For the thousandth time he wondered why he’d ever been such a sap as to enroll in this Logic 2B class. He’d never pass the exam. And he was majoring in paleontology, anyway. He liked paleontology; a dinosaur was something you could get your teeth into, in a manner of speaking. But logic, phooey; 2B or not 2B. And he’d rather study about fossils than listen to one.
He happened to look down at his hands on the desk.
“Gaw!” he said.
“Mr. McCabe?” said the professor.
Shorty didn’t answer; he couldn’t. He was looking at his left hand. There weren’t any fingers on it. He closed his eyes.
The professor smiled a professorial smile. “I believe our young friend in the back seat has… uh… gone to sleep,” he said. “Will someone please try—”
Shorty hastily dropped his hands into his lap. He said, “I… I’m O. K., professor. Sorry. Did you say something?”
“Didn’t you?”
Shorty gulped. “I… I guess not.”
“We were discussing,” said the professor—to the class, thank Heaven, and not to Shorty individually—“the possibility of what one might refer to as the impossible. It is not a contradiction in terms for one must distinguish carefully between impossible and un-possible. The latter—”
Shorty surreptitiously put his hands back on the desk and sat there staring at them. The right hand was all right. The left— He closed his eyes and opened them again and still all the fingers of his left hand were missing. They didn’t feel missing.
Experimentally, he wriggled the muscles that ought to move them and he felt them wriggle.
But they weren’t there, as far as his eyes could see. He reached over and felt for them with his right hand—and he couldn’t feel them. His right hand went right through the space that his left-hand fingers ought to occupy, and felt nothing. But still he could move the fingers of his left hand. He did.
It was very confusing.
And then he remembered that was the hand he had used in reaching out toward the place where the bluebottle fly had disappeared. And then, as though to confirm his sudden suspicion, he felt a light touch on one of the fingers that wasn’t there. A light touch, and something light crawling along his finger. Something about the weight of a bluebottle fly. Then the touch vanished, as though it had flown again.
Shorty bit his lips to keep from saying “Gaw!” again. He was getting scared.
Was he going nuts? Or had the professor been right and was he asleep after all? How could he tell? Pinching? With the only available fingers, those of his right hand, he reached down and pinched the skin of his thigh, hard. It hurt. But then if he dreamed he pinched himself, couldn’t he also dream that it hurt?
He turned his head and looked toward his left. There wasn’t anything to see that way; the empty desk across the aisle, the empty desk beyond it, the wall, the window, and blue sky through the pane of glass.
But—
He glanced at the professor and saw that his attention was now on the blackboard where he was marking symbols. “Let N,” said the professor, “equal known infinity, and the symbol a equal the factor of probability.”
Shorty tentatively reached out his left hand again into the aisle and watched it closely. He thought he might as well make sure; he reached out a little farther. The hand was gone. He jerked back his wrist, and sat there sweating.
He was nuts. He had to be nuts.
Again he tried to move his fingers and felt them wriggle very satisfactorily, just as they should have wriggled. They still had feeling, kinetic and otherwise. But— He reached his wrist toward the desk and didn’t feel the desk. He put it in such a position that his hand, if it had been on the end of his wrist, would have had to touch or pass through the desk, but he felt nothing.
Wherever his hand was, it wasn’t on the end of his wrist. It was still out there in the aisle, no matter where he moved his arm. If he got up and walked out of the classroom, would his hand still be out there in the aisle, invisible? And suppose he went a thousand miles away? But that was silly.
But was it any sillier than that his arm should rest here on the desk and his hand be two feet away? The difference in silliness between two feet and a thousand miles was only one of degree.
Was his hand out there?
He took his fountain pen out of his pocket and reached out with his right hand to approximately the point where he thought it was, and—sure enough—he was holding only a part of a fountain pen, half of one. He carefully refrained from reaching any farther, but raised it and brought it down sharply.
It rapped—he felt it—across the missing knuckles of his left hand! That tied it! It so startled him that he let go of the pen and it was gone. It wasn’t on the floor of the aisle. It wasn’t anywhere. It was just gone, and it had been a good five-dollar pen, too.
Gaw! Here he was worrying about a pen when his left hand was missing. What was he going to do about that?
He closed his eyes. “Shorty McCabe,” he said to himself, “you’ve got to think this out logically and figure out how to get your hand back out of whatever that is. You daren’t get scared. Probably you’re asleep and dreaming this, but maybe you aren’t, and, if you aren’t, you’re in a jam. Now let’s be logical. There is a place out there, a plane or something, and you can reach across it or put things across it, but you can’t get them back again.
“Whatever else is on the other side, your left hand is. And your right hand doesn’t know what your left hand is doing because one is here and the other is there, and never the twain shall— Hey, cut it out, Shorty. This isn’t funny”
But there was one thing he could do, and that was find out roughly the size and shape of the—whatever it was. There was a box of paper clips on his desk. He picked up a few in his right hand and tossed one of them out into the aisle. The paper clip got six or eight inches out into the aisle, and vanished. He didn’t hear it land anywhere.
So far, so good. He tossed one a bit lower; same result. He bent down at his desk, being careful not to lean his head out into the aisle, and skittered a paper clip across the floor out into the aisle, saw it vanish eight inches out. He tossed one a little forward, one a bit backward. The plane extended at least a yard to the front and back, roughly parallel with the aisle itself.
And up? He tossed one upward that arced six feet above the aisle and vanished there. Another one, higher yet and in a forward direction. It described an arc in the air and landed on the head of a girl three seats forward in the next aisle. She started a little and put up a hand to her head.
“Mr. McCabe,” said Professor Dolohan severely, “may I ask if this lecture bores you?”
Shorty jumped. He said, “Y—No, professor. I was just—”
“You were, I noticed, experimenting in ballistics and the nature of a parabola. A parabola, Mr. McCabe, is the curve described by a missile projected into space with no continuing force other than its initial impetus and the force of gravity. Now shall I continue with my original lecture, or would you rather we called you up before the class to demonstrate the nature of paraboloid mechanics for the edification of your fellow students?”
“I’m sorry, professor,” said Shorty. “I was… uh… I mean I… I mean I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, Mr. McCabe. And now”— The professor turned again to the blackboard. “If we let the symbol b represent the degree of unpossiblity, in contradistinction to c—” Shorty stared morosely down at his hands—his hand, rather —in his lap. He glanced up at the clock on the wall over the door and saw that in another five minutes the class period would be over. He had to do something, and do it quickly.