Dimension A Page 3

  “Probes,” Lee said briefly.

  “For reaching, for taking samples. And the haste with which they have obviously been made suggests that there was no time in which to make or obtain more efficient instruments. The door was there, they didn’t know how long it would remain. There is nothing here to suggest that their probings produced tangible results. There is nothing here with which they could have tested the most important factor of all, the atmosphere beyond the door. And yet they went through, one of them an experienced scientist—”

  “An accident,” Lee suggested.

  “Everything points to that. I feel positive that your uncle would never have gone through intentionally after so little preparation.”

  I felt it was time I added something to the discussion.

  “Perhaps one of them went through with the rope tied round his waist, sir. But something went wrong and the one left in the lab was pulled through as well.”

  “An explanation that does seem to fit the facts,” Leming allowed. “One worth keeping in mind. I think we have learned all we can of the event itself.” He went to stand by the first section. “Our first task will be to repair this. Not a big job, I feel. Then the real work will start. Tedious work.” He beckoned, and we went to stand at his side.

  “These two dials”—he pointed to them—“are fixed and can be ignored. We will be concerned with the other three. Trial and error. With no notes to guide us we will have no alternative but to work our way through all the countless permutations of these three readings until we stumble upon the correct grouping. It will be like trying to open a safe without knowing the combination.”

  Mr. Leming peered down at his immaculate grey suit.

  “I will need overalls,” he said. “And tools. Soldering iron, screwdrivers, pliers.” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “The sooner we get started, the better.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  And so Mr. Leming took charge of operations. A telegram was sent to the Institute to explain our absence. I don’t know what reason he gave. Wearing stained brown overalls that had once belonged to Professor Maver’s assistant, he set about repairing the damaged section.

  Lee and I assisted in a tool-handing capacity. We started work the same afternoon of our arrival, a Tuesday. Lee demonstrated that the phone was functional by calling up Mrs. Robson to have a meal brought across. At midnight, Mr. Leming laid his tools aside and decided to call it a day. We walked together across the moonlit yard to the house.

  Mrs. Robson had gone to bed but had left a meal laid ready for us. It was our second sit-down meal at the farm, and it was as silent as the first had been. I ate without knowing what I was eating. Tiredness was only partly the cause of my lack of concentration.

  I was living in a dream. Yesterday—an age ago, it seemed—I had spent the day poring over petri dishes and their unwholesome-looking contents. At five o’clock I had left the Institute to catch my usual bus home. After tea I had gone for my usual stroll through the park, sitting for a while on my usual bench watching whiter than white ducks paddling and preening on the muddy verge of the pond. I had walked back through golden sunlight and lengthening shadows to my digs. Home, I called that small, top-floor room.

  That was yesterday. A sane, ordinary day. Like the one before and the one before that.

  And now—

  My new bedroom had a wallpaper of pink rosebuds, a ceiling with low beams and a pleasant view of the drive and the lane beyond. The ugly laboratory building was at the other side of the house. But being out of sight didn’t mean that it and what it represented could be put out of mind.

  The gateway to another place … Part of me was prepared to believe in the existence of another dimension. The other part found the idea incredible, impossible, horrifying. Another world—perhaps an infinity of them, all occupying the same space as ours. While I was standing here, my hand on the window sill, with the solid, comfortable farmhouse furniture all around, perhaps another man was standing in this very same place, but in very different surroundings. Or maybe not a man, but a creature of some kind. Or perhaps—even more terrible—perhaps nothing at all. Emptiness. Limbo. Airless space. That was a possibility that Leming hadn’t considered. Or if he had, perhaps for Lee’s sake he had deliberately refrained from suggesting it.

  Despite the warm night air I shivered, my scalp creeping, the hair bristling at the back of my neck. I tried not very successfully to thrust those thoughts aside. I climbed between sheets that were smooth and cool and smelled faintly of lavender.

  Lee woke me next morning. It was, he informed me cheerfully enough, almost six o’clock. Mr. Leming, he added, was already at breakfast.

  “Sleep well?” he inquired as some time later we went down the stairs together. “No nightmares? No bug-eyed monsters and little green men?”

  “I slept well enough,” I told him.

  “I feel a damned sight happier now I know something constructive’s being done,” he said, opening the dining-room door. The room was empty; Mr. Leming must have wasted no time over his breakfast. “I like your boss, Gerald. He may be a big noise, but he’s not stuck-up. You know. And he’s not above getting himself all mucked up doing menial tasks like soldering. Ah—” He turned as Mrs. Robson, complete with morning smile and laden tray, appeared in the doorway. “I may be worried sick, but I can still eat.”

  Half an hour later we entered the laboratory, Leming acknowledging our arrival with a preoccupied nod. He was engrossed in the business of soldering a broken connection.

  We were allowed time out for a knife-and-fork lunch. “No point in starving the inner man,” Mr. Leming said. “The outer man works all the better, thinks all the more clearly for having a good solid meal inside.”

  About the middle of the afternoon he laid his tools aside for the last time, wiped his hands on an oily rag, expressed the opinion that everything should now be in order, and as proof of that, made a small ceremony of flicking up the three generator switches.

  Then he bent to closely inspect the dials of the repaired section. He was able to make himself heard above the generator thrum without having to raise his voice.

  “Yes,” said he. “Everything seems to be in order.”

  “All systems go,” Lee interpreted.

  Leming lifted silver eyebrows and peered over the tops of his glasses. “Quite so,” he agreed dryly. And then he proceeded to lay down the routine we were to follow.

  He showed us first how to feed in the power and control it by watching the fluctuations of the three quivering needles and adjusting accordingly. He warned us to keep a close watch on a larger dial set some distance apart from the rest. If the needle of that dial was to slide into the red, we were to switch off immediately.

  We were to work in shifts. Just like a factory. To save time, so that not a minute would be wasted. It could take days, weeks, even months. A twenty-four-hour day it was to be from now on. Three eight-hour shifts, Leming to take the first one so that we could watch him in action, get the hang of the routine. He would start now, at four. Lee would take over at midnight. I was to relieve him at eight the next morning.

  Leming had thought of everything. A mirror propped in front of the operator on duty so that he could watch the triangle of poles on the floor without having to turn round. The magnetic field of the door might be invisible when it came, so a long piece of wood was laid on the floor across the triangle. We were to keep our eyes on that marker. If the part in the triangle was to vanish or become hazy, we would know the door had opened.

  The routine we were to follow was simplicity itself. And boring—incredibly boring and monotonous.

  Adjust control, wait for needles to settle, look in mirror, make a note of readings, start all over again… . The sort of thing that after the first few minutes one can do automatically while the mind is on something else.

  Leming said impressively: “Now, this is important. If either of you happens to be on duty and something happens, no matter what—anything out
of the ordinary—under no circumstances must you try to do anything about it. You must immediately phone me at the house.”

  And then, without removing his overalls, without even bothering to wash the grime from his hands, he drew up the stool, seated himself at the bench, made the first adjustment, noted the readings, and we were off.

  Lee and I watched the sequence of movements for a while. Ten minutes were more than enough for us to get the hang of it. At first, each time a new adjustment was made I found my eyes turning to that triangle on the floor, my whole body tensing, a dentist’s-waiting-room feeling of fearful anticipation gnawing at the pit of my stomach.

  It was a feeling that gradually passed away. I even found myself yawning, but that could have been the effect of nervousness, not tiredness.

  After twenty minutes or so, Leming turned to look back over his shoulder, asking crisply: “All right?”

  Lee nodded, and we answered together: “Yes, sir.” It was odd in a way how we kept on calling him “sir,” even though he had asked us not to. Respect as well as courtesy, I suppose.

  “Good,” Leming said. “If you are both certain you know what to do, there is no point in your remaining here. You, Miller, had better get some sleep. Morton, get out and about. Get plenty of fresh air while you can. Don’t forget that you will be sitting here for eight hours at a stretch. A long time …” He cocked an eyebrow at Lee, who answered the unspoken question.

  “At the back of this building, sir. No need to go all the way to the house.”

  “Good.” Leming turned back to the panel. Lee and I walked across the yard.

  “Sleep,” said he, brown face turned to the cloudless sky, black hair stirred by the breeze. “At five in the afternoon. What a thought.”

  “You’ll have to try,” I said tritely.

  “I’ll sleep if it kills me.” He sounded as if he really meant that. “I’ve no intention of dozing off during my midnight stint. How do you feel about it, Gerald?”

  “I’m getting used to it.”

  “No, not that. What do you think the chances are?”

  “Your uncle found the door.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself. What’s been done once can be done again. But how long is it going to take?”

  There was no answer to that.

  Leaning against the trellis arch he plucked one of the purple flowers. Clematis, would they be? I should have known. My father was a gardener, and I had been brought up with growing things.

  “Going for a walk?” he asked.

  “After tea,” I told him.

  That evening I didn’t venture far afield but confined myself to an exploration of the spreading woods beyond the farm. I’d always preferred the country to the town, but then I’d been born and brought up in a cottage on the outskirts of a Dorset village. My parents still lived there.

  I thought a lot about my home that evening. And, reaching the edge of the woods, emerging on to the road, I came across a cottage that was almost the image of my own home. For a while, standing there, looking at the bright windows and neat curtains, the plume of smoke from the chimney, the scarlet geraniums in the white window-boxes, I was quite homesick.

  It was tennish when I arrived back at the farm. Supper was laid ready for me. When I had finished, Mrs. Robson informed me placidly, she would clear away and then relay ready for when the other gentleman had finished work. If she was puzzled by this strange sequence of meals, she gave no sign. But then, being housekeeper to a scientist, she had probably learned to take anything in her stride.

  And so my second day at Haweford came to a close. My first session in the laboratory started at eight o’clock the following morning. It was without doubt the longest eight hours of my life.

  Leming dropped in about eleven. I thought at first that he had come to see how I was making out, but it seemed he had come with the idea of trying to improve upon Professor Maver’s crude devices for testing the unknown. I altered the angle of the mirror a fraction so that I could see the triangle and his back at the same time. And after a while I asked him the same question Lee had earlier put to me.

  “What are our chances, sir?”

  “Chances?” He didn’t look up from what he was doing.

  “Of finding the door.”

  “We’ll find it.” He was busy with pliers. ‘The question is, how long? We don’t know how long it took John. It could have been years …”

  And now he seemed to be talking for his own benefit, thinking aloud.

  “But much of that time could have been taken up in determining the fixed readings. I’m certain that to find the final readings he must have adopted the same hit-or-miss method I am employing now. Tedious but, so far as I can see, no alternative.”

  He came back to earth. “We’ll open the door sooner or later, Morton. Nothing is more certain.”

  “And when we do, sir?”

  “A bridge to cross when we come to it, Morton.” He brooded for a while, his hands still. “We must devise some means of testing the atmosphere. I hope to God we find it breathable …” He shook his head. “Professor Maver is a very old and dear friend… .”

  Wednesday slipped by, Thursday and Friday. The hours dragged slowly when I wasn’t out walking or asleep. The house itself had nothing to offer in the way of entertainment, no television, not even a radio, and the only books were incomprehensible scientific tomes. I saw little of Lee—he was usually fast asleep when I came off duty at four.

  And then came Saturday morning.

  As usual, the sounds of the house coming to life woke me a little after six o’clock. Washing and shaving took me to half past, and that still left another hour before Mrs. Robson would have breakfast on the table. So, after passing the time of the day with her, not bothering to put on my jacket, I made my way through the early morning sunshine to see how Lee was faring after his long night. I remember stopping halfway across the yard while I wound my watch.

  Lee, his shirt sleeves rolled up—the badly-ventilated laboratory was inclined to get warm—looked to see who it was, grinned briefly, and finished entering his latest readings.

  “Tired?” I asked, for something to say.

  He shifted on the stool. “More stiff than anything.”

  I wandered over to the generators. Heat rose in waves from their pulsating cowls. I looked at the triangle on the floor. They could almost have been three halved ostrich eggs, with wire protruding from the top of each. The magnetic field of the door would spring from those three silvery filaments. If ever the door came … And what would it look like? A solid prism of light reaching up to the ceiling, perhaps. Or maybe a kind of grey curtain. Or perhaps nothing at all, just the flicking out of existence of part of that piece of wood. A length of wood—such a crude, amateurish device to reveal the presence of a new dimension, the threshold of a new world.

  And what would that new world look like? At the best, a place of trees and grass and flowers, of hills and towns and people. Of people like us. At the best … And the worst? Deep in thought, I stepped away from the generators without looking where I was putting my foot. It caught against the piece of wood, dislodging it from its position.

  Lee swivelled on the stool to discover the cause of the noise.

  “Clumsy clot,” he said equably and swung back again.

  I stooped to return the marker to its original position. One of the eggshells was perhaps two feet away from my face. Its filament was glowing brightly. And so—when I shifted my startled gaze—were the other two. I stared at them stupidly, wondering at first if I was imagining that incandescence, then suddenly realising its possible significance.

  And what happened then happened so quickly that there was no more time for wondering. Before I had a chance to call to Lee, before I had a chance even to straighten from my stooping position, the glowing metal threads suddenly flared, fanning out into sheets of brilliance that met to form an unbroken screen. And at the same time something, some force, seemed to reach out towar
ds me, gripping me with huge, invisible fingers, dragging me forward, towards the sheet of brilliance.

  I think I must have shouted, perhaps screamed, for I had a momentary glimpse of Lee swinging round and coming to his feet, the stool flying. As I struggled desperately against the relentless sucking force, he came towards me. I saw his hands reaching out, I felt one of them clamp on my ankle, and then I was lurching forward, plunging through the dancing screen, pulling Lee with me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  One moment I had been in the glaring brilliance of the laboratory; the next, I was in pitch blackness, falling into emptiness. There was the sickening, terrifying sensation of being in a lift that was plummeting down, out of control, into unimaginable depths. At the same time a hand seemed to reach inside me, grasping and twisting as if trying to turn me inside out.