John Norman Read online

  “You are familiar, are you not,” asked Herjellsen of William, “with the distinction between the sensibility-dependent property and the sensibility-independent property?”

  “Any educated man is,” said William. “That distinction dates from the time of Galileo.”

  “From the time of Leucippus and Democritus,” corrected Herjellsen.

  “Very well,” said William.

  “It is then my belief,” said Herjellsen, “that time and space, as we conceive them, are sensibility-dependent, a mode of our sensibility, a condition for experience, given whatever we may be. That we experience the reality spatially and temporally does not imply that the reality apart from our experience is as we conceive it to be. That we experience a bright yellow does not imply that in the physicist’s reality such a yellow, apart from our experience, exists. That we experience a symphony of Beethoven does not imply that in the physicist’s reality such music, apart from our experience, exists as we experience it. Rather it would be only a pounding on the skin. For the lobster, for the sponge, for the spider, it presumably would not exist, not as music. Similarly, of course, for them there might be beauties and rhythms that would be lost on us, we lacking the appropriate sensors, the appropriate sensibility.”

  “Space and time are unreal?” asked William.

  “As phenomenal reality, relative to our mode of perception,” said Herjellsen, patiently, “they are quite real.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Perhaps,” said William, “they are a mode of perceiving something which is doubtless quite real, or, perhaps they are themselves perceptions of something-or things-which are quite real.”

  “Perhaps,” said William, “they are modes of perceiving space and time, or, if perceptions, perceptions of space and time.”

  “Does the music of Beethoven, the color of bright yellow, exist in nature as you hear it, as you see it?”

  “No,” said William.

  “Why then do you fear to extend the distinction of sensibility-dependent and sensibility-independent property to space and time?” asked Herjellsen.

  “I am afraid,” said William, “because then I would be lost.”

  “Yes,” said Herjellsen, “you would then be alone-without your maps. Your very world would totter.”

  “Why do you suspect that space and time are not of the reality itself, or are different in that reality?”

  “Space and time, as we conceive of them,” said Herjellsen, “are irrational. Thus, I conjecture they are not as we conceive of them.”

  William said nothing.

  “It is interesting,” said Herjellsen, “men who conceive placidly of irrationalities are accounted sane. I who question them am accounted insane. I wonder who is truly sane and who truly insane.”

  Brenda Hamilton fought the terror. She shook her head. She looked into the cubicle.

  It had begun with a soft glow of light, vibrating, filling the interior of the cubicle with a fog of crystals, and then it had seemed to slip to the floor of the cubicle, like beads, like molecules forming chains of light, first keeping to the margins of the cubicle, then, strand by strand, darting across the plastic floor, until now the entire floor of. the cubicle seemed laced with light, and then, tendril by tendril, it began to climb the walls of the cubicle. Now the floor of the cubicle was covered, it seemed inches thick, with a matting of light strands, and more light, like illuminated vines began to grow about the interior of the cubicle.

  But it was not the light that frightened Hamilton. It was turnings and terror in her mind.

  William seemed calm. He had had the experience before. He was patient.

  “There are two times now,” he said, “that are present.”

  “One is a memory,” whispered Hamilton.

  “No,” said William. “Both are quite real. It is like a mountain and a lake. They are times, but they co-exist.”

  “That is not possible,” said Hamilton.

  “It is like the parts of a picture. They are different parts but they are all now. There are two times, and they are now.”

  “No,” said Hamilton.

  She shook her head in terror. She recalled Herjellsen saying that time, as we think of it, did not exist in the reality.

  “It is like a sphere,” said William. “It is like a transparent sphere. I see two points on one surface, each opposite the other. They are related to one another. Each is different and yet they are the same, and they are both now.”

  “Is it truly that way?” asked Hamilton.

  William looked at her blankly. “No,” he said, “that is only a poem, a. poem.”

  Hamilton shuddered. She sought a concept, a root to grasp, a branch to seize, even a poem that might try to speak what could not be spoken.

  “No metaphors from the phenomenal realm are adequate or clarifying,” Herjellsen had insisted. “It is its own reality, not ours. We cannot understand it in the modes of our perception. It is another reality.”

  Hamilton shuddered. There were no charts, no diagrams, no schemas, no pictures. Nothing would be adequate. It was not our reality. It was another reality.

  William smiled. “It is gone now,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” said Hamilton.

  “Frightening, the disordering of the time sense,” he said.

  Brenda smiled. William, light, pleasant, cool, witty, sharp, sophisticated, was again his self. His attention was now drawn to the cubicle, watching the phenomenon of the light. Now the cubicle was almost filled with the interwoven tendrils of brightness, like beaded strands of brightness. Hamilton looked at William. “Pretty good trick, what?” he asked Hamilton, not looking at her, referring to the light.

  Brenda wanted to cry out with joy. Suddenly William, in his casual manner, had made the world real again for her.

  It was William’s mathematics which Herjellsen utilized. William, a physician, but gifted amateur mathematician, had, utilizing analogies from the mathematics of polydimensional spaces, developed, as a fictive sport, a jeux d’esprit of ideas, a calculus for polydimensional temporalities. He had published this privately. The slim volume had come to the attention of Herjellsen, an omnivorous reader. What had been a form of fictive play for William, an engaging pastime, a lighthearted diversion, had given Herjellsen the language, the equations, for his conjecture. Men before Herjellsen had doubted the sensibility-independent nature of space and time, notably and most famously the tiny, hunchbacked, brilliant Prussian, Immanuel Kant, but Kant had not had at his disposal the mathematics of polydimensional temporalities, and Kant had been rational in a way that Herjellsen was not. Herjellsen brought to the problem the conviction that the mind might have the capacity to touch the reality. Kant had been of the Enlightenment. Mind, for Kant, had been essentially an organ of rationalities, conscious, reflective, clear, logical, Euclidean, a sunny, felicitous instrumental mechanism, common in all men, incorporating the canons of reason, a suitable device whereby man might, within his limitations, know the true, solve problems and advance in social progress. Kant was unfamiliar with the storms of the mind, the turbulences unleashed in the Nineteenth Century, the intellectual and technological explosions, and horrors, of the Twentieth. Kant was before the teachings of Freud, the investigations of the darknesses of the mind, the first organized probings into psychic phenomena, the first organized attempts to understand what might be the nature, and the powers, some perhaps untapped, and the reaches, of this mysterious, evolutionary oddity, the mind of the human being. Herjellsen, a crazed Finn, was the first man to bring together, in a madman’s brain, the conjecture, the mathematics, and the suspicion that the reality could be touched, that the key could be found, and that it lay in the mind.

  The translation cubicle was now aflame with light.

  Hamilton, and William, watched it with awe.

  Hamilton, glancing about, cried out. Herjellsen had not moved, but there was blood on the back of his neck, beads of blood. His collar was stained. His f
ists were clenched. He seemed oblivious of the world, of anything, save for one thing, the thought he held in his brain.

  Hamilton looked at Gunther. He had not spoken. His eyes were closed.

  The cubicle was exploding with light.

  “Kill it!” cried Gunther. “Kill it! Kill it!”

  Hamilton cried out with fear. William put his arm about her.

  “Do not be frightened,” said William. “It is the disordering of the time sense. In a moment he will be perfectly all right. It is only his reaction.”

  “It’s coming!” cried Gunther. “Give me the rifle, you fool l”

  Hamilton looked at him, frightened.

  “It’s dead,” laughed Gunther. “It’s dead.” He looked at Hamilton. “I killed it,” he said.

  “Yes, Gunther,” she whispered.

  Gunther smiled, and shook his head.

  “Do you hear it?” asked Hamilton. She knew it was not an actual sound. But it began to scream in her head, a highpitched, whistling note. It began to grow louder and louder. The light seemed now ready to shatter the heavy plastic of the cubicle. Hamilton could no longer look at it. She pulled away from William, shielded her eyes. The whistling note was intolerably loud. She shut her eyes against the pain of the light and, though she knew the sound was from within her brain, covered her ears with her hands. Then it seemed her brain would burst with the note, and then it was suddenly still, absolutely still.

  She opened her eyes, lowered her hands.

  “Look,” said William.

  The light was gone from the cubicle. It now seemed heavy, silent, very empty.

  “There is nothing,” she whispered.

  “No,” said William, “you are mistaken.”

  “What do you mean?” she whispered.

  “P is now present,” said William. “It is in the cubicle. The cubicle is now open.”

  Hamilton looked at the cubicle, the heavy, sliding plastic panel. The cubicle was closed.

  “It is closed,” said Hamilton.

  “No,” said William. “The cubicle is open.”

  Hamilton looked into the cubicle. It seemed very quiet now, absolutely still. The energies of P, asserted to be present, she knew, would not be, if they existed, in the visible or tactual spectrum. They could not be heard. They could not be seen. They could not be tasted, or smelled or touched.

  “Such energies cannot exist,” she had once said to Herjellsen.

  “Gravitation,” had said Herjellsen, “too, cannot be heard, nor can it be seen, or touched, or smelled or tasted, and yet it commands the motions of material bodies; it balances universes, plays with planets and guides meteors; does it not exist?”

  “Of course,” had said Hamilton. “We know it does. We can see its effects.”

  “And so, too,” bad said Herjellsen, “can one see the effects of P.”

  Hamilton stared into the cubicle.

  “It’s closed,” she whispered. “It’s closed.”

  “No,” said William. “The cubicle is now open.”

  Hamilton regarded the cubicle. It was three hundred and forty-three cubic feet in content, seven feet in height, width and depth, but, if William were correct, it was unfathomed in depth in another dimension. Hamilton wondered how deep was it? It was closed to three dimensions. She could see that. But, if William, and Gunther, and Herjellsen were correct, it was open to another.

  “It’s there!” cried William. “It’s there!”

  Hamilton screamed.

  In the center of the cubicle, on the floor, was a small, heavy-wire cage, about a foot wide, a foot high and two feet in length. There was straw in the bottom of the cage, and a pan of water. Hamilton saw it was a trap, that had been sprung shut. It must have been baited. Inside, peering out through the cage wire, its eyes bright, was a large rodent.

  Hamilton slipped to the floor, unconscious.

  3

  Gunther turned the Land Rover abruptly from the graveled road onto the plain.

  Hamilton, pleased, sat between Gunther and William. It was the first time she had been permitted out of the compound since her arrival.

  She, too, was now excited about Herjellsen’s work. The identification had not yet been made on the animal in the cage.

  When she had learned that Gunther and William were to take the Land Rover and seek another animal, a live specimen, wild, for the third series of experiments, she had begged Herjellsen to be permitted to accompany them.

  “Of course, Doctor Hamilton,” Herjellsen had readily agreed.

  Hamilton had been frightened that he would refuse. She had been incredibly relieved, elated, at the readiness with which he had acceded to her request.

  How marvelous it was to be outside the compound, away from the high, wire fence, the small, plain, severe buildings, of stucco and tin, the watching eyes of the armed blacks.

  The Land Rover churned dust from the plain, in a stream of debris cast into the air behind it.

  Gunther, his eyes narrowed, drove swiftly, too swiftly for the terrain.

  Hamilton did not mind. It gave her a sense of release. She sensed the air pressed aside by the passage of the vehicle, sensed the dirt, spitting away, beneath the tread of the heavy sand tires.

  On the graveled road, which passed not more than a half mile from the compound, which lay concealed from the road, the three of them had talked. William, as always, was affable. Gunther, as he usually was, was tight-upped, taciturn. Neither man wore a hat. A bag of water was slung to the right-hand door handle.

  Hamilton had been permitted to come with the men. Herjellsen had willingly acceded to her request. She was fully fledged now, a member of the team.

  The computer runs she had conducted on Herjellsen’s modified 1180, from data furnished by William, she had not completely understood, but she knew that they were integral to the development of the experimental sequence.

  On the road, away from the compound, the men had spoken more openly with her about Herjellsen’s work, particularly William. Gunther, too, had commented from time to time. And when addressed, he responded to her questions, carefully, exactly. Hamilton leaned back. She was pleased. She was out of the compound. She could speak with the men alone, with Herjellsen not present. They seemed more communicative outside of the compound. Within the compound, they were less willing to speak freely. Though Herjellsen himself was commonly pleasant, and congenial, he tended, without meaning to, to dominate any group of which he was a member. When he was present, there was always the waiting to hear what he would say. It was not only Herjellsen’s ponderousness, his erudition, his brilliance which tended to cause him to loom among his colleagues, but also the imponderables of age and experience; he was in his late fifties; and, too, that he was their head, the leader, the determiner of action, the employer. Perhaps most simply there was the fact that he was Herjellsen, short, incisive, powerful, dominating. To him even Gunther, like a young, powerful liegeman, deferred. It was pleasant then for the hour, or afternoon, to be beyond the wire of the compound. Gunther, Hamilton and William were young. They were more of an age, were more commonly equal, and had more in common with one another than any of them might have had with Herjellsen. It was pleasant to be apart from him, his experience, his weightiness, the innocent oppressiveness of his maturity, his dominance. The three of them were young, and were now alone together, Herjellsen left behind. And, too, though she did not perhaps fully realize it, it was pleasant for another reason, for Hamilton, to be with the younger men. She sat between them, one with them, talking, with closeness. She felt very pleased to be with them, male colleagues. She did not fully understand her feelings. Perhaps it was simply the relief of being out of the compound, beyond the wire. She looked at Gunther. Suddenly he looked at her, too. Startled, she looked forward again, out the jolting, dusty, insect-stained windshield. His attention was again on his driving. If William were not present, and Gunther began to make love to her, she felt she would be unable to resist him. Gunther would not ask her if h
e might make love to her; he would simply begin. And she knew she would be unable to resist him. She fantasized his hands opening her shirt, unhooking her brassiere, freeing her slacks from her body, his hands then at her thighs, lifting her legs, putting her on her back across the front seat of the rover, half stripped. She knew she would be unable to resist him.

  But she put such thoughts from her mind. She was a colleague, not a woman.

  “I still suspect Herjellsen is a charlatan,” said William.

  “It is possible,” said Gunther.

  “Yet-the artifact,” said William. “It seems genuine.”

  William referred to the piece of stone, spoken of by them as the Herjellsen artifact.

  It was commonly kept in the computer building. Hamilton had seen it many times.

  The artifact was rounded, chipped, roughly polished; it weighed 2.1 kilograms. Anthropologists would have referred to it as a tool. It was a weapon.

  The artifact was the most surprising result of the first series of experiments. There had been many abortive experiments, many failures, many disappointments, in the first series. But in the first series, bit by bit, rudimentary translation techniques, relevant to testing the Herjellsen conjecture, had been conceived, developed and refined. The first object to appear in the translation cubicle, two months before Hamilton had been employed, was a piece of broken branch, seared and splintered as though torn from its tree by claws of fire. It had appeared in the cubicle blasted and smoking. The radiocarbon dating on the branch, conducted by Gunther, indicated the branch, though of an unknown wood, was contemporary. This was as it should have been. The branch had been living, had been torn from a living tree. Other results, in the beginning, were similar, though the objects collected were generally simple stones, sometimes pebbles, or chips. Most appeared stained, some half fused and glazed. Toward the end of the first series Herjellsen had, with the aid of William and Gunther, considerably refined his techniques. One of the major difficulties to be surmounted in the practical application of the Herjellsen conjecture was the coordination of diverse terms in appropriate binary combinations; many such combinations yielded nothing; one had destroyed a generator; Herjellsen spoke often of interphenomenal translation, namely, the translation of an object from one phenomenal dimension to another; speaking phenomenally, one might have said from one time and place to another; two pairs of values were stipulated, those of the translation cubicle in a compound in Rhodesia and a given time, sidereal scale, for its longitude at the moment of projected translation; the other two values, the crucial binary combinations, coordinated with the space and time of the cubicle, presented fantastic difficulties; the mind of Herjellsen was like the hand of a blind man reaching out in a dark room of incredible dimension; generally it would close on nothing; but then, once, suddenly, blasted and smoking on the floor of the cubicle had lain a branch, torn as though by fire from a tree; the hand had closed on something; this was the first successful set of coordinates; Herjellsen, with William, had studied them intensely, noting parameters and matrices, resemblances and divergencies. They had been computerized and examined from more than two hundred aspects. They were repeated, but this time yielded nothing.