Dimension A Read online

  DIMENSION A

  L. P. DAVIES

  Published by DELL PUBLISHING CO.,INC.

  750 Third Avenue

  New York, New York 10017

  Copyright © 1969 by L. P. Davies

  All rights reserved. For information, contact

  Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

  Reprinted by arrangement with

  Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  New York, New York, 10017

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Dell printing—March 1972

  MIRAGE OF DEATH

  Ordinary green-foliaged trees appeared to float above the ground. In front of them was a collection of about a dozen houses, alongside were the beings themselves.

  Adam strode unhesitatingly towards them. He had almost reached them when the transformation came. The trees, the houses, and the weird white shapes suddenly collapsed, dissolving, melting into the ground. Without warning a brown sea lapped out, reaching towards Adam’s feet. We saw him struggle to free himself. And then we heard him scream… .

  DIMENSION A

  CHAPTER ONE

  It took a certain amount of courage to knock on the white enameled door of Mr. Leming’s ivory tower. The Director of the Institute of Biochemistry was an august personage reputedly unapproachable except by senior members of his staff, and I was the greenest of junior trainees. There was much the same sort of feeling I had sometimes had before entering my old headmaster’s study. But I was eighteen now— a man by anyone’s standards—my sheet was clean, and if Lee’s letter was right the Director would be more concerned over what I had to tell him than incensed at my interruption.

  So I knocked and went inside. This was the outer office, a place of metal filing cabinets and duplicating machines, a strong smell of .antiseptic, and a desk from behind which an acid-faced female looked up to demand shortly, “Yes? What is it?”

  “I would like to see Mr. Leming,” I told her.

  A young man with gingery fair hair and a narrow, serious-looking, small-featured face watched me through a window behind the desk. It was only when he moved as I did that I realised my nervousness had made a mirror look like a window and I was looking at myself.

  “Have you an appointment?” asked the female.

  “No,” I confessed, adding quickly: “But it is very important.”

  Supercilious brows arched, she eyed my stained white coat. “Name and department?”

  “Gerald Morton. Department D.”

  She wavered, pressed a button and spoke into a receiver.

  “A Mr. Morton would like to see you, sir. He says it’s very important.”

  The gruffly metallic voice sounded annoyed and impatient.

  “What’s that? Who?”

  “Tell him it’s concerning Professor Maver,” I put in quickly before the female had a chance to reply. She relayed the message.

  “John Maver?” echoed the voice with undertones of surprise. Then, “All right. Send him in.”

  Mr. Leming sat behind the largest and untidiest desk I had -ever seen. He had a round, clean-looking face, a white military moustache and silver hair brushed immaculately back with sweeping wings over each large ear. He wore heavy, black-rimmed spectacles, and his white coat looked as if it had been tailored.

  “Morton. Yes.” He removed his glasses. “Have we met before?”

  “No, sir.” And, in case he got the idea I had been hiding away in the darkest corner of some obscure laboratory, “I’ve only been here a few months.”

  “Yes. And you want to see me about Professor Maver,” He nodded impatiently to a chair. “Draw up and sit down, Morton. Well?”

  Taking a deep breath, I drew Lee’s letter from my pocket.

  “I received this letter from a friend of mine, Lee Miller, this morning, sir.”

  He frowned heavy impatience. I was to learn as time went by that he never wasted time or words, and expected those he came in contact with to do the same.

  “Lee is Professor Maver’s nephew, sir,” I explained hastily, and his face cleared.

  “I see. Go on, Morton.”

  “Lee works in Norwich but spends his week-ends with his uncle at Haweford.”

  “Come to the point,” said Mr. Leming testily.

  I did. “Professor Maver and his assistant have disappeared, sir.”

  “Disappeared?” White eyebrows tried to meet silver hair. “What do you mean ‘disappeared’?” He nodded towards the letter. “Is that what that’s all about?”

  “Yes, sir.” I took the letter from its envelope, eight large sheets filled with Lee’s ungainly scrawl, and handed it to him. He replaced his glasses to inspect it, shuddered, dropped the sheets on the desk, swept off the spectacles again and leaned back.

  “Tell me,” he said succinctly.

  It was difficult to know where to start, or, having started, how to put it concisely enough to satisfy my listener.

  “The Professor and his assistant”—I reached for the letter so that I could refresh my memory—“Adam Sokel, disappeared from their laboratory five weeks ago.”

  Mr. Leming’s brows lifted again. “Five weeks?”

  I found the paragraph that explained the delay. “The police were in charge at first; then the Special Branch took over. They asked Lee not to discuss the disappearances with anybody.”

  “Which explains why there has been nothing in the newspapers. I was wondering about that, Morton. Professor Maver is a well-known personality. So the Special Branch are interested …” He brooded silently for a few minutes. “Defection behind the Curtain?” He shook his head in answer to his own question. “No. Not John Maver. But that’s obviously what they suspect. I don’t like the sound of it … Go on, Morton.”

  I selected another page of the letter and read aloud from it:

  “‘Uncle John and Adam had been working in the lab all morning. It’s a new building, some distance from the house. There’s a telephone that Uncle John rigged up himself connecting it with the house. At midday Adam rang through for sandwiches. Mrs. Robson—she’s the housekeeper—took them across. Everything was all right then. Later in the afternoon Adam came to the house to collect a length of rope which he took back to the lab. Mrs. Robson said he looked excited. At six o’clock she rang the lab to ask if they would be coming to the house for tea. There was no reply, so she went across herself. The door was locked and when she hammered on it there was no reply. Then she noticed a smell of burning. Thinking there had been some kind of accident she ran for help. The police cottage is only a few yards down the lane and luckily the constable was in. He came back with her, forced the door open, and found the lab empty.’”

  I looked up. “Then Lee goes on to explain that there are no windows to the place, only the one door, and that had been locked from the inside.”

  Mr. Leming stroked his chin. “Maver’s nephew. What kind of person is he?”

  I had been expecting that. After the first reading of the letter my mind had travelled along the same road of doubt. I was as honest with my listener as I had been with myself.

  “Very easy-going, sir. The life and soul of the party. The same age as I am—we knew each other at the university. He’s training to become a commercial artist.”

  “The type of person who might indulge in an elaborate practical joke?”

  “Yes, sir.” I had to agree to that. “But both his parents are dead. His uncle is his only living relative. I know he thinks the world of him.”

  “I see.” The other nodded pensively.

  “When I first came to work here, sir, I mentioned to Lee who the Director was. He told his uncle, who said he knew you very well. Lee says here in his letter that despite the instruction
s given by the Special Branch man he felt he just couldn’t sit back and not do anything about his uncle’s disappearance. He says you are the only person he could think of to ask for help.”

  “That’s reasonable. Yes. Does your friend mention at all what work his uncle was engaged upon?”

  I shook my head. “No, sir. But there is something …” I leafed through the pages, found the appropriate paragraph, and read aloud again.

  “‘I think Mr. Leming will know the nature of Uncle John’s experiments. Tell him that this farm is the one from which the farmer vanished back in 1926. Apparently, he just flicked out of existence while crossing the yard. Uncle bought the place a few years back and built the lab on the exact spot on which the farmer did his vanishing act.’”

  Mr. Leming gazed thoughtfully into the middle distance. “And now it would appear history has repeated itself. Yes”—he seemed to be talking to himself rather than for my benefit—“I am well aware of the bee John Maver had in his bonnet.” He came back. “Where did you say the place was, Morton?”

  “Haweford Farm, Haweford. I’ve looked it up, sir. It’s about ten miles the other side of Norwich.”

  He reached to press a button. “Miss Travers. I have to go away. Cancel all my appointments for the next three days. Arrange leave of absence for Mr. Morton. I’ll give you fuller details later.”

  His finger still on the button, he looked at me.

  “Do you have a car, Morton?”

  On the pittance of a junior trainee? That was a laugh. “No, sir,” I told him.

  “And mine is out of commission. Miss Travers, look up the trains to—Haweford, you said, Morton?”

  “It’ll have to be Norwich, sir. Haweford doesn’t run to a station.”

  He passed on the information and leaned back.

  “You had better phone your friend to let him know we are on our way,” he said.

  “The farm doesn’t have an outside line,” I told him. “I’ll have to send a telegram.”

  Lee was waiting for us outside the Norwich station. Standing in the sunshine by his battered car, jacket-less, white shirt open at the neck, face sunburned, thick black hair untidy as always, he looked more like a gypsy than an embryo commercial artist. His spectacles had slid down his beak-like nose and he pushed them up into place before taking my hand. Worry showed through his smile.

  “Welcome to the wilds of East Anglia,” he greeted me.

  I introduced him to Mr. Leming, who had sat silently engrossed in work during the train journey and who now, in pearl-grey suit and matching Hornburg, looked anything but a big noise in the world of biochemistry.

  “There is a marked family resemblance,” Mr. Leming observed with ponderous joviality.

  “Uncle John is Mother’s brother,” Lee said. “She used to say I took after him.” And then, awkwardly: “It’s very good of you to have come, sir.”

  “The least I could do, Miller. Your uncle is a very old friend of mine. I owe him more than one favour. If I can’t do anything else, at least I can try to persuade authority that there can be no question of defection to the East.”

  “That’s what they’re thinking,” Lee said bleakly, picking up Mr. Leming’s smart grey suitcase and opening the car door.

  I sat in the front with Lee. As the car lurched noisily away, Mr. Leming removed his hat and leaned forward so that his face was between us.

  “Have there been any developments since your letter?” he wanted to know.

  “No,” Lee replied steadily.

  “The assistant—what was his name?”

  “Sokel. Adam Sokel.”

  “No relatives turned up wanting to know what has become of him?”

  Lee shook his head. “He never spoke of having any relatives. Or friends.”

  “‘Sokel’—” The other tested the name. “Foreign, I would say. Mid-European. Could even be Russian. ‘Adam’—” I felt his shrug. “Universal. You meet it everywhere. What kind of man was he?”

  “Smallish in build. Swarthy complexion …” Lee furrowed his brows. “I can’t remember his ever telling me what part of the world he came from. But then he never did have much to say. It was hard work having a conversation with him. He had an accent of sorts—guttural.”

  “How long had he been with your uncle?”

  “A little over two years. He came first as a gardener, drifted to odd-jobbing, then graduated to helping in the lab.”

  We had left the outskirts of the town now and were out in the country, fields spreading flatly on either side, relieved by occasional farm buildings and clumps of wind-angled trees.

  “Have you any idea what type of work your uncle was engaged upon?” asked Leming.

  Lee nodded. “Yes,” he said in a flat voice.

  “Yet you made no direct mention of it in your letter to our young friend here.”

  Lee smiled faintly. “I was afraid that if I did he wouldn’t feel like going to ask for your help, sir. He might have thought I was pulling a fast one. And I didn’t want to write to you direct, in case a secretary or someone opened the letter and read it first.”

  “Commendable precautions,” Mr. Leming said dryly. “And did your uncle take you into his confidence as to the nature of any progress he might be making?”

  “No, sir.”

  “A pity.” Mr. Leming rested his solid chin on the back of my seat, a schoolboy attitude that was very much out of character. “I can well appreciate why you turned to me for help, Miller. I am pleased that you did. But you must realise that I am a humble biochemist, not a physicist. The small knowledge I have of electronics is purely basic, gleaned during the short time I was an associate of your uncle’s.”

  “I do realise that, sir.”

  “Yes. Doubtless you have your own explanation as to what happened to your uncle and his assistant?”

  “I have,” Lee told him.

  Mr. Leming turned to me, one eyebrow cocked quizzically, his large face only inches from mine.

  “And you, Morton; can you suggest any explanation for the mysterious disappearances from within a windowless locked room?”

  And that, of course, was something I had been puzzling over ever since receiving the letter. There was no answer.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Then let me supply a few clues upon which you can attempt to erect a theory. On the afternoon of September 23, 1900, a farmer by the name of David Lang walked across one of the fields of his farm in the small town of Gallatin in Sumner County, Tennessee. Halfway across the field, in the presence of three witnesses, he vanished into thin air and was never seen again. You may have come across the details at one time or another, Morton. The incident has found its way into various collections of inexplicable happenings. That particular disappearance, only one of many, is in the forefront of my mind because it is an example Professor Maver was very fond of quoting. He set great store upon the testimonies of the three witnesses.

  “Much the same sort of thing happened many years ago on the farm to which we are now bound. Another man—again a farmer, but that is pure coincidence—vanished into thin air. And five weeks ago, two more people disappeared from the same place. A final clue to add to the collection, Morton … Professor Maver once put forward a theory, the theory of simultaneous worlds. The idea is that an infinity of worlds exists in the same space as ours, although occupying different vibratory planes. There …”

  He leaned back. I turned to stare incredulously, and he was smiling a little.

  “Well?” he asked when I remained speechless. “Still no solution to suggest? Or is it that you have one, but it is so wildly incredible you are reluctant to voice it? Never be afraid to speak your mind, Morton. That is to delay progress. Never be afraid to announce findings based upon established facts, even if those findings are so incredible they can only give rise to derision. Professor Maver had no qualms. He spoke of his theory to many of his colleagues. He believed that our world was only one of an infinity of worlds existing in th
e same space. That immediately adjoining ours he called Dimension A.”

  The dry, matter-of-fact tone of his voice, his placid face, the calm, almost casual manner in which he spoke, helped me through the stunning shock of revelation. The implications were immediate and obvious. Professor Maver had been trying to find the doorway to an adjoining world.