The 4-D Doodler | Page 5

missing part of Gault's
body....
He scraped in the bench drawer for the scissors, and started to sheer
through a large stiff piece of paper.
A moment later he looked up as Pillbot walked over.
"Gault has some reason for not wanting his silhouette touched," he said.
"Can't quite make out his lip movements, but he seems afraid some
permanent mark may be left on him by his return. He wants time to
figure out--why, what are you doing?"
"I've made another cutout for experiment," explained Harper. "And this
one doesn't look like the Professor, isn't tall and thin. See--?" He lifted
the second cutout from the flat surface of the bench, held it suspended
before him.
"This one is short and fat--" Harper halted abruptly, the breath
whooshing from his lungs.
There was no use talking to thin air. Pillbot had been whisked into
nothingness. Where the portly figure of the eminent psychiatrist had

stood was now nothing, not even a half man.
Too late, Harper realized that when he had lifted the paper figure from
the surface of the bench, the Entity had imitated him by "lifting" Pillbot
into the fourth dimension. Belatedly, he knew that the cutout which he
held dangling, resembled Pillbot in outline.
Harper dashed back and forth in little rushes, carrying the paper figure.
He dared not put it down, for fear of seeing some segment of Pillbot
flash back. He did not know what to do with it.
Finally he compromised by suspending it to a low hanging chandelier,
where it dangled swaying in the slight air currents.
* * * * *
Gault was watching his assistant's antics with a bleak expression that
changed to sardonic satisfaction as he realized Pillbot was in a
predicament like his--only more so. Abruptly he frowned, staring ahead,
and Harper guessed that Pillbot had located Gault's torso in the other
realm, was nudging him to indicate the fact.
Suddenly Harper knew that he himself must enter this fourth
dimensional realm. That strange instinct told him the solution to
everything was there--somewhat as a woman's intuition impels her to
act in a certain way, without knowing why.
How to get there? Another paper cutout? He glanced toward the
Professor--the occupied trousers, and swimming above it, the man's
head. The head was watching him, the expression savage.
No, there must be no more cutouts, Harper decided. While the four
dimensional entity distinguished between the outlines of a thin
silhouette and a fat one, something in between, like Harper's form,
would be testing It too far.
He, Harper would take the place of his own cutout!

Gault's head reared up, glared fixedly at his assistant as the young man
swung his legs onto the desk, then lay down flat. A moment he lay
there, in "Flatland"--then leaped to his feet.
It was as though he had leaped into a different world. He was no longer
in the laboratory. He wasn't on any, floor at all, as far as he could make
out. His feet rested on nothing--and yet there was some sort of tension
under him--like the surface tension of water.
He was--he suddenly knew it--standing on a segment of warped space!
There was a spacial strain here that acted as a solid beneath him!
Harper looked "up"--that is, overhead. There was nothing there but vast
stretches of emptiness--at first. Then he saw that this emptiness was
lined and laced with filmy striations, like cellophane. They bore a
strange resemblance to his "doodlings," as though that strange faculty
of his enabled him to somehow perceive this place of the fourth
dimension. And instinctively Harper knew that these lacings were the
boundaries of a vast enclosure--a four dimensional enclosure, the
"walls" of which consisted of joined and meshed space-warps.
Abruptly he became aware of movement. He became aware of solidity
there above him. And the solidity was in motion.
Harper knew he was gazing upon a being of the fourth
dimension--doubtless the Entity that had caused the phenomena in the
laboratory, which had snatched him into the fourth dimension, and was
even now observing him with its four dimensional sight! There was a
shape above him that strained his eyes, gave hint of Form just beyond
his comprehension.
Harper hardly noticed that Pillbot was beside him, shaking him. He had
suddenly grasped a fundamental law of spacial stresses, and he
whipped out a pad and pencil, began scribbling down the mathematical
formula of these laws. He began to see now why skyscrapers
encountered the "stress-barrier" at a certain height. He understood it
just as a person of innate musical ability, hearing music for the first
time, would understand the laws of that music.

"Look out, It's moving, descending!" Pillbot was yelling into his ear. "It
is about to act. Became active the moment