grasp it. After all, you are a people from an earlier age, an almost barbaric age.”
'Try her,' growled Gary.
'All right,' said the old man, but there was a patronizing tone to his thoughts.
Gary gained a confused impression of horrific equations, of bracketed symbols that built themselves into a tangled and utterly confused structure of meaning — a meaning that seemed so vast and all-inclusive that his mind instinctively shuddered away from it.
Then the thoughts were gone and Gary's mind was spinning with them, with the vital forcefulness that he had guessed and glimpsed behind the symbolic structure that had been in the mathematics.
He looked at Caroline and saw that she was puzzled. But suddenly a look of awe spread over her face.
'Why,' she said, and hesitated slightly, '…. why, the equations cancel, represent both everything and nothing, both zero and the ultimate in everything imaginable.”
Gary caught a sense of surprise and confusion that flashed through the mind of their host.
'You understand,' said the faltering thought. 'You grasp the meaning perfectly.”
'Didn't I tell you,' said Gary. 'Of course, she understands.' ‘
Caroline was talking, almost as if she were talking to herself, talking her thoughts aloud. 'That means the energy would be timeless. It would have no time factor, and since time is a factor in power, its power would be almost infinite. There'd be no stopping it, once it started.”
'You are right,' said the old man. 'It would be raw, created energy from a region where four-dimensional laws are no longer valid. It would be timeless and formless.”
'Formless,' said Caroline. 'Of course, it would be formless. It wouldn't be light, or heat, or matter, or motion, or any other form of energy such as we know. But it could be anything. It would be waiting to become something.
It could crystallize into anything.”
'Good Lord,' said Gary, 'how could you handle stuff like that? Your hyperspheres wouldn't handle it. It could mold space itself. It could annihilate time.”
Caroline looked at him soberly.
'If I could create a fifth-dimensional trap,' she said, 'if I could trap it in the framework of the medium from which it came. Don't you see that such a framework would attract it, would gather it in and hold it. Like a battery holds energy. Like water seeking its own level and coming to rest.”
'Sure,' agreed Gary, 'if you could create a fifth-dimensional trap. But you can't. It's eternity. The dimension of eternity. You can't go fooling around with eternity.”
'Yes, she can,' said the old man.
The two of them stared at him, not believing.
'Listen closely,' said the oldster. 'By rotating a circle through three dimensions you create a sphere. Rotate the sphere through four dimensions and you have a hypersphere. You already have created this. You have bent time and space around a mass to create a hypersphere, a miniature universe.
Now all you have to do is rotate the hypersphere through five-dimensional space.”
'But you'd have to be in five-dimensional space to do that,' objected Gary.
'No, you wouldn't,' contended the old man. 'Scattered throughout three-dimensional space are ether eddies and time faults and space traps — call them anything you like. They are a common phenomena and they're nothing more, when you come right down to it, than isolated bits of four-dimensional space scattered around through three-dimensional space.
The same thing would apply to a fifth dimension in the fourth dimension.”
'But how,' asked Caroline, 'would one go about it? How would one rotate a hypersphere through the fifth dimension?”
Again Gary had that sense of confusion as the thoughts of the ancient one swept over him, thoughts that translated themselves into symbols and equations and brackets of mathematics that it seemed impossible any man could know.
'Gary,' gasped Caroline, 'have you a pencil and some paper?”
Gary fumbled in his pocket and found an old envelope and a stub of pencil.
He handed them to her.
'Please repeat that very slowly,' she said, smiling at the old man.
Gary watched in amazement as Caroline, slowly and carefully, jotted down the formulas, equations, symbols — carefully checking and going over them, checking and rechecking so there could be no mistake.
'It will take power,' she said. 'Tremendous power. I wonder if the Engineers can supply it.”
'They have magnetic power,' said Gary. 'They ought to be able to give you all you need.”
The old man's eyes were twinkling. 'I am remembering the Hellhounds,' he said. 'The ones who would have the universe destroyed. I cannot seem to like them. It seems to me that something should be done about them.”
'But what?' asked Gary. 'They seem to be all-powerful. By the time we get back they may have battered the city into a mass of ruins.”
The oldster nodded almost sleepily, but his eyes were glowing.
'We have had ones like that in our history,' he said. 'Ones who overrode the nations and imposed their will, standing in the way of progress. But always someone found something that would break them. Someone found a greater weapon or a greater strength and they went their way. Their names and works were dust and they were forgotten and the civilization that they sought to mold to their own selfish ends went on as if they had never been.”
'But I don't see…' began Gary, and then suddenly he did — as clearly as light. He smote his knee and yelled his enthusiasm.
'Of course,' he cried. 'We have a weapon. A weapon that could wipe them out. The fifth-dimensional energy!”
'Certainly you have,' said the old man.
'That would be barbarous,' protested Caroline.
'Barbarous!' shouted Gary. 'Isn't it barbarous to want to see the universe destroyed so the Hellhounds can go back to the beginning and take it over, control it, dominate it, take over galaxy after galaxy as a new universe is born? Shape it to their needs and desires. Hold in thrall every bit of life that develops on every cooling planet. Become the masters of the universe.”
'We must hurry, then,' said Caroline. 'We must get back. Minutes count. We still may be able to save the Engineers and the universe, wipe out the Hellhounds.”
She rose impatiently to her feet.
The old man protested. 'You would go so soon?' he asked. 'You would not stay and eat with me? Or tell me more about this place at the edge of the universe? Or let me tell you strange things that I know you would be glad to hear?”
Gary hesitated. 'Maybe we could stay a while,' he suggested.
'No,' said Caroline. 'We must go.”
'Listen,' said Gary to the old man, 'why don't you come along with us? We'd be glad to have you. We could use you in the fight. There are things that you could tell us that would help.”
The old man shook his head. 'I cannot go,' he said. 'For, you see, you are right. I may be only a shadow. A very substantial shadow, perhaps, but still just a shadow of probability. You can come to me, but I can't go back with you. If I left this planet I might puff into nothingness, revert to the non-existence of the thing that never was.”
He hesitated. 'But there's something,' he said, 'that makes me suspect I am not a shadow… that this is actuality, that the Earth will follow the course history tells me it has followed.”
'What is that?' asked Gary.
'It is a thing,' the old man said, 'that I cannot tell you.”
'Perhaps we can come back and see you again,' said Caroline. 'After all this trouble is over.”
'No, my child,' he said. 'You will never come, for ours are lives that never should have met. You represent the beginning and I represent the end.
And I am proud that the Earth's last man could have been of service to one of the beginners.”
