He rowed some more, and quit when it occurred to him that he had no idea whither he was going.
"Hey!"
Silence.
"HEY!"
Still no sound. Gosh!
He rowed with long, hard strokes; the glimmering water slid past. When he stopped and looked around, the boat still floated on a ribbon of water bordered by nothingness and stretching away to infinity on both sides.
Nash headed the boat straight toward the side of this canallike body and rowed some more. He moved; the eddies from his strokes swirled away aft into the dark. But his surroundings failed to change accordingly. It was as though the ribbon of water were being unrolled on one side and rolled up on the other, so that no matter what Nash did he remained in the middle.
When even the chevalier's iron frame began to tire, Nash gave up and rested again. The direct approach that he had used was evidently all wrong. He should have inquired around more. Where had he gotten the idea that he was a sensible fellow smart enough to improvise his way out of trouble? The only comfort was the knowledge that Bechard had been an even bigger fool, to send him off on this adventure so lamentably unprepared—
Well, if it was really all Bechard's fault there was no point in sitting there and reproaching oneself. He was tired and hungry; if he made himself as comfortable as possible until dawn he might be able to grasp his predicament then—if there was going to be a dawn, and if he weren't in some sort of hyperspatial tunnel between the mundane and astral planes. He scooped enough. water out of the lake to fill the gnawing void for a while, lay down in the boat, and put his hat over his face.
He slept badly; every time he dropped off, the cold would bring him to shivering. After what seemed like the hundredth such awakening his itching eyes picked out the spots of lighter gray toward which the watercourse stretched. They seemed definitely brighter, and the canal itself was lightening in response.
The world brightened but became no more intelligible. The canal seemed to run through a glass tunnel of indefinite length, the glass fluted so that nothing in the world outside could be made out. At the sides of the canal the water appeared to merge into the glass, so that the diameter of the tunnel was difficult to estimate. Nash guessed it at thirty to forty feet.
As he stared, a narrow horizontal red line appeared in the wall of the tunnel at eye-level. The minutes passed, and the red line widened to a band with an apparent width of about two degrees, meanwhile brightening to a glowing orange. It got no wider, but rose with gastropodal speed and turned a fierce white.
Sun, thought Nash; the walls of the tunnel must have the optical property of stretching one dimension of the world outside out to infinite length. No wonder nothing was recognizable. He rowed about for a while, toward the walls of the tunnel and along its axis, but with no more results than he had achieved during the night.
Before he resigned himself to eating his floppy boots for breakfast he had better have one more try with lung-power. He yelled, and listened, and yelled again, until his throat was sore. At last a voice answered:
"Ahoy, if it isn't the saucy lubber in the macaroni hat! Belay yourself and return my boat, sir!" The voice was startlingly clear and unmistakably that of Captain Perry Decatur Shapiro.
"Glad to," Nash yelled back, "but how?"
"Row, you fool! Not that way; head toward the outer wall of the sphere!"
"Which way is that?"
"Little more to stabberd; there you are. Now pull, my hearty!"
Nash pulled along the axis of the tube until he puffed."Keep on!" cried the invisible captain. Nash rowed some more and craned his neck to see where he was going. Perhaps fifty yards ahead the water and sun and streaks along the sides of the tunnel almost converged, and around the spot toward which they pointed, objects could be made out; a bit of lake shore with a couple of trees, shrunken down as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. As the boat moved, the picture grew as pieces of the streaks detached themselves and joined it. It seemed to Nash as though he were looking into a deep parabolic mirror, except that there was no reflection of himself at the focus. Suddenly the walls of the tunnel whisked back, and he was out on the familiar lake; or at least most of him was. When he looked at the stern he saw that the boat ended just beyond his feet, as if it had been crumpled up along its longitudinal axis. Even as he watched, the stern extended itself away from where he sat until the boat reached its normal dimensions. He had just rowed out of the smooth, dull, curved band that lay "on the water like a wide streak of oil encircling the island.
"Hurray!" " 'Rah!" "Vive!" "Bravo!" "Euge!" "Yipee!" "Olé!"
These sounds came from a score of men on the shore of the lake. Among them Nash made out Captain Shapiro's nautical cap. As he rowed toward them he discerned that they were laughing. Half of them were soldiers and the rest the usual motley astral assortment. He handed over the boat to its commander with a self-conscious grin.
"Went to sleep," he explained, "and got lost in the dark—"
Captain Shapiro was examining the boat minutely."It's well for you that it's sound, sir," he said."We don't mind your trying to reach Tukiphat's island, having tried to do so ourselves without success. But if you'd lost or damaged the boat, the lads here would have haled you before the Private."
Nash asked: "Say, what is that thing around the island? What became of that tunnel I got into?"
"Wasn't any tunnel," said one of the soldiers."It's a... what you call it... optical effect. How does it work, General Kenyon?"
Another soldier took up: "You see, Frenchy, when Tukiphat set up his island he didn't want visitors, so he put what he calls a zone of refraction around it. How does it work, colonel? I'm just an ordinary general."
"It's shaped like a hollow ball," explained the colonel, "and it slows down everything moving toward or away from its center, the way glass slows down light, only more so, so that it takes you as long to go a foot in a... uh... radial direction as it would take you to go a mile ordinarily. A man who enters it is flattened out so that from the outside he looks like a cardboard cutout, only to him he looks normal and everything not in the zone is stretched all out of shape." The first general said: "You can fire a bullet at it, and when it hits the zone you can see it hang in the air and then drop straight down plunk into the water. Here, I'll show you—"
The general raised his gun. The colonel barked: "Put that down, you damn fool! Don't you know if you don't hit the zone square on, the bullet'll be refracted back out and maybe hit somebody?"
"Aw, but colonel—"
"Shut up! Who's giving orders here?" The general meekly subsided. The colonel started to say: "All right, Frenchy, try not to get in any more trouble—"
"Jean-Prospère!" cried a man in the crowd who was dressed much like Nash."Ami! Où estois tu caché?" The man threw himself upon Nash with a swirl of cloak, and before Nash could get his guard up he had been seized around the shoulders and kissed on both cheeks. The crowd guffawed.
He looked at his toes, vainly hoping the earth would swallow him, while his new friend poured a stream of Seventeenth-Century French over his embarrassed head, "—beaucoup de peine j'ay cue! J'ay oui dire par des scélérats que peur tu avois. Un cheval tu as! Je croyois que vendue tu l'avois—"
Nash finally worked in: "Had a little lapse of memory. Didn't know where I belonged or anything."
"And now back it all comes? Bon! We go, no?"
Nash mounted without protest and let the other guide him out of the park. He learned how difficult is the task of following a man while riding alongside of him and acting as if one knew where one was going. He rode in silence, gloomy over the night's fiasco and apprehensive lest his fellow-cavalier get suspicious.