Forgotten Fiction

by Lloyd Eshbach

  And, strangest of all, it seemed as normal as could be—save for that lurking three-dimensional sense which told him how bizarre everything really was.

  Suddenly Hal stiffened, every fibre of his new self vibrant with tremendous vitality. He remembered the monster—and Rita! Perhaps she, too, had entered this world! If so, she must be beyond this imprisoning net of interlocking spheres—and he’d find her. He moved toward the transparent wall, leaning forward grimly. His hand touched the moving bubbles, sank into them—and he followed. A struggle, the sense of stifling, compressing energies, and he was outside the dome, crouching with widespread legs on a firm, hard surface.

  The walls of the great hall were still about him, but they were solid now, like the walls of the tessaract in Rand’s laboratory. And that strange impression of unreality was gone; he saw with normal eyes only that which he should normally see. The net of spheres must have acted as an all-powerful telescope through which he had peered into infinity.

  Hal gazed upward. He was in the center of a great amphitheatre. All around him rose tier upon tier of squat backless seats, the lowest circle holding about twenty beings—geometrical spectres formed of spheres and many-sided solids, within them a suggestion of bodies like the armless, pinkskinned creature of the void.

  As he stared at them, Hal heard a sound behind him. He whirled.

  “Hal!”

  “Rita!”

  THE words came as one; then man and girl were caught in a fierce embrace. Unbounded joy and relief swept over Hal. He had thought her dead, slain by the monster, had followed the thing for revenge, and now—

  He held her away from him and gazed at her—and his eyes slowly widened. Was this the woman he loved?—this strange, geometrical figure? He could see the actual Rita distorted and obscured by hazy, cubical outlines not unlike the shapes that hid the armless things.

  “Do—do I look like that?” The words were incredulous. “So—much of me?”

  Rita laughed. “Of course. Why not?”

  Hal nodded slowly. Why not? He was four-dimensional now, since he was in a world of four dimensions. But who cared? There were things more important than that. Here was Rita; and all around were alien creatures, among them, perhaps, the monster he had followed.

  “What about them, Rita?” He gestured toward the tiers of seats, his voice low. “Are they—?”

  “They’re friendly,” she answered, “and they want to help.”

  She took his arm and led him around the high-piled mass of moving spheres—spheres that were as solid and opaque as the walls appeared to be. They reached the base of a wide dais and paused, staring at the monster!

  A hyper-being now, hidden in spectral solids, he was manacled to the platform. Standing on squat legs, his pink body almost colorless, the tentacles that ringed his wide mouth drooping abjectly, heglared at Hal in sullen rage. Hal stared back coldly, and shrugged. It looked like the end of the trail for the creature.

  Beside him, seated on an elevated disc, an impressive figure of vast power looked down at the man and woman. From him came a faint whisper, reminiscent of the voice of the shadows. And strangely, he spoke in a tongue that conveyed meaning to Hal’s mind—almost telepathic. The words were formal and somewhat stilted, yet there was something kindly and sympathetic about them.

  “Welcome to Hesplon, Hal-Kinkaid. Greetings from the Ninety-fourth Aalik of the Hall of Knowledge, and from all the Intellectuals.”

  Hal nodded rather stiffly and waited. Things looked peaceful, but he couldn’t be sure. After all, these beings had torn Rita and him from the void against their will. One good sign—they hadn’t been mancled like the monster.

  The Ninety-fourth Aalik answered his unspoken thought. “It is true that we drew you from the Void against your will, but it was an accident. You merely came too close to the Door; its action was automatic.”

  An image of the net of interlocking spheres came to Hal’s mind. The Door—between the third and fourth dimensions? Too close? But what had drawn him?

  “You were drawn—” The Aalik paused. “Better, I believe, that I explain everything to you as I did to Rita-Rand, to free your mind of bewilderment, and so that you may know that we are not responsible for the entrance into your dimension by the—Condemned.”

  The whispered words ceased. But the message continued, a series of moving pictures that seemed to materialize within his mind—a drama in the fourth dimension.

  First was a scene in the great hall. A group of nine hyperbeings were gathered around a device of bewildering intricacy, erected above the dome of revolving spheres. Deft tentacles were completing delicate adjustments. There was something furtive in their actions. Numerous hyperbeings, as tense as the central figures, watched from the surrounding seats. There was no sound; it was as though he were viewing a colored, stereoscopic motion picture with the sound-track disconnected.

  Now one of the nine looked up and Hal recognized the being he called the monster. There was triumph in the twist of his wide mouth, triumph in the rheumy eyes. For moments he seemed to be addressing his audience; then while the other eight Hesplonians drew back, his tentacles coiled around a long rod projecting from the apparatus like a switch.

  A brief pause—and into the hall from somewhere above poured a seemingly endless horde of Hesplonians—a horde that swept over the assembly in an instant, checking them in the act of rising—that overwhelmed them so rapidly and completely that they surrendered without a struggle—all save the nine in the center. They fought with insensate fury; but they were subdued finally. . . . And the scene faded.

  The Aalik explained in his penetrating whisper.

  “Under the leadership of Ersa,” he indicated the manacled figure, “a faction of radical Hesplonians had planned to open the gateway into a realm above ours—the fifth dimension. They contended that we would benefit by the knowledge the higher beings could give us; that the Intellectuals in their blindness were ignoring an opportunity to better the conditions of Hesplon incalculably. Actually, they thought nothing of improving Hesplon. They wanted either to control the world or destroy it. And they planned to employ this means of accomplishing one or the other end. In secret, they built the necessary mechanism and installed it while Hesplon slept.

  “But they had been watched—and when there was no possible question about their intentions, we checked them. They were given fair trial, and were condemned to disembodied isolation in the emptiness between the dimensions.”

  HIS WORDS ceased and Hal was suddenly looking at another scene in the Hall of Knowledge. The seats of the amphitheatre were empty. A solemn group of Intellectuals stood in a wide circle about the dome of spheres—a dome that had changed! Transparent as it had been when Hal had looked through it into the hyperworld, it now opened into a vast panorama of black space, space that held other things, half-revealed worlds alive with motion.

  A slow procession of Hesplonians entered the hall from some hidden doorway, and passed within the circle of waiting Intellectuals. In single file they moved around the huge hemisphere, their tread stiff and mechanical, as though—the thought came to Hal—as though they were hypnotized. When they formed an unbroken circle, the procession halted. The heads of the Intellectuals bowed in concentration—a wave of almost tangible force seemed to come from them—and the Condemned sagged slowly to the floor, limp, unmoving.

  And into the transparent dome drifted writhing cloudy things, things without definite form, things that vanished through that dome in a weaving, twisting haze of somehow luminous shadow!

  Hesplonians entered and removed the bodies, while the Intellectuals waited in motionless silence. Then another group of Condemned entered—to sag, to die, their life drifting into the black void—another—and another—and yet another interminably. . . . And the vision faded.

  “Afterward,” the Aalik commented, “we gave to the Door the power to seize and hold any of the Condemned that came within the field of its strength. In their incorporeal form they woul
d be kept captive until we released them to undergo more—thorough—punishment. You, being more material, could force your way through the spheres.” As an afterthought, he added, “as you may have understood, the Condemned were cast out by the combined metal strength of the Intellectuals—and stayed, for until Ersa crashed through, none came back from the Void.”

  Hal nodded, whistling his faint monotone. He understood what he had seen, but some things were still foggy. “What has all this to do with us? Why did these—shadows—suggest plans for tessaracts to the minds of our scientists? Why did they choose Earth, of all three-dimensional realms? And why did they want to enter a lower dimension? Was it to escape the Void, or—”

  The Aalik interrupted. “To escape the Void, yes—but more than that. They planned to enter the world of three dimensions, draw life from the bodies of three-dimensional beings, and with that life gain sufficient solidity to come back and overthrow Hesplon. Or, more likely, to go on into the fifth dimension, and enlist their aid in bringing about our downfall. They chose Earth because of all the spheres in the third which we have investigated, it alone has physical conditions approaching ours.”

  Again Hal nodded, grimly now. He remembered Dr. Lucius Rand, and Phillips, the old servant, and the physician lying unconscious while Ersa had become strangely solid.

  “But that dome—“Hal questioned. “When I came through, it was transparent. Now it’s opaque. And in that vision it was transparent again, giving me a view of space and—other things.”

  “When you entered,” the Aalik replied, “the dome was set to draw from space any of the Condemned who came too close. Its action was directed into Hesplon. For those looking out, it was opaque. In the scene I showed you, we were casting the Radicals out into the Void, and the action of the Door was reversed. From our point of view, it was transparent; and had anyone been looking in, it would have been opaque. I’ll show you.”

  He crossed to the huge hemisphere, stooped, and darting tentacles played over a concealed keyboard. The spheres halted momentarily, blurring hazily—then they were revolving in the opposite direction; and they formed an inverted bowl of crystalline bubbles.

  Hal stared through the ghostly spheres into utter darkness. Rita was beside him, her arm hooked in his—peering together into nothingness.

  Again the tentacles of the Aalik darted over the keyboard, and lights came alive in the gloom—squares and triangles of radiance marking tesseracts in Terrestrial laboratories; dim vistas of half-light where living mist floated. . . . Those tessaracts—the Condemned, who like Ersa had gotten through to Earth, must have set them glowing, the doorways open. Most of them must be out of the Void now, free to do what they would on a defenseless world.

  Rita’s low voice broke the silence. “I wonder what’s happening out there. Those things—how could people defend themselves? Appearing like ghosts out of thin air, they’d demoralize almost everyone. The human race will be helpless. We—we should do something!”

  Hal shrugged helplessly. “But what? We’re in another world. And even if we were there—”

  “Something will be done!” The Aalik interrupted, his whisper bearing unusual intensity of feeling. “Even now the Draks of Hesplon are gathering. Indirectly, we are responsible for the danger in which your world finds itself, since we sent the Condemned into the Void; and they are a menace to our own life—so they will be removed! It will not be long—”

  Frantic whispers from hoarse Hesplonian throats cut short the Aalik. And a shape hurtled past Rita and Hal, flinging itself headlong into the dome of crystalline bubbles. Hal had a blurred glimpse of Ersa bursting through—then he vanished in the blackness.

  Ersa—free!

  THE feelers of the Aalik writhed in important rage as he stared into the endless dark. He turned and glared at the empty manacles.

  “I should have known,” he whispered, a mere thread of sound. “He was only partly material—he was tenuous enough to free himself.” He paused and contempt replaced his wrath. “Ersa is a fool. He has gone to warn his fellow Radicals, I suppose. But it will not help them. The Draks will destroy him with the rest.”

  At that instant, a hyperbeing appeared at the top of a ramp running like an aisle between the seats, and descended to the Aalik’s side. Silent communication passed between them; then the messenger turned and sped back the way he had come.

  “The Draks will be here almost immediately,” the Aalik said. “Until they come, you may see what is happening on your world.” His tentacles flicked the keyboard.

  Staring intently through the crystal spheres, Hal and Rita saw something that had been a mere blur of ghostly light, leap up toward them. It was a colossal view of all Earth, a gigantic panoramic revelation of the entire globe spread out before them in a veritable living Mercator’s projection. Earth laid bare to the all-seeing eyes of a four-dimensional world. Daylight, dusk, dark and dawn merged over the flattened face of the world. Land and sea, cloud and sky—all appeared in an incredible bird’s-eye-view.

  Again the Aalik touched the keyboard and the distant world flashed up to their eyes, so close now that they seemed to become part of the scene. Rita gasped in horror, and Hal ground his teeth as he felt the blood drain from his face.

  A strange little village squatted between two peaks. Quaint cottages staggered on either side of a winding, dusty road, a road now darkened with queerly dressed folk—a people caught in the clutch of terror. There were shadowy shapes drifting above the throng, shapes that drove them on like cattle to slaughter. Frightened faces peered over cringing shoulders. Hands flailed wildly about the heads upon which shadows had settled—flailed with ever weakening force—till bodies sagged—and lay still—to be trampled beneath the feet of those who fled. And rapidly the shadowy forms were growing more solid, pink-skinned monstrosities like Ersa creeping into view.

  Under the Aalik’s manipulation, the scene changed. “London!” Hal breathed as he recognized the British metropolis through the veil of overhanging fog. The spectacle of the mountain village was repeated on a vastly magnified scale. Hysteria, blind fear rode the backs of fleeing mobs. Black masses of panic-maddened humanity glutted narrow thoroughfares. Motionless forms dotted every street. Motor cars sped wildly away from the approaching cloud of shadows, vague forms materializing out of thick mist. Here and there one twisted suddenly, swerved, and crashed headlong into a crowd of screaming pedestrians. Screaming—though the watchers could hear no sound. Countless tragedies. Collisions of trains, of automobiles; airplanes staggering, crashing; a chaos of a disrupted civilization.

  Flight, the universal impulse! Nowhere was their sign of resistance—for how could one resist a foe little more tangible than air?

  Hal turned a pallid face to the Aalik. “Can you stop them? They’ll wreck everything. And those people—no doctor of Earth had succeeded in reviving any of them before I—left. Ersa’s victims—”

  “They will be stopped! And soon. The Draks have come!” As he spoke, the Aalik’s tentacles darted across the board; and the blackness of interdimensional space replaced the view of Earth.

  Into the great hall poured a stream of hyperbeings, flowing down a long, wide ramp, an angle where, curiously, no angle should have been. Beneath their distorting spheres and cubes, Hal could detect legs short and squat, pink like all Hesplonians, but with massive bodies, with wide heads, great gaping mouths, and heavy, powerful tentacles—creatures created for combat Down the ramp they came in single file—to the hemisphere—and into it! One after another, an unbroken chain, flowing into the Void.

  Hal peered intently through the spheres; and he saw wraithlike Draks flash into the blackness, speeding toward the distant, glowing tessaracts, spreading out to all the spots of light. Interminably they poured into the dome, a horde that far outnumbered that of the Condemned.

  When all had gone, the Aalik turned to Hal and Rita. “Now we Intellectuals will follow to direct the Draks. Only Vinst will remain to adjust the Door for our return. He will
set the controls so that you may view Earth and see the destruction of the Radicals.”

  A Hesplonian stepped from the group of scientists and came to Hal’s side. At a whispered word from the Aalik, Hal and Rita drew away from the dome; and in orderly manner the Intellectuals swept down into the crystalline pile—into it—and out through the blackness after the Draks.

  CHAPTER VII

  FINAL STRUGGLE!

  MAN and girl were alone with the Hesplonian, Vinst. The latter turned to the keyboard, depressed several buttons; and again a view of Earth leaped up before them. Hal glanced at it, then spoke to the hyperbeing.

  “If it’s all the same to you, how about shifting around till I tell you to stop?” The Hesplonian ignored him. Hal looked at Rita questioningly. She smiled, then explained:

  “The Aalik told me before you arrived that he was the only one of his race who could talk with us. He has studied conditions in the third dimension, and has mastered communication between the two types of beings—sort of a cross between speech and telepathy.”

  Hal forced a short laugh. “If that’s the case, I suppose we’ll have to look at whatever he wants us to see. If the show’s no good, I’ll get my money back.” He was suddenly serious. Rita—I wonder where it will end.”

  “So do I, Hal.” Her face tightened. “Tell me, Hal—what about father? The truth now.”

  “Now don’t start worrying,” Hal chided gently. “He was somewhat groggy from his return trip, but I’m certain he’s okay now.”

  The girl slowly shook her head. “I don’t believe you, Hal.” She looked pleadingly into his eyes. “Is—is he like those people we saw in that village and London?”

  Hal nodded mutely. His arm went around her. “I’m sure he’ll be all right, Rita dear. Phillips had called a doctor; and by this time he probably has him as well as ever.”

  “We’ll hope so, anyway.” Rita smiled bravely. “Even though you told the Aalik that no doctor had succeeded in reviving any of them.”