Microcosmic God

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Your deal,” whispered Harry to me, and turned half away from the table.

  I took up the cards. I spent three solid minutes shuffling them. I had Harry cut them and then cut them again myself and then passed them to Delehanty for another cut. I dealt four hands, and Harry’s was the winning hand, with three sixes—hearts, diamonds, clubs.

  Delehanty’s eyes were almost as big now as his ears. He said, “Heaven. All. Might. Tea.” and rested his chin in his hands. I thought he was going to cry or something.

  “Well?” said Face.

  “Were we playing poker with this guy?” Harry asked no one in particular.

  When, by a great deal of hard searching, I found my voice again, I asked Face, “Hey, do you do that any time you feel like it, or does it come over you at odd moments?”

  Face laughed. “Any time,” he said. “Want to see a really pretty one? Shuffle and deal out thirteen cards to each of us, face down. Then look them over.”

  I gave him a long look and began to shuffle. Then I dealt. I think we were all a little afraid to pick up our cards. I know that when I looked at mine I felt as if someone had belted me in the teeth with a night stick. I had thirteen cards, and they were all spades. I looked around the table. Delehanty had diamonds. Face had hearts. Harry had clubs.

  You could have heard a bedbug sneeze in the room until Harry began saying, “Ah, no. Ah, no. Ah, no,” quietly, over and over, as if he were trying to tell himself something.

  “Can they all do things like that where you come from?” I asked, and Face nodded brightly.

  “Can everyone walk where you come from?” he returned. “Or see, or hear, or think? Sure.”

  “Just where do you come from?” asked Harry.

  “I don’t know,” said Face. “I only know how I came and I couldn’t explain it to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “How could you explain an internal-combustion engine to an Australian bushman?”

  “You might try,” said Delehanty, piqued. “We’s pretty smart bushmen, we is.”

  “Yeah,” I chimed in. “I’m willing to allow you the brains to do those card tricks of yours; you ought to have enough savvy to put over an idea or two.”

  “Oh—the cards. That was easy enough. I felt the cards as you shuffled them.”

  “You felt with my fingers?”

  “That’s right. Want proof? Jack, your head is itching a little on the right side, near the top, and you’re too lazy to scratch it just yet. Harry’s got a nail pushing into the third toe of his right foot—not very bad, but it’s there. Well, what do you say?”

  He was right. I scratched. Harry shuffled his feet and said, “O.K., but what has that got to do with arranging the cards that way? Suppose you did feel them with our hands—then what?”

  Face put his elbows on the table. “As for arranging the cards, that was done in the shuffle. You grasp half of the deck in each hand, bend them, let them flip out from under your thumbs. If you can control the pressure of each thumb carefully enough, you can make the right cards fall into the right places. You all shuffled at least four times; that made it that much easier for me.”

  Delehanty was popeyed again. “How did you know which cards were supposed to go in which places?”

  “Memorized their order, of course,” said Face. “I’ve seen that done in theaters even by men like you.”

  “So’ve I,” said Harry. “But you still haven’t told us how you arranged the deal. If you’d done the shuffling I could see it, but—”

  “But I did do the shuffling,” said Face. “I controlled the pressure of your thumbs.”

  “How about the cuts?” Delehanty put in, finding that at last we had him on the run. “When Jack dealt he handed the pack to Harry and me both to be cut.”

  “I not only controlled those cuts,” said Face calmly, “but I made you do it.”

  “Go way,” said Delehanty aggressively. “Don’t give us that. How’re you going to make a man do anything you like?”

  “Skeptical animal, aren’t you?” grinned Face; and Delehanty rose slowly, walked around the table, caught Harry by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks. Harry almost fell off his chair. Delehanty stood there rockily, his eyes positively bulging. Suddenly he expectorated with great violence. “What the dirty so and forth made me do that?” he wanted to know.

  “Chummy, ain’t you?” grinned Harry through his surprise.

  Face said, “Satisfied, Delehanty?”

  Delehanty whirled on him. “Why you little—” His fury switched off like a light going out. “Right again, Face.” He went over and sat down. I never saw that Irishman back down like that before.

  “You made him do that?” I asked.

  Face regarded me gravely. “You doubt it?”

  We locked glances for a moment, and then my feet gathered under me. I had a perverse desire to get on all fours and bark like a dog. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. I said quickly, “Not at all, Face, not at all!” My feet relaxed.

  “You’re the damnedest fellow I ever saw,” said Harry. “What kind of a man are you, anyway?”

  “Just a plain ordinary man with a job,” said Face, and looked at Delehanty.

  “So am I,” said Harry, “but I can’t make cards sit up and typewrite, or big, dumb Irishers snuggle up to their fellow-men.”

  “Don’t let that bother you,” said Face. “I told you before—there’s nothing more remarkable in that than there is in walking, or seeing, or hearing. I was born with it, that’s all.”

  “You said everyone was, where you come from,” Harry reminded him. “Now spill it. Just where did you come from?”

  “Geographically,” said Face, “not very far from here. Chronologically, a hell of a way.”

  Harry looked over my way blankly. “Now what does all that mean?”

  “As near as I can figure out,” said Face, “it means just what I said. I come from right around here—fifty miles, maybe—but the place I came from is thirty-odd thousand years away.”

  “Years away?” I asked, by this time incapable of being surprised. “You mean ‘ago,’ don’t you?”

  “Away,” repeated Face. “I came along duration, not through time itself.”

  “Sounds very nice,” murmured Delehanty to a royal flush he had thumbed out for himself.

  Face laughed. “Duration isn’t time—it parallels it. Duration is a dimension. A dimension is essentially a measurement along a plane of existence. By that I mean that any given object has four dimensions, and they extend finitely, along four planes—length, width, height, duration. The last is no different from the others; nor is it any less tangible. You simply take it for granted.

  “When you’re ordering a piece of lumber, for instance, you name its measurements. You say you want a two by six, twelve feet long. You don’t order its duration; you simply take it for granted it will extend long enough in that dimension to suit your needs. You would build better if you measured it as carefully as you do the others, but your life span is too short for you to care that much.”

  “I think I can savvy that,” said Harry, who had been following carefully, “but what do you mean by saying that you came ‘along’ duration?”

  “Again, just what I said. You can’t move without moving along the plane of dimension. If you walk down the street, you move along its length. If you go up in an elevator, you move along its height. I came along duration.”

  “You mean you projected yourself into the fourth dimension?” asked Henry.

  “No!” said Face violently, and snorted. “I told you—duration is a dimension, not another set of dimensions. Can you project yourself into length, or height, or into any one dimension? Of course not! The four are interdependent. That fourth-dimension stuff you read is poppycock. There’s no mystery about the fourth dimension. It isn’t an impalpable word. It’s a basis of measurement.”

  I said, “What’s this business of your traveling along it?”


  Face spread out his hands. “As I said before, duration is finite. Suppose you wanted to walk from Third Street to Fifth Street. First you’d locate a sidewalk that would take you in the direction you were going. You’d follow that until it ended. Then you’d locate one that would take you to your destination. Where the one stopped and the other started is Fourth Street. Now if you want to go twenty blocks instead of two, you simply repeat that process until you get where you’re going.

  “Traveling along duration is exactly the same thing. Just as you enter a street at a certain point in its length, so you encounter an object on the street at a certain point in its duration. Maybe it’s near the beginning, maybe near the end. You follow it along that dimension—you don’t project yourself into it. All objects have two terminations in duration—inception and destruction. You travel along an object’s duration until it ceases to exist because you have reached the end of it—or the beginning. Then you proceed to find another object so that you may continue in the same direction, exactly as you proceeded to find yourself another sidewalk in your little trek across town.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Delehanty, “I can understand it!”

  “Me, too,” Harry said. “That much of it. But exactly how do you travel along duration? I can get the idea of walking beside a building’s length, for instance, but I can’t see myself walking along beside … er … how long it lasted, if you see what I mean. Or do I see what I mean?”

  “Now you’re getting to something that may be a little tough to explain,” said Face. “You have few expressions in your language that could cover it. About the clearest way for me to put it is this: My ability to travel in that particular direction is the result of my ability to perceive it. If you could only perceive two dimensions, length and breadth, you would be completely in the dark about the source of an object which dropped on you from above. If you couldn’t sense the distance from here to the door—if you didn’t know the door existed, nor the distance to it, you wouldn’t be able to make the trip. I can see along duration as readily as you can see up and down a road. I can move along it equally readily.”

  “Do you stay in one place while you travel duration?” I asked suddenly.

  “I can. I don’t have to, though. You can go forward and upward while you curve to the left, can’t you? Mix ’em any way you like.”

  Harry piped up. “You say you came thirty thousand years. How is that possible? You don’t look as if you’re much older than I am.”

  “I’m not,” said Face, “in point of years existed. That is, I didn’t live those years. I—passed them.”

  “How long did it take you?”

  Face smiled. “Your question is ridiculous, Harry. ‘How long’ is a durational term. It involves passage of time, which is a convenient falsehood. Time is static, objects mobile. I can’t explain a true state of affairs from the basis of a false conception.”

  Harry shut up. I asked him something that had been bothering me. “Where did you come from, Face, and—why?”

  He looked at me deeply, that eyebrow ridge rising a trifle. “I came—I was sent. I came because I was qualified for the job. I was sent because—well, someone had to be sent, to restore the balance of the city.”

  “What city?”

  “I don’t know. It had a name, I suppose, but it was forgotten. Do you name your toothbrush, or your bed sheets, or anything else that has been nearly part of you all your life? No one ever left the city, no one ever arrived at it. There were other cities, but no one cared about them, where they were, who their people were and what they were like, and so on. There was no need to know. The city was independent and utterly self-sufficient. It was the ultimate government. It was not a democracy, for each individual was subjugated entirely to the city. But it was not a dictatorship as you know the term, for it had no dictators. It had no governing body, as a matter of fact. It didn’t need one. It had no laws but those of habit and custom. It ran smoothly because all of its internal frictions had been worn smooth by the action of centuries. It was an anarchistic society in the true sense of anarchism—society without need of government.”

  “That’s an impossibility,” said Harry, who had a reputation as a minor barroom sociologist.

  “I came from that city,” Face reminded him gently. “Why is it impossible? You must take certain things into account before you make such rash statements. Your human nature is against such an organization. Your people would be like lost sheep—possibly like lost wolverines—under such a set-up. But my people were not like that—not after centuries of breeding for the most desirable traits, living circumscribed ways of life, thinking stereotyped thoughts. Imagine it if you can.

  “Now the city was divided into two halves, like the halves of a great brain. For every death there was a birth; for every loss there was a gain or an equal loss on the other side. The equation was kept balanced, the scales level. The city was permanent, inexorable, immortal and static.”

  “What did they do with their spare time?” asked Harry.

  “They lay in their cubicles until they were needed.”

  “Were there no theaters, ball games—nothing like that?” asked Delehanty.

  Face shook his head. “Amusement is for the relaxation of an imperfect mind,” he said. “A mind that has been trained to do one thing and one thing only needs no stimulation or change of pace.”

  “Why was the city so big?” asked Harry. “Good gosh, a civilization like that doesn’t mean anything. Why didn’t it simply degenerate into the machines that ruled it? Why keep all those humans if they must live like machines?”

  Face shrugged. “When the city was instituted, there was a population of that size to allow for. Then, it had a rigid human government, and there was crime and punishment and pain and happiness. They were disposed of in a few generations—they were not logical, you see, and the city was designed on the philosophy that what is not logical is also not necessary. By that time the city was too steeped in its own traditions, there was no one left to make such a radical change as to cut down on the population. The city could care for that many—likewise it could not exist as it was unless it did care for that many. Many human offices were disposed of as they became unnecessary and automatic. One of these was that of controller of population. The machines took care of that—they and the unbreakable customs.”

  “Hell!” said Delehanty explosively. “I wouldn’t go for that. Why didn’t the people push the whole thing over and get some fun out of life?”

  “They didn’t want it!” said Face, as if he were repeating a self-evident fact, and was surprised that he had to. “They had never had that sort of life; they never heard or read or saw anything of the sort. They had no more desire to do things like that than you have to play pattycake! They weren’t constituted to enjoy it.”

  “You still haven’t told us why you left the place,” I reminded him.

  “I was coming to that. In the city there was a necessity for the pursuance of certain knowledges, as a safety measure against the time when one or another of the machines might need rebuilding by a man who understood them.

  “One of these men was an antiquarian named Hark Vegas, which is really not a name at all but a combination of sounds indicating a number. His field was history—the development of all about him, from its earliest recorded mythologies and beyond that to its most logical sources. In the interests of the city, he so applied himself to his work that he uncovered certain imponderables—historical trends which were neither logical nor in harmony with the records. They were of no importance, perhaps, but their existence interfered with the perfection of his understanding. The only way he could untangle these unimportant matters was to investigate them personally. And so—that is what he did.

  “He waited until his successor was thoroughly trained, so that in any eventuality the city would not be left without an antiquarian for more than a very little while, and he studied carefully the records of the city’s customs. These forbade any citi
zen’s leaving the city, and carefully described the boundaries thereof. They were so very old, however, that they neglected to stipulate the boundaries along the duration dimension, since duration perception was a development of only the past four or five thousand years. As an antiquarian, Hark Vegas was familiar with the technique. He moved himself out along the duration of a metallic fragment and thus disappeared from the city.

  “Now this unheard-of happening disturbed the timeless balance of the city, for Hark Vegas was no longer to be found. Within seconds of his disappearance, news of it had reached the other half of the city, and the group of specialists there.

  “The matter involved me immediately for several reasons. In the first place, my field was—damn it, there’s no word for it in your language yet. It’s a mental science and has to do with time perceptions. At any rate, I was the only one whose field enabled him to reason where Hark Vegas had gone. Secondly, Hark Vegas was my contemporary in the other half of the city. We would both be replaced within a week, but during that week there would be one too many in my half of the city, one too few in his—an intolerable, absolutely unprecedented state of affairs. There was only one thing to do, since I was qualified, and that was to find him and bring him back. My leaving would restore the balance; if I were successful in finding him, our return would not disturb it. It was the only thing to do, for the status quo had to be maintained at all costs. I acquired a piece of the metal he had used—an easy thing to do, since everything in the city was catalogued—and came away.”

  Face paused to light a cigarette. The man smoked, I noticed, with more sheer enjoyment than anyone I had ever met.

  “Well,” said Harry impatiently, “did you find him?”

  Face leaned back in a cloud of blue smoke and stared dreamily at the ceiling. “No,” he said, “And I’ll tell you why.

  “I ran into a characteristic of dimensions that was so utterly simple that it had all but escaped me. Let me give you an example. How many sides has a cube?”

  “Six,” said Harry promptly.

  Face nodded. “Exactly. Excluding the duration dimension, the cube is a three-dimensional body and has six sides. There are two sides as manifestations of each dimension. I think I overlooked that. You see, there are four dimensions, but eight—directions!”