred. Their nausea was correspondingly increased, till they were forced to lie down on the ground from illness.

  When their giddiness abated, there were blurring views again. There was an impression as though the speed of a train were decreasing as one looks out of the window. And how one view held for several seconds, a vast and wild mountain-range with glaciers and snow peaks by moonlight. When this faded gradually, the scenes began to flick by, more and more rapidly, and grew blurred. Phil and Ione were attacked by nausea until, again, they had to lie down. After that came the familiar succession: the wooden animals, the tangle of vines, the vast sea, the spheres, and more blurred scenes. Then came a pause, with the nebula and the glorious suns swinging into view once again.

  "Oh, I understand!" Ione exclaimed; "We're swinging. The safe was so heavy that we swung too violently, too far, and back again--"

  "And we keep going till it knocks us o
ut, or till the old cat dies," added Phil.

  * * * * *

  However, they found that after a number of repetitions of the same program, their giddiness was becoming less; and instead of lying down in the middle of the swing, they could look about. Then it occurred to Phil to time the interval between the nebula and the mountain-range. When the exact halfway point was determined, and after several more swings, they could see dimly the windows and machinery of Tony's laboratory flash by when they passed the middle.

  "I don't mean to be a crepe-hanger, but how do you know we will stop at the right point?" Phil asked.

  "I don't," replied Ione cheerfully. "But mathematics says so. A freely oscillating segment of space would naturally come to equilibrium in a position parallel to the rest of its own space, would it not?"

  There came a swing when they did not reach the nebula on the one hand and the mountain-range on the other. After that, views dropped off from either end of the swing quite rapidly, and before many minutes, they looked into Tony's laboratory a large portion of the time. For many seconds the laboratory held; then it would gradually fade, and reappear again, only to fade into empty nothingness all around.

  "The old cat's dead," Phil finally announced.

  They sat and stared about them as the laboratory held steady and no further intervening periods of blankness intervened. They both sighed deeply and slumped over on the ground to rest.

  "Bang! bang! bang!"

  * * * * *

  Some sort of hammering woke them up. They looked about them in a daze. It was broad daylight, and things looked queer in the laboratory. There was a smell of scorched rubber and hot oil. Great loops of wire sagged down from above. Several nondescript heaps stood about that might once have been machinery, but now suggested melting snow-men, all fused into heaps. At a table sprawled a queer, misshapen figure that suggested human origin. Both of its hands were burned to cinders to the elbows. Great holes were scorched into the clothes. But the face was recognizable. Tony's playthings had got him at last.

  "Looks like something's happened in here!" Phil gasped, in amazement.

  "I'll bet it has, too," Ione exclaimed. "This is the first time it occurred to me that our recoil from throwing the safe overboard and the oscillation of our space-segment must have created a tremendous electrical field in the tetra-ordinate apparatus. The reaction is reversible, you see. The field swings the space-segment, or the swinging of the space-segment creates the field. And the field was too much for Tony."

  At this point the door fell under the blows of the police, and the raiding squad rushed into the room.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE GOSTAK AND THE DOSHES

  by Miles John Breuer

  Of late the pages of science-fiction periodicals have been filled with a lot of words about words. We refer to the stories based upon the neo-science of semantics, the talk about "non-Aristotelianism," and the multiple social, political, moral, and psychological concepts that the more fanatical followers of these word-schemes derive from them. At risk of calling down the wrath of devotees, your editor must confess that most of these stories do not seem to make too much sense. And it is just possible that some of the readers of "The Gostak and the Doshes" may also express, for a while, similar bewilderment. Dr. Breuer's story, we think, was the very first story about semantics to appear in a fantasy magazine. It was written many years before its time, back in 1930, and we still feel that it is the best of the lot. We also suspect that it points a moral that could well be heeded in these hectic days of slogans, advertising, and mass hysterias.

  Let the reader suppose that somebody states: "The gostak disims the doshes." You do not know what this means, nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we know that the doshes are distimmed by the gostak. We know that one distimmer of the doshes is a gostak. If, moreover, doshes are galloons, we know that some galloons are distimmed by the gostak. And so we may go on, and so we often do go on.—Unknown writer quoted by Ogden and Richards, in THE MEANING OF MEANING, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1923; also by Walter N. Polakov in MAN AND HIS AFFAIRS, Williams & Wilkins, 1925.

  Why! That is lifting yourself by your own bootstraps!" I exclaimed in amazed incredulity. "It's absurd."

  Woleshensky smiled indulgently. He towered in his chair as though in the infinite kindness of his vast mind there were room to understand and overlook all the foolish little foibles of all the weak little beings that called themselves men. A mathematical physicist lives in vast spaces where a lightyear is a footstep, where universes are being born and blotted out, where space unrolls along a fourth dimension on a surface distended from a fifth. To him, human beings and their affairs do not loom very important.

  "Relativity," he explained. In his voice there was a patient forbearance for my slowness of comprehension. "Merely relativity. It doesn't take much physical effort to make the moon move through the treetops, does it? Just enough to walk down the garden path."

  I stared at him and he continued:

  "If you had been born and raised on a moving train, no one could convince you that the landscape was not in rapid motion. Well, our conception of the universe is quite as relative as that. Sir Issac Newton tried mathematics to express a universe as though beheld by an infinitely removed and perfectly fixed observer. Mathematicians since his time, realizing the futility of such an effort, have taken into considertation that what things 'are' depends upon the person who is looking at them. They have tried to express common knowledge, such as the law of gravitation, in terms that would hold good for all observers. Yet their leader and culminating genius, Einstein, has been unable to express knowledge in terms of pure relativity; he has had to accept the velocity of light as an arbitrarily fixed constant. Why should the velocity of light be any more fixed and constant than any other quantity in the universe?

  "But, what's that got to do with going into the fourth dimension? I broke in impatiently.

  He continued as though I hadn't spoken.

  "The thing that interests us now, and that mystifies modern mathematicians, is the question of movement, or more accurately: translation. Is there such a thing as absolute translation? Can there be movement—translation—except in relation to something else than the thing that moves? All movement we know of is movement in relation to other objects, whether it be a walk down the street, or the movement of the earth in its orbit around the sun. A change of relative position. But the mere translation of an isolated object existing alone in space is mathematically inconceivable; for there is no such thing as space in that sense."

  "I thought you said something about going into another universe—" I interrupted again.

  You can't argue with Woleshensky. His train of thought went on without a break.

  "By translation we understand getting from one place to another. 'Going somewhere' originally meant a movement of our bodies. Yet, as a matter of fact, when we drive in an automobile, we 'go somewhere' without moving our bodies at all. The scene is changed around us; we are somewhere else; and yet we haven't moved at all.

  "Or suppose you could cast off gravitational attraction for a moment and let the earth rotate under you; you would be going somewhere, and yet not moving—"

  "But that is theory; you can't tinker with gravitation—"

  "Every day you tinker with gravitation. When you start upwards in an elevator, your pressure, not your weight, against the floor of it is increased; apparent gravitation between you and the floor of the elevator is greater than before—and that's like gravitation is anyway: inertia and acceleration. But we are talking about translation. The position of everything in the universe must be referred to some sort of coordinates. Suppose we change the angle or direction of the coordinates: then you have 'gone somewhere' and yet you haven't moved, nor has anything else moved."

  I looked at him, holding my head in my hands.

  "I couldn't swear that I understand that," I said slowly. "And I repeat, that it looks like lifting yourself by your
own bootstraps."

  The homely simile did not dismay him. He pointed a finger at me as he spoke:

  "You've seen a chip of wood bobbing on the ripples of a pond. Now you think the chip is moving; now the water. Yet neither is moving; the only motion is of an abstract thing called a wave.

  "You've seen those 'illusion' diagrams, for instance this one of a group of cubes. Make up your mind that you are looking down upon their upper surfaces, and indeed they seem below you. Now change your mind, and imagine that you are down below, looking up. Behold, you see their lower surfaces; you are indeed below them. You have 'gone somewhere,' yet there has been no translation of anything. You have merely changed coordinates."

  "Which do you think will drive me insane more quickly—if you show me what you mean, or if you keep on talking without showing me?"

  "I'll try to show you. There are some types of mind, you know, that cannot grasp the idea of relativity. It isn't the mathematics involved that matters; it's just the inability of some types of mental organization to grasp the fact that the mind of the observer endows his environment with certain properties which have no absolute existence. Thus, when you walk through the garden at night the moon floats from one tree top to another. Is your mind good enough to invert this: make the moon stand still and let the trees move backwards. Can you do that? If so, you can 'go somewhere' into another dimension."

  Woleshensky rose and walked to the window. His office was an appropriate setting for such a modern discussion as was ours; situated in a new, ultra-modern building on the University campus, the varnish glossy, the walls clean, the books neatly arranged behind clean glass, the desk in most orderly array; the office was just as precise and modern and wonderful as the mind of its occupant.

  "When do you want to go?" he asked.

  "Now!"

  "Then, I have two more things to explain to you. The fourth dimension is just as much here as anywhere else. Right here around you and me things exist and go forward in the fourth dimension: but we do not see them and are not conscious of them, because we are confined to our own three. Secondly: if we name the four coordinates as Einstein does, x, y, z, and t, then we exist in x, y, and z, and move freely about in them; but are powerless to move in t. Why? Because t is the time dimension; and the time dimension is a difficult one for biological structures that depend on irreversible chemical reactions for their existence. But, biochemical reactions can take place along any one of the other dimensions as well as along t.