The last thought gave me a notion. “Could we have shrunk so we’re inside his body? Or he grown so we’re floating in his liver?”
“No,” said Goldy. “Topology is preserved. But I don’t —or, hell—I really don’t know. If he grew so big he was outside the psychicecology, he might just have faded away.” The big pataphysicist wrinkled up his face inside his beard. “Alice should be required reading for mathenauts,” he muttered. “The real trouble is no one has ever been outside and been back to tell about it. The animal experiments and the Norbert Wiener and Wilbur on the Paul R. Halmos. They just disappeared.” “You know,” I said, “You can map the volume of a sphere into the whole universe using the ratio: Ir: R equals R:Or, where Ir and Or are the inside and outside distances for the points. Maybe that’s what happened to Ted. Maybe he’s just outside the ship, filling all space with his metamath and his acne?”
“Down boy,” said Goldwasser. “I’ve got a simpler suggestion. Let’s check over the ship, compartment by compartment. Maybe he’s in it somewhere, unconscious.”
But he wasn’t on the ship.
We went over it twice, every tube, every compartment. (In reality, a mathenautic ship looks like a radio, ripped out of its case and flying through the air.) We ended up in the ecology section, a big Broadway-line subway car that roared and rattled in the middle of darkness in the middle of nothing. The B.C.N.Y. kids were all there—Freddi Urbont clucking happily away to her boy friend, chubby and smily and an education major; Byron and Burbitt, electronics engineers, ecstatic over the latest copy of C-Quantum; Stephen Seidmann, a number-theory major, quietly proving that since Harvard is the best school in the world, and B.C.N.Y. is better than Harvard, that B.C.N.Y. is the best school in the world; two citizens with nose jobs and names I’d forgotten, engaged in a filthy discussion of glands and organs and meat. The walls were firm, the straw seats scratchy and uncomfortable. The projectors showed we were just entering the 72nd Street stop. How real, how comforting! I slid the door open to rejoin Johnny and Ed. The subway riders saw me slip into freefall, and glimpsed the emptiness of vector space.
Hell broke loose!
The far side of the car bulged inward, the glass smashing and the metal groaning. The CUNYs had no compensation training!
Freddi Urbont burst into tears. Byron and Burbitt yelled as a bubble in the floor swallowed them. The wall next to the nose jobs sprouted a dozen phallic symbols, while the seat bubbled with breasts. The walls began to melt. Seidmann began to yell about the special status of N. Y. City University Honors Program students.
Pearl acted with a speed and a surety I’d never have imagined. He shoved me out of the way and launched himself furiously at the other end of the car, now in free fall. There he pivoted, smiled horribly and at the top of his lungs began singing “The Purple and the Black.”
Goldy and I had enough presence of mind to join him. Concentrating desperately on the shape and form of the car, we blasted the air with our devotion to Sheppard Hall, our love of Convent Avenue and our eternal devotion to Lewisohn Stadium. Somehow it saved us. The room rumbled and twisted and reformed, and soon the eight of us were back in the tired old subway car that brought its daily catch of Beavers to 139th Street.
The equilibrium was still precarious. I heard Goldwasser telling the nose jobs his terrible monologue about the “Volvo I want to buy. I can be the first to break the door membranes, and when I get my hands on that big, fat steering wheel, ohh!, it’ll be a week before I climb out of it!”
Pearl was cooing to Urbont how wonderful she was as the valedictorian at her junior high, how great the teaching profession was, and how useful, and how interesting.
As for me; “Well, I guess you’re right, Steve. I should have gone to B.C.N.Y. instead of Berkeley.”
“That’s right, Jimmy. After all, B.C.N.Y. has some of the best number-theory people in the world. And some of the greatest educators, too. Like Dean Cashew who started the Privileged Student Program. It sure is wonderful.”
“I guess you’re right, Steve.”
“I’m right, all right. At schools like Berkeley, you’re just another student, but at B.C.N.Y. you can be a P.S., and get all the good professors and small classes and high grades.”
“You’re right, Steve.”
“I’m right, all right. Listen, we have people that’ve quit Cornell and Harvard and M.I.T. Of course, they don’t do much but run home after school and sit in their houses, but their parents all say how much happier they are—like back in high school . . .”
When the scrap paper and the gum wrappers were up to our knees and there were four false panhandlers in the car, Johnny called a halt. The little psychist smiled and nodded as he walked the three of us carefully out the door.
“Standard technique,” he murmured to no one in particular. “Doing something immediately rather than the best thing a while later. Their morale was shot, so I—” He trailed off.
“Are they really that sensitive?” Goldwasser asked. “I thought their training was better than that.”
“You act like they were components in an electronics rig,” said Pearl jerkily. “You know that Premedial Sensory Perception, the ability to perceive the dull routine that normal people ignore, is a very delicate talent!”
Pearl was well launched. “In the dark ages such people were called dullards and subnormals. Only now, in our enlightened age, do we realize their true ability to know things outside the ordinary senses—a talent vital for BC-flight.”
The tedium and meaninglessness of life which we rationalize away—
“A ship is more mind than matter, and if you upset that mind—”
He paled suddenly. “I, I think I’d better stay with them,” he said. He flung open the door and went back into the coach. Goldwasser and I looked at each other. Pearl was a trained mathenaut, but his specialty was people, not paramath.
“Let’s check the lab,” I muttered.
Neither of us spoke as we moved toward the lab—slap a wall, pull yourself forward, twist round some instrumentation—the “reaction swim” of a man in free fall. The walls began to quiver again, and I could see Goldy clamp down on his body and memories of this part of the ship. We were nearing the limits of the BC-field. The lab itself, and the experimental apparatus, stuck out into vector space.
“Let’s make our tests and go home,” I told Goldy.
Neither of us mentioned Ted as we entered the lab.
Remember this was a commercial project. We weren’t patasociologists studying abstract groups, or super-purists looking for the first point. We wanted money.
Goldy thought he had a moneymaking scheme for us, but Goldy hasn’t been normal since he took Polykarp Kusch’s “Kusch of Death” at Columbia, “Electrodimensions and Magnespace.” He was going to build four-dimensional molecules.
Go back to Flatland. Imagine a hollow paper pyramid on the surface of that two-dimensional world. To a Flat-lander, it is a triangle. Flop down the sides—four triangles. Now put a molecule in each face—one molecule, four molecules. And recall that you have infinite dimensions available. Think of the storage possibilities alone. All the books of the world in a viewer, all the food in the world in your pack. A television the size of a piece of paper; circuits looped through dim-19. Loop an entire industrial plant through hyperspace, and get one the size and shape of a billboard. Shove raw materials in one side—pull finished products out the other!