Time Slave

2

“Splendid!” cried Hamilton, delightedly.

She worked at the side of the men in the experimental shack.

In the past days she had felt herself a full member of the team, welcomed and respected. She was one with them. Herjellsen was gentle, perceptive, directive. William was helpful, amusing. Even Gunther was bearable, and seemed now, for the first time, to see her as a human being. He had even, once, called her “Brenda.”

The interior of the translation cubicle, seen through the heavy, clear, plastic walls, was beginning to glow, pulsating with a diffused, photic energy; this phenomenon, Herjellsen had explained, was a concomitant of the transference phenomenon, not a manifestation of the phenomenon per se; it was related to the phenomenon derivatively, not directly; it was like the waves that are displaced by the passage of an invisible ship, not the ship but the sign of its passage; yet the photic phenomenon, like turbulence in a medium, ‘in water or an atmosphere, signaled the presence of the force Herjellsen had called P.

Gunther’s eyes blazed, looking into the cubicle.

William touched Hamilton’s arm. “Do not be afraid now,” he whispered.

“I’m not!” cried Hamilton, happily. “It’s beginning, is it not?”

She looked to Herjellsen.

Herjellsen sat to one side, in a straight wooden chair, before a wooden table. To one side was the amplifying mechanism, wires running to it from the generator, and from the mechanism to the steel hood mounted on the table. Two cables, in a loop, passed from the hood to the cubicle and back, as though a self-reinforcing cycle might be established.

Under the hood Herjellsen’s head was down. His fists were clenched.

Suddenly, for no reason she understood, Brenda Hamilton was apprehensive.

Gunther and William were intent.

There is only one reality, had said Herjellsen, in its infinite modes and attributes.

“Spinoza thought something like that,” had remarked William earlier.

“Spinoza did not understand,” said Herjellsen. “It is neither God nor Nature. It is deeper than nature, and too deep and terrible to be God.”

“What is it?” had asked William.

“The reality,” had said Herjellsen.

“I do not understand,” had said William.

“The reality-and the power,” had said Herjellsen.

Hamilton shivered.

“And nature, and gods,” had said Herjellsen, “and spiders and stars are but its forms, the lion and the child, flowers and galaxies, perceptions, modes, diversities, transiencies, all!”

William had been silent. It was not wise to argue with Herjellsen at certain times, in certain moods. He was at most times eminently rational, pleasant, but when the mood was upon him, the frenzy of the conjecture, one did not speak with him.

“And,” Herjellsen had cried, “the reality-the power-is as much and wholly present in a blade of grass, in the petal of a flower, as in the furnace of Betelgeuse!” He had looked wildly at William, who had not met his eyes. “And that means,” had cried Herjellsen, “that here-in my hand-in my head-as much as anywhere, as full and perfect, lies the power. We, each of us, are the reality, the power.”

“I’m sorry,” had said William. “I’m sorry.”

“There are continuities!” had wept Herjellsen. “Continuities!” His voice had trembled. “You know of continuities between heat and light and sound, and between the particles of an apple and those of a stone, and between the fluid cell in an algae in the pristine sea and the brain of an Alexander, a Beethoven, an Einstein’’

“The relevance is obscure,” had said William, hesitantly.

“Time and space are modes of intuition,” had whispered Herjellsen. “Do they exist in their own right?”

“Yes,” had said William.

“How do you know?” asked Herjellsen.

“I perceive them,” said William.

“You have begged the question,” said Herjellsen.

“I do not know what space and time are in their own right,” said William.

“Do they pertain to things in themselves?” demanded Herjellsen.

“I do not know,” grumbled William. “Perhaps they do.”

“Yes,” said Herjellsen, “perhaps they do-but perhaps they do not.”

Gunther had not spoken during this interchange, but had listened. He did not generally discuss this sort of thing with Herjellsen. He respected Herjellsen. Herjellsen was perhaps the only man whom Gunther respected.

“All that you know,” said Herjellsen, “is a succession of perceptions-indeed, you find even yourself, in so far as you dare to search-a perception and perceptions among others.”

“Perception requires a physical body-a brain,” snapped William. William was normally polite. This time he was not.

“And what is your evidence of a physical body-a physical brain?” inquired Herjellsen.

William was silent.

“Perceptions,” said Herjellsen.

William refused to speak.

“A slender ribbon of perceptions flowing among mysteries,” said Herjellsen, wearily. “All that we know are these conscious scraps, these sparks in darkness, and, to be sure, we fling out our speculations from them, reaching out, like hands to touch something real. Prom these scraps, these tiny pieces of paper, we try to construct a world, a time and a place, a map, a home in which we may feel secure. We build for ourselves, on these bits of sand, a world in which we claim to live.”

“We must do Sol” said William.

“To be sure,” said Herjellsen. “That is not at issue.”

Herjellsen looked at William intently. “You know, as a rational man, from studies in logic and mathematics, that any given conclusion follows from an infinite diversity of sets of premises, even sets incompatible with one another.”

“Yes,” said William.

“And, too,” pressed Herjellsen, “every event, accordingly, is subject to an infinite variety of explanations.”

“Theoretically,” grumbled William.

“Do you not see the consequence of these truths?” asked Herjellsen. “The world we construct, extrapolating beyond the stream of our data, to explain our ideas, our perceptions, is but one logical possibility among infinite alternatives.”

William looked away. His face was white.

“I am simply saying,” smiled Herjellsen, “let us not be dogmatic.”

William looked at him.

“You see, my dear William, all I am asking you to recognize is that we may not live in the world-within the reality-you think we do.”

“But we may!” blurted William.

“Yes,” granted Herjellsen, “we may-and we-may not.”

“Our view of the world,” said Gunther, speaking for the first time, “has given us science.”

“You argue,” said Herjellsen, “from the utility of science to the truth of its world picture.”

“Yes,” said Gunther.

“Ultimately,” said Herjellsen, “the utility of science reduces to its capacity to reconcile, harmonize and predict perceptions. Theoretically, an infinite number of intellectual constructions would be equally efficacious in this regard. Suppose, for example, that we have a thousand sciences, each with its different world picture, each with its own theoretical entities, one making use of atoms, one not, and so on, would we then have a thousand truths, each incompatible with the other?”

“No,” said Gunther, “there would be only one truth.”

“But a thousand utilities?”

“Yes,” said Gunther.

“What then,” said Herjellsen, “of utility as a guide to truth?”

“It is still,” said William, “the best we have.”

“Yes,” said Herjellsen, “I think that is true.” He smiled at William. “Only I do not find your `science’ too useful. There are many things I find of interest which it does not explain.”

“You refer, perhaps,” said William, “to reputed psychic phenomena, extrasensory perception; psychokinesis, and such?”

Herjellsen shrugged, neither admitting anything nor disagreeing with William.

“Such phenomena do not exist,” said William.

“Perhaps not,” said Herjellsen, “but it is interesting to note that, even did they exist, science as it is presently constituted could not explain them.”

“So?” asked William.

“So we must be wary,” said Herjellsen, “that we do not take as our criterion for existence what science can explain. At one time science could not explain the functioning of a magnet, at another time the falling of a stone, the digestion of food, the circulation of the blood.”

“That is different,” said William.

“Surely it is an obvious fallacy to argue from the inexplicability of a phenomenon to its lack of existence.”

“Not always,” said William.

“Explain to me,” said Herjellsen, “the fact of consciousness, the fact that when I wish to move my hand, my hand moves.”

William said nothing.

“Of these things,” said Herjellsen, “I am more certain than I am of the existence of the world, and your science cannot explain them.”

“Do you demean science?” asked William.

“I only require it,” said Herjellsen, “to be adequate to the whole of experience.” Then he looked at William. “I am confident,” he said, “that whatever may be the nature of the reality it cannot be as our science maintains it to be.”

“Why not?” asked William.

“Because of the radical discontinuity of mind and matter,” said Herjellsen.

“I do not understand,” said William.

“I am confident,” said Herjellsen, “that the same power that causes water to flow moves in the dreams of a sleeping lion, that causes fire to burn and worlds to turn guides the equations of Descartes, the stick of Archimedes, drawing its circles in the sand, that causes a seed to germinate and a flower to open its petals to the sun moves in your mind and mine.”

“Perhaps,” said William.

“The reality and the power is one,” said Herjellsen.

“What do you propose to do about it?” asked William.

“The power is in me,” said Herjellsen, “as much as in any seed, in any leaf, in any tree, in any world.”

“But what are you going to do?” asked William.

“I am going to touch the reality,” said Herjellsen.

William was silent. Then he said, “And with what tool are you going to do this?”

“With the only tool I have,” said Herjellsen, “with that which is most akin to it, most unexpected, most alien to science’s accustomed modalities.”

“And what tool is that?” asked William, skeptically.

“My mind,” said Herjellsen. “My mind.”

Hamilton could not take her eyes from the cubicle.

It was some seven feet in height, and some seven feet in length and breadth.

The walls were of clear, heavy plastic. Access to the cubicle was by way of a small, sliding panel, some eighteen inches in width, some four feet in height. It was closed now.

It seemed very primitive, somehow. But Hamilton understood its primitiveness as one might have understood the primitiveness of the first steam engine. It was simple, and crude, and yet the wonder of it was what was herein, per hypothesis, harnessed. It would have been simpler, more reassuring, could one have seen a wheel turn, a valve lift and fall, but there was little to note within save an odd play of light, a photic anomaly, now at the fringes of the cubicle, now like beads of bright water at its edges, pulsating, corruscating, then in small threads darting across the heavy plastic to join other threads, other ripples of light across the cubicle. These beads, and leapings, and threads increased. But the light was not the phenomenon, but its accompaniment. It was no more than the footprint of a summoned force, an impression, not the force, marking its passage. It was a crushed leaf, a snapped branch in its path, that was all, not the beast, not the power, but the sign, the sign of the beast, the power, the force which Herjellsen called P.

P was present.

In the cubicle was P.

Hamilton was terrified. She was a little girl crying in the night.

“Do not be afraid,” said William. He was tense.

“It is tomorrow!” cried Hamilton suddenly.

“No,” said Gunther. “No. It is like the light. It will pass. It is a subsidiary effect, meaningless.”

Hamilton shuddered. William held her arm.

“It is tomorrow,” said Hamilton. “I know it is tomorrow.”

“It is a disordering of your sense,” said William. “Part of your mind senses the presence of P.”

“It is today, too,” wept Hamilton.

“Do not be frightened,” said William. “This is similar to a temporary drug-induced schizophrenia. It is irrelevant to the experiment, the substance of the work”

William’s eyes were closed. He smiled. “I now have the consciousness of an afternoon, when I was six, in London, on a holiday. It is real.”

“It is a memory,” whispered Hamilton.

“No,” said William. “It is not like a memory. It is real, and it is now.”

“It cannot exist at the same time as now,” whispered Hamilton. “This is a different time.”

“Two times exist now,” said William. “Each is real. Both are real.”

“No,” said Hamilton.

Hamilton shook her head. Herjellsen sat silent, his head beneath the steel hood, his heavy fists clenched. He was leaning forward, tense in the wooden chair. His shoulders were hunched. The toes of his heavy shoes pressed at the boards of the floor, the black, rubber heels lifted. His body, powerful, muscular, squat, seemed then like a rock, but a rock that might contain a bomb, a cart of granite that might explode. His large head was bent, his eyes closed. He was alone under the steel hood, with the coils and receptors, with the darkness, with the tension, the straining of that large, unusual, maddened brain.

Hamilton knew that the brain emitted waves. These could be empirically verified.

They were real.

“The reality and the power is one,” Herjellsen had claimed.

“Why then,” had asked William, “do you not think you might touch the reality with electricity, or magnetism, or even the blow of your fist?”

“They are crudely intraphenomenal,” had said Herjellsen. “They are relative to the perceptual mode.”

“I do not understand,” had said William.

“They are the furniture of the room,” had said Herjellsen. “They are not the key to the door.”

But the waves of the brain were crudely physical.

But, Hamilton recalled, Herjellsen had cried out that the simplistic dichotomy between the physical and the mental was an intellectual convenience, not corresponding to what must be the case. “The dichotomy is false,” had said Herjellsen. “If it were true, the mind could not move the body or the body affect the mind. If it were true, then I could not move my hand when I wish. If it were true, I could not feel pain when my body was injured.”

“What then is true?” had asked William.

“A more useful distinction, though itself ultimately dubious,” had said Herjellsen, “is that between the phenomenal and the nonphenomenal, that between the categories and sensibilities of experience and that which exceeds such categories and sensibilities, that which is other than they.”

“Which is?” asked William.

“The reality,” had said Herjellsen, “and the power.”

“The distinction, you said,” commented William, “was ultimately dubious.”

“I think so,” had responded Herjellsen, “because the phenomenal is itself a mode of the reality; it is a way in which the reality sees itself, a perspective, perhaps one of an infinite number in which the reality chooses to reveal itself. Thus, I see no complete and categorical distinction between ourselves and the reality. Indeed, the distinction itself seems relativized to our modes of consciousness. In the reality itself such a distinction would be, one supposes, meaningless.”

William had shaken his head.

“Oh, we are quite reap” had laughed Herjellsen. “We are as real as anything that is real; it is only that there are other manifestations, other truths, other dimensions, that are quite as real as ours.”

“How do you know?” demanded William.

“I do not,” said Herjellsen. “But it seems to be likely. It seems implausible, does it not, that our handful of categories, our tiny, evolving package of sensibilities, our tiny phenomenal island of awareness, emerging from sensed, but uncharted seas, should be unique.” Herjellsen had then leaned back. “Rich as we are, I suspect,” he had said, “we are only one penny in the riches of reality.”

“What is the reality in itself?” demanded William.

“We are one thing, I suspect,” had said Herjellsen, “that the reality is in itself-but what other things the reality may be in itself I do not know.” “Is the reality to be distinguished,” had asked Gunther, “from the totality of its diverse phenomenal representations or manifestations?”

“I think so,” whispered Herjellsen. “I think that it is in itself these manifestations, but that it is, in itself, too, more.”

“This seems contradictory,” said William.

“I do not think so,” said Herjellsen. “Representations or manifestations are not like shells or costumes in which something else hides; they area way in which reality, in itself, truly, has its being; they are not other than the reality but a way in which it is; but, too, it seems probable that reality’s riches, in their unmanifested profundity, exceed phenomenal expressions. It is not that the phenomena are not reality, but that there are realities beyond phenomena. Reality contains, I suspect, depths and inexpressibilities beyond those of any set of. phenomenal configurations.”

“This is hard to understand,” said William.

“The words `in itself’ are hard to understand, perhaps unintelligible,” said Herjellsen. “Perhaps they are misleading. Let us forget them. Let us think what might be meant, not trouble ourselves with a particular semantic formulation. I am saying that there is no adequate distinction, in this matter, between real and unreal. All that exists is equally real. All that I wish to say is that there is a reality-doubtless identical with all that exists-but that this reality far exceeds our perspectives upon it, or those of other perspectives. It is, perhaps, infinitely profound and inexhaustible. There is more to it than we see. It is not that it is not as we see it, but that it is also other than we see it. And perhaps, if we held other perspectives, we would see that it was also other than we conceived it.”

“Granted these things, supposing them intelligible,” said William, “is it not your belief that in extraphenomenal reality, reality as it is apart from our particular, or some particular, mode of experience, time and space do not exist?”

“Certainly not as we conceive of them,” said Herjellsen. “Time and space, as we conceive of them, are irrational. It seems irrational both that space should be infinite, that it should have no end, and irrational, too, that it should at some boundary terminate, for what would be on the other side?”

“What of an expanding, finite space?” asked William. Hamilton’s mind had swept to a speculative conjecture common in astrophysics.

“Irrational,” said Herjellsen. “What is it expanding into?”

William looked angry.

“What if it were closed and static?” asked William.

“What would lie outside its sphere?” asked Herjellsen.

“That question would be answered ‘nothing,”’ said William.

“Yes,” said Herjellsen, “but scarcely answered rationally.” He smiled. “A sphere requires place,” he said.

“What of the Moebius strip?” demanded William.

“It, too, requires place,” smiled Herjellsen.

“I suppose there are difficulties,” admitted William.

“Too,” said Herjellsen, “consider time-it is irrational both to suppose that it had a beginning and that it had no beginning-each hypothesis affronts the intellect, challenges sanity itself.”

“So, then,” said William, “space and time are irrational?”

“Space and time, as we conceive of them,” said Herjellsen, “make little sense.”

“So what should we think?”

“We should think at least,” said Herjellsen, “that they may not be as we conceive of them.” He smiled. “They are relative, in my conjecture,” said Herjellsen, “to our mode of perception-I think it quite unlikely that they characterize, or characterize in the same way, the reality as it is apart from our sensibility. It may be that what we experience as space and time is, apart from our experience of it, quite unlike space and time.”

“This sort of thing,” volunteered Gunther, “is quite common in science, though seldom extended to space and time. The distinction between the sensibility-dependent and the sensibility-independent property is germane. Sound, for example, considered as physicalistic atmospheric concussions is quite unlike the auditory phenomenon of listening, say, to a symphony. The reality is like blows; the auditory phenomenon is music. Similarly with other properties. Consider color, as the physicalistic property of a surface, selectively absorbing and reflecting waves of light. This is quite different from the painting one sees or the blue sky. The world of physics is one of particles and motions, of invisible motions, silent, unlit, dark, hurried. But our world of experience, the human world, is bright with sound, with feeling, taste and touch, with odors, with light and color. Our sensors dip into alien spectra. Our brain is a transducer that transforms physical energies into a human experience, one congruent with the world of the physicist, and yet quite different from it.”

“You are familiar, are you not,” asked Herjellsen of William, “with the distinction between the sensibility-dependent property and the sensibility-independent property?”

“Any educated man is,” said William. “That distinction dates from the time of Galileo.”

“From the time of Leucippus and Democritus,” corrected Herjellsen.

“Very well,” said William.

“It is then my belief,” said Herjellsen, “that time and space, as we conceive them, are sensibility-dependent, a mode of our sensibility, a condition for experience, given whatever we may be. That we experience the reality spatially and temporally does not imply that the reality apart from our experience is as we conceive it to be. That we experience a bright yellow does not imply that in the physicist’s reality such a yellow, apart from our experience, exists. That we experience a symphony of Beethoven does not imply that in the physicist’s reality such music, apart from our experience, exists as we experience it. Rather it would be only a pounding on the skin. For the lobster, for the sponge, for the spider, it presumably would not exist, not as music. Similarly, of course, for them there might be beauties and rhythms that would be lost on us, we lacking the appropriate sensors, the appropriate sensibility.”

“Space and time are unreal?” asked William.

“As phenomenal reality, relative to our mode of perception,” said Herjellsen, patiently, “they are quite real.”

“Is that all?”

“Perhaps,” said William, “they are a mode of perceiving something which is doubtless quite real, or, perhaps they are themselves perceptions of something-or things-which are quite real.”

“Perhaps,” said William, “they are modes of perceiving space and time, or, if perceptions, perceptions of space and time.”

“Does the music of Beethoven, the color of bright yellow, exist in nature as you hear it, as you see it?”

“No,” said William.

“Why then do you fear to extend the distinction of sensibility-dependent and sensibility-independent property to space and time?” asked Herjellsen.

“I am afraid,” said William, “because then I would be lost.”

“Yes,” said Herjellsen, “you would then be alone-without your maps. Your very world would totter.”

“Why do you suspect that space and time are not of the reality itself, or are different in that reality?”

“Space and time, as we conceive of them,” said Herjellsen, “are irrational. Thus, I conjecture they are not as we conceive of them.”

William said nothing.

“It is interesting,” said Herjellsen, “men who conceive placidly of irrationalities are accounted sane. I who question them am accounted insane. I wonder who is truly sane and who truly insane.”

Brenda Hamilton fought the terror. She shook her head. She looked into the cubicle.

It had begun with a soft glow of light, vibrating, filling the interior of the cubicle with a fog of crystals, and then it had seemed to slip to the floor of the cubicle, like beads, like molecules forming chains of light, first keeping to the margins of the cubicle, then, strand by strand, darting across the plastic floor, until now the entire floor of. the cubicle seemed laced with light, and then, tendril by tendril, it began to climb the walls of the cubicle. Now the floor of the cubicle was covered, it seemed inches thick, with a matting of light strands, and more light, like illuminated vines began to grow about the interior of the cubicle.

But it was not the light that frightened Hamilton. It was turnings and terror in her mind.

William seemed calm. He had had the experience before. He was patient.

“There are two times now,” he said, “that are present.”

“One is a memory,” whispered Hamilton.

“No,” said William. “Both are quite real. It is like a mountain and a lake. They are times, but they co-exist.”

“That is not possible,” said Hamilton.

“It is like the parts of a picture. They are different parts but they are all now. There are two times, and they are now.”

“No,” said Hamilton.

She shook her head in terror. She recalled Herjellsen saying that time, as we think of it, did not exist in the reality.

“It is like a sphere,” said William. “It is like a transparent sphere. I see two points on one surface, each opposite the other. They are related to one another. Each is different and yet they are the same, and they are both now.”

“Is it truly that way?” asked Hamilton.

William looked at her blankly. “No,” he said, “that is only a poem, a. poem.”

Hamilton shuddered. She sought a concept, a root to grasp, a branch to seize, even a poem that might try to speak what could not be spoken.

“No metaphors from the phenomenal realm are adequate or clarifying,” Herjellsen had insisted. “It is its own reality, not ours. We cannot understand it in the modes of our perception. It is another reality.”

Hamilton shuddered. There were no charts, no diagrams, no schemas, no pictures. Nothing would be adequate. It was not our reality. It was another reality.

William smiled. “It is gone now,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” said Hamilton.

“Frightening, the disordering of the time sense,” he said.

Brenda smiled. William, light, pleasant, cool, witty, sharp, sophisticated, was again his self. His attention was now drawn to the cubicle, watching the phenomenon of the light. Now the cubicle was almost filled with the interwoven tendrils of brightness, like beaded strands of brightness. Hamilton looked at William. “Pretty good trick, what?” he asked Hamilton, not looking at her, referring to the light.

Brenda wanted to cry out with joy. Suddenly William, in his casual manner, had made the world real again for her.

It was William’s mathematics which Herjellsen utilized. William, a physician, but gifted amateur mathematician, had, utilizing analogies from the mathematics of polydimensional spaces, developed, as a fictive sport, a jeux d’esprit of ideas, a calculus for polydimensional temporalities. He had published this privately. The slim volume had come to the attention of Herjellsen, an omnivorous reader. What had been a form of fictive play for William, an engaging pastime, a lighthearted diversion, had given Herjellsen the language, the equations, for his conjecture. Men before Herjellsen had doubted the sensibility-independent nature of space and time, notably and most famously the tiny, hunchbacked, brilliant Prussian, Immanuel Kant, but Kant had not had at his disposal the mathematics of polydimensional temporalities, and Kant had been rational in a way that Herjellsen was not. Herjellsen brought to the problem the conviction that the mind might have the capacity to touch the reality. Kant had been of the Enlightenment. Mind, for Kant, had been essentially an organ of rationalities, conscious, reflective, clear, logical, Euclidean, a sunny, felicitous instrumental mechanism, common in all men, incorporating the canons of reason, a suitable device whereby man might, within his limitations, know the true, solve problems and advance in social progress. Kant was unfamiliar with the storms of the mind, the turbulences unleashed in the Nineteenth Century, the intellectual and technological explosions, and horrors, of the Twentieth. Kant was before the teachings of Freud, the investigations of the darknesses of the mind, the first organized probings into psychic phenomena, the first organized attempts to understand what might be the nature, and the powers, some perhaps untapped, and the reaches, of this mysterious, evolutionary oddity, the mind of the human being. Herjellsen, a crazed Finn, was the first man to bring together, in a madman’s brain, the conjecture, the mathematics, and the suspicion that the reality could be touched, that the key could be found, and that it lay in the mind.

The translation cubicle was now aflame with light.

Hamilton, and William, watched it with awe.

Hamilton, glancing about, cried out. Herjellsen had not moved, but there was blood on the back of his neck, beads of blood. His collar was stained. His fists were clenched. He seemed oblivious of the world, of anything, save for one thing, the thought he held in his brain.

Hamilton looked at Gunther. He had not spoken. His eyes were closed.

The cubicle was exploding with light.

“Kill it!” cried Gunther. “Kill it! Kill it!”

Hamilton cried out with fear. William put his arm about her.

“Do not be frightened,” said William. “It is the disordering of the time sense. In a moment he will be perfectly all right. It is only his reaction.”

“It’s coming!” cried Gunther. “Give me the rifle, you fool l”

Hamilton looked at him, frightened.

“It’s dead,” laughed Gunther. “It’s dead.” He looked at Hamilton. “I killed it,” he said.

“Yes, Gunther,” she whispered.

Gunther smiled, and shook his head.

“Do you hear it?” asked Hamilton. She knew it was not an actual sound. But it began to scream in her head, a highpitched, whistling note. It began to grow louder and louder. The light seemed now ready to shatter the heavy plastic of the cubicle. Hamilton could no longer look at it. She pulled away from William, shielded her eyes. The whistling note was intolerably loud. She shut her eyes against the pain of the light and, though she knew the sound was from within her brain, covered her ears with her hands. Then it seemed her brain would burst with the note, and then it was suddenly still, absolutely still.

She opened her eyes, lowered her hands.

“Look,” said William.

The light was gone from the cubicle. It now seemed heavy, silent, very empty.

“There is nothing,” she whispered.

“No,” said William, “you are mistaken.”

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

“P is now present,” said William. “It is in the cubicle. The cubicle is now open.”

Hamilton looked at the cubicle, the heavy, sliding plastic panel. The cubicle was closed.

“It is closed,” said Hamilton.

“No,” said William. “The cubicle is open.”

Hamilton looked into the cubicle. It seemed very quiet now, absolutely still. The energies of P, asserted to be present, she knew, would not be, if they existed, in the visible or tactual spectrum. They could not be heard. They could not be seen. They could not be tasted, or smelled or touched.

“Such energies cannot exist,” she had once said to Herjellsen.

“Gravitation,” had said Herjellsen, “too, cannot be heard, nor can it be seen, or touched, or smelled or tasted, and yet it commands the motions of material bodies; it balances universes, plays with planets and guides meteors; does it not exist?”

“Of course,” had said Hamilton. “We know it does. We can see its effects.”

“And so, too,” bad said Herjellsen, “can one see the effects of P.”

Hamilton stared into the cubicle.

“It’s closed,” she whispered. “It’s closed.”

“No,” said William. “The cubicle is now open.”

Hamilton regarded the cubicle. It was three hundred and forty-three cubic feet in content, seven feet in height, width and depth, but, if William were correct, it was unfathomed in depth in another dimension. Hamilton wondered how deep was it? It was closed to three dimensions. She could see that. But, if William, and Gunther, and Herjellsen were correct, it was open to another.

“It’s there!” cried William. “It’s there!”

Hamilton screamed.

In the center of the cubicle, on the floor, was a small, heavy-wire cage, about a foot wide, a foot high and two feet in length. There was straw in the bottom of the cage, and a pan of water. Hamilton saw it was a trap, that had been sprung shut. It must have been baited. Inside, peering out through the cage wire, its eyes bright, was a large rodent.

Hamilton slipped to the floor, unconscious.