“What happened out there, Isaac?” Grace Hopper looked as though she knew more than she was letting on.
“That’s ‘Mr. Asimov,’ isn’t it, Ensign Hopper?” Isaac grinned.
“I can see the experience didn’t change you much,” she said dryly. “Who was your friend, the huge golden hypnotist? I’m not accustomed to being driven like an automobile.” It dawned on Isaac that Hopper’s experience with Quetzalcóatl might have been even more disturbing than his own.
“He’s a retired god,” said Isaac, matter-of-factly. “He bred the plesiosaurs — this world is his ranch, I think.” He furrowed his brow. “Oh, wait! I know where we are!”
“Just a moment. If the immediate crisis is past, it’s time to resume normal operations.” She turned to the crewmen, now reduced to about fifty men. “Return to your stations, men.” They dispersed, and she turned back to Isaac and Bob.
“I prefer not to have an audience for this conversation,” she said quietly. “Continue, Mr. Asimov. Where are we?”
“We’re exactly where we seem to be, in the Sargasso Sea.” Isaac paused for effect. He couldn’t help himself. “But we’re rotated through other dimensions than those we’re accustomed to.”
Hopper didn’t seem surprised by the notion. “That’s a bit of a stretch from the data at hand. Why do you think so?” Bob, of course, was already nodding. That was the advantage of being a science fiction writer — nothing was ever too strange.
“Quetzalcóatl told me.” The information had been poured into him, really, like water filling a pitcher. The ship, with everyone on board, was rotating out of alignment with their familiar dimensions into synchronization with ones they couldn’t ordinarily perceive, and each of the phase-change events that they had gone through had rotated them further from the familiar.
“And you were told this?”
Now that Isaac thought about it, he wasn’t so sure that words were exchanged. “He made it clear to me, anyway.”
Heinlein was looking at him oddly. “What makes you think it’s true?”
Isaac shrugged. “Would a god lie?” Then, “Unfortunately, he didn’t say how to stop the process — so I guess we’re as far from home as ever, unless the skipper here knows something I don’t.”
Grace Hopper’s eyes narrowed. “Let me see if I can steer you in the right direction, Mr. Asimov.” Oops, he thought. “We started off in a space-time continuum that may have an infinite number of dimensional vectors, of which we can perceive four — height, depth, width, and time. Somehow, when we discharge the Tesla coils, the ship rotates relative to these infinite dimensions, and we perceive what’s going on in dimensions we don’t usually have to deal with.”
Asimov knew that Hopper knew something about physics, but non-linear abstract geometry? Who was this woman, anyway? “I apologize, ma’am. But how come it doesn’t look any different? Except for the plesiosaurs, and so forth.”
“Quetzalcóatl is a pretty big so-forth, but that’s a good question, Mr. Asimov. This is just a guess, but it could be that so far, at least, the physics is basically the same, and it’s relatively easy to orient ourselves. It might be that if we get knocked out of alignment with all our familiar dimensions, we would find the situation much more disorienting. We’ve still got one foot on the dock, but we’re slipping away.”
“I’m not sure I follow you there.” Isaac had trouble admitting ignorance, but if anything mattered, getting this right mattered. This dimensional stuff wasn’t his strong point.
Bob Heinlein was leagues ahead of him. “That’s it, I think, ma’am, the alignment. Isaac, imagine living in only three dimensions — you don’t perceive depth, say. Things seem two-dimensional to you, as if you lived on a piece of paper. That doesn’t mean the other dimensions aren’t there, but so as far as you’re concerned, they might as well not be. Now suppose you rotate, so you do perceive depth. Because you live in only three dimensions, you’d lose the ability to perceive one of the other ones — height or width or time, see? You’d still be limited to three. But the other one would still be there.”
Isaac could see that. He nodded.
“Now suppose there are more dimensions than three or four. Suppose we inherently four-dimensional beings got realigned with another dimension somehow. We’d lose alignment with one of the ones we’ve got. Maybe what’s happening when we go through these phase-transitions is the dimensional axes are rotated, so that we’re no longer perfectly aligned with our familiar world. We’re still there, but we can’t get at it!”
“Therefore, to get home, we have to rotate our ship back into alignment with the dimensions we want to live in,” Hopper said.
“And soon,” added Isaac.
“But don’t you think it would be interesting to try a few more realignments first?” There actually was a pleading tone to Heinlein’s voice. He honestly wanted to take a few more spins through the circles of Hell.
Asimov shuddered. “I don’t think — ”
A jarring percussive clatter rattled the deck. The entire ship vibrated at a bone-numbing frequency. The area between the lines that Heinlein and Isaac had marked on the deck sublimated into gray-green fog, and the smell of ozone filled Isaac’s nostrils. Green fire played over the deck, over the guns, over the conning tower. The fire moved beyond mere green: it was the color of chartreuse tinted with the music of flutes and the vinegar taste of radio waves. It was a color that smelled like butyl mercaptan.
Someone had switched on the Tesla coils again.
“Your wish has been granted, Bob,” said Isaac, through paralyzing fear.
Bob
Wherever they were this time, the weather was awful. Lightning crackled about the masts, waves of thunder boomed, wind threatened to blow everyone over the rails, and rain sheeted down, drenching the three of them even as they flailed across the deck, trying to avoid the smoking zones of green fire.
A wave surged over the railing to port, and foam sluiced past their ankles. Isaac yelled over the roar of the storm: “The chalk marks!” The water was washing them away.
It was too late, in any case. Whoever had thrown the switch had caught many of the sailors unawares, out of position. Ahead, three crewmen dropped, screaming, into the mist, as if through a trap door, and disappeared. Two others, pinned to the starboard rail by writhing, advancing ropes of green fire, leapt yelling over the side. Someone else screamed to port — “No! No! No!” — and as Bob turned to look, a running man slammed into him, so hard that Bob could feel the man’s hot, panicked breath. Bob fell backward, grabbed the railing of a ladder to right himself, and gaped when he realized there was no running man — just a disembodied series of No’s above a line of splashes across the standing water on the deck, like those made by a man running straight for the rail. The last No turned into a shriek, and the last little fountain of spray subsided as the shriek faded into the wind.
He tripped on something that gave slightly, and looked down to see a dead man’s yawning head sticking out of the deck, the lower jaw fused with the steel. Bob had kicked the corpse in the teeth.
“Dear God,” Bob said, and for the first time in his life, meant it as a form of address.
Then the green fire was subsiding — and so were the winds, waves, and lightning, Bob was glad to see, though the downpour showed no sign of letup.
The rain washed down over the scene of senseless, senseless death. Bob thought of friends of his who had died at Pearl Harbor, perhaps without even knowing what had happened to them. Did this death have less meaning? Was combat against a human foe morally greater than combat against the cold equations, as Campbell termed them, of physics? He’d wanted to do his part in a just war, but justice had no meaning here.