"He pulled out a king and a jack. Two two-dimensional people, he called them—length and width, but no thickness. He put them face-to-face and then asked me, could they see each other? I said I supposed not.
"He said, ‘Right. They can't, because they're not in quite the same plane. They're separated by a very small thickness, and their world contains no thickness.’”
Edward remembered how triumphantly Rawlinson had beamed, then. Prof was a spare, sandy-haired man with the fussy, pedantic manner of an Oxford don, but he looked no more than twenty, most of the time. His English had an odd burr, which might be more historical than geographical. He knew a lot and his mind was quick, but there was something essentially impractical about Prof, a hint of that most damning of all indictments: not quite sound. If you needed a detailed report with graphs and illustrations and references, fine—very good chap. Else put him in charge of the sports program.
Materially, he was doing very well. His bungalow was large, one of the inner circle of residences surrounding the node, and he must own one of the finest collections of books in the Vales, where printing was a very recent innovation. He had at least a dozen servants, all rigged out in snowy white livery.
But Stringer and Smedley would not be interested in all that.
"I said, ‘You're telling me that Nextdoor and Earth are separated in some other dimension?’ and he said, ‘It's more complicated. If it were only one dimension, then Home would have only two neighbors, but there are at least six worlds that can be reached directly from Home. We know of only two others from Nextdoor, but then we don't know very much about this world outside the Vales. So we must be dealing with more than one extra dimension. I know it's hard enough to think in four dimensions without throwing five or six at you.’”
Edward was alarmed to hear himself chuckle. “I remember taking a long drink at that point. I couldn't cope with this while sober."
All the time he'd been on Nextdoor, he'd been homesick for Earth. And now he was Home, he felt his heart twisting as he talked of Olympus. He recalled the dry fragrance of the air, tantalizing scents of spice or dried flowers; hot by day, cooling off rapidly in the evening when the tyikank gathered on their verandas to drink gin and blue...
He looked again at his audience—Stringer's eyes half closed as he dribbled smoke, Julian's wide, too wide.
"I warned you this was going to take a lot of swallowing! It even stuck in my throat, and I'd done it—I mean, I'd actually crossed over to another world. No offense, Mr. Stringer, but this is a too practical, down-to-earth setting for fairy tales. I told you you wouldn't be able to believe me. I had trouble believing Prof, although I knew I wasn't on Earth, and hadn't been for two years. Look here: desk, papers, telephone, filing cabinet! Whereas I was sitting in a wicker chair drinking what they call gin, but isn't, on a veranda with screens around it. The trees had an African look to them, you know?—airy traceries with foliage hovering around the branches more like clouds of smoke or insects than leaves. There were mountains like white teeth behind them, going straight up into a pale, bloodless blue sky. My drink had been brought by a liveried servant who addressed me as Tyika Kisster. Prof and I were dolled up in white tie and tails—he'd asked me to come a little early so we could have a private chat, but a dozen or more other guests would be arriving shortly and his wife was indoors overseeing the final touches."
Chattering like this was madness! The sparkle in Smedley's eyes was welcome. The poor devil seemed to be enjoying the guff, and anything that took his mind off his own personal internal hell for even a few minutes was worth doing. But Stringer wasn't going to believe a word of it. Edward Exeter, alias John Three, was cutting his own throat with all this babbling. Trouble was, he'd been silent for so long that now he'd started to speak, he couldn't stop himself....
The veranda fronted on a garden of flowering shrubs and carefully scythed lawn, a surprise of green fertility in the khaki dryness of Olympus. Teams of servants must water it frequently to keep it so lush.
Scattered amid the woods were more of the tyikank's sprawling bungalows, clustered around the node. An irregular line of denser, dark-foliaged trees marked the course of the Cam. The natives’ village lay a mile or so downstream.
To the west, the jagged sword of the Matterhorn towered over everything, a stark silhouette. Opposite stood Mount Cook and Nanga Parbat and Kilimanjaro's perfect cone, a poem in itself. All three were flushing pink and salmon and peach in the sunset. The valley lay like a palm between them, the Matterhorn being the thumb and the other three raised fingers. Several minor summits might qualify as the pinkie. He had not learned all their names yet.
"They're two slightly different aspects of the same world,” Prof said, “two cards in the same pack, no two identical. Make two slices through, oh, say a Stilton cheese, and you won't get exactly the same pattern of maggot holes each time, what?"
Edward thought longingly of Stilton cheese. “The stars are the same."
"Ah! You noticed that? Small things are different, big things are the same. The beetles have eight legs. The sun looks exactly the same. The planets are very much the same, so far's I've been able to find out. The year's a little shorter, this world's axial tilt's a little less, days are about three minutes longer."
"How can you know that? You can't bring a watch over with you."
Rawlinson smiled knowingly. “But you can go back and forth. Sometimes you arrive at the same time of day, sometimes later or earlier. It works out to about three minutes’ lag per day."
Edward had walked into that one. Even so ... “Nextdoor has four moons. Moons are not exactly small."
"You're wrong!” Prof beamed excitedly. “Oh, they're big, but they may be caused by very small effects. A trumpet can't knock down a forest, can it?"
"No.” Edward could not see what a trumpet had to do with moons, but he knew he was about to find out.
"But suppose there's an avalanche poised to fall? Then the trumpet call might set off the avalanche! There goes your forest. Now, it's generally agreed that the Moon was knocked off the Earth by a giant meteor, you know. The Pacific Ocean is the scar remaining. A meteor hit is a very chancy business. If the meteor comes by even a second or two earlier or later, it will miss the Earth altogether. Both bodies are moving at tremendous speed, remember! So it struck Nextdoor slightly differently. The debris coalesced into four small moons instead of one large one. Even Trumb is quite small. It just looks big because it's very close.” Prof reached for his glass triumphantly. “Or perhaps there were several hits."
"How about the other worlds?"
"Other slices, remember? More variations. Gehenna has two moons, or so I've been told. Never been there.” Rawlinson took a long drink. He was just hitting his stride, glad of an audience. “Back to our flat friends. We agree that they can't see each other, because they're not in the same plane. These cards can't be perfect planes, can they? No such thing as a perfectly flat surface. But if they're face-to-face, then they must touch here and there, what?"