"Well," said Dr. Wooden, straightening. "Hello."
Jonathan sat down and put out a trembling hand, drew an open pack of cigarettes toward him.
"I've been far away," he said slowly. "To the other side of the universe. Billions of miles away, and yet—in your own backyard."
Dr. Wooden grinned and sat on the edge of the sandstone tabletop. He lighted a cigarette himself, saying, "Tell me."
Jonathan told him. And then he said, "It seems understandable enough, really. Those powers I possess. What are they but an innate adaptability to environment. And isn't that the true goal of Nature?
"The environment is what destroys, is what weakens, is what kills. Call it a blast furnace. Call it disease. Call it a clawing tiger. It is, nevertheless, our environment: temporary or permanent. To survive that, man must be immortal, in a physical sense. In the sense that he possessesin himselfall the necessary attributes to enable him to overcome that environment. That way lies immortality."
Dr. Wooden regarded the glowing tip of his cigarette. He said, "That's clear enough. It is fantastic, but who knows what changes one million or two million years will bring in man. Lord knows, it brought a lot of changes on Earth itself! Now, about the flames—"
Jonathan crushed out his cigarette.
"They were the emanations from the calcatryte. I realized that eventually. It stood to reason. It had to be something alien to a universe where light curves. Something that either ate up matter or made it invisible or opened a door for it to leak out somewhere, into nothingness.
"Calcatryte gives off straight light, so powerful that it eats through metal. It could as easily eat through dirt and rock, through the moon of a planet, through a planet itself. Through the universe, in short. In a universe based on curving light, that unbendable light was an anomaly. It ate up our universe, or started to."
"Again, clear enough. It's reasonable, and possible. But when you went into the shadows and passed through them—you emerged here in my laboratory. But my laboratory is billions upon billions of miles from Neeoorna."
Jonathan grunted, "In terms of ordinary space, yes. I passed through hyperspace."
"That's a mathematical concept."
"I know. But we—you have proved it exists. It has been proven mathematically."
Dr. Wooden looked dubious. Jonathan picked up a pencil and pressed down with the point on a slip of graph paper.
"That black mark, that dot, is one-dimensional. Extend a line from that point to another dot. The line is also one-dimensional. Let us put the pencil on the line, supersede the line with the pencil. Since the pencil has three dimensions, so does the line—for the pencil is the line.
"Suppose ann-dimensional object. Supersede the pencil with then-dimensional object and we have ann-dimensional line. It is ann-dimensional space ofn-dimensional points, instead of our original definition of a line as a single dimensioned space of points set in a row.
"Ordinary space is called three-dimensional because it is occupied by three-dimensional things. Planes, for instance. But if we speak of lines of spheres or circles, we can easily step into the realm ofn-dimensionality.
"The drawback is that we can't see it. We can't envisionn-dimensionality.
"Consequently, we have always been intrigued by many-dimensionality because we can't picture it to ourselves. But the calcatryte rays weren't hindered by a lack of imagination. They just zoomed off into ann-dimensional space, and wound up near Neeoorna. They were lines, remember, straight lines. And lines can ben-dimensional."
Dr. Wooden rubbed his chin and said, "Could be, could be. But how does hyperspace solve your problem?"
"A dot inside a circle can go outside that circle without crossing its circumference. Likewise, I could pass from the inside to the outside of a sphere without going through the surface of a four-dimensional object.
"Those calcatryte rays beamed out from your lab into hyperspace, passing through ordinary space without touching it, and appeared billions of miles away. When I entered the shadows, I followed their course."
Dr. Wooden drew a deep breath, saying, "If I hadn't seen you materialize out of thin air—" and broke off, laughing.
"Seeing does enter it, doesn't it? But the attempts that were made to fight the shadows! Why were the attackers always destroyed? Unless—unless their weapons backfired on them—"
"That's my thought. They were shooting three-dimensional objects at an n-dimensional space. The three-dimensional objects never got anywhere. They didn't even leave their source. They expended their frightful energy right where they began."
"Well," muttered Dr. Wooden. "You could talk for hours and notproveanything."
He broke off, looking at Jonathan. He lifted a wooden mallet and held it out to him.
"Destroy it," he said simply. "If it's that much of a danger to the universe, it deserves obliteration."
Jonathan put out his hand, brushed the mallet aside.
He bent over the table, setting both hands on it, partially supporting his weight.
The calcatryte in the metal cradles began to quiver as though made of soluble, moving liquid. Their veins ran into channels of color, red and green and blue and yellow. The blocks hazed over, writhing.
The calcatryte was fading, bit by bit.
Jonathan stood up. He looked worn, but his lips smiled.
"It's done," he whispered.
"You won't stay?"
A smile came and dwelt on Jonathan's lips.
"No," he said. "No, I won't stay. I am going back to Neeoorna, and then to Zarathza—to look at a sunrise coming up over the waters of the Jaralayan Sea."
He went out, and the door closed behind him, softly.