Читать книгу Alienist - Laurence M. Janifer - Страница 10

CHAPTER FIVE

Euglane explained a little about the Gielli to me, after we’d had a chance to talk about my problem, and when we met the next evening. He’d had, he told me, appointments right through the day, “and it would be unkind in me to break them, if I can avoid doing that,” he said. “There’s a certain dependence, you know.” His voice was middle-register for a male human, pleasant and even and just a little gruff.

I nodded at that, and I didn’t press it. I agreed to meet him at his home at what Ravenal calls eighteen-thirty and I call six-thirty P. M. I was there about eight minutes early, but when I thumbed the entry switch the little bell-announce had barely stopped chiming inside when he opened the door. He was smiling, or he looked as if he were smiling. With a face like his, it was hard to tell, and mostly in the eyes.

Two eyes, a rather small head, and a beak. The head was tan, the beak dark and glossy, either brown or black. His eyes were large, looked almost human—the irises were narrow upright ovals—and bright blue.

Imagine a koala with the head of an eagle. Wearing, by the way, a short-sleeved white shirt, a pair of shorts, and slippers, and standing about five feet eleven inches tall. That isn’t it— Euglane wasn’t as puffy as a koala, and his head was larger and longer than an eagle’s—but it will give you a fast idea. I said: “Mr. Euglane?” and he said:

“Euglane, please. You’re Knave?”

Despite its hard, glossy appearance, the beak was mobile enough to shape vowels. “I am,” I said. He stepped aside, and I went in, to a small, light entry hall panelled in expensive dark wood. He shut the door—which was also wood; apparently this particular Giell was doing all right for himself financially—and then led the way to a big, airy living room. There were couches, tables, overstuffed chairs; he indicated a small couch and I sat down, and he dropped into a big chair nearby.

“I don’t know what Master Higsbee has told you about me,” he said.

“Not a lot,” I said. “To be frank, I’d never heard of the Gielli till he mentioned you last night. He said you might be helpful.”

“Well,” he said, “I will be if I can. That’s my nature, being helpful. It’s what I do, you know.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “A psychiatrist, after all.”

At that point he remembered his manners, or something, and offered me drinks. I said fruit juice, to be friendly, and he went away and came back with a couple of tall glasses on a tray. I took one, he sat down again and said:

“Do you mind if I relax?”

“Not at all,” I said.

He nodded, put his own glass on the tray, which sat on a nearby small table, and sighed. A second went by.

Then his arms and legs started to extend.

When each limb was about four feet long, he sighed again. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s a strain, but it is best to seem as non-threatening as possible. Long arms mean a long reach, long legs an overpowering height. Not always the best or most reassuring picture for a human.”

Accordion limbs? They seemed to be boneless, with strong muscles for motion. Expandable cartilage? Standing upright looked to be a problem without anything as hard as bones to take the weight over four feet of leg, and I thought, when fully relaxed, he probably got around on all fours, in a sort of sea-lion crawl. “I can see where it might be a strain,” I said. “Holding yourself in like that.”

“Well,” he said, thrashing his arms and legs a little, just loosening up after a long day, “it’s worth it, if it keeps my patients calm. But of course you’re not a patient.”

“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I wasn’t quite sure. The Master was—a little vague.”

“He was very vague with me.” Euglane said. “He told me he wanted me to form my own impressions—a good idea generally, but I’m pretty much a blank at the moment; anything you tell me is going to be news.”

I nodded. “What do you know about dimensions?” I said.

“Dimensions?”

I explained, as briefly as possible—which was not very. I finished: “What I ran into recently—not anywhere near here, though I am not at all sure ‘near’ has any meaning in this context—is, then, and among other things, a claim to live in terms of ‘other dimensions’. I am damned if I know what that means.”

He shut his eyes. His arms began to twine around each other, not tightly. I waited for a long minute.

“I assume,” he said without opening his eyes, “you heard this claim as something literal. Not some sort of figurative, poetic statement.”

“The speaker didn’t strike me as the poetic type,” I said.

He hummed for a second. Not an unpleasant sound—a little distant. Then his eyes opened. “A dimension is a mathematical convenience,” he said. “N-dimensional space is a common enough theoretical concept. But to speak of living in some— other set of dimensions—well, we can define a dimension in terms of right angles.”

“Go ahead.” The easiest way to consult an expert is to let him explain to you, even if you know most of what he’s going to tell you.

“Take a line—one-dimensional, assume it’s a mathematical line, without width. Erect another line at right angles to it and you have a two-dimensional structure. Erect still another at right angles to both of those, and you have an object in three dimensions.”

I nodded. “Clear so far,” I said. “And a fourth line, at right angles to all the other three, defines a fourth spatial dimension—space-four, in fact.”

“That’s the theory,” he said, “and since we do travel in terms of space-four, we can accept the theory as having some sort of practical existence.”

“Line, square, cube, tesseract,” I said. “So far I’m with you.”

“Now, if we continue to erect lines, each at right angles to all of the previous lines, we will be creating objects of more and more dimensions.”

“We can deal with the objects mathematically,” I said. “We can’t picture them. Not that picturing them is a final test of anything.”

“It is some sort of test in this case, though,” he said. “This being—Folla?”

“Folla.”

“Folla was able to interact—massively, he moved your ship—in terms of our four spatial dimensions. While he was doing that, he must have been—in a way—picturable. If you see what I mean.”

“He must have existed in this space.”

“At least in part,” Euglane said. His arms twined again. “The question is: does he exist in terms of more than our dimensions—three spatial dimensions, we can travel by means of space-four, but we can’t do anything in it, so to speak, or with it, we just pass through—or merely a different three?”

He had said something I hadn’t expected, for the first time. And I had only one reply, though I seemed to have been saying it a lot lately. “I am damned if I know.”

“It must be one or the other,” he said, and as he said it I held up a hand. Something had occurred to me, something interesting. Just perhaps…

“He said he was now existing in these spaces, and implied he’d been existing in different ones, or a different combination,” I said. “But does this involve a different set of dimensions?”

Euglane raised an arm over his head, and turned it. A shrug?. “What else can it mean, after all? It sounds like science-fiction, as I understand such stuff—it sounds, even, like very bad science-fiction—but there it is.”

“Maybe,” I said, “just maybe, there it isn’t.”

He left his chair. I’d been right; he didn’t stand upright. He eased himself to the carpet, which was expensive-looking but thin and comparatively stiff, and got around in a sort of combination crawl and all-fours. He went over to another table, where there was a small pile of papers. He levered himself up to a chair next to the table, picked a paper off the top of the pile, and said: “I’ve been thinking about this general subject for some time.”

What a psychological-statics expert had been doing thinking about other dimensions I couldn’t really imagine, and, as politely as possible, I said so.

“A few of my patients report contact with alien intelligences from other dimensions,” he said.

I blinked. “But—”

“But they’re mad,” he said. “Crazy. Mentally many degrees out of true. Yes. And I do not for a second believe that any report I’ve heard has any foundation in objective fact.”

“Well, then—”

“But my habit is to look everywhere,” he said. “Let me give you an example.”

I took a swallow of fruit juice. “Go ahead.”

“A few years ago,” he said, “a patient of mine reported that she was being spied on by aliens. From some ‘other dimension’, I don’t doubt. They patrolled her building, she said. They had a set of signals that told them which room of her little apartment she was in—she lived at the top floor of a small building—so they could train their spy-rays on her at any time.”

“And you found the aliens?” I said.

He laughed. He had a musical sort of laugh, with an undertone of the gruffness that was in his voice. “I did not,” he said. “I never expected to. But I looked. I hired some people to look.”

“And?”

“There were no aliens,” he said. “Of course there weren’t, and never had been. But—on the roof of a building near hers, with a good view of three of her windows—there was a human. A peeping tom.”

I nodded. “Everybody needs a hobby.”

“I suppose so,” he said. “A little talk with him stopped the practice, at least as far as my patient was concerned—and perhaps altogether, I can’t be sure.”

“And that relieved your patient?” I said.

“Not by itself, though it certainly helped,” he said. “Humans do tend to feel that they’re being watched—when they’re being watched. Sometimes, as well, when they’re not—but the feeling diminished greatly for my patient when the practice stopped. Some further work with her helped relieve her of her delusion about the aliens.”

I took a second with it. “So when people report contact with aliens from other dimensions—” I began.

With his patients, he was probably quieter. But he was one of those people who seldom let you finish a sentence. “I look into the contacts they’ve had with beings from these dimensions,” he said. “Friends, business associates, relatives—and so on. And,” he went on, lifting the paper again, “I look, generally, into the idea of other dimensions as well.” He went to the floor again, and came over to me, holding the paper in one hand. He gave me the paper, and went back to the chair near me. “The fact is, Knave, very little about the universe is certain. It’s a good idea to check everything you can—however odd it seems to do so.”

It’s an attitude I’m very fond of, and one I never expect to meet in anybody else—except Master Higsbee, of course. I nodded at him. “The damnedest things do turn up,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.