Fourth dimension -- Fiction; Musicians -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction
"These men are very much interested in your case," the doctor tells
me. "I have been telling them about your statement and the strange
circumstances attending your appearance on Fifty-Second Street today.
Now I feel that you have had enough rest and I want you to tell them
the entire story."
Well, I know they will figure I am off the beat, but I start at
the beginning and relate the whole story anyway. They do not say a
word until I have finished. Then they look at each other and have a
whispered session on the other side of the room. Finally one of them
speaks up.
"Mr. McRae," he says, "we want to question you a little further if you
don't mind. Will you please put on your clothes and come with us?"
I do like they say since there is nothing else for me to do, and when
I am dressed they take me down the hall to a big light room which is
practically all glass, and they ask me to sit down at a large table.
"Now, Mr. McRae," the first doc says, "I want you to do something for
me."
He hands me ten little blocks of different sizes and informs me that I
am to place them in the proper holes in a board which he has ready for
just that purpose. I do as he asks.
These seems to surprise him, but he is all set with another test, and I
spend the rest of the afternoon playing these little games, until I am
plenty weary of it and I say so to him.
"Well," he says, "as you likely know, we have been trying to determine
your sanity. I will say that you have demonstrated yourself to be
entirely normal."
"That is fine," I say, "but now that we have decided that will someone
kindly tell me what is this business about Twenty-Five O Seven--and
what has been happening to me anyhow."
Another of the doctors answers me.
"There seems to be only one other explanation," he says, "one which we
are reluctant to accept but which we must consider if your story is
true. You have been in a fourth dimension. The passage of time there
is something that we know nothing of, and it is possible that the few
months you spent in it were equivalent to the centuries which have
passed in this dimension. You have apparently evolved a unique and
purely personal method for entering and leaving the fourth dimension,
and since it seems entirely dependent on your own physical skill
together with a large element of chance, it is of little value for
scientific exploitation. That is the pity."
While he is giving out this statement, the rest of the doctors grow
very excited, and soon as he has finished they begin throwing questions
at him about curvature of space and Neilson's theory and a lot of other
stuff which is very confusing to me indeed.
Finally I stop them.
"If you will kindly return my trombone," I tell them, "I will be on my
way, as I do not know anything of all this and I would like to get out
and see what it is like in Twenty-Five O Seven A.D."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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