He reached the laboratory and rushed to the tessaract. He paused beside the motor. He didn’t want to leave this doorway into—somewhere—open after he went through. Something might enter from the other side. Maybe he could get the motor going full blast—throw the switch—leap into the block, and get through before its action ceased. But how could he get back? Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe Rand would recover in time to bring them back—but even if he didn’t, he’d have to get out there to Rita!
He closed the switch. The shrilling of the motor knifed the stillness, mounting steadily. The tessaract came alive, white radiance flooding its walls. Up—up the sound mounted—till Hal, with a quick stroke against the switch, leaped into the triangular opening!
Chaos crashed about him! He was in the center of a vortex of tempestuous forces, a mighty roaring blasting his ears. Creation whirled, swayed, collapsed around him. Suddenly he was swept to the brink of a black, yawning gulf—and was through, whirling into infinity.
Then—nothing.
CHAPTER III
INTO THE VOID!
HAL KINKAID stirred. He opened his eyes to stare into blackness. It must be night, he thought vaguely then consciousness of a terrible burning pain which seared every inch of him, drove all thought from his mind. He felt as though he’d had a tussle with the inside of a concrete mixer! Then he remembered the tessaract. He forced himself to look around.
He couldn’t see a thing He listened. There wasn’t a sound.
He tried to think calmly, tried to check a mounting sense of fear. This was empty space, according to what Dr. Rand had said. But then how could he breathe? And why didn’t he burst with atmospheric pressure removed? Hell—he wasn’t breathing—had no body with which to breathe! He was like a ghost—with a body whose molecules were transformed, expanded till he had become vaporous.
Interesting—but where was Rita? That was all that counted. And where were the shadows the scientist had mentioned?
With the thought, they were all about him—faintly luminous, like faded will-o’-the wisps. Around him they circled and eddied and swirled, a procession of vague cobwebby things without form or substance.
Will to move surged through him and he knew he was in motion, propelled by the power of thought. As he sped through the blackness, realization of his position came to him, understanding of the futility of his quest. Lost in utter darkness! Lost in a realm where there was nothing—nothing, that is, with physical substance. Yet he must find Rita.
With ethereal senses he knew that the shadows still encircled him—were speeding with him through the emptiness. Now sounds of faint stirrings came to him from every side. Imagination! It was the silence beginning to thud, thud, thud against his consciousness.
Anger flared through Hal. Damn the things! Did they think he was running away from them? Furiously he tore into them, tenuous fists flailing—cutting through even less tangible forms. Soundless mirth came back to him out of the darkness, silent laughter that hammered loudly against his senses.
In futile rage Hal turned and sped away in headlong flight. But always the shadows and the shadowy half-light were with him.
After a time he halted, lying motionless in the emptiness. Narrow-eyed, he peered around. Those ghostly devils were reeling around him in a crazy, jerky, unbalanced dance. His mind seemed to reel in unison with them. They were shrieking steadily, mocking him, deriding him for the fool that he was.
And he was a fool! Sharply the thought stabbed Hal’s reason. This was what the things wanted—this, what they had done to
Dr. Rand! And he’d almost followed the Doctor. He’d ignore them, as he had the shadow in the laboratory, and they couldn’t harm him!
His mind grew calm. He saw the shadows draw away—and he was alone. He thought of Rita—Rita with her dark hair, her warm red cheeks, her large, deep-blue eyes—and a voice seemed to leap into being in his own mind!
“Hal! Hal Kincaid! Hal—it’s Rita!” Joyously his answer sped from his mind. “Coming—Rita!”
He willed himself through the void—felt that he was flashing somewhere with the speed of thought. Then he saw her—faintly luminous as the shadow horde had been—an ethereal form rushing toward him with arms outspread. Shadow woman and shadow man met and clung, emotion playing in them like a flame
“I was afraid, Rita.” Hal said at length in the language of thought, the only means of communication in this strange realm. “Afraid for you. I tried to follow when you went through the tessaract, but I missed the opening—knocked myself out. Somehow I had kicked open the switch; when I came to, I started the motor again, just—just in time to let your dad come through; then I came out here to find you.”
“Then dad’s safe?” Hal could sense the relief and anxiety mingled in her thought. “The—things separated us before I found out that they couldn’t harm me if I ignored them. I tried to find dad. but he was gone. Then I caught your thought of me—and here we are.”
“I left your father with Phillips,” Hal answered “And now we’ve got to get back ourselves.”
Together they scanned the void They saw or sensed that utter blackness was closing in on them—that the shadows were flowing away from them like an ebbing tide speeding through the endless dark, all in one direction, with one apparent goal
Uncomprehending, they watched. Then suddenly Rita questioned:
“What’s that—that light?”
Hal stared intently. That spot—it was distant, almost beyond sight. He could barely see it as an angular point of brilliance, sharp against the blackness.
“Hal—it’s—it’s the—”
“The tessaract!” Hal’s thought was electric. “And those things are going through to Earth! We’ve got to stop them! Quick. Rita, it’s a chance for us to get back!” Instantly he willed himself into the opening, felt his ethereal body flashing toward it, through the ranks of the shadows. Almost as fast as thought—the will to move—the dash through emptiness—and he was in the tessaract.
MAD vertigo of whirling radiance! Agony of rending flesh—and Hal Kinkaid stumbled groggily into the laboratory of Dr. Lucius Rand.
A motor spun with silent speed. Hal’s outflung hand whipped back the switch, checking it. No shadowy thing could come through now. He’d stopped them.
“Rita, I wonder who started it. Maybe your father—” He turned; and the words choked him.
Rita had not come through with him! He had shut her out there in the void!
Bitterly cursing himself he stared about. But he knew beforehand that he would not see her. He’d have to go back!
As he reached for the switch, he heard a sound behind him. Wheeling, he saw crouched a yard away a creature as grotesque and repulsive as some malformation of birth. Manlike, it squatted erect on two crooked limbs like the legs of a satyr. Its long, hairless body, thin as a snake, was lined on its inner side with hungry sucker discs that opened and closed incessantly. Its trunk terminated in a flat, wide-jawed head, its mouth rimmed by slender, foot-long tentacles. It had no arms. From head to foot the monster was completely hairless, its skin the deep flesh-pink of a measuring worm. There was about it a vague suggestion of transparency, like a figure before an X-ray projector. And somehow, it seemed familiar.
The thing spoke in a low. hoarse whisper—and Hal gasped. This was the shadow—the thing that had attacked him and Dr. Rand—grown solid!
Hal whistled softly, his muscles knotting—and the creature sprang. Hal’s fist lashed against something soft and yielding: then the supple body wrapped itself about him sucker discs gripping his skin, his clothes. As he tore at the thing, craniel tentacles coiled about his neck, choking him.
With a violent wrench he ripped the monster from him and hurled it across the room. Landing catlike on widespread feet, it charged again, its ceaseless whisper a demoniacal thing. Hal swung again—missed—and a second time those tentacles encircled his throat, and the suckers clung. The wide mouth was fearfully close to his face, flat, rheumy eyes burning in
to narrowed gray orbs. For moments they lurched around and around, twisting, reeling in a furious struggle.
Again Hal’s superior strength asserted itself as he tore the thing loose and flung it spinning. For an instant it crouched, tentacles writhing, body weaving back and forth, madness gurgling from its gaping mouth—then it leaped toward the tessaract!
A tentacle closed the switch and the monster was in the glass pile. A second behind, Hal checked the motor, but the creature was gone—into the void—out into the emptiness where Rita was! With a curse Hal reached for the switch.
CHAPTER IV
PURSUIT!
A SCREAM—a woman’s scream—slashed the silence. Sweating in mental turmoil, Hal hesitated. Again the cry, then a spasm of hysterical sobbing. The veins bulged on Hal’s forehead, and his fingers tightened on the switch. Let her scream—Rita needed him! Still he hesitated, and up to him came a weird cackling—the voice of old Mrs. Derch, the housekeeper!
Hal’s mind became suddenly icy, and he dashed toward the stairway. He ought to consign to hell the old woman and her screaming—but he couldn’t.
With startling clarity, extraneous things registered on his mind. Newsboys were yelling in the street. A radio somewhere blared.
“—seems to be worldwide. From everywhere comes news of people collapsing. Doctors are helpless. The strange shadows are being seen more often. And now monsters are appearing—naked pink things without arms. Panics are sweeping some cities. Martial law is being declared.
“One strange fact has been observed. A careful check has shown that the shadows have first been seen in the homes of scientists—mathematicians. And most of the collapses have been found among the same men. Some significance—”
Hal heard no more. He had reached the room in which he had left Dr. Rand. Faint laughter came through the door, unhinged laughter. He pushed the door open—and stopped short, staring unbelievingly.
Dr. Rand still lay motionless on the davenport. On the floor close by sprawled two awkward figures—old Phillips, the servant, and a tall man Hal recognized as Dr. Carew, the family physician. On their faces was stamped a dreadful emptiness and an unearthly fear. Across the room a gray-haired woman slouched loosely in a deep chair, madness looking out of her thin face. She laughed—and Hal shuddered.
“Sara—what’s wrong? Look here—it’s Hal. Sara!”
She glanced up owlishly. “Hee—hee—I fooled it—fooled it! I fainted an’ it didn’t get me! Got them—” A crooked finger pointed toward the man-servant and the physician. “—but didn’t get me!” Then suddenly she began to weep hysterically. “Got them, but didn’t get me.”
Hal shook his head pityingly. That damned shadow had done this, had drained the life from the two men, and had destroyed her sanity. Abruptly he started. That strange solidity of the creature—had it come with the life taken from Dr. Rand, Phillips, the physician? Fantastic thought—but how else explain his transformation? He glanced at the prostrate figures, then shrugged. There was nothing he could do—and he had delayed too long already. He darted into the hall, sprang up the steps. A faint, demented sobbing drifted after him.
As he ran, fear grew in Hal Kinkaid. He could not rid his mind of an image of a pink-skinned monster with a snakelike body and a tentacle-rimmed mouth. A monster out there with Rita . . .
He reached the laboratory, was beside the tessaract. He jammed down the switch, his body tensed for speed. Impatiently he waited while the hum of the motor mounted—then with a single smooth motion, he cut the switch and sprang into the glass block.
Turbulent energies flayed him, lashing, tearing—cosmic forces seized him—and he was through, in interdimensional space.
When his senses cleared, Hal Kinkaid circled the enshrouding blackness with sharpened senses. Nervous tension gripped him. Long he gazed—but he saw nothing. He listened—heard nothing. There were no shadowy forms near to molest him—nor was Rita near—and thought of her had become a deadening weight.
“Rita!” Out through the void he sent the mental call. “Rita! It’s Hal!” There was no answer. Again he called—and waited—and silence came back to him, only dead silence that throbbed and hammered loudly out of the blackness.
Gray despair dropped upon Hal Kinkaid, numbing him. He was too late! Rita—gone . . . dead!
Interminably, he floated in vacancy, his thoughts dulled, hopeless. Then after a time his grief crystallized into a bursting fury. Ungovernable rage and hatred swayed him. The pink thing—it must have destroyed her! He could visualize its attack with its choking tentacles and fleshy sucker discs—and his rage became madness. He willed himself to the horde of shadows.
They leaped toward him, a tenuous wall of drab gray mist. Spread out over a vast area, they seemed to have assumed military order, as though they were engaged in a concerted attack on some invisible foe like a gigantic wheel with spokes radiating from a common center—but spokes that extended in every direction—they were flowing steadily toward their hub, a brilliant square of light, flowing through a tessaract, to Earth—not Rand’s tessaract, for his doorway was triangular! Then there must be still others!
The thought vanished as Hal saw beside that spot of radiance, directing activities, a figure less tenuous than the rest. His fists tightened, and down he flashed into the hazy mass, down, toward a flesh-pink creature with satyr limbs.
The creature saw him, and darted aside, whispering frantically. Within the throaty mouthings Hal sensed something of command to the surrounding shadows, and something of fear. Then he reached the monster, and his fist plowed viciously through its aeriated form. He, too, was tenuous—but he was less tenuous than the thing he fought. Hal struck again, savage satisfaction surging through him. This thing could feel! It was less wraithlike than its fellows—yet was too devoid of substance to offer resistance to Hal’s more solid body.
Again his fists lashed out, and the other fell back, devils of fearful hatred glaring out of hazy eye sockets. Its whispered commands were wild pleas for aid. In answer the shadows swarmed over Hal, enveloping him in a cloud of misty gray. He ignored them. Only the thing he fought existed.
He swung another blow, his fist tearing deep—and he followed it with clawlike hands reaching for the slender body. His fingers gripped it, ground into it—and the brute tore away, fled through the emptiness, anguished whispers coming back to Hal. And Hal followed.
On—with the speed of thought in a race through utter darkness, the dull ache of grief in Hal, and a consuming anger; the monster spurred by a goad of fear. On—until abruptly out of nothingness leaped something so tremendous that, it vanished above and below, to right and to left, in a dim haze—as though a universe had come into sudden being before them!
The monster, far ahead, slowed, as though striving furiously to stop—then flashed on, through a great circular portal of light that opened before him—vanished within it.
Futilely Hal tried to check his headlong flight. Something irresistible held him—drew him on. The portal loomed ahead, a thing of pale silvery radiance, beyond it an elusive suggestion of inconceivable shapes: crazy, multi-angular solids, mazes of distorted arcs—a nightmare world of mind-staggering shapes—the world of four dimensions!
It was fearfully close; he was within it; and an inferno of pain seized him. Something rasped and tore his nerve-ends like fingers of white-hot steel. He was swelling, bursting—then a mighty force caught him and whirled him away. Blackness fell like a crashing blow.
CHAPTER V
THE WORLD OF FOUR DIMENSIONS
WHEN consciousness returned, Hal Kinkaid’s first sensation was one of some vast and unfamiliar power. The fires of a new life flared within him. It seemed as though he had been freed from age-old fetters that had been an unrecognized burden. So vastly increased and rarefied was his intelligence that he could not fully comprehend the extent of the transformation he had undergone.
Dimly he realized that the black emptiness no longer surrounded him; but the thought vanished
in the wonder of his own strange metamorphosis. What had happened to him?
Then he knew, as though the will to know brought knowledge. He had entered the realm of four dimensions—and in that entry had been transformed into a four-dimensional being! Logical enough. A one-dimensional being in a two-dimensional world; a two-dimensional being in a three-dimensional world—each would have to be transformed to comprehend the higher realm. Why not a similar transformation for a three-dimensional being in a fourdimensional world?
He directed the power of his senses on his surroundings—gazed about with eyes that saw on every side simultaneously. Wonder filled him, and a confused sense of unreality; but as his four-dimensional nature asserted itself, he realized the significance of what he saw. He was looking through what seemed to be gigantic, transparent bubbles, bubbles that interlocked, moving about him in an unbroken dome, passing through each other as though they possessed no material substance. Beyond them was something vague that seemed too close to be seen, something that ended in the walls of a gigantic hall, stretching far back into some strangely understandable infinity. Those walls seemed singularly lacking in solidity; Hal could see past them into a world of geometrical confusion—yet a realm that was the embodiment of orderliness and rationality—an unimaginable city, multiangular, polycubical—yet a city that was systematic, methodical, reasonable! Streets and buildings, earth and sky—he could see them all—yet none bore even remote resemblance to those with which he was familiar. The sky seemed unthinkably distant, yet near enough to touch. The rest of the city—masses of volumes, cubes, spheres, pyramids . . . tessaracts projecting in a fourth direction . . . were far away; yet something told him that though he was here in the hall, he was in them, too—an infinite figure like they were!
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