Chapter XI

Randolph Warren raised a shaking hand to his head, and brushed back the hair that had fallen over his eyes. His mind was muddled, uncertain. There was a feeling of weirdness, of inexplicable things about him as he lay on the floor, even before he opened his eyes. The thick, soft carpeting of semi-sponge rubber was comfortable under him, and languorously he opened his eyes. He stared, raised a hand before his eyes, and stared harder.

His hand was a brilliant, flaming violet. His hair was a pale, virulent shade of green. He was wearing dark red shoes, dark orange trousers with twisting threads of a bright turkey red. His belt was pale violet. The gold buckle was slightly greenish in cast, but otherwise unchanged.

Lying on the floor nearby, and slightly stirring now was Putney. His lips were a dark violet, his hands the same bright violet that showed on Warren's own. His hair, normally brown, was now colored green, several shades darker, and much more pleasant in appearance than Warren's.

What Had Happened to the Control Room?

The physicist gasped, and sat up. The control room of his ship of course. But what had happened to it? It looked familiar, yet unfamiliar. The angles and proportions were wholly, utterly wrong.

And it was dark. The lights were giving a pale orange glow, but the window opened on a jet emptiness. Warren knew it was in open space, he could recognize that quality of empty blackness, but there was something very wrong with the sky, too. The very stars in their courses seemed vastly changed. He could not recognize a single familiar star, a single known constellation.

He heard a gasp of astonishment. Putney was staring at his hand with wide eyes. His eyes were bright, light blue, where they should be white, and very dark green where they had been black.

"You awake?" said Warren. "I felt the same way when I first saw my hand. Look at those beautiful red shoes you have on. How do you like my orange-and-red trousers?" His voice though, did not convey any sound of jocularity, but a feeling of helplessness.

"Where under the sun are we—what's happened?" gasped Putney.

"To the first I'd say, I doubt that we are, and to the second, I could guess, but I won't." The helpless tone of stupified surprise was rapidly leaving Warren's voice, with a note of excitement following close on its heels.

Shouts and cries of amazement were coming from the rear of the ship.

"All men up here!" sang out Warren. Presently men began to file into the room. In a short time ten of the weirdest sights that ever met the human eye stood grouped before the two scientists. They were gaping at each other in speechless amazement. McLaurin, the burly Scots mechanician, was the prize specimen, however. He had on pale pink trousers, a light orange coat, blue shoes with red soles, and was now equipped with violet hair. A short time before it had been very red.

Warren burst out laughing at the sight of the dour Scot clad in this brilliant array of pastel tints. "Lord, Mac, was ever such a sight before?"

"An' o' course ye'r a beauty ye'rself," replied the Scotsman. "An' what may it mean?"

"Carl—you're somewhat of an astronomer, take a look out of the observation window. What stars do you recognize?"

"None—not a one!" gasped the young astro-physicist, after a keen survey of the star-field.

"I'm afraid to turn the ship around right now, don't know what will happen, if my theory is right, anything might. Now where would you say the sun lay from here?"

No Sun to Be Seen at Any Angle

Carl looked briefly out of the window which ran around three sides of the control room, and finally pointed straight astern. "Must be behind, we'd see it if it were anywhere else."

"Mac, run back and look."

The mechanist was gone scarcely thirty seconds before he came back, his face paled to a slightly lighter shade of violet.

"I can see through three other angles, Doctor Warren, but there is na sun!" he reported.

The men stared at him in horror. "No sun? My God, where are we?" demanded one.

"I can't say, but I can guess," replied Warren quickly. "This thing will get on your nerves if you let it, but take it easy. We are in a space ship, the most powerful men ever knew. We are somewhere, where, obviously, this space ship, plus that little ball of fire, brought us. Therefore it's a reasonable conclusion that this same space ship, plus an exactly similar ball of fire, which we can create, will take us back. Is it not?"

If Warren's theories were correct, it was not necessarily true, but the men nodded, hopefully.

"My theory is that we have gone where that matter went! Into another space! Not quite where that matter went, for remember we went through that, merely out of our own space, where there was no matter, and where no matter could exist. We exist, therefore we are in a space where matter can exist, but the conditions are different here, hence our violet faces, the weird coloring of our clothes and hair, and the feeling of unfamiliarity with this very ship we built. But the conditions are not so different that we cannot understand them, and live till we can control them.

Locating Themselves in the New Space

"The first thing to do is to locate ourselves in this new space. We must take photographs. First, however, we must see that conditions permit our plates to work. This ship is completely stocked, luckily, so we have plenty of time to work. We must be in some part of this new space which corresponds with the solar system in ours.

"To get our position, remember that our own space is a curved hyper-sphere, a fourth-dimensional sphere, roughly speaking, whose shape is maintained by the pull of the multitude of bodies, stars and worlds, which fill it. Now here are other stars—and probably other worlds. This, then, would be a space similar to ours, as one world is similar to another. Matter cannot exist between the two, but can exist in either, just as a man could not exist between Earth and Venus for instance, but, supposedly, could exist on either, but under different conditions of gravity, light, heat, atmosphere—everything.

"So it is here.

"But one thing is not changed men, one of the most important things. I've still got an appetite, so let's eat!"

With a laugh of relief, they agreed with him on that, and started below. Two of the men set to work in the galley, preparing the meal, while Warren and Putney stayed in the control room, observing the meters.

A Puzzled Group of Space Travelers

"We've got gravity, we've got power, and light and heat, and evidently our force-screen is working, for there's atmospheric pressure outside, earth-atmosphere brought with us. But what in—in the Universe did this?" demanded Putney.

"Conflicting force-fields, Putt, the conflicting fields of that little release-flame running wild, and our own field X-785. It threw us for a loss, Putt, but I think it killed that release-flame.

"Now we've got to work fast, and locate ourselves. First and foremost, we'll have to use the telescope and take star-charts, so that we can come back to this point if we move, and by all the gods we will! I couldn't have done this in a billion years, and no man will ever do it again, in all probability, so let's make hay while the sun shines. Either we can return, or we can't. If we can, we don't have to worry, and if we can't, we might as well enjoy life while we live!"

"I guess you're right, Ran, but what will we have to do to learn about our position?"

"Determine the Constants of Space here. There are certain constants that are, I suspect, universal. The constant of gravity, the proportionality factor you know, will probably be the same, but we can determine that. But such fundamental constants as the velocity of light, radius of space curvature, the space equation of time and the resistance or rigidity of space-constants, we will have to know. Evidently our release-flame burns steadily, though Mac said it was orange here—I'm not surprised—so we will have time to work. But most important for us, is the rate of progress of time as relative to our own space-time sphere."

"A second here may be a million years of earth-time you mean?"

"Exactly—and if it is, we are forever isolated. By this time, or by the time we return, the sun and its attendant planets will have swung around the galaxy and been lost from us forever in a maze of five hundred thousand million suns, and the galaxy itself may have swung into some other part of our super-galaxy, the Magellanic cloud for instance——"

"Yes, and a much simpler way of being gloomy is to merely say we might all commit suicide. Let's go below," said Putney.