He was, as I have said, a tall and large man, but what was most striking about him was his head. This was high and broad, the face pale and with grey eyes. His hair was thinning at the temples, but on the crown it grew thickly and wildly, exaggerating the size of his head, and he wore a bushy beard which itself made more marked the pallor of his skin.
I wished I had found him more at his ease, for in the few moments he had been in the room he had destroyed the pleasant sense of well-being that had developed while I was with Amelia, and now I was as nervous as he.
A sudden inspiration came to me, that he himself might be a man not used to meeting strangers, that he was better accustomed to long hours of solitary work. My own occupation involved meeting many strangers, and it was a, part of my job to be able to mix well, and so, paradoxical as it might sound, I suddenly realized that here I could take the lead.
As Mrs Watchets left the room, I said to him: “Sir, you say you are nearly finished? I hope I have not disturbed you.”
The simplicity of my device had its desired effect. He went towards one of the vacant chairs and sat down, and as he replied his words were phrased more calmly.
“No, of course not,” he said. “I can continue after tea. I needed a short rest in any event.”
“May I enquire as to the nature of your work?”
Sir William’ glanced at Amelia for a moment, but her expression remained neutral.
“Has Miss Fitzgibbon told you what I am currently building?”
“She has told me a little, sir. I have seen your flying machine, for instance.”
To my surprise, he laughed at that. “Do you think I am insane to meddle with such follies, Turnbull? My scientific colleagues tell me that heavier-than-air flight is impossible. What do you say?”
“It’s a novel concept, sir.” He made no response but continued to stare at me, so I went on hastily: “It seems to me that the problem is a lack of an adequate power-supply. The design is sound.”
“No, no, the design is wrong too. I was going about it the wrong way. Already I have made machine flight obsolete, and before I even tested that contraption you saw!”
He drank some of his tea quickly, then, astounding me with his speed, jerked out of his chair and moved across the room to a dresser. Opening a drawer he brought forth a thin package, and handed it to me.
“Have a look at those, Turnbull. Tell me what you think.”
I opened the package and inside found that there were seven photographic portraits. The first one was a head and shoulders picture of a boy, the second was a slightly older boy, the third was that of a youth, the fourth that of a very young man, and so on.
“Are they all of the same person?” I said, having recognized a recurring facial similarity.
“Yes,” said Sir William. “The subject is a cousin of mine, and by chance he has sat for photographic portraits at regular intervals. Now then, Turnbull, do you notice anything about the quality of the portraits? No! How can I expect you to anticipate me? They are cross-sections of the Fourth Dimension!”
As I frowned, Amelia said: “Sir William, this is probably a concept new to Mr Turnbull.”
“No more than that of heavier-than-air flight! You have grasped that, Turnbull, why should you not grasp the Fourth Dimension?”
“Do you mean the… concept of…?” I was floundering.
“Space and Time! Exactly, Turnbull … Time, the great mystery!”
I glanced at Amelia for more assistance, and realized that she had been studying my face. There was a half-smile on her lips, and at once I guessed that she had heard Sir William expounding on this subject many times.
“These portraits, Turnbull, are two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional person. Individually, they can depict his height and width, and can even offer an approximation of his depth … but they can never be more than flat, two-dimensional pieces of paper… Nor can they reveal that he has been travelling all his life through Time. Placed together, they approximate the Fourth Dimension.”
He was pacing about the room now, having seized the portraits from my hands, and was waving them expansively as he spoke. He crossed to the mantel and set them up, side by side.
“Time and Space are inherently the same. I walk across this room, and I have travelled in Space a matter of a few yards. but at the same moment I have also moved through Time by a matter of a few seconds. Do you see what I am meaning?”
“That one motion complements the other?” I said, uncertainly.
“Exactly! And I am working now to separate the two… to facilitate travel through Space discrete from Time, and through Time discrete from Space. Let me show you what I mean.”
Abruptly, he turned on his heel and hurried from the room. The door slammed behind him.
I was dumbfounded. I simply stared at Amelia, shaking my head.
She said: “I should have known he would be agitated. He is not always like this, Edward. He has been alone in his laboratory all day, and working like that he often becomes animated.”
“Where has he gone?” I said. “Should we follow him?”
“He’s returned to his laboratory. I think he will be showing you something he has made.”
Exactly at that moment the door opened again and Sir William returned. He was carrying a small wooden box with great care, and he looked around for somewhere to place it.
“Help me move the table,” Amelia said to me.
We carried the table bearing the tea-things to one side, and brought forward another. Sir William placed his box in the centre of it, and sat down… As quickly as it had begun, his animation seemed to have passed.
“I want you to look at this closely,” he said, “but I do not want you to touch it. It is very delicate.”
He opened the lid of the box The interior was padded with a soft, velvet-like material, and resting inside was a tiny mechanism which, on first sight, I took to be the workings of a clock.
Sir William withdrew it from its case with care, and rested it on the surface of the table.
I leaned forward and peered closely at it. At once, with a start of recognition, I realized that much of it was made with that queer, crystalline substance I had seen twice before that afternoon. The resemblance to a clock was misleading, I saw now, lent to it simply by the precision with which the tiny parts had been fitted together, and some of the metals with which it had been made. Those I could recognize seemed to be some tiny rods of nickel, some highly polished pieces of brass and a cog-wheel made of shining chrome or silver. Part of it had been shaped out of a white substance which could have been ivory, and the base was made of a hard, ebony-like wood. It is difficult, though, to describe what I saw, for all about there was the quartz-like substance, deceiving the eye, presenting hundreds of tiny facets at whatever angle I viewed it from.
I stood up, and stepped back a yard or two. From there, the device once more took on the aspect of a clock-mechanism, albeit a rather extraordinary one.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, and saw that Amelia’s gaze was also on it.
“You, young man,. are one of the first people in the world to see a mechanism that will make real to us the Fourth Dimension.”
“And this device will really work?” I said.
“Yes, it will. It has been adequately tested. This engine will, depending how I choose, travel forward or backward in Time.”