Astounding · Analog

I have for years been working on the theory that there is another world, existing here in this same space with us. The Fourth Dimension!

Before Northwood’s horrified sight, he vanished; vanished as though he had turned suddenly to air and floated away.

In this, I have even been compelled to manipulate in the matter of time! I must not only defeat and annihilate the minions of Moyen, but must work from a mathematical absurdity, so that at the moment of impact that moment itself must become part of the past, sufficiently remote to remove the monsters at such distance from the earth that not even the mighty genius of Moyen can return them!

Dear Editor: Thus far the chief objection to time traveling has been this: if a person was sent back into the past or projected into the future, it would be possible for said person to interfere most disastrously with his own birth. —Arthur Berkowitz, 768 Beck Street, Bronx, N.Y. (Mar 1932)

Dear Editor: I write this letter to comment, not on the stories, which satisfy me, but on a few letters in the “Corner” of the March issue; especially Mr. Berkowitz’ letter. . . . Since he brought up the question of the time-traveler interfering disastrously with his own birth, I will discuss it. . . . Back he goes into time and meets his grandfather, before his father’s birth. For some reason John kills his grandfather. —Robert Feeney, 5334 Euclid, Kansas City, Mo. (Jun 1932)

Dear Editor: I read and enjoyed Mr. Feeney’s interesting letter in the June issue, but wish to ask: Why pick on grandfather?. . . This incessant murdering of harmless ancestors must stop. —Donald Allgeier, Mountain Grove, Mo. (Jan 1933)

The Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary continuously, but only by a certain finite amount, or exact multiples of this amount, had been the key that unlocked the door.

This is accomplished by means of extremely complex vibrations penetrating earth, metals, buildings, space itself, and returning to our viewing and sound reproducing spheres to reveal the desired past or present occurrences at the point at which the rays of vibrations are directed.

Because the article on dominant coordinates had appeared in the Journal of Physics and had dealt with a state of things in which the normal coordinates of everyday existence were assumed to have changed their functions; when the coordinates of time, the vertical, the horizontal and the lateral changed places and a man went east to go up and west to go “down” and ran his streat-numbers in a fourth dimension.

A terrestrial astronomer may reckon that the outburst on Nova Persei occurred a century before the great fire of London, but an astronomer on the Nova may reckon with equal accuracy that the great fire occurred a century before the outburst on the Nova.

Let’s try and reduce it to rationality. The cage was—is, I should say, since of course it still exists—that cage is a Time-traveling vehicle. It is traveling back and forth through Time, operated by a Robot.

I could not help wondering, as we settle swiFTLy over the city, whether our historians and geologists and other scientists were really right in saying that Denver had at one period been far from the Pacific.

Think a minute. If the watch seems running double speed that would indicate that your perception of its movements had slowed down fifty per cent.

“We are here only as onlookers,” the Wanderer explained sadly, “and can have no material existence here. We can not enter this plane, for there is no gateway. Would that there were.”

What I’ve done is to build a time-space traveler, working by atomic energy. Even as long ago as 1913, you know, Rutherford succeeded in partly breaking down the hydrogen atom. By 1933, others succeeded in partially breaking down atoms with high voltages of electricity. But they used up far more energy than they got back, or released. I’ve simply perfected the method to a point where, with an initial bombardment of fifty volts, I can break down one atom and get back thousands of times the energy I put in. There’s nothing strange or wonderful or miraculous about it. I don’t create energy of power from nothing. I simply liberate energy that already exists. Part of the power I use to break down another atom, and so on, while the rest is diverted to propel the torpedo by discharging through tubes—like a rocket. I’ve made one short experimental trip.

The year of grace 1935! A dull year, a comfortable year! Nothing much happened. The depression was over; people worked steadily at their jobs and forgot that they had every starved; Roosevelt was still President of the United States; Hitler was firmly ensconced in Germany; France talked of security; Japan continued to defend itself against China by swallowing a few more provinces; Russia was about to commence on the third Five Year Plan, to be completed in two years; and, oh, yes—Cuba was still in revolution.

I am the daughter of Ellayn, who was the daughter of Ellayn, until far back there was the first Ellayn. She and Worin were the first two.

I must have a subject. And there is a certain—risk. Not great, now, I’m sure. My apparatus is improved. But, in my first trial, my subject was—injured. I’ve been wondering, Mr. Webb, if you—

He looked at the fantastic, beauteous sleeper, and his haggard face was terrible again with longing and despair and dread.

He’s found the fourth dimension and it is the realm of invisibility.

“[. . .] This is an experiment in mental monism, you know, along the time-space continuum that forms material totality.”
I looked at Nicholas and, despite all my conversatons with him, I did not comprehend.

You know as well as I that in 1932 the Earth was groaning under a tyranny more brutal, morehorrible, thanany in all recorded history.

That evening, as he and Lois Lane stepped into the waiting room, Garney came out of his office and looked in.

Past, present, future—all one. And we, moving along the dimension called time, intersect them. I can’t grasp it. But I can’t deny it. If only there were proof—

To come to my point, Richard, I have for many years been very disgusted with the fact that all the human race—indeed every living organism—must waste a third of its life in sleep. Think what a race we’d be if we never slept!

There are an indefinite nubmer of possible futures, any one of which we would encounter if we took the proper ‘forks” in time.

Why should father want tounlock the doors of the unknown—probe backward through time? Beyond the beyond!

Of course! It has always been known that you would ‘appear’ sooner or later.

In my time it was June 5, 1942. The only thing that’s certain is that it is summer; the year depends on—well, it depends on what year you were living in when all this happened.

Physically, I am thirty-three years of age. But, counting years of terrestrial chronology, I am three hundred and eighteen years old.

They stand about, little misshapen men with huge heads. But their heads contain only brains. They had machines that could think—but somebody turned them off a long time ago, and no one knew how to start them again. That was the trouble with them. They had wonderful brains. Far better than yours or mine. But it must have been millions of years ago when they were turned off, too, and they just hadn’t thought since then. Kindly little people.

“The first stroke of the elaborate electric-gong arrangement which Barton had had built into tthe clock, sounded out”

For a space of roughly ten ages we have been asleep, in a state of suspended animation, in that mighty mausoleum known as your Moon.

“These,” said Pete calmly, “are my fiancée.”

Incidentally, I have forgotten the most important thing of all. Remember that Donovan’s dominating idea was to prove to me, and to the world, that he had been in the Cretaceous and hobnobbed with its flora and fauna. He was a physicist by inclination, and had the physicist’s flair for ingenious proofs. Before leaving, he loaded a lead cube with three quartz quills of pure radium chloride that he had been using in a previous experiment, and locked the whole thing up in a steel box.

It’s another form of the space-time field that I use in the Egg to bridge the gap between the coils of time.

The tracer fields are following all the world lines that intersected at the battle, back across the months and years. The analyzers will isolate the smallest—hence most easily altered—essential factor.

“Great Snell!” he gasped. “So that was it! I ran into a temporal snag!”

The Palace of Immortality was built in an eddy of time, the only known Reverse, or Immortality, Drift in the Earth Time Stream

By turning a calibrated dial, I check the possible futures

But Alveron and his kind had been lords of the Universe since the dawn of history, since that far distant age when the Time Barrier had been folded round the cosmos by the unknown powers that lay beyond the Beginning.

It was sensitive enough to pick up the “fingerprints” of light and sound waves imprinted on matter, descramble and screen them, and reproduce the image of what had happened.

Apart from its stupendous novelty value, the commercial success of slow glass was founded on the fact that having a scenedow was the exact emotional equivalent of owning land.

The danger was definitely not within the walls of Hold Ruath. Nor approaching the paved perimeter without the Hold where relentless grass had forced new growth through the ancient mortar, green witness to the deterioration of the once stone-clean Hold.

“Dragons can go between times as well as places. They go as easily to a when as to a where.”

Robinton’s eyes widened as he digested this astonishing news.

“That is how we forestalled the attack on Nerat yesterday morning. We jumped back two hours between times to meet the Threads as they fell.”

If one of these people dies young, that will pay your debt.

Lomua opened his eyes in an immaculate room with pastel walls and warm lights, feeling fully refreshed.

A dynamic landscape is timespace today.