The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (14 page)

‘You say that Nelson has been rotated in the Fourth Dimension; but I thought Einstein had shown that the Fourth Dimension was time.’

Hughes groaned inwardly. He had been anticipating this red herring.

‘I was referring to an additional dimension of space,’ he explained patiently. ‘By that I mean a dimension, or direction, at right-angles to our normal three. One can call it the Fourth Dimension if one wishes. With certain reservations, time may also be regarded as a dimension. As we normally regard space as three-dimensional, it is then customary to call time the Fourth Dimension. But the label is arbitrary. As I’m asking you to grant me four dimensions of space, we must call time the Fifth Dimension.’

‘Five Dimensions! Good Heavens!’ exploded someone further down the table.

Dr Hughes could not resist the opportunity. ‘Space of several million dimensions has been frequently postulated in sub-atomic physics,’ he said quietly.

There was a stunned silence. No one, not even McPherson, seemed inclined to argue.

‘I now come to the second part of my account,’ continued Dr Hughes. ‘A few weeks after his inversion we found that there was something wrong with Nelson. He was taking food normally, but it didn’t seem to nourish him properly. The explanation has been given by Dr Sanderson, and leads us into the realms of organic chemistry. I’m sorry to be talking like a textbook, but you will soon realise how vitally important this is to the company. And you also have the satisfaction of knowing that we are now all on equally unfamiliar territory.’

That was not quite true, for Hughes still remembered some fragments of his chemistry. But it might encourage the stragglers.

‘Organic compounds are composed of atoms of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, with other elements, arranged in complicated ways in space. Chemists are fond of making models of them out of knitting needles and coloured plasticine. The results are often very pretty and look like works of advanced art.

‘Now, it is possible to have two organic compounds containing identical numbers of atoms, arranged in such a way that one is the mirror image of the other. They’re called stereo-isomers, and are very common among the sugars. If you could set their molecules side by side, you would see that they bore the same sort of relationship as a right and left glove. They are, in fact, called right—or left-handed—dextro or laevo—compounds. I hope this is quite clear.’

Dr Hughes looked around anxiously. Apparently it was.

‘Stereo-isomers have almost identical chemical properties,’ he went on, ‘though there are subtle differences. In the last few years, Dr Sanderson tells me, it has been found that certain essential foods, including the new class of vitamins discovered by Professor Vandenburg, have properties depending on the arrangement of their atoms in space. In other words, gentlemen, the left-handed compounds might be essential for life, but the right-handed one would be of no value. This in spite of the fact that their chemical formulae are identical.

‘You will appreciate, now, why Nelson’s inversion is much more serious than we at first thought. It’s not merely a matter of teaching him to read again, in which case—apart from its philosophical interest—the whole business would be trivial. He is actually starving to death in the midst of plenty, simply because he can no more assimilate certain molecules of food than we can put our right foot into a left boot.

‘Dr Sanderson has tried an experiment which has proved the truth of this theory. With very great difficulty, he has obtained the stereo-isomers of many of these vitamins. Professor Vandenburg himself synthesised them when he heard of our trouble. They have already produced a very marked improvement in Nelson’s condition.’

Hughes paused and drew out some papers. He thought he would give the Board time to prepare for the shock. If a man’s life were not at stake, the situation would have been very amusing. The Board was going to be hit where it would hurt most.

‘As you will realise, gentlemen, since Nelson was injured—if you can call it that—while he was on duty, the company is liable to pay for any treatment he may require. We have found that treatment, and you may wonder why I have taken so much of your time telling you about it. The reason is very simple. The production of the necessary stereo-isomers is almost as difficult as the extraction of radium—more so, in some cases. Dr Sanderson tells me that it will cost over five thousand pounds a day to keep Nelson alive.’

The silence lasted for half a minute; then everyone started to talk at once. Sir Robert pounded on the table, and presently restored order. The council of war had begun.

Three hours later, an exhausted Hughes left the conference room and went in search of Dr Sanderson, whom he found fretting in his office.

‘Well, what’s the decision?’ asked the doctor.

‘What I was afraid of. They want me to re-invert Nelson.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘Frankly, I don’t know. All I can hope to do is to reproduce the conditions of the original fault as accurately I can.’

‘Weren’t there any other suggestions?’

‘Quite a few, but most of them were stupid. McPherson had the best idea. He wanted to use the generator to invert normal food so that Nelson could eat it. I had to point out that to take the big machine out of action for this purpose would cost several millions a year, and in any case the windings wouldn’t stand it more than a few times. So that scheme collapsed. Then Sir Robert wanted to know if you could guarantee there were no vitamins we’d overlooked, or that might still be undiscovered. His idea was that in spite of our synthetic diets we might not be able to keep Nelson alive after all.’

‘What did you say to that?’

‘I had to admit it was a possibility. So Sir Robert is going to have a talk with Nelson. He hopes to persuade him to risk it; his family will be taken care of if the experiment fails.’

Neither of the two men said anything for a few moments. Then Dr Sanderson broke the silence.

‘Now do you understand the sort of decision a surgeon often has to make,’ he said.

Hughes nodded in agreement. ‘It’s a beautiful dilemma, isn’t it? A perfectly healthy man, but it will cost two millions a year to keep him alive, and we can’t even be sure of that. I know the Board’s thinking of its precious balance sheet more than anything else, but I don’t see any alternative. Nelson will have to take a chance.’

‘Couldn’t you make some tests first?’

‘Impossible. It’s a major engineering operation to get the rotor out. We’ll have to rush the experiment through when the load on the system is at minimum. Then we’ll slam the rotor back, and tidy up the mess our artificial short has made. All this has to be done before the peak loads come on again. Poor old Murdock’s mad as hell about it.’

‘I don’t blame him. When will the experiment start?’

‘Not for a few days, at least. Even if Nelson agrees, I’ve got to fix up all my gear.’

No one was ever to know what Sir Robert said to Nelson during the hours they were together. Dr Hughes was more than half prepared for it when the telephone rang and the Old Man’s tired voice said, ‘Hughes? Get your equipment ready. I’ve spoken to Murdock, and we’ve fixed the time for Tuesday night. Can you manage by then?’

‘Yes, Sir Robert.’

‘Good. Give me a progress report every afternoon until Tuesday. That’s all.’

The enormous room was dominated by the great cylinder of the rotor, hanging thirty feet above the gleaming plastic floor. A little group of men stood silently at the edge of the shadowed pit, waiting patiently. A maze of temporary wiring ran to Dr Hughes’s equipment—multibeam oscilloscopes, megawattmeters and microchronometers, and the special relays that had been constructed to make the circuit at the calculated instant.

That was the greatest problem of all. Dr Hughes had no way of telling when the circuit should be closed; whether it should be when the voltage was at maximum, when it was at zero, or at some intermediate point on the sine wave. He had chosen the simplest and safest course. The circuit would be made at zero voltage; when it opened again would depend on the speed of the breakers.

In ten minutes the last of the great factories in the service area would be closing down for the night. The weather forecast had been favourable; there would be no abnormal loads before morning. By then, the rotor had to be back and the generator running again. Fortunately, the unique method of construction made it easy to reassemble the machine, but it would be a very close thing and there was no time to lose.

When Nelson came in, accompanied by Sir Robert and Dr Sanderson, he was very pale. He might, thought Hughes, have been going to his execution. The thought was somewhat ill-timed, and he put it hastily aside.

There was just time enough for a last quite unnecessary check of the equipment. He had barely finished when he heard Sir Robert’s quiet voice.

‘We’re ready, Dr Hughes.’

Rather unsteadily, he walked to the edge of the pit. Nelson had already descended, and as he had been instructed, was standing at its exact centre, his upturned face a white blob far below. Dr Hughes waved a brief encouragement and turned away, to rejoin the group by his equipment.

He flicked over the switch of the oscilloscope and played with the synchronising controls until a single cycle of the main wave was stationary on the screen. Then he adjusted the phasing: two brilliant spots of light moved toward each other along the wave until they had coalesced at its geometric centre. He looked briefly toward Murdock, who was watching the megawattmeters intently. The engineer nodded. With a silent prayer, Hughes threw the switch.

There was the tiniest click from the relay unit. A fraction of a second later, the whole building seemed to rock as the great conductors crashed over in the switch room three hundred feet away. The lights faded, and almost died. Then it was all over. The circuit breakers, driven at almost the speed of an explosion, had cleared the line again. The lights returned to normal and the needles of the megawattmeters dropped back onto their scales.

The equipment had withstood the overload. But what of Nelson?

Dr Hughes was surprised to see that Sir Robert, for all his sixty years, had already reached the generator. He was standing by its edge, looking down into the great pit. Slowly, the physicist went to join him. He was afraid to hurry; a growing sense of premonition was filling his mind. Already he could picture Nelson lying in a twisted heap at the centre of the well, his lifeless eyes staring up at them reproachfully. Then came a still more horrible thought. Suppose the field had collapsed too soon, when the inversion was only partly completed? In another moment, he would know the worst.

There is no shock greater than that of the totally unexpected, for against it the mind has no chance to prepare its defences. Dr Hughes was ready for almost anything when he reached the generator. Almost, but not quite….

He did not expect to find it completely empty.

What came after, he could never perfectly remember. Murdock seemed to take charge then. There was a great flurry of activity, and the engineers swarmed in to replace the giant rotor. Somewhere in the distance he heard Sir Robert saying, over and over again, ‘We did our best—we did our best.’ He must have replied, somehow, but everything was very vague….

In the grey hours before the dawn, Dr Hughes awoke from his fitful sleep. All night he had been haunted by his dreams, by weird fantasies of multidimensional geometry. There were visions of strange, other-worldly universes of insane shapes and intersecting planes along which he was doomed to struggle endlessly, fleeing from some nameless terror. Nelson, he dreamed, was trapped in one of those unearthly dimensions, and he was trying to reach him. Sometimes he was Nelson himself, and he imagined that he could see all around him the universe he knew, strangely distorted and barred from him by invisible walls.

The nightmare faded as he struggled up in bed. For a few moments he sat holding his head, while his mind began to clear. He knew what was happening; this was not the first time the solution of some baffling problem had come suddenly upon him in the night.

There was one piece still missing in the jigsaw puzzle that was sorting itself out in his mind. One piece only—and suddenly he had it. There was something that Nelson’s assistant had said, when he was describing the original accident. It had seemed trivial at the time; until now, Hughes had forgotten all about it.

‘When I looked inside the generator, there didn’t seem to be anyone there, so I started to climb down the ladder….’

What a fool he had been! Old McPherson had been right, or partly right, after all!

The field had rotated Nelson in the fourth dimension of space, but there had been a displacement in
time
as well. On the first occasion it had been a matter of seconds only. This time, the conditions must have been different in spite of all his care. There were so many unknown factors, and the theory was more than half guesswork.

Nelson had not been inside the generator at the end of the experiment.
But he would be
.

Dr Hughes felt a cold sweat break out all over his body. He pictured that thousand-ton cylinder, spinning beneath the drive of its fifty million horsepower. Suppose something suddenly materialised in the space it already occupied…?

He leaped out of bed and grabbed the private phone to the power station. There was no time to lose—the rotor would have to be removed at once. Murdock could argue later.

Very gently, something caught the house by its foundations and rocked it to and fro, as a sleepy child may shake its rattle. Flakes of plaster came planing down from the ceiling; a network of cracks appeared as if by magic in the walls. The lights flickered, became suddenly brilliant, and faded out.

Dr Hughes threw back the curtain and looked toward the mountains. The power station was invisible beyond the foothills of Mount Perrin, but its site was clearly marked by the vast column of debris that was slowly rising against the bleak light of the dawn.

Castaway

First published in
Fantasy
, April 1947, as by ‘Charles Willis’