Dick said shortly, “We did today.”
“Sure! Twice. But once we had ‘em swimmin’,” said another man gloomily. “The other time you had tear-gas. Got any more tear-gas?”
“N-No,” admitted Dick. “But if I could get in touch with my friends—”
There was sardonic, mirthless laughter. If any man in the Other World had been able to get in touch with his friends on Earth, the fact of the Other World’s existence wouldn’t have remained a secret, and it would have been the object of the research of all the scientists on Earth for centuries or millenia. All Earthly science would have been focussed upon it, and it would have been reached and conquered long ago.
“What keeps the ruhks loyal?” demanded Dick. “Why do they work for the masters? If they’re so intelligent, why don’t they go off and be happy savage beasts?” Nobody knew the secret.
“I never saw a master,” growled a short, brawny man, “but the ruhks do. Every ruhk gets to stay at the palace a while every so often. The overseers see to that! And let me tell you, the overseers are scared of the ruhks, too! Plenty scared! It ain’t but three or four years ago that a overseer was given to the ruhks to play with. They had a swell game with him. I watched. First time I ever enjoyed watchin’ a ruhk game! There’s some trick the masters got to keep the ruhks crazy about ‘em—”
“Wait a minute!” said Dick sharply. “Overseers are scared of them? And still give them orders? Why do ruhks take orders from them and not from slaves?”
A tall man said with precise, academic detachment:
“It’s the robes. Police dogs learn to obey any man in uniform. Only overseers wear robes. That’s a uniform. Maybe the cloth has a special smell the ruhks recognize, but a robe would be enough. Slaves are nearly naked. A new-caught slave is stripped at once. That’s what makes him a slave in the ruhks’ minds.”
“But they’re supposed to be intelligent,” objected Dick. “Would that be enough—”
“Why not?” asked the tall man. “They’re intelligent, but they’re not educated. Illiterate peasants would accept a badge like that. In fact, they do. They obey any man in a policeman’s uniform. It doesn’t mean lack of brains. It just means lack of information. There are no schools for ruhks. They’re intelligent like men with limited educations.” Then he said deliberately: “Yes. I think that any of us with an overseer’s robe—we might need a bath, too— would be obeyed within limits by the ruhks. I would be quite willing to try to deceive them. I think it could be done at least for a time.”
“Good!” said Dick. “We’ll pick a few among ourselves to impersonate overseers, then. Right?”
The tall man said, “Overseers shave. That’s another badge. No slave ever has a blade he could use to shave— or cut his throat with.”
Dick fumbled mentally. He had an idea. It might or might not work. He put it forward diffidently. But to his surprise, there was no enthusiasm.
“That’s not what we want,” growled the man with the broken nose. “Get back to Earth? Sure! But only after we wipe out this gang! If I was by myself, I’d jump at the chance to escape. But there’s a lot of us here, and I aim to see some ruhks an’ overseers get theirs before I duck!”
Growled agreement echoed his words. A man who has been enslaved and degraded wants two things above all others. One is freedom, to be sure, but the other is to get back his self-respect, which means the destruction of the cause of his degradation.
“We’ll try the trick I mentioned,” said Dick, grimly. “I’ve got a pocket-knife of sorts. We’ll hone it up for shaving and use the robes of the overseers we’ve killed, and make more if we find suitable stuff on board, here. Let’s get to work.”
His counsellors rose. But the tall man lingered. He touched Dick on the shoulder.
“Just a moment. I used to be professor of physics. If you can tell me how your friend set about making that doorway between worlds... It can’t call for elaborate apparatus if it could be worked out five thousand years ago, as you explained.”
Dick began helplessly to tell him what he knew. It was not much. Maltby had explained that the trick was a freak orientation of the molecules of an alloy. The tall man listened. Dick added that Maltby, working drearily and close to exhaustion, had said that what we call dimensions happen actually to be merely a set of directions in which the forces we know of work. Forms of energy interchange at right angles to each other. Electricity and magnetism, for example. One wraps wire around an iron core, so that a current in the wire will always be at right angles to the length of the core. The magnetic field which results is parallel to the core and at right angles to the current-flow.
The tall man said, “Of course. It goes farther than that. There’s what they call the three-finger rule in elementary physics. Go on! What’s next?” [This of course, is the well-known principle by which dynamos; motors, ammeters, etc., work. The three-finger rule will be found in some form in any physics textbook which treats of electricity and magnetism.—Murray Leinster.]
Dick frowned, trying to recall what Maltby had said. When Maltby had made his explanation, however, he had been already tired and Dick had been close to madness because of Nancy’s disappearance. He hadn’t really tried to understand the abstract principles Maltby was wearily putting into words.
“All I can remember,” said Dick, “is that he said that the three forms of energy you mentioned as following the three-finger rule—electricity, magnetism, and kinetic energy—simply have to operate at right angles to each other. And he said that if two of them or all three were interdependent and yet somehow the apparatus was contrived so that they were not at right angles in our cosmos, then the whole system would tend to rotate into a cosmos in which they could be at right angles. And that such a system could be made to bend anything introduced into it into other cosmos. Does that make sense to you?”
The tall man clasped his hands feverishly.
“Of course! Of course! Go on!” Then as Dick looked at him in doubt, he said irritably. “The most obvious thing in the world!”
“I—suppose so,” said Dick doubtfully. “Anyhow, Maltby said he thought he could produce the set-up he wanted with electricity and magnetism and so on because there wasn’t any—” He paused and said uncertainly, “Hall effect? Because there’s no Hall effect in liquids?”
The tall man tensed.
“There isn’t! Go on!”
“I don’t remember anything else,” admitted Dick ruefully. “The only thing that had seemed strange to him was that the crux ansata we started with had bismuth in it. Actually, it was a freak bronze. Very early, perhaps earlier than the Fifth Dynasty. The Egyptians didn’t have tin at the beginning, you know. Egyptology is my specialty, though, and I could tell him that they had bismuth and antimony almost as early as they had copper. They used antimony for kohl—for eye-shadow, for the women to make their eyes look larger,” he finished unnecessarily.
The tall man stared at him, his eyes intent. He reached up and thoughtfully tugged at one ear.
“I shall have to think,” he said slowly. “I think I see the principle. Copper is just a trifle diamagnetic, and bismuth is much more so. Yes ... But—”