Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (72 page)

“Then make it mathematical physics, and I’ll be grateful to you.”

So I was conducted to the mathematical physicist. The student led me into the very building that corresponded to Morton Hall, and into an office the position of which quite corresponded to that of Woleshensky’s office. However, the office was older and dustier; it had a Victorian look about it and was not as modern as Woleshensky’s room. Professor Vibens was a rather small, bald-headed man with a keen-looking face. As I thanked the law student and started on my story, he looked rather bored, as though wondering why I had picked on him with my tale of wonder. Before I had gotten very far he straightened up a little; and farther along he pricked up another notch; and before many minutes he was tense in his chair as he listened to me. When I finished, his comment was terse, like that of a man accustomed to thinking accurately and to the point.

“Obviously you come into this world from another set of coordinates. As we are on the
z
dimension, you must have come to us from the
t
dimension—”

He disregarded my attempts to protest at this point.

“Your man Woleshensky has evidently developed the conception of relativity further than we have, although Monpeters’s theory comes close enough to it. Since I have no idea how to get you back, you must be my guest. I shall enjoy hearing about your world.”

“That is very kind of you,” I said gratefully. “I’m accepting because I can’t see what else to do. At least until the time when I can find myself a place in your world or get back to my own. Fortunately,” I added as an afterthought, “no one will miss me there, unless it be a few classes of students who will welcome the little vacation that must elapse before my successor is found.”

Breathlessly eager to find out what sort of world I had gotten into, I walked with him to his home. And I may state at the outset that if I had found everything upside down and outlandishly bizarre, I should have been far less amazed and astonished than I was. For, from the walk that first evening from Professor Vibens’s office along several blocks of residence street to his solid and respectable home, through all of my goings about the town and country during the years that I remained in the
t
-dimensional world, I found people and things thoroughly ordinary and familiar. They looked and acted as we do, and their homes and goods looked like ours. I cannot possibly imagine a world and a people that could be more similar to ours without actually being the same. It was months before I got over the idea that I had merely wandered into an unfamiliar part of my own city. Only the actual experience of wide travel and much sightseeing, and the knowledge that there was no such extensive English-speaking country in the world that I knew, convinced me that I must be on some other world, doubtless in the
t
dimension.

“A gentleman who has found his way here from another universe,” the professor introduced me to a strapping young fellow who was mowing the lawn.

The professor’s son was named John! Could anything be more commonplace?

“I’ll have to take you around and show you things tomorrow,” John said cordially, accepting the account of my arrival without surprise.

A redheaded servant girl, roast pork and rhubarb sauce for dinner, and checkers afterward, a hot bath at bedtime, the ringing of a telephone somewhere else in the house—is it any wonder that it was months before I would believe that I had actually come into a different universe? What slight differences there were in the people and the world merely served to emphasize the similarity. For instance, I think they were just a little more hospitable and “old-fashioned” than we are. Making due allowances for the fact that I was a rather remarkable phenomenon, I think I was welcomed more heartily in this home and in others later; people spared me more of their time and interest from their daily business than would have happened under similar circumstances in a correspondingly busy city in America.

Again, John found a lot of time to take me about the city and show me banks and stores and offices. He drove a little squat car with tall wheels, run by a spluttering gasoline motor. (The car was not as perfect as our modern cars, and horses were quite numerous in the streets. Yet John was a busy businessman, the district superintendent of a life-insurance agency.) Think of it! Life insurance in Einstein’s
t
dimension.

“You’re young to be holding such an important position,” I suggested.

“Got started early,” John replied. “Dad is disappointed because I didn’t see fit to waste time in college. Disgrace to the family, I am.”

What in particular shall I say about the city? It might have been any one of a couple of hundred American cities. Only it wasn’t. The electric streetcars, except for their bright green color, were perfect; they might have been brought over bodily from Oshkosh or Tulsa. The ten-cent stores with gold letters on their signs; drugstores with soft dnnks; a mad, scrambling stock exchange; the blaring sign of an advertising dentist; brilliant entrances to motion-picture theaters were all there. The beauty shops did wonders to the women’s heads, excelling our own by a good deal, if I am any judge; and at that time I had nothing more important on my mind than to speculate on that question. Newsboys bawled the
Evening Sun
and the
Morning
Gale,
in whose curious, flat type I could read accounts of legislative doings, murders, and divorces quite as fluently as I could in my own
Tribune
at home. Strangeness and unfamiliarity had bothered me a good deal on a trip to Quebec a couple of years before; but they were not noticeable here in the
t
dimension.

For three or four weeks the novelty of going around, looking at things, meeting people, visiting concerts, theaters and department stores was sufficient to absorb my interest. Professor Vibens’s hospitality was so sincerely extended that I did not hesitate to accept, though I assured him that I would repay it as soon as I got established in this world. In a few days I was thoroughly convinced that there was no way back home. Here I must stay, at least until I learned as much as Woleshensky knew about crossing dimensions. Professor Vibens eventually secured for me a position at the university.

It was shortly after I had accepted the position as instructor in experimental physics and had begun to get broken into my work that I noticed a strange commotion among the people of the city. I have always been a studious recluse, observing people as phenomena rather than participating in their activities. So for some time I noted only in a subconscious way the excited gathering in groups, the gesticulations and blazing eyes, the wild sale of extra editions of papers, the general air of disturbance. I even failed to take an active interest in these things when I made a railroad journey of three hundred miles and spent a week in another city; so thoroughly at home did I feel in this world that when the advisability arose of my studying laboratory methods in another university, I made the trip alone. So absorbed was I in my laboratory problems that I only noted with half an eye the commotion and excitement everywhere, and merely recollected it later. One night it suddenly popped into my head that the country was aroused over something.

That night I was with the Vibens family in their living room. John tuned in the radio. I wasn’t listening to the thing very much; I had troubles of my own.
F = gm1m2/r2 was familiar enough to me. It meant the same and held as rigidly here as in my old world. But what was the name of the bird who had formulated that law? Back home it was Newton. Tomorrow in class I would have to be thoroughly familiar with his name. Pasvieux, that’s what it was. What messy surnames. It struck me that it was lucky that they expressed the laws of physics in the same form and even in the same algebraic letters, or I might have had a time getting them confused——when all of a sudden the radio blatantly bawled: “THE GOSTAK DISTIMS THE DOSHES!”

John jumped to his feet.

“Damn right!” he shouted, slamming the table with his fist.

Both his father and mother annihilated him with withering glances, and he slunk from the room. I gazed stupefied. My stupefaction continued while the professor shut off the radio and both of them excused themselves from my presence. Then suddenly I was alert.

I grabbed a bunch of newspapers, having seen none for several days. Great sprawling headlines covered the front pages:

“THE GOSTAK DISTIMS THE DOSHES ”

For a moment I stopped, trying to recollect where I had heard those words before. They recalled something to me. Ah, yes! That very afternoon there had been a commotion beneath my window on the university campus. I had been busy checking over an experiment so that I might be sure of its success at tomorrow’s class, and looked out rather absently to see what was going on. A group of young men from a dismissed class was passing and had stopped for a moment.

“I say, the gostak distims the doshes!” said a fine-looking young fellow. His face was pale and strained.

The young man facing him sneered derisively, “Aw, your grandmother! Don’t be a feeble—”

He never finished. The first fellow’s fist caught him in the cheek. Several books dropped to the ground. In a moment the two had clinched and were rolling on the ground, fists flying up and down, smears of blood appearing here and there. The others surrounded them and for a moment appeared to enjoy the spectacle, but suddenly recollected that it looked rather disgraceful on a university campus, and after a lively tussle separated the combatants. Twenty of them, pulling in two directions, tugged them apart.

The first boy strained in the grasp of his captors; his white face was flecked with blood and he panted for breath.

“Insult!” he shouted, giving another mighty heave to get free. He looked contemptuously around. “The whole bunch of you ought to learn to stand up for your honor. The gostak distims the doshes!”

That was the astonishing incident that these words called to my mind. I turned back to my newspapers.

“Slogan Sweeps the Country,” proclaimed the subheads. “Ringing Expression of National Spirit! Enthusiasm Spreads Like Wildfire! The new patriotic slogan is gaining ground rapidly,” the leading article went on. “The fact that it has covered the country almost instantaneously seems to indicate that it fills a deep and long-felt want in the hearts of the people. It was first uttered during a speech in Walkingdon by that majestic figure in modern statesmanship, Senator Harob. The beautiful sentiment, the wonderful emotion of this sublime thought, are epoch-making. It is a great conception, doing credit to a great man, and worthy of being the guiding light of a great people—”

That was the gist of everything I could find in the papers. I fell asleep still puzzled about the thing. I was puzzled because—as I see now and didn’t see then—I was trained in the analytical methods of physical science and knew little or nothing about the ways and emotions of the masses of the people.

In the morning the senseless expression popped into my head as soon as I awoke. I determined to waylay the first member of the Vibens family who showed up, and demand the meaning of the thing. It happened to be John.

“John, what’s a gostak?”

John’s face lighted up with pleasure. He threw out his chest and a look of pride replaced the pleasure. His eyes blazed, and with a consuming enthusiasm he shook hands with me, as deacons shake hands with a new convert—a sort of glad welcome.

“The gostak!” he exclaimed. “Hurray for the gostak!”

“But what is a gostak?”

“Not
a
gostak!
The
gostak. The gostak is—the distimmer of the doshes—see! He distims ’em, see?”

“Yes, yes. But what is distimming? How do you distim?”

“No, no! Only the gostak can distim. The gostak distims the doshes. See?”

“Ah, I see!” I exclaimed. Indeed, I pride myself on my quick wit. “What are doshes? Why, they are the stuff distimmed by the gostak. Very simple!”

“Good for you!” John slapped my back in huge enthusiasm. “I think it wonderful for you to understand us so well after being here only a short time. You are very patriotic.”

I gritted my teeth tightly to keep myself from speaking. “Professor Vibens, what’s a gostak?” I asked in the solitude of his office an hour later.

He looked pained.

He leaned back in his chair and looked me over elaborately, and waited some time before answering.

“Hush!” he finally whispered. “A scientific man may think what he pleases, but if he says too much, people in general may misjudge him. As a matter of fact, a good many scientific men are taking this so-called patriotism seriously. But a mathematician cannot use words loosely; it has become second nature with him to inquire closely into the meaning of every term he uses.”

“Well, doesn’t that jargon mean anything at all?” I was beginning to be puzzled in earnest.

“To me it does not. But it seems to mean a great deal to the public in general. It’s making people do things, is it not?”

I stood a while in stupefied silence. That an entire great nation should become fired up over a meaningless piece of nonsense! Yet the astonishing thing was that I had to admit there was plenty of precedent for it in the history of my own z-dimensional world. A nation exterminating itself in civil wars to decide which of two profligate royal families should be privileged to waste the people’s substance from the throne; a hundred thousand crusaders marching to death for an idea that to me means nothing; a meaningless, untrue advertising slogan that sells millions of dollars’ worth of cigarettes to a nation, to the latter’s own detriment—haven’t we seen it over and over again?

“There’s a public lecture on this stuff tonight at the First Church of the Salvation,” Professor Vibens suggested.

“I’ll be there,” I said. “I want to look into the thing.”

That afternoon there was another flurry of “extras” over the street; people gathered in knots and gesticulated with open newspapers.

“War! Let ’em have it!” I heard men shout.

“Is our national honor a rag to be muddied and trampled on?” the editorials asked.

As far as I could gather from reading the papers, there was a group of nations across an ocean that was not taking the gostak seriously. A ship whose pennant bore the slogan had been refused entrance to an Engtalian harbor because it flew no national ensign. The Executive had dispatched a diplomatic note. An evangelist who had attempted to preach the gospel of the distimmed doshes at a public gathering in Itland had been ridden on a rail and otherwise abused. The Executive was dispatching a diplomatic note.