The Street That Wasnt There | Page 5

his beloved classics on the first
shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The second shelf
contained but one book. And it was around this book that Mr.
Chambers' entire life was centered.
Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach its
philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he
remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had been
set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand either
his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent of some
anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the school.
It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as merely
the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.
Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began thumbing
slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of happier days
swept over him.
Then his eyes focused on the paragraph, a paragraph written so long
ago the very words seemed strange and unreal:
Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the physical fate
of this earth ... yes, even the universe. Billions of minds seeing trees as
trees, houses as houses, streets as streets ... and not as something else.
Minds that see things as they are and have kept things as they were....
Destroy those minds and the entire foundation of matter, robbed of its
regenerative power, will crumple and slip away like a column of
sand....
His eyes followed down the page:
Yet this would have nothing to do with matter itself ... but only with
matter's form. For while the mind of man through long ages may have
moulded an imagery of that space in which he lives, mind would have
little conceivable influence upon the existence of that matter. What

exists in our known universe shall exist always and can never be
destroyed, only altered or transformed.
But in modern astrophysics and mathematics we gain an insight into
the possibility ... yes probability ... that there are other dimensions,
other brackets of time and space impinging on the one we occupy.
If a pin is thrust into a shadow, would that shadow have any knowledge
of the pin? It would not, for in this case the shadow is two dimensional,
the pin three dimensional. Yet both occupy the same space.
Granting then that the power of men's minds alone holds this universe,
or at least this world in its present form, may we not go farther and
envision other minds in some other plane watching us, waiting, waiting
craftily for the time they can take over the domination of matter? Such
a concept is not impossible. It is a natural conclusion if we accept the
double hypothesis: that mind does control the formation of all matter;
and that other worlds lie in juxtaposition with ours.
Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our
world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some
stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the
very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to
be our own.
* * * * *
He stood astounded beside the bookcase, his eyes staring unseeing into
the fire upon the hearth.
He had written that. And because of those words he had been called a
heretic, had been compelled to resign his position at the university, had
been forced into this hermit life.
A tumultuous idea hammered at him. Men had died by the millions all
over the world. Where there had been thousands of minds there now
were one or two. A feeble force to hold the form of matter intact.

* * * * *
The plague had swept Europe and Asia almost clean of life, had
blighted Africa, had reached South America ... might even have come
to the United States. He remembered the whispers he had heard, the
words of the men at the drugstore corner, the buildings disappearing.
Something scientists could not explain. But those were merely scraps
of information. He did not know the whole story ... he could not know.
He never listened to the radio, never read a newspaper.
But abruptly the whole thing fitted together in his brain like the missing
piece of a puzzle into its slot. The significance of it all gripped him
with damning clarity.
There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the material
world in its mundane form. Some other power from another dimension
was fighting to supersede man's control and take his universe into its
own plane!
Abruptly Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the case and
picked up his hat and coat.
He had to know more. He had to find someone who could