He led me into the next room. There, on a low table, was what I took at first to be a piece of modernistic sculpture. It had a base of cast iron. A central shaft came up through its middle, and on top of the shaft was a sphere about the size of a human head. Radiating in all directions from the sphere were lucite rods. At the end of each rod was a cube. The whole contraption looked like a cubist porcupine with blocks stuck to the end of its spines.
Then I saw that the blocks had images or signs painted on their faces. There were Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Arabic letters, Freemason and Egyptian symbols, Chinese ideograms, and other figures from many different lores. Now it looked like a bristling phalanx of mysticism, marching forth to do battle against common sense. And even though I’m in the business, it made me shudder.
“He didn’t know it, of course,” Foster said, “but what Hinton stumbled upon was the mandala principle. His cubes were the arts; put them all together in your mind and you create the Eternal, the Unchanging, the Solid Mandala, or four-dimensional space, depending upon which terminology you prefer. Hinton’s cubes were a three-dimensional exploded view of an ethereal object. This object refuses to come together in our everyday reality. It is the unicorn that flees from the view of man—”
“—but lays its head in the lap of a virgin,” I finished for him.
He shrugged it off. “Never mind the figures of speech, old boy. Mouse will unscramble my metaphors when she types up the manuscript. The point is, I can use Hinton’s brilliant discovery of the exploded mandala whose closure produces the ineffable object of endless fascination. I can journey down the endless spiral into the unknown. This is how the trip begins.”
He pushed a switch on the base of the contraption. The sphere began to revolve, the lucite arms turned, and the cubes on the ends of those arms turned too, creating an effect both hypnotic and disturbing. I was glad when Foster turned it off.
“My Mandala Machine!” he cried triumphantly. “What do you think?”
“I think you could get your head into a lot of trouble with that device,” I told him.
“No, no,” he said irritably. “I mean, what do you think of it as the subject for a book?”
No matter what else he was, Foster was a genuine writer. A genuine writer is a person who will descend voluntarily into the flaming pits of hell, as long as he’s allowed to record his impressions and send them back to Earth for publication. I thought about the book that would most likely result from Foster’s project. I estimated its audience at about one hundred fifty people, including friends and relatives. Nevertheless, I heard myself saying, “I’ll buy it.” That’s how I manage to stay a small and unsuccessful publisher, despite being so smart.
I returned to London shortly after that. Next day I drove to Glastonbury to spend a few days with Claude Upshank, owner of the Great White Brotherhood Press. We have been good friends, Claude and I, ever since we met ten years ago at a flying-saucer convention in Barcelona.
“I don’t like it,” Claude said, when I told him about Foster’s project. “The mandala principle is potentially dangerous. You can really get into trouble when you start setting up autonomous feedback loops in your brain like that.”
Claude had studied acupuncture and Rolfing at the Hardrada Institute in Malibu, so I figured he knew what he was talking about. Nevertheless, I thought that Charles had a lot of savvy in these matters and could take care of himself.
When I telephoned Foster two days later, he told me that the project was going very well. He had added several refinements to the Mandala Machine: “Sound effects, for one. I’m using a special tape of Tibetan horns and gongs. The overtones, sufficiently amplified, can send you into instant trance.” And he had also bought a strobe light to flash into his eyes at six to ten beats a second: “The epileptic rate, you know. It’s ideal for loosening up your head.” He claimed that all of this deepened his state of trance and increased the clarity of the revolving cubes. “I’m very near to success now, you know.”
I thought he sounded tired and close to hysteria. I begged him to take a rest.
“Nonsense,” he said. “Show must go on, eh?”
A day later, Foster reported that he was right on the brink of the final breakthrough. His voice wavered, and I could hear him panting and wheezing between words. “I’ll admit it’s been more difficult than I had expected. But now I’m being assisted by a certain substance that I had the foresight to bring with me. I am not supposed to mention it over the telephone in view of the law of the land and the ever-present possibility of snoops on the line, so I’ll just remind you of Arthur Machen’s Novel of the White Powder and let you work out the rest for yourself. Call me tomorrow. The fourth dimension is finally coming together.”
The next day Mimi answered the telephone and said that Foster was refusing to take any calls. She reported him as saying that he was right on the verge of success and could not be interrupted. He asked his friends to be patient with him during this difficult period.
The next day it was the same, Mimi answering, Foster refusing to speak to us. That night I conferred with Claude and Pam.
We were in Pam’s smart Chelsea apartment. We sat together in the bay window, drinking tea and watching the traffic pour down the King’s Road into Sloane Square. Claude asked, “Does Foster have any family?”
“None in England,” Pam said. “His mother and brother are on holiday in Bali.”
“Any close friends?”
“Mouse, of course,” Pam said.
We looked at each other. An odd presentiment had come to us simultaneously, a feeling that something was terribly wrong.
“But this is ridiculous,” I said. “Mimi absolutely adores him, and she’s a very competent woman. What could there be to worry about?”
“Let’s call once more,” Claude said.
We tried, and were told that Mimi’s telephone was out of order. We decided to go to Sepoy Cottage at once.
Claude drove us out in his old Morgan. Mimi met us at the door. She looked thoroughly exhausted, yet there was a serenity about her that I found just a little uncanny.
“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said, leading us inside. “You have no idea how frightening it’s all been. Charles came close to losing his mind in these last days.”
“But why didn’t you tell us?” I demanded.
“Charles implored me not to. He told me—and I believed him—that he and I had to see this thing through together. He thought it would be dangerous to his sanity to bring in anyone else at this point.”
Claude made a noise that sounded like a snort. “Well, what happened?”
“It all went very well at first,” Mimi said. “Charles began to spend increasingly longer periods in front of the machine, and he came to enjoy the experience. Soon I could get him away only to eat, and grudgingly at that. Then he gave up food altogether. After a while he no longer needed the machine. He could see the cubes and their faces in his head, could move them around at any speed he wanted, bring them together or spread them apart. The final creation, however, the coming together of the hypercube, was still eluding him. He went back to the machine, running it now at its highest speed.”
Mimi sighed. “Of course, he pushed himself too hard. This time, when he turned off the machine, the mandala continued to grow and mutate in his head. Each cube had taken on hallucinatory solidity. He said the symbols gave off a hellish light that hurt his eyes. He couldn’t stop those cubes from flashing through his mind. He felt that he was being suffocated in a mass of alien signs. He grew agitated, swinging quickly between elation and despair. It was during one of his elated swings that he ripped out the telephone.”