MISS MOUSE AND THE FOURTH DIMENSION
I first met Charles Foster at the Claerston Award dinner at Leadbeater’s Hall in the Strand. It was my second night in London. I had come to England with the hope of signing some new authors for my list. I am Max Seidel, publisher of Manjusri Books. We are a small esoteric publishing company operating out of Linwood, New Jersey—just me and Miss Thompson, my assistant. My books sell well to the small but faithful portion of the population interested in spiritualism, out-of-body experiences, Atlantis, flying saucers, and New Age technology. Charles Foster was one of the men I had come to meet.
Pam Devore, our British sales representative, pointed Foster out to me. I saw a tall, good-looking man in his middle thirties, with a great mane of reddish blond hair, talking animatedly with two dowager types. Sitting beside him, listening intently, was a small woman in her late twenties with neat, plain features and fine chestnut hair.
“Is that his wife?” I asked.
Pam laughed. “Goodness, no! Charles is too fond of women to actually marry one. That’s Miss Mouse.”
“Is Mouse an English name?”
“It’s just Charles’s nickname for her. Actually, she’s not very mouselike at all. Marmoset might be more like it, or even wolverine. She’s Mimi Royce, a society photographer. She’s quite well off—the Royce textile mills in Lancashire, you know—and she adores Charles, poor thing.”
“He does seem to be an attractive man,” I said.
“I suppose so,” Pam said, “if you like the type.” She glanced at me to see how I was taking that, then laughed when she saw my expression.
“Yes, I am rather prejudiced,” she confessed. “Charles used to be rather interested in me until he found his own true love.”
“Who was—?”
“Himself, of course. Come, let me introduce you.”
Foster knew about Manjusri Books and was interested in publishing with us. He thought we might be a good showcase for his talents, especially since Paracelsus Press had done so poorly with his last, Journey Through the Eye of the Tiger. There was something open and boyish about Foster. He spoke in a high, clear English voice that conjured up in me a vision of punting on the Thames on a misty autumn day.
Charles was the sort of esoteric writer who goes out and has adventures and then writes them up in a portentous style. His search was for—well, what shall I call it? The Beyond? The Occult? The Interface? After twenty years in this business I still don’t know how to describe, in one simple phrase, the sort of book I publish. Charles Foster’s last book had dealt with three months he had spent with a Baluchistani Dervish in the desert of Kush under incredibly austere conditions. What had he gotten out of it? A direct though fleeting knowledge of the indivisible oneness of things, a sense of the mystery and the grandeur of existence… in short, the usual thing. And he had gotten a book out of it; and that, too, is the usual thing.
We set up a lunch for the next day. I rented a car and drove to Charles’s house in Oxfordshire. It was a beautiful old thatch-roofed building set in the middle of five acres of rolling countryside. It was called Sepoy Cottage, despite the fact that it had five bedrooms and three parlors. It didn’t actually belong to Charles, as he told me immediately. It belonged to Mimi Royce.
“But she lets me use it whenever I like,” he said. “Mouse is such a dear.” He smiled like a well-bred child talking about his favorite aunt. “She’s so interested in one’s little adventures, one’s trips along the interface between reality and the ineffable… Insists on typing up my manuscripts just for the pleasure it gives her to read them first.”
“That is lucky,” I said, “typing rates being what they are these days.”
Just then Mimi came in with tea. Foster regarded her with bland indifference. Either he was unaware of her obvious adoration of him, or he chose not to acknowledge it. Mimi, for her part, did not seem to mind. I assumed that I was seeing a display of the British National Style in affairs of the heart subdued, muffled, unobtrusive. She went away after serving us, and Charles and I talked auras and ley-lines for a while, then got down to the topic of real interest to us both—his next book.
“It’s going to be a bit unusual,” he told me, leaning back and templing his fingers.
“Another spiritual adventure?” I asked. “What will it be about?”
“Guess!” he said.
“Let’s see. Are you by any chance going to Machu Picchu to check out the recent reports of spaceship landings?”
He shook his head. “Elton Travis is already covering it for Mystic Revelations Press. No, my next adventure will take place right here in Sepoy Cottage.”
“Have you discovered a ghost or poltergeist here?”
“Nothing so mundane.”
“Then I really have no idea,” I told him.
“What I propose,” Foster said, “is to create an opening into the unknown right here in Sepoy Cottage, and to journey through it into the unimaginable. And then, of course, to write up what I’ve found there.”
“Indeed,” I said.
“Are you familiar with Von Helmholz’s work?”
“Was he the one who read tarot cards for Frederick the Great?”
“No, that was Manfred Von Helmholz. I am referring to Wilhelm, a famous mathematician and scientist in the nineteenth century. He maintained that it was theoretically possible to see directly into the fourth dimension.”
I turned the concept over in my mind. It didn’t do much for me.
“This ‘fourth dimension’ to which he refers,” Foster went on, “is synonymous with the spiritual or ethereal realm of the mystics. The name of the place changes with the times, but the region itself is unchanging.”
I nodded. Despite myself, I am a believer. That’s what brought me into this line of work. But I also know that illusion and self-deception are the rule in these matters rather than the exception.
“But this spirit realm, or fourth dimension,” Foster went on, “is also our everyday reality. Spirits surround us. They move through that strange realm which Von Helmholz called the fourth dimension. Normally they can’t be seen.”
It sounded to me as if Foster was extemporizing the first chapter of his book. Still, I didn’t interrupt. “Our eyes are blinded by everyday reality. But there are techniques by means of which we can train ourselves to see what else is there. Do you know about Hinton’s cubes? Hinton is mentioned by Martin Gardner in Mathematical Carnival. Charles Howard Hinton was an eccentric American mathematician who, around 1910, came up with a scheme for learning how to visualize a tesseract, also called a hypercube or four-dimensional square. His technique involved colored cubes that fit together to form a single master cube. Hinton felt that one could learn to see the separate colored cubes in the mind and then, mentally, to manipulate and rotate them, fold them into and out of the greater cube shape, and to do this faster and faster until at last a gestalt forms and the hypercube springs forth miraculously in your mind.”
He paused. “Hinton said that it was a hell of a lot of work. And later investigators, according to Gardner, have warned of psychic dangers even in attempting something like this.”
“It sounds like it could drive you crazy,” I said.
“Some of those investigators did wig,” he admitted cheerfully. “But that might have been from frustration. Hinton’s procedure demands an inhuman power of concentration. Only a master of yoga could be expected to possess that.”
“Such as yourself?”
“My dear fellow, I can barely remember what I’ve just read in the newspaper. Luckily, concentration is not the only path into the unknown. Fascination can more easily lead us to the mystic path. Hinton’s principle is sound, but it needs to be combined with Aquarian Age technology to make it work. That is what I have done.”