Alienist. Laurence M. Janifer
say he was coming from other dimensions.”
“But surely—”
“There is a lot of empty space,” I said. “Even in crowded places, there’s a lot of empty space.”
“Between the atoms, to so speak,” he said.
“Everything we know,” I said, “is nine-tenths nothing. There are forces traveling that nothing, from one particle to another. But there doesn’t seem to be anything else. Ten per cent of the space has particles in it—speaking loosely. Quarks, subquarks, and all the things built of quarks—protons and electrons and so on, right up to us. The other ninety per cent—nothing.”
He nodded, very slowly. “I do see the point,” he said.
“It’s not a new idea,” I said. “It’s been out of fashion the last few centuries—space-four, which does call for a fourth spatial dimension, started people looking in another direction, so to speak. But even back before the Clean Slate War, some people had theories involving something, God knows what, existing in the empty space between what we can detect. In the ninety per cent.”
He stared at me. “How very ingenious,” he said. “Not at all the sort of thing a Giell would think of. An actual, physical universe, co-existing with this one, and undetectable by it.”
“At least,” I said, “there may have been such theories. Everything got so damn scrambled when the War happened—”
“So I understand,” he said. “A shame, to let such destructive emotions loose. But I do understand that humans are like that.”
“Some of us, and some of the time,” I said, and he nodded again. “Not ‘other dimensions’ at all, but just what this Folla said—other spaces.”
“Fascinating,” he said. “Though of course there’s no way to establish—”
“No way in the world,” I said. “At least, until Folla pops up again.”
“You think he will?” He looked eager, as closely as I could read his face. Not worried, not puzzled. Something new to experience, something new to look at.
“He met me,” I said. “Somehow or other, he picked up enough of the language to make himself both understood and confusing. He flipped me thousands of light-years in no time I could measure. He must have expended some sort of work on all that. Maybe he wants to follow it up—for whatever reason. Maybe he just wants to see what happened, or what my ‘friends and neighbors’ are like, from somewhere nearby. I think he’ll pop up—sooner or later.”
After which, of course, nothing whatever happened for six weeks.
PART TWO
HARRIS FRANCE
CHAPTER SEVEN
I mean, of course, that nothing happened involving Folla, or other dimensions, or other spaces. In fact, the Hell of a lot happened, and I was right in the middle of most of it.
Not the shooting, though. I was out of range for that, and I would have heard about it eventually, I suppose, but in fact I got the news about as fast as anybody did, except the victim. Until then, I was working with Master Higsbee on the idea of other spaces. The math for such a concept had been worked out before the Clean Slate War, “as a theoretical exercise, Gerald,” he said. “You must remember that the ancients had no idea anything existed that was completely unmeasurable.”
“If you can’t measure it, it isn’t science,” I quoted.
“Exactly,” he said. “A silly attitude, but quite typical of the time. The saying spread so widely and rapidly that we have, today, no idea who originated it. People seemed to like it.”
“Well,” I said, “they had some excuse. Even psychology works better when you can put the numbers in—that’s what Psychological Statics is all about.”
“Ah,” he said. “You enjoyed your talk with Euglane?”
I nodded. “An interesting fellow. It was while we were talking that this other-spaces notion bit me.”
“You were bitten well,” the Master said. “It is an idea too long laid aside, Gerald. Such other spaces would be wholly intangible—not even detectable as forces, particles or waves or whatever the ancients called such things—I don’t recall.”
“Wavicles,” I said.
He shrugged. “To be sure. Deciding that a compromise is an object. Typical.”
“Well—”
“An object that cannot be detected in any way cannot be measured,” the Master said. “Therefore, it was not science; therefore it could not exist.”
“We can’t measure space-four,” I said. “But the ancients didn’t know there was a space-four. They have some excuse.”
“They knew that Cantorian infinities existed,” he said. “Cantor, Dedekind, many others lived and died before space flight. Such infinities are not mensurable in any usual sense; they can be measured in terms of each other, but not in terms of any objects themselves not infinite.”
“Well,” I said, “they were the ancients, after all.”
“They were a strange collection of people,” he said. “But let us leave them, and apply ourselves to something more interesting—to this idea of other spaces.”
We discussed it up, down, and sideways, and kept running up against the central puzzle: how in Hell could we contact anything that existed in the ninety per cent of the universe that was, for us, nothing at all except a passageway for forces? We came up with some notions, many of them complicated and all of them too silly to bother you with—but if you don’t hunt for all the notions, silly or not, you are not going to find the good ones.
And a few weeks went by. And I did other things—renewed an acquaintance here and there, went to a meeting of a club I’m a member of—spun time out, in other words, in the company of my friends and neighbors. And then, early one evening, Euglane called me.
I was, in fact, dressing for dinner, and looking forward to it, since a rosebud named Gjenda Cass, an expert in some arcane aspects of physical chemistry (which was not, for me, her major attraction, but I have no prejudice against physical chemists), had agreed to share it with me, and had suggested a restaurant I’d never tried.
“It’s rather a new idea, Knave,” she’d said, “and I think you’ll like it.”
I am all for new ideas, or at any rate some of them, and I was looking forward to suggesting to Gjenda some rather old ideas of my own, later on in the evening. I was putting some plain black studs into a lovely and expensive off-white shirt when the phone blipped at me.
I went and got it, keyed in Remote and said: “Hello?” as I put in another stud.
“I need you,” a voice said. Not, unfortunately, Gjenda’s.
“Euglane?” I hadn’t heard from him, nor had I called him; Master Higsbee and I had been off on another track, and I assumed that, if Euglane had any news about other dimensions, alien beings or the like, he’d be in touch. Until something happened, I wasn’t on any deadline.
“I dislike to ask it, Knave,” he said, “but I need to see you as soon as possible.”
His voice was still pleasant, just a bit gruff, but there was a lot of strain in it. “What’s happened?” I said.
He made an odd sound. In a human being I’d have called it a moan, and maybe it was one. “Death and destruction,” he said. “I am at home. You remember the address?”
Euglane hadn’t struck me as the kind of person who was given to random hysteria. I checked my watch. All right. “Give me forty minutes,” I said, and hung up without waiting for a reply.
Damn. There was just