"Calm down, Dottie, calm down. I'm just trying to get you used to this mess--I'll try something else. Here, you know what this is--a new can of tobacco, with the lid soldered on tight. In three dimensions there's no way of getting into it without breaking metal--you've opened lots of them. But out here I simply reach _past_ the metal of the container, like this, see, in the fourth dimension? Then I take out a pinch of the tobacco, so, and put it into my pipe, thus. The can is still soldered tight, no holes in it anywhere, but the tobacco is out, nevertheless. Inexplicable in three-dimensional space, impossible for us really to understand mentally, but physically perfectly simple and perfectly natural after you get used to it. That'll straighten you out some, perhaps." "Well, maybe--I guess I won't get frantic again, Dickie--but just the same, it's altogether too perfectly darn weird to suit me. Why don't you pull that switch back out and stop us?" "Wouldn't do any good--wouldn't stop us, because we have already had the impulse and are simply traveling on momentum now. When that is used up--in some extremely small fraction of a second of our time--we'll snap back into our ordinary space, but we can't do a thing about it until then." * * * * * "But how can we move around so fast?" asked Margaret from the protecting embrace of the monstrosity that they knew to be Martin Crane. "How about inertia? I should think we'd break our bones all to pieces." "You can't move a three-dimensional body that fast, as we found out when the force was coming on," Seaton replied. "But I don't think that we are ordinary matter any more, and apparently our three-dimensional laws no longer govern, now that we are in hyperspace. Inertia is based upon time, of course, so our motion might be all right, even at that. Mechanics seem to be different here, though, and, while we seem solid enough, we certainly aren't matter at all in the three-dimensional sense of the term, as we used it back where we came from. But it's all over my head like a circus tent--I don't know any more about most of this stuff than you do. I thought, of course--if I thought at all, which I doubt--that we'd go _through_ hyperspace in an instant of time, without seeing it or feeling it in any way, since a three-dimensional body cannot exist, of course, in four-dimensional space. How did we get this way, Mart? Is this space coexistent with ours or not?"