The HOUNDS of TINDALOS By Frank Belknap Long, Jr. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales March 1929. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "I'm glad you came," said Chalmers. He was sitting by the window and his face was very pale. Two tall candles guttered at his elbow and cast a sickly amber light over his long nose and slightly receding chin. Chalmers would have nothing modern about his apartment. He had the soul of a mediæval ascetic, and he preferred illuminated manuscripts to automobiles and leering stone gargoyles to radios and adding-machines. As I crossed the room to the settee he had cleared for me I glanced at his desk and was surprized to discover that he had been studying the mathematical formulæ of a celebrated contemporary physicist, and that he had covered many sheets of thin yellow paper with curious geometric designs. "Einstein and John Dee are strange bedfellows," I said as my gaze wandered from his mathematical charts to the sixty or seventy quaint books that comprised his strange little library. Plotinus and Emanuel Moscopulus, St. Thomas Aquinas and Frenicle de Bessy stood elbow to elbow in the somber ebony bookcase, and chairs, table and desk were littered with pamphlets about mediæval sorcery and witchcraft and black magic, and all of the valiant glamorous things that the modern world has repudiated. Chalmers smiled engagingly, and passed me a Russian cigarette on a curiously carved tray. "We are just discovering now," he said, "that the old alchemists and sorcerers were two-thirds _right_, and that your modern biologist and materialist is nine-tenths _wrong_." "You have always scoffed at modern science," I said, a little impatiently. "Only at scientific dogmatism," he replied. "I have always been a rebel, a champion of originality and lost causes; that is why I have chosen to repudiate the conclusions of contemporary biologists." "And Einstein?" I asked. "A priest of transcendental mathematics!" he murmured reverently. "A profound mystic and explorer of the great _suspected_." "Then you do not entirely despise science." "Of course not," he affirmed. "I merely distrust the scientific positivism of the past fifty years, the positivism of Haeckel and Darwin and of Mr. Bertrand Russell. I believe that biology has failed pitifully to explain the mystery of man's origin and destiny." "Give them time," I retorted. Chalmers' eyes glowed. "My friend," he murmured, "your pun is sublime. Give them _time_. That is precisely what I would do. But your modern biologist scoffs at time. He has the key but he refuses to use it. What do we know of time, really? Einstein believes that it is relative, that it can be interpreted in terms of space, of _curved_ space. But must we stop there? When mathematics fails us can we not advance by--insight?"