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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Astounding Stories, Sep 1934, with "The Living Equation"
BILL SIKE was a burglar; Hugh Wilmot a mathematician. Which was a misfortune. Ever after, Wilmot was to bemoan the fact that their respective roles had not been reversed. Nor would Sike have raised the slightest objection. Quite the contrary!
Sike, when he picked on Wilmot's small but comfortably furnished home on the outskirts of the great city as a suitable site for the exercise of his talents, had no inkling of what awaited him. If he had, he aggrievedly informed his interlocutor after the event, he would rather have marched to the nearest police station, confessed to the contemplated crime in futuro, and accepted with a cheerful and philosophic mind a three-year stretch in the can.
But then, as his guide, mentor, and counselor, "Louie the Eel," pointed out with much penetrating language, it all boiled down to the fact that he, Bill Sike, was a disgrace to the profession, a blundering idiot, and a stumbling amateur. Catch a skillful craftsman like Louie arousing a household in the course of his nocturnal business, or falling all over a lousy infernal machine in a mad attempt at a get-away!
So the world was thrown into a state of convulsion from which it has not yet extricated itself, without at the same time having any clear idea of the exact mechanism of the debacle. Bill, for particular reasons associated with the laws on the statute books governing breaking and entering, maintained a discreet silence, except to the aforesaid Louie the Eel, and to Hugh Wilmot, who was able to exercise a certain compulsion.
But Bill, as has been stated, was not a mathematician. He could not remember, under Wilmot's most stringent cross-examination, just what it was he had done, and the almost supernatural phenomena of which he was an unwilling witness and sole human participant had left him reduced to a state of incoherent gibberings. As for explanations, alas——
Wilmot knew the explanations. He had been in the habit, when the hour was late and the wine good, of expatiating to his friend, Arnold Polger, certain fanciful theories which Polger, a lawyer and an intelligent man to boot, received with a certain open-mindedness because mathematics generally was in all conscience mysterious enough.
But it was the method, the accidental concatenation of levers and light impulses and whirling disks which set the machine into strange motion, that excited Wilmot to frenzy. Bill squirmed and growled and groveled, and swore that he had been too busy with panicky flight before, and too terrified after, to know what he had done. The machine, of course, was wrecked, together with everything else.
Wilmot, being a mathematician, calculated the possible permutations and combinations of all the levers and light cells and disks he had incorporated into the damned thing to be a staggering figure with enough naughts on the end of it to take five thousand men five thousand years to exhaust every possible combination. That is, even if he could reproduce exactly what had taken him seven years of ceaseless toil to construct.
So it was that Wilmot tore his hair and fumed helplessly and swore at an unkind fate that had not destined him to be a burglar from his cradle, so that on that eventful night of September 16th, he could have burglarized his own home and crashed into the machine himself.
This is how it all came about.
ARNOLD POLGER followed his host patiently through the library and living room into the rather large chamber that had been built to accommodate week-end guests. He was in an expansive mood. Sally, the cook, had thoughtfully provided all his favorite dishes, and the cigar in his mouth had an excellent aroma.
He liked visiting his friend, Hugh Wilmot. Law was an exacting profession, clients sometimes bores and judges a curse, so it was a relief to steep himself in the rarefied, but extremely exciting, atmosphere that eternally surrounded the mathematician. It sharpened his brains, honed them to razor edge, even though he could not often quite follow the glittering dance of equations.
Wilmot flung open the door. "This," he announced with a certain pride, "is what I wanted you to look at."
Polger surveyed the machine with considerable interest, but no understanding. It filled half the chamber. An intricate array of gears meshed on gears; innumerable levers connected with turning wheels underneath the supporting stanchions; and thick cables ran to an auxiliary motor. Photo-electric cells cast a strange bluish glare on every disk and gear of the complex mechanism. And midway between machine and ceiling, motionless, suspended from no discoverable source, was a smooth, round, transparent globe, a hollow, thin-walled bubble.
"Well?" he said at last. "What is it?"
"An equation producer. I've worked on it for seven years, and I think I've got somewhere."
"Oh!" Polger said disappointedly. He had been intimate with Wilmot long enough to understand mathematical phraseology. "Something like the 'brain' machine at Massachusetts Tech, for solving differential equations, or the tide calculator at Washington, eh?"
He was really sorry. After all, his friend was brilliant, and he had received in the course of years many cryptic hints of this ceaseless toil of his. He had expected something more.
Wilmot glared at him reproachfully. "I said equation producer," he said, "not equation calculator. I choose my words carefully. Those, clever as they are, are mere glorified adding machines. They solve the differential problems that are fed into them, problems for which any mathematician of modest attainments could get the answers with pencil and paper and a few hours' work.
"This is something different. It starts where the others leave off; it is a mathematician on its own hook."
Polger puffed comfortably on his cigar. "Suppose you explain," he suggested.
Wilmot gazed raptly at his creation. "You notice the hundreds of levers and disks?"
"Yes."
"Every one of them, when set, represents a definite component in an equation."
"Exactly the same as the Mass. Tech, 'brain'," Polger pointed out.
"In a way," Wilmot admitted. "But with a tremendous difference. These deal with vectors, directional mathematics, and tensors, the mathematics of strain, the most advanced and intricate of all forms of modern analysis. Without these twin flights of man's genius, we should be helpless to explain the exact inner workings of the universe." His eyes held a far-away look.
"Sometimes I think that these symbols, the little scratches we make to represent vectors and tensors, are the universe, the structure itself, and that what we see, the physical, the mechanical, are mere outward clothings of the eternal mathematical thought. We——"
"In other words, your machine is an improvement on the others," Polger interrupted hastily. He had heard Wilmot's peculiar theory before, and it still didn't quite make sense to his practical mind.
Wilmot smiled grimly. "Not at all! My machine will, I hope, build from where the best of us leave off. In other words, it will take our most complicated tensors and vectors and proceed as though it were itself a supermathematician. It will construct of its own accord new problems, new equations, beyond anything I, or any one else, have been able to accomplish so far. It may even," and Polger was surprised at the light in his friend's eyes, "create an entirely new order of mathematics, something as far beyond tensors as they are beyond the multiplication table."
Polger's cigar had gone out. He forgot to relight it. "But then you have created a real thinking machine," he said slowly.
Wilmot nodded. "Exactly!"
THE lawyer was bewildered. He looked again at the complex array of steel parts and photo-electric cells. It was exactly the same as before—incomprehensible.
"But how? What force——"
"Light, electricity, energy waves," Wilmot responded promptly. "It all goes back to my theory, the one you listen to without grasping at more than the hem of my meaning. Mathematics is real. The higher equations, educed solely from the inner consciousness of our greatest minds, without former roots or counterparts in the world of what to us is physical reality, have, for all their seeming violation of common sense and things as we see them, satisfactorily explained the constitution, the very essence of the universe."
"I still don't——"
Wilmot disregarded the interruption. "I felt therefore that these symbols we evolved were as much existent and endowed with a life of their own as, let us say, the Earth and stars and the atoms whose actions they explained and predicted. Suppose, I thought, we could actually clothe these abstract symbols with physical reality, make them manifest to our senses, would they not interact, produce new forms, even as hydrogen and oxygen in close contact will form a new substance—water."
Polger lighted his dead cigar with a shaky hand. Had his brilliant friend gone mad from too much pondering?
"I am not crazy," Wilmot said quietly. "I succeeded. Each disk can be moved to a position corresponding to a directional vector. Each lever, depending on the amount of thrust, warps the flat steel and creates a condition of stress and strain corresponding to a tensor. A steady beam of light, playing upon the warped, directed disks, suffers certain minute changes. This accords with the theory of relativity. The rays are then reflected to the photo-electric cells, each contacting a single disk.
"Electrical currents are set up in the cells, and these in turn are focused in beams within that globe you see suspended in mid-air."
Polger, his head spinning a bit, craned his neck upward again. "I was wondering about that," he said.
"That," said Wilmot, "is my greatest creation. By a series of strategically placed magnets, thermostats, electrical, and other controls, I have eliminated or neutralized every possible force that might have acted upon that quartzite globe. To all intents and purposes the vacuum within is a section of empty space, quiescent in a universe of its own. As far as it is concerned', the rest of the world of matter and force has no meaning, no existence."
Polger gasped and looked a bit more respectfully at the motionless orb. "And what may the purpose of all this be?" he asked faintly.
"It permits the electrical impulses, each slightly varied by its vector and tensor component, to interact without the disturbance of any outside force. Nowhere else in all space does such a condition obtain."
"I begin to see," Polger said thoughtfully. "And you think that the mathematical waves, so to speak, finding themselves free of all interference, will combine to form new equations, which in turn will fall into new combinations—new to humanly acquired mathematics?"
"Exactly!" Wilmot grinned delightedly. "And I've evolved a method for imprinting the new series on revolving drums from which it will be possible to effect intelligible translations."
Polger felt himself in the presence of great forces. He was awed. Sudden desire swept through him. "Try it out now, Hugh," he said quickly. "If it works——"
Wilmot smiled and shook his head. "It isn't as easy as all that," he said. "I haven't completed the series of tensors I want to feed into the machine. I want it to be the highest flight yet of the human mind, the next step after Einstein's world equation of ten variables. To-morrow it will be finished. And to-morrow night—— But we'll sleep on it, old friend."
A half hour later the house was dark and still. Wilmot, strangely enough, snored soundly, while it was Polger who tossed and stared wide-eyed at the blackness of the night outside his window. Sally, the cook, in her room in the attic, dreamed, as she did every night, of the handsome prince who came to solace her subconscious for her dry and withered spinsterhood.
BILL SIKE moved silently to the rear of the house. Thick clouds obscured both moon and stars, and the house itself was but a vague shadow. A perfect night for a burglar!
He flicked his pencil flash cautiously at the low-lying kitchen window. Louie the Eel had taught him that early in the game. "Most people," remarked Louie sagely, "is dumb. They lock their doors with fancy locks an' patent chains; then they go ahead an' leave a window wide open."
Bill chuckled. Smart bird, Louie! For, sure enough, the upper sash gaped invitingly. Within seconds he was inside, feeling his way carefully through blackness. The next room was the dining room. He cast a small questing pencil of light over its contents. An old-fashioned sideboard of rubbed mahogany took up almost the entire opposite wall. Bill grunted his satisfaction. Sideboards meant silverware, and silverware was convertible into cash. Louie the Eel took care of that. He shifted his sack to his other hand and advanced.
In so doing, he brought his shin in sharp contact with the edge of a chair. The chair moved violently against an end table, which tottered and sent a lamp crashing. Bill himself howled with anguish at the pain to his shin. He had not learned the art of repression.
Arnold Polger, still awake—his restless thoughts had traveled from his friend's machine to more important things, to wit, whether the bill he had sent to a certain client had not been underestimated—sat bolt upright. He shouted fatuously: "Who's there?"
Sally, with the salt kisses of her dream prince wet upon her lips, thudded back to reality and screamed. Wilmot shot from healthy sleep to instant awareness. His first thought was of his precious machine. He left his bed in a single bound, and his bare feet made quick patter on the carpeted stairs. Polger groaned and followed, stubbing his toes in the blackness.
Sike was aghast. His first solo burglary had ended in disaster. His shin throbbed and his flash had flown from his hands. It lay at the farther end of the room, making a pool of radiance. He glanced wildly around.
Feet and accompanying voices were catapulting down the rear stairs, cutting off flight through the kitchen, the way he had come. A door loomed dimly to his left. He darted through it, cursing.
Some one yelled "Stop!" behind him. Panic gripped his vitals; he lost his head. He smashed straight on, missing the door to the outside and safety, smacked his shoulder against the opening to the spare chamber, spun around, howled, and went headlong into the darkness within.
Cold metal caught at his feet, tripped him. He thrust his hands out blindly to save himself, and sprawled, flat, outstretched, heavy, against serried banks of levers, buttons, and disks.
At once there was a whir. Things moved and slithered beneath him. A humming sound smote at his ears. Outside there was more sound—the noise of an aroused household.
He scrambled off the spinning contraption, whining in self-pity. Then he screamed in good earnest. His head was back and his eyes glared. He forgot the inglorious end of his venture, the looming hoosegow.
UP above him, suspended in midair, was a huge shining globe. The light within it was ghostly, shimmering. It looked to his affrighted imagination like a bodiless head come to plague hint for his sins.
Even as he stared, paralyzed into stone, mouth still open from his scream, the globe swirled with strange green currents which grew thicker and thicker until they seemed liquid, oily.
Fantastic configurations appeared and disappeared within its depths, succeeded each other in rapid succession. Cubes, rhomboids, cones, parabaloids, then shapes and forms beyond all human or physical—conceiving—fourth dimensional, fifth, multidimensional, swirled and melted with the rapidity of their contriving. Higher and higher they built up, pure sirupy vibratory essences, until the whole mass seemed to explode of its own complexity.
The globe expanded into an unknown dimension and disappeared suddenly. Waves of green luminescence beat outward, surrounded the burglar, pierced through the confining walls of the room as though they were so much glass, went on and on with unimaginable rapidity, beyond the speed of light, past the substantial stone of the house, into the night, engulfing, swallowing up, fields and rivers and towns and the solid earth itself; New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, swift-cleaving liners in mid-Atlantic, soft green isles in the South Pacific; London, Paris, Moscow, Shanghai, the Gobi, Eskimo igloos in frozen Greenland, whales spouting in Ross Sea.
Out into space the radiance went, impacted on the Moon, pierced it through and through with green fires, expanded outward with ever-increasing velocity. Within seconds Mars, Jupiter, Pluto were aflame with virescent shine; the Sun shuddered and masked its yellow heat under the tremendous influence.
And still the beating waves did not cease. Space rolled up like a well-scanned parchment before their gigantic strides. Alpha Centauri winked suddenly green; so did Sirius, Procyon, and far Aldebaran. The Milky Way glowed with the strange gleam and the Galaxy was hurdled. On and on, spanning the nebulae, racing through island universes, past Andromeda, until the very outposts of the scheme of things entire were far behind. Out into the emptiness, where matter did not exist, where space itself was a figment, where the waves of mathematical probability were the only reality in the inchoate, unstirring dreams of creation.
And the heart of the universe, the core of all things, was in a room in Wilmot's house.
A ball of liquid green light hung motionless where the globe had been. Within its strange consistency was a paradox. Featureless forms, passive activity, abstractions made visible, mathematical equations of dizzying complexity clothed in ceaseless vibration.
Bill Sike moaned and remained rooted to the floor. Terror robbed him of speech, of movement, of any human faculty of comprehension. Outside, Hugh Wilmot, pajama-clad, hurled himself toward the open doorway and crashed into an invisible wall that sent him back, battered and reeling.
Arnold Polger, barefooted, came panting up. He stopped abruptly, stared. "What the devil's happened?" he gasped.
Wilmot did not answer. He crouched like a linesman, smashed forward again. He brought up short, his shoulder compressed, and once more he fell back, face twisted in agony, frenzied with something beyond agony. Yet no obstruction showed.
Polger plucked at him with restraining hand as, insanely, he bent to resume his futile charge. "Don't be an ass," he said sharply. "You'll kill yourself."
Wilmot turned his tortured face to him. "Don't you see?" he almost sobbed. "The machine—it's worked! Some one—that man in there—started it—somehow——"
POLGER peered through the luminescence that bathed him, together with the universe, and saw the fantastic ball within, the fear-frozen figure of Bill Sike. His legal-trained mind responded immediately. "He's a burglar," he snapped. "I'll call the police."
"To blazes with the police!" Wilmot shouted. "I'd give a million dollars to be in there, in his place. Something has happened that lay beyond my wildest dreams."
"What?"
Sally, stringy gray hair in iron curlers, voluminously wrapped in a flannel nightgown, stumbled down the stairs. The queer green radiance was unmerciful to her sallow, dried-out features. She saw the globe of light, saw Bill Sike, who, released from his paralysis, made a wild dash for the door, to be smashed back from nothingness and converted into a gibbering, moaning wretch. She screamed shrilly.
"Shut up, Sally!" Wilmot snapped.
But Sally was beyond hearing. She was already out of the house door, into the green luminescent night, running, sobbing, shrieking, cutting her bare feet on stubbly grass, crying doom to all the world. Nor was she alone on her wild flight that night.
Wilmot caught his breath. "It's mad, mad! The equations have formed in the globe; they have spawned and combined and propagated new equations—I catch faint semblances of mathematical abstractions clothed in being within; but they've done more than that. They're affecting the universe; changing its laws maybe."
He glared at Polger in a sort of futile frenzy. His voice rose almost to a scream. "They are the universe! You, I. are mere illusions, manifestations of their eternal configurations." He gripped his friend's arm with fierce strength. "Good Heaven, man! Do you realize what it may mean? Suppose they spawn a new type of mathematics, non-Euclidean, non-Riemannian, non-tensor, non-vector, something that does not fit in with the present laws on which our universe is constructed."
"Well, suppose they do?" Polger said a bit impatiently. So far, it was a mere matter of light phenomena due to that peculiar globe which, strangely enough, had disappeared. He was more interested in catching the burglar. The man might come out of his groveling fit any moment and make a break for it.
"You still don't understand!" cried Wilmot. "Our universe would vanish like smoke into the limbo of forgotten things together with the underlying equations which were its basis. Another universe would take its place, consonant with the new mathematics. That light is spreading, Heaven only knows how far. It's alive, sentient, instinct with the newborn equations. It will devour, destroy, the old, the accustomed."
Polger stared blankly. His practical mind fumbled at the implications. "And what will happen to us?" he asked feebly.
Wilmot laughed bitterly. "Us?" he echoed. "We'll be dissolved with the rest of the illusions. There'll be no place for our symbols in the higher mathematics. If only I could get in there, to stop the machine, to see how it is set."
He shouted, hoping to break through the wall of force with his voice, to reach the groveling burglar, to make him understand what to do. But Sike rolled on the floor in a veritable fit, nor could he have heard in any event. The force bubble that had been thrown around the room was impenetrable to any agency known to man.
POLGER still did not believe. He shifted uneasily from one bare foot to another, acutely conscious of his state of undress, of the fact that the uncanny green light was playing nasty tricks with their complexions. He wanted to call the police, the fire department. Those very practical embodiments of law and order in a universe of law and order would know just what to do.
Wilmot's cry brought his head jerking up. "It's come! The new order of equations. They've just spawned. Our universe is done for. Good-by, old friend! If only I could understand, get in there——"
His voice trailed off; he fell unconscious.
Polger lasted a while longer. Perhaps his physical configurations conformed a bit closer to the new laws. Bill Sike lay inside, mouth agape, foam frozen on his lips, eyes protruding, to all appearances dead.
Polger saw the uncircumscribed ball of green liquid flame change slowly to a pure supernal orange of dazzling hue. Figures, vibrations, swarmed in ceaseless whirling within. Then suddenly, there was a soundless explosion, the strange component abstractions fell into a pattern—a pattern into the depths of which Polger's mind penetrated for one instant of breathless, awful comprehension.
For that one instant he was in tune with the new universe. Then, as the ball expanded and rushed to engulf him, he, too, fell unconscious. Never after was he able to explain what it was he had seen, what for that one dazzling second he had comprehended. Wilmot swore and fumed over him, even as he did over Bill Sike, without result.
Polger shook his head feebly and gabbled about forms that had gone beyond all dimensions, that possessed no dimension at all, forms for which time had no meaning or existence, and which—most stupendous of all—were pure thought, pure consciousness, pure life, stripped of all physical excrescences.
Wilmot, the one man who could have explained, who could have duplicated the phenomena, had not observed. It was given to a burglar to initiate and a lawyer to witness the finale, and none other. For which the universe as we know it, to the farthest nebula, should give heartfelt thanks. It was close enough to destruction as it was, and Wilmot's caution could be ill relied on in the presence of greater and vaster scientific experiments.
THE night mail was flying rather high over the Alleghenies. The passenger, a radio star in a hurry to get to a big movie contract in Hollywood, leaned forward toward the cockpit.
"Everything seems lighted up with green lights," he said conversationally. "What's up—a celebration?"
The pilot heard him perfectly. For the first time he realized what was wrong, what had been bothering his subconscious for the past few minutes without his being able to lay a finger on it.
The deathly silence; the absence of all sound. The roar of the propeller was muted to nothingness. They seemed to be swimming in a motionless sea of green flame. For a wild moment he thought they were falling, yet his instruments showed motion, and the body throbbed from a noiseless motor. The lights, too, bothered him.
He swung half around, anxiously. "I don't know just what——"
Orange blasts enveloped them. The next instant both men felt violently compressed into themselves. It was the last sensation they ever had. The plane and its occupants vanished; in their place a tiny, microscopic globule—electrons and protons compacted into a unitary mass—fell with terrific velocity toward the earth, to bore of its own incredible weight a mile below the surface.
THE great liner, Ladonia, nearing the coast of Europe, was ablaze with lights and merriment. It was the last night on board, and a fancy-dress ball was in progress. The saxophones moaned and the violins tossed off spangles of glittering notes. Fairy princes danced with Carmencitas and whispered words into small ears that brought quick laughter. The huge punch bowl ebbed and filled with magic rapidity.
The bar was crowded with men, flushed of face, beefy, righteously scornful of being togged out like Boy Scouts. Couples snuggled on steamer chairs near the lifeboats, oblivious to dance and bar and sky. A woman strode purposefully along the deck, peering into the faces of the bemused couples. Their faces were green with strange illumination, yet they did not notice.
The woman, hatchet-face grim with repressed fury, pursued her tour of investigation. In the shadow of a lifeboat she spied two dim figures locked in each other's arms. Lips were pressed tightly together.
She bore down on them like a destroying demon.
The man heard, raised startled eyes. "Maria!" he gasped. Without another word he tore out of the arms of his lovely companion, and fled down the deck as if all the devils of hell were after him.
The woman turned on the girl: "You dirty tramp, you——"
The captain stood on the bridge, legs astraddle. He stared into the night. "I've never seen an aurora like this before," he told the first officer.
"No more have I," said his subordinate. "It came up like a blanket. Look at the moon, too, and the stars. They're all green."
The telephone rang. The steersman said excitedly. "The compass has gone haywire, sir. And the ship doesn't respond to the wheel."
Another telephone jangled—the engine room. The shocked voice of the engineer. "Steam's gone, sir. And the fire's out; the coal lies dead and cold. Tried to light a match, sir, and the blamed thing——"
The universe turned orange.
The liner Ladonia tilted, shuddered, and rose straight into the air. A huge waterspout followed her.
The captain sprang toward the pilot house. The ship tilted more, and he sprawled out into the open; a whirling tiny figure that rushed up and up, keeping even pace with the soaring liner.
The fleeing man, avoiding the wrath of an aroused wife, stumbled and catapulted over the rail. He, too, became a satellite of the ship.
The fancy-dress ball was a confusion of struggling, screaming, and floating creatures. The ship accelerated its mad upward flight; ice formed a quick curtain; the cold of the stratosphere bit into the thinly clad bodies of the passengers. Their screams grew more and more feeble; blue congealment stilled their struggles.
Then the air rushed out into space with a great swoosh; the limits of the atmosphere had been reached. The frozen bodies developed steely hardness; those few who were still alive literally exploded from release of pressure.
Higher and higher, faster and faster, the great ship fled, followed by masses of ocean turned into glittering ice, followed by the dead captain and the man whose wife had caught him in flagrante delicto. A huge cosmic morgue, with thousands of dead bodies floating and bumping within its vast interior, the liner sped upward and outward, past the Moon, past Mars, out into the region of the asteroids.
By that time the universe had settled back to normal, and the Ladonia became a new asteroid, swinging around the Sun in a majestic period of five years and thirty-four days.
The laws of gravitation had been reversed for the particular sector of the Atlantic Ocean in which the liner had unfortunately been.
FOR the new mathematical order of things proved positively freakish. Vast portions of the universe were left wholly untouched; others had only certain limited modifications in the laws governing being; circumscribed areas received the full impact and vanished or were irreparably changed.
Wilmot tried to explain it afterward. "You see," he told Polger, "my machine was not quite powerful enough. The superequations filled with the universe, it is true, but spottily. Had their influence been evenly propagated, nothing would have remained, not even space and time. Then again, the equations themselves realized before it was too late——"
THE New York telephone exchange was extremely busy, even though it was past midnight. Girls said monotonously: "Number, please! Thank you, I'm ringing them. Sorry, sir, the line is busy. No, madam; I don't know what is happening."
All New York had awakened at the curious green glare that shrouded the city, blotted the heavens, masked the normal yellow glow of millions of lights. All were possessed with the same idea. This was the weather bureau's job, for which good citizens paid taxes. Ask them about it.
James B. Wales, night editor of the Clarion, jiggled his phone furiously. "Listen, sister," he said hoarsely, "I got to get the bureau."
"Sorry, sir, line's still busy."
"T'hell with that. I'm the Clarion. Cut 'em all off and give me a wire. Be a good kid; I'll take you out to dinner, and a show."
The phone went dead. He swore and pushed black streaming hair out of his eyes.
"The dirty so and so!" he said in low earnest accents.
But the girl was not to blame.
For just then the orange wave lashed out.
Where the gigantic setback cliff of steel and tan stone had stood was a gaping hole. The Telephone Building was gone, vanished forever, never to return. Some topsy-turvy shifting of a mathematical formula in its vicinity had snatched it, thrown it headlong into a superdimension. It might have been right where it had always been, but our normal dimensions did not contain it.
A year later, when all hope of its return was abandoned, a new and larger building was erected on the spot. Yet Wilmot always had an uncomfortable feeling that the ghost, the superdimensional ghost of the kidnaped structure, glared forlornly at and through him every time he entered its precincts.
For by some strange unaccountable freak, telephone communication with the world as it is had not been lost. Engineers traced it eventually to a wire that seemed to taper into nothingness. A guard was placed around the wire to prevent accidents. The guard was maintained for at least a month after the final message had come through.
Nellie McCafferty was the heroine of the tragic misadventure, the girl whom Jimmy Wales had called unmentionable names. He took every one of them back, blazoned her name all over his headlines, raised a whacking big fund for the relief of the parents whom she had supported out of her scanty salary.
And no wonder!
For through her he achieved the biggest scoop in the history of the newspaper business. Imagine talking directly with a girl in another dimension, getting her sensations, the sensations of a thousand other men and women in that crazy place; people, who to all intents and purposes, were dead, vanished.
It was his connection, cut off by the orange flash, which still functioned.
For days she stuck to her self-appointed task. They were, she told Jimmy, in a world of utter blankness. No light, no sound, no depth, or height, or width; nothing but a flat impenetrable grayness. Of course, said Wilmot, when he heard of it. They were still three-dimensional people in a three-dimensional building. The new dimensions could mean nothing to them.
At first the thousand marooned humans called frantically for rescue. They did not understand, did not realize why, when they tried to leave through open doors and windows, there was nothing for them to step into. It was a curious sensation, which, in spite of faithful efforts to reproduce for the benefit of the people on Earth, held no meaning.
Then awareness came to them, and with it fright. Rescue from their predicament was impossible. Though doubtless as near to their own kind as interpenetrated bodies could be, they might as well have been out on Orion's belt.
For weeks the world hung with fascinated horror on the slowly unfolding tragedy. Only a thousand lives were involved, as against the millions who had died all over the Earth, and the possible countless billions of forms who went crashing in debacle throughout the universe. But here was novelty, gigantic drama, human interest, everything that went to make up a perfect play. Ghosts from beyond our time and space talking with us daily!
And the Clarion grew fabulously in circulation, and Jimmy Wales was content.
Nellie McCafferty told in plain, unadorned words the story of their growing fear, the trapped feeling. Then came hunger; thirst a little later. The supplies of the company's cafeteria were scanty and had to be rationed. Then came a worse difficulty; the air in the building was giving out, growing foul and stale with overuse.
Day by day she communicated; slowly, more painfully each day. Then finally, the phone rang.
Wales lifted it; there was a faint whisper, a gasp. "Yes, yes, Nellie!" he half shouted. He swears, and so that night's edition had it, that he heard her say: "Good-by, people of Earth. I am the last alive."
Then, and this was indubitable fact, the connection broke, irrevocably. The superdimension had lost contact.
To Jimmy Wales' eternal credit be it stated that he had to wink his eyes rather violently for a moment; then once more he was the hard-boiled editor.
"Copy desk; rewrite man, boy, pressroom!" he bellowed. "Stop everything, take this for the final. Wow, what a story!"
THE teeming province of Shantung in China disappeared, dissolved as though it had never been; land, people, animals, rivers, thereby bringing to an abrupt end the plans of outside nations to gobble up this delectable bit of territory.
In its place was a hole, a gigantic incredible hole extending over thousands of square miles of area and descending in a smooth bottomless pit a trifle less than a thousand miles into the interior of the Earth.
Geologists and scientists of all nations, with scarcely a thought for the millions of unfortunates whose mathematical laws had vanished and with them their own existence, descended with loud glee upon this unparalleled opportunity to see the very bowels of the Earth bare.
For over a hundred years they were busy, inventing machines to take them down where no man had been before, studying strata, examining specimens, wrangling, concocting new theories to fit new facts, living, growing old, bearing a new crop of scientists to take their places, all in an unprecedented state of excitement.
LUCKILY sparsely inhabited, North Australia stood up on end for hundreds of miles, to remain a fabulous mountain visible for thousands of miles. The Pacific rushed into the depression and formed a new ocean. As a result, the general level of the Earth's seas was lowered, and Atlantis was rediscovered. It proved to be in the shallows of the Caribbean Sea. Stately buildings, unimaginable artifices of ancient people, rose, covered with slime and mud.
But there was another more serious effect of this upending, coupled as it was with certain other changes in the structure of the solar system. The delicate balance had been destroyed. The Earth's year was cut to three hundred and thirty-six days, seven hours, two minutes, and prominent scientists issued grave warnings. At the present rate, all other things considered, the year would become shorter and shorter, and within fifty million years, Earth and all its works would fall into the maw of the Sun.
At first, however, the news had been very much more alarming. The Sun and planets of the solar system were functioning, with slight modifications, according to former schedule. But the rest of the universe seemed to have gone haywire. The background of stars went round and round in streaking circles of flame. It was impossible to register the number of revolutions per day, so fast did they swing from pole to pole. Not only that, but the hitherto fixed stars were actually moving across the face of the heavens, visibly, shifting whole minutes of arc from day to day.
Astronomers turned gray overnight. Rough calculations showed speeds that were absolutely unbelievable—trillions of miles per second. It was impossible; it was mad; it was insane! Wilmot finally hit upon the explanation.
Time had changed for the solar system. A new system of coordinate functions had displaced the old, while the rest of the universe had remained unaffected.
Time had speeded up in the region of the Sun and its planets. A thousand years of sidereal time had been compressed, for us, into a single instant of existence. The rest of the universe was growing old while we still remained infants, so to speak.
This strange state of affairs made no appreciable difference in our private concerns, inasmuch as, aside from the clock of the stars, life seemed to go at the same pace as before. But it played the very devil with sidereal astronomy. All calculations, all former data, had to be revised.
NOR were these the only profound disruptions due to the release of sets of formulae and equations that had no former counterparts in the universe. Stars blanked out completely; others were discovered after much painful searching in an entirely different part of the heavens. Instead of an expanding space, the nebulae seemed simultaneously to have made up their minds to return to the primeval gigantic atom from which they had originally emerged.
New life forms appeared suddenly on earth, strange sentient creatures whose physical basis was silicon, who neither breathed nor ate nor seemed to move. Nor was this inexplicable. The mathematics of evolutionary processes had shifted, too.
Fortunately they all soon died.
The maddest freak of all, however, was the simultaneous appearance of formerly respectable material things in different parts of the world. The Empire State Building, for instance, found itself in the middle of the Arabian Desert. Travelers, whose reputation for unswerving honesty and sobriety was unimpeachable, reported it there, solitary and somewhat ashamed. Yet the Empire State Building still occupied its accustomed quarters at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. Mount Everest, while still a fixture in far-off Tibet, also achieved a second domicile not far from Washington, to the delight of intrepid mountain climbers who had not the wherewithal to make the expensive and arduous journey to the Himalayas.
Not so pleasant was the predicament of a poor devil of a bank clerk who found himself suddenly three people, wandering the streets of the same city, meeting himself over and over again, to his own vast confusion and to the utter bewilderment of a wife and four children who had not followed him in his metamorphosis. Quite naturally she raised a to-do about such goings on, and quite as naturally each of the three simulacra objected to further support of a family, who, each argued, refused whole time conjugal and filial duties.
At last the matter reached the courts and became a cause celèbre. The case dragged for seventy-five years. When a decision was finally reached, all of the original participants were dead, and the learned jurist who wrote the closing opinion labored under the reasonable misapprehension that it. had something to do with a remission of taxes on a nonexistent plot of land.
WILMOT slowly became aware of his surroundings. He was flat on his back and his side hurt. Polger lay near him, breathing stertorously. A bit farther off, eyes closed, and moaning through clenched teeth, was the burglar, Bill Sike.
Where was he? What had happened? He opened his eyes. The green light had gone; in its place was darkness streaked by curious wheels of fire. Underneath him, too, was damp strangeness. He felt weakly with his hands.
Earth and grass and small stones, wet with dew. He was out on the lawn, in the open. He sprang to his feet, panickily. How had he been carried out of the house? What about his precious machine—the mathematical life to which it had given birth?
He strained feverishly. It was his own lawn, without doubt. There were the two beech trees in which he took so much pride; to the left, as ever, nestled the little rock pool.
But the house—it was gone! A depression showed where it had stood.
Polger staggered to his feet, eyes bloodshot, staring. Sike instinctively started to creep away on hands and knees.
"No, you don't," Wilmot said harshly, and grabbed him by the collar.
Bill whined. "Please let me go, mister. I got five orphaned children, an' I only did it to get 'em some grub. Please don't send me t' jail."
Wilmot laughed wildly. "Jail? There are no jails. I want you to tell me exactly what you did." He shook the shivering burglar. "Do you hear?"
But as has already been stated, Bill's information was not illuminating.
MORNING came on a stricken universe. Wilmot's house was definitely gone. With it the machine, the cause of the tragic adventure, and also the mathematical globe of equations.
It was decided to keep quiet about the machine.
But Wilmot and Polger discussed interminably in the privacy of their own quarters.
"What," asked the lawyer for the hundredth time, "happened to the globe of equations?"
Finally Wilmot said hesitantly: "It may only have been a dream, but while I was unconscious, it seemed to me that I was aware of certain things happening in the globe. The configurations, the pure inherent thoughts, were dissatisfied. They had conformed parts of this universe to their own laws and theorems, but not all. The old laws were in the main too powerful. There was tremendous conflict.
"It was therefore decided to build a universe of their own, completely outside our time and space, where the outward habiliments would be the harmonious counterparts of their equational desires."
Polger pondered a moment. He rose. "Thank God!" he said with due deliberation.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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