For an instant the laboratory stopped its ominous vibration. Then
the figure of Gault flew through the air, came up against a
wall--but it was his complete figure.
"More signs of violence," cried Pillbot. "But that action won't
appease It--we must get out of here--"
Even as he spoke there was a thunderous crackling and roaring.
Harper felt himself flying about, and for an instant of awful
vertigo he did not know up from down. Forces seemed to be tearing
at him. He felt as though he were a piece of iron being attracted
simultaneously in several directions by powerful electro magnets.
There was a flare of colored lights, a deafening detonation--and
he felt himself knocked breathless against a wall.
He picked himself up, looked around.
* * * * *
On one side of him was the familiar south wall of the laboratory.
To the north, east and west was--open air. He was standing on a
section of laboratory flooring that jutted out over empty space
from the wall. His desk was a few feet away, right at the edge of
the jutting floor. Gault and Pillbot were picking themselves up
to one side of the desk.
The pair looked over the edge of the floor, then recoiled,
frenziedly hugging the flooring under them.
Harper crawled over, looked over the edge, quickly backed away.
Several hundred feet below, the traffic of the city roared!
Gault went over to the door in the one wall, opened it, then
stepped back quickly, his face pale.
"The laboratory has been turned inside out!" he shouted. "We are
on the outside!"
"We must get away from here," squalled Pillbot. "Another spasm of
the creature will precipitate us into the street!"
Gault forgot his apprehensions long enough to freeze Harper with
a glance. "This is all your doing," he bawled. "You with your
absurd doodling, which attracted the attention of some Being of
the fourth dimension!" In his anger, he overlooked the fact that
he was contradicting his formerly held opinion.
"The laboratory wrecked," he continued, "and that isn't all!" He
stalked up to the cringing Harper, thrust his face toward him.
"Do you know," he yelled, "why I didn't want to be returned
hastily--why I didn't want you to bring me back by flattening out
the paper cutout? You dolt, did you ever try to get a crease out
of a piece of paper?"
"I--I don't understand," murmured Harper.
"That paper doll was creased, wasn't it?" shouted Gault.
"Once a piece of paper is creased," he resumed heatedly, "it
can't be perfectly flattened out again. At the crease a thin
cross-section continues to bulge--into the third dimension in the
case of that paper cutout. Into the fourth dimension in my case!
_I'm creased too_, at the line where I was bent into the fourth
dimension! Surely you aren't blind?"
Harper staggered back as he saw it--a thin, horizontal line of
light shining through Gault's body--across his waistline, through
clothes and all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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