by Z. M. Wilmot
Chapter Six
Professor Reinhouer was awake at seven o’clock the next morning, and his younger companion was about half an hour later. After a meager breakfast of oatmeal and tea, Henry politely asked if Reinhouer could perhaps go shopping, and get some "real" food. After a moment of indignation, the professor agreed. At eight o’clock, when the grocers opened, Reinhouer drove out to the market and purchased the items on a list of foodstuffs provided by Henry. Upon returning, he and Devalier called Malacky University and arranged their respective excuses of absence. As Henry retired to his room on the pretense of study, Reinhouer set out to acquire the necessary parts, a process that he claimed would take about three hours.
In reality, the process took a mere fraction of that time, which left the professor with two and a half hours with which to peruse the Devalier archives. Upon his arrival at the estate, he realized that the main doors were locked. Cursing himself silently, he wandered around the well-trimmed hedges that grew against the walls of the house, looking for some way in.
After several minutes of searching, the professor found a thick patch of ivy leading up to a second-storey window, which appeared to be open. Reinhouer, after a moment of mental preparation, clambered up onto the hedge and grasped the ivy. Testing its strength, he deemed it strong enough to hold his weight, and slowly and laboriously climbed to the top, praying to the gods that he would not be spotted.
He made it without mishap, and collapsed to the floor of a room that he recognized as one he had visited the previous day. He hurriedly made his way through the house, stealthily so as to not awake any servants who might be about, and let himself into the still-unlocked archive room. Once inside, he locked the door behind him and began his search, looking first for documents from the time that Henry’s many-times great-grandfather probably had lived. It took him nearly the rest of his spare time to locate the year, a feat that he only accomplished through knowledge of the name of Devalier’s ancestor, that he had previously obtained through casual questioning. Reinhouer noted the section that he needed to return to and hurriedly left the house the way he had come in, arriving back at his home precisely when he had said he would. Henry was still in his room studying, and so Reinhouer immediately travelled up to the device room and began his repair work.
Reinhouer’s obsession began to take him over then, and the professor forgot all about his suspicions regarding Devalier’s family and the dread document that even now still weighed down his coat pocket.
A significant length of time passed before Henry entered the room, inquiring as to whether or not the professor was hungry. Reinhouer responded in the affirmative, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that young Henry was an able cook, him having prepared a hearty meal of beans and ham.
As the pair ate, they began to talk of mundane things, such as events in the newspaper and other local occurrences. Over the course of a few minutes, the discussion turned to more serious and personally relevant matters. Devalier, as he finished the last of his baked beans, turned his attention to Reinhouer’s research, and began to inquire as to how he had set upon that path. What had led him to discover the Parallax?
It was, Reinhouer explained, not his discovery, but rather that of his colleague, professor Sebastian Korig. Korig had from a young age been interested in the physics of the paranormal, and had also been blessed – or cursed – with extra-sensory perception. He claimed to have been able to see ghosts, and could accurately predict occurrences of other similar events. The late professor had, of course, also been gifted with a singular extraordinary intelligence and a burning curiosity, and had by his young adulthood begun investigating the underlying causes behind his self-described “gifted condition.” He had had various surgeons work on and examine his body for any peculiar anatomical features or anomalies, and gradually developed a map of his body. He believed firmly that those born with extra-sensory perception had bodies that were physically distinct from those born without.
After comparing his bodily map to the general layout of the normal homo sapiens, he did indeed find some physical differences, mostly in terms of the structure of neurons and nerves controlling the senses. He then began his life’s work: the creation of the inter-dimensional visualiser, which would allow the wearer to see the world as he did.
The machine was based around the structure of Korig’s own body, with the twisting cables, wires, and pipes mimicking the layout of Korig’s nervous system. By this time, the professor was talking animatedly and excitedly, so much that Devalier began to share in the man’s enthusiasm. The two left their dishes upon the table and journeyed upstairs, where the older man pointed out how the machine was constructed, explaining how it worked. The machine was partitioned into four sections, each one representing one of the so-called “essential” senses. The auditory partition consisted of two large confused masses of tubes on either side of the machine. They were constructed primarily out of gold, a material which Korig had found particularly receptive to the vibrations of the Parallax. This division allowed for the user to faintly hear the sounds coming from it. Henry commented that he had heard nothing, to which Reinhouer responded that one had to listen very carefully to hear.
Between the auditory partitions, on the left side, was the tactile division. It consisted of a large plate of aluminum, with a complex web of thin gold filaments woven over the back. It was, the professor claimed, a representation of Korig’s epidermis and the neural network behind it. Combined with what doctor Korig had learned of acupuncture in the Orient, it allowed he who wore the helmet to experience the physical sensations of the Parallax with more clarity, without being near one of the bridges between the two realities.
On the right side of the central partitions was the olfactory division, responsible for smell. As far as Korig or Reinhouer had been able to tell, this partition had in fact accomplished very little, if anything, as there did not appear to be anything that clearly had a smell in the Parallax. Its appearance was that of a pair of hollow, topless cylinders made from gold piping, embedded periodically with diamonds. The diamonds, in this case, Reinhouer said, were there to channel any scents that might exist.
In the very center of the device was the most important sensory division for humans: the ocular partition. It was, in physical appearance, a golden sphere, with various tubes, coils, cables, and wires coming out of the back end of it, all of which fed into a moderately-sized platinum cube. The front of the ocular device, according to the professor, consisted of a large lens in the form of a smoothed diamond, which in turn blocked off a passage made completely of the same material, which then turned into the thickest of the golden tubes coming out of the eye. The platinum box the wires fed into was, in fact, the central processing unit of the whole apparatus, and each of the partitions fed into one face of the cube – the ocular to the top, the olfactory to the front, the tactile to the bottom, and the auditory to the left and right. The wires emerging from the back of the cube fed straight into the helmet, and sent to it all of the processed sensory information, which used electrical impulses to help the user experience the Parallax more fully.
Devalier, impressed, asked how the device received the signals from the Parallax. The professor promptly launched into an explanation, which focused mainly again on how the wires and such mirrored Korig’s neural network, which allowed for the signal flow to function as it did in his body, and that the device had the added effect of being constructed from elements especially conducive to receiving signals from the Parallax. When questioned on how Korig had known to make the device out of said materials, Reinhouer could only shrug and say that he knew naught, for he had only worked with the professor for four years before his untimely death. By that time the machine had almost been completed, it having taken nearly all of Sebastian’s life and accumulated funds to do so. He similarly dodged any questions regarding how the pair had discovered that the cause of paranormal phenomena was a separate dimension interacting with our own.
Leaning
against the wall, Devalier asked how Korig had died, and Reinhouer’s answer was very tight-lipped. A single word was spoken: “Unknown.”
Devalier did not pursue this line of questioning any further, and instead broached a new topic, asking why the professor called the sister dimension “the Parallax.”
“Ah, but you see, it is simple. Do you know what parallax means, in the colloquial sense?”
“It refers to the apparent distance one object is displaced when viewed from two separate viewpoints, yes?”
“That works, yes. Korig and I made a discovery about this alternate dimension in the last two years of his life: one can sometimes catch glimpses into it by viewing the parallax of our vision.”
The young man blinked. “How does one view an abstract object?”
Reinhouer chuckled. “The same way one would view a physical one: with one’s eyes.” Henry begged for an explanation, and the professor supplied him with one. By rapidly changing the eye one viewed the world through, the illusion of one object being in two places at once could be created, and the distance between them made visible. Reinhouer, long practiced at this, could do so merely by winking each eye rapidly in alternation, while the inexperienced Henry was forced to cover and uncover each eye in rapid motions mimicking Reinhouer’s eyelids. Occasionally, Reinhouer explained, one could catch a glimpse of objects in the Parallax by doing this and focusing on the area centrally in one’s altered field of vision. Of course, it helped greatly when one was at a bridge, but it was not at all necessary.
Upon the completion of their conversation, Henry asked about the repairs, and the professor responded that they were going very well, and that the device should be back up by the next evening. Well pleased, Henry then asked if it was possible for the professor to, in the morning, go forth and have the television put in the shop, and if he would be so kind as to replace the moth-eaten cushions on the sofa. Reinhouer responded in the affirmative on both counts, and went back to work as Henry descended to his room to continue his studies.