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CHAPTER FOUR

Ravenal is the hard-science center of the galaxy, as far as human beings are concerned—which is putting it mildly. I’ve spent time there on a small variety of occasions, and I have some friends there. It is not my planet of residence, but it was, very definitely, the place I wanted to go. If you need dependable answers, Ravenal is the first place to go and look for them, and some of the people I know there are the first ones to ask.

What had happened to me out there in the unknown had no explanation I could come up with, and no ancestors I could think of; I had never heard of such a thing happening to anybody, anywhere. People do hear voices, of course, but not quite like that.

There is the old joke, for instance. Psychologist to patient: “Do you ever hear voices, and you don’t know whose voices they are, or where they’re coming from?”

Patient. “Yes.”

Psychologist: “Aha. And when does this happen?”

Patient: “When I answer the telephone.”

And there are, of course, people who really do hear voices from the unknown. Some of these people have become heroes of one religion or another, and some of them have become patients in facilities for the helpless, and a very few of them have become respected poets.

These were not, on the whole, groups I was comfortable about belonging to. And the experience I’d had hadn’t quite been theirs: my voice had told me that something absolutely impossible was going to happen, and it had then, and very quickly, happened. Even the voices that had come to religious heroes hadn’t been quite that efficient.

I had traveled about sixteen thousand light years in either zero time, or a time interval small enough to measure in eyeblinks. I couldn’t tell which, because I was not sure either that I’d noticed what my boards had told me at the precise millisecond they’d begun to tell me—I’d been just a little distracted—or that the boards had responded instantaneously to my change in location.

It didn’t, as far as I could see, make much difference; either was impossible, Space-four doesn’t work like that; trip time is a fairly large number of minutes, at a minimum, and is usually measured in days. There are studies that seem to have established that the minimum theoretical trip time through space-four is just over eighteen minutes—no trip whatever, from anywhere to anywhere, can ever be shorter than that.

Mine had been—by something over eighteen minutes.

The voice I’d heard, obviously, knew some different theories.

And they’d worked out, in the real world. I got my signals from Tower for Ravenal’s City Two, punched in the course, braking and so on, and was on the ground in ninety minutes; even the landing people on Ravenal are efficient, and there is very little fuzz or delay to the process.

The fuzz and delay happened after I’d left and sealed my ship, of course, and is known everywhere as Customs. I bore up under the various idiocies and indignities gamely, and, a couple of hours later, by now late at night by my body clock, found that a hotel I remembered visiting during my last visit—with the typical Ravenal lack of any literary imagination at all, it was called City Two Rooms and Services—was happy to board me. I settled in, and then, even before I began any serious unpacking, I reached for the phone.

The rasp that answered gave me the feeling that some things never change. “Who?” Master Higsbee said, in a voice like an unoiled camshaft with attitude.

“Gerald Knave, Master,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “Gerald. I am glad to hear your voice. It has been too long—nearly eight months Standard. Where are you, and why do you call? It is not, surely, to cheer an old blind man.”

“Well,” I said, trying not to sound either sympathetic or irritated, “any cheering I can do, you’re welcome to. But something strange has happened. Very strange. I’m right here on Ravenal, and I’ve got a story I don’t think you’ve heard before.”

“Indeed,” he said. “You have come to ask me questions, Gerald? It should not be necessary; you have the wit to provide your own answers.”

I sighed. “Not this time, I don’t,” I said. “You may not have any answers either.”

He said it again: “Indeed.” And then: “It is nearly time for my dinner, Gerald. I will come to your hotel, if I may.”

“City Two Rooms and Services,” I said, not bothering about the fairly obvious deduction that I was in a hotel. “We’ll find a restaurant.”

“Room Service will be sufficient for an old and helpless man,” he said. “If you are serious about your story, Gerald, we shall want no distractions.”

An old and helpless man. Oh, God. But though being around the Master meant you had to put up with a lot—you also had to put up with being called Gerald, for instance—it was worth it; he was, after all, the Master.

“I’ll look for you,” I said.

“Do that. Look for a blind and lamed old man, Gerald.”

“Lamed?”

“It is unimportant,” he said. “A small accident, and I am assured temporary. Finished.”

Click. The Master wasted no phone time whatever.

He has been blind for thirty years and more, but I had never seen him with a cane before. He didn’t lean on it unduly and he didn’t flourish it; he used it, with as little waste motion as possible. He stalked into the hotel lobby, a big barrel-shaped man with a large, Roman head and a crown of fine white hair, moving a little slowly but not with a noticeable limp—and when he got to the middle of it he stopped and cocked his big head. The place was full of bustle and movement, for City Two— which, while a full city, is not as crowded as City One, where the bureaucracy lives—but when I said: “Over here,” he heard me without effort. He stalked toward me. People in his path got out of his path.

I think the Master has memorized the entire ground plan of any place on Ravenal he’s at all likely to be; he’s never used a cane for location that I know of. He came within two inches or so of a pillar, on the way to me, but no closer. When he got to me, he said: “I thought you might come down to meet me, Gerald.”

“Of course I would,” I said. “And not because you have difficulties—”

“Blind,” he said. “Not because I am blind. Periphrasis does not become you, Gerald.”

“At any rate,” I said uncomfortably, “simple politeness. What happened to your leg?”

“The room,” he said. “I dislike to chat in large open spaces.”

“Sorry,” I said, and headed for the elevators. He followed me without trouble. A couple of large men walking across the lobby and arguing with each other nearly bumped into him, but they did see him at the last second, and turned aside just enough. A little more than just enough. He affected not to notice, and let them live.

In the room, we got settled into chairs, and he said: “If I remember this establishment, the steak au poivre is edible. We will accept their usual accompaniments. That, and any decent red wine.”

I seconded the motion, called for Room Service, added coffee and a warmer to the menu—well, it would do for a midnight supper, for me, and the coffee would be welcome (though much earlier I’d been filling up on it), after the last few hours of Customs.

I put down the phone, and the Master said: “Tell me.”

“The leg first,” I said. “What happened?”

He shrugged, just a little. “I was examining some files, at the request of a friend,” he said. “Instances of minor theft in specialty shops—unusual lingerie.”

I nodded, trying not to look surprised; God knows what he can notice. “Unusual lingerie?”

“What seem to be called Playtime Wispies,” he said flatly. “I had not myself previously encountered the objects. The records of theft were among several boxes of reader spools.”

I was trying hard not to picture the Master encountering a delicate handful of Playtime Wispies. Some of them are edible. Some play music. Some are rigged to vanish into thin air after set periods of wear—say two hours. Some—well, there are a lot of variations. “And the boxes of spools—”

“Just so,” he said. “A particularly heavy box fell on my foot. There is injured musculature, a small broken bone, a swollen ankle. All, I am assured, quite temporary.”

“Good,” I said. “And the thefts—”

“A very minor matter,” he said. “But my friend was curious as to patterns in the timing as well as in the objects stolen. A private matter, not for police inquiry. It will be settled easily enough, there is no real complexity involved.”

“Well,” I said, “I hope the foot’s better soon.”

“Indeed,” he said, and then: “Tell me.”

So I did. In careful detail, and word for word, second for second. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing I had trouble remembering. He asked no questions until the end, which was pleasing; it meant I was doing a thorough job of reporting events.

When I had brought him to the point at which I was orbiting Ravenal, I stopped. He said nothing at all for over a full minute—which was not usual.

Then he said: “You have left nothing out, and have added nothing?”

“Of course not.”

“Then we have an extraordinary situation,” he said. “You were quite right, Gerald: this is a story I have not heard before, and one for which I do not have any immediately final answers. There are, of course, a number of suggestive points.”

I said: “I’ve seen a few of them. But I’d like to hear your—” and there was a polite little rap at my door.

Room Service, of course. I got up and let the Totum in, told it where to set up the table and arrange the plates and food and so on, and punched my accept code into its shield. It buzzed faintly, said: “Ank you, Sir, and a pleas evening.”

Well, that it talked at all was evidence of the high ranking of my hotel; expecting perfection, in a machine that saw the kind of heavy use a hotel Totum had to see, would have been silly. “Thank you,” I said, and it went away, and I shut and locked the door and we got down to eating.

“Suggestive points,” I said after a while.

“Let us assume that what you experienced was objectively real,” he said. “In that case—though I hesitate greatly over the conclusion, and of course this Folla may have been lying, or mistaken, or mad—you were hearing the voice—produced I do not know how—of someone who was not, so to speak, from this universe.”

“Not from this galaxy, you mean,” I said. “A total stranger. I did get that. A very strange stranger, too.”

“Not from this universe,” the Master said flatly. “So he claims. Not from this—little sheaf of spaces. Three dimensions of space, and one of time—as Folla said. With visitations, of course, to a fourth dimension of space—which would describe, loosely to be sure, our travels in or through or with space-four.”

I nodded—very tentatively. “He described—space-time— as if it were something special. Odd. Not the kind of thing he’s used to.”

“God alone knows what he might be used to,” the Master said. He cut the last bit of steak au poivre and began to chew. “‘Sensory equipment limited’,” he said. “I wonder what unlimited sensory data would be.”

“Maybe his is limited too,” I said. I chased some peas around my plate, caught them and ate a forkful. “But in different ways.”

“Anything is possible,” the Master said. “He said ‘these spaces’ are his ship—that is, these spaces are where he now resides, and through which, or by which, he now travels. These three—or four—spatial dimensions.”

“As opposed to what?”

“Other dimensions?” he said. “I say that very hesitantly, Gerald—and, indeed, without any clear idea of what such a phrase might in fact mean to us.” He shook his head. “I sound as if I were talking about a very bad piece of science-fiction. A dimension is a heuristic convenience; it is not, if we except the ones we normally live in, an object, a thing one can point to and so define.”

“Space-four can’t be pointed to,” I said.

“And space-four is a dimension by definition only,” he said at once. “We cannot in fact point to time, Gerald. We can define, practically, so to speak, three dimensions of space, and those only.” He drank off some wine. “What do we mean by ‘dimension’—and what can it possibly mean to say that this creature, this voice, this Folla lives in some other one or ones?”

I poured out the last of the wine for him, and emptied my own glass. “Damned if I know,” I said.

There was quite a lot to be dug out of the comparatively few words I’d had with Folla, whoever or whatever he was. (He, she or it, I suppose—but “it” doesn’t seem to cover the case, somehow, and since Folla is not really a nice sort of being, I’d rather include him in my own gender than insult my companions of another g.) It was somewhere after midnight by City Two clocks, and positively into early morning by mine, when the Master sighed: “This shall have to be continued. I must leave.”

I agreed that it was getting late. He got up, grabbed his cane from beside his chair—he’d had it leaning against the portable table—and headed for the door. He wastes very little time on polite goodbyes.

But at the door—I trailed him by a few feet, politely—he turned. “Gerald,” he said, “I would like you to talk to a psychiatrist. An expert in Psychological Statics.”

I took a second to digest that. “Well,” I said, not wanting to burst out with objections, of which I had several hundred on immediate call, “why would you want me to do that? If we’re to accept the experience as objectively real—”

“That is why,” he said. “Euglane has an interest in such matters. He may prove quite valuable, if we are to inquire into what has happened at all. We could of course simply drop the whole matter.”

“And spend the rest of my life wondering what the Hell had happened,” I said. “Thanks. But why a psychiatrist? I may have a few bats in my personal belfry, but—”

“Your bats are your affair,” the Master said, “as mine are my affair; that is what it means to be human, and adult. But I believe you will find his insights helpful, as regards this particular problem.”

I was doubtful—but he was, after all, the Master. “If you say so,” I told him.

“I do,” he said. “I will call him in the morning, and he will then call you. By the way, Gerald—he’s a Giell.”

I blinked. “A what?”

He gave me his chuckle—a dry sound, part muted trumpet and part creak. “Not a gel,” he aid. “A Giell. You may not have heard of the race. There has been very little contact as yet between humans and Gielli, though they have found a place here. In City One they are become, even, fashionable.”

“A new race?”

“New to humans,” he said. “Or to most of them.”

He chuckled again. I said: “I can hardly wait.”