Quentin pulled out the CD.
I said, 'Victor, please tell me the disc player you got from that Lilac woman is still in working order after your duel with Dr. Fell?'
Victor gave me an odd look. 'Her name is Lily. I haven't checked the player. I don't know if it works.
Give me the disc, Quentin.'
Colin said, 'What is supposed to happen?'
I said, 'The last time I was here, Miss Daw played music. One of the objects in the safe reacted to the music, and sent out an energy. Call it light. That light allowed me to see in a direction I normally cannot see, and to reach a part of my body… God, you guys don't remember any of that, do you?'
Victor said, 'I remember.' To the others, he said, 'She thinks she is four-dimensional. That is the model she uses to explain her supernatural effects, like psychokinesis, clairvoyance, and shape-change.'
I wasn't going to argue the point. I said, 'Play the music.'
One of Mozart's violin concertos floated from the tiny speakers on the little square machine. I saw space shiver and flatten.
Like a crystal goblet vibrating in sympathy to a perfect note, the sphere in the safe rang. It gave off the substance of hyperspace, a material thicker than reality, which, at once, was light, music, thought, interval, time, probability, certainty___
I could see the squat safe, drawn like a thick line around the other flat objects it encircled. Extending above and below it in the 'red' and 'blue' directions, I saw the hemispheres of the hypersphere.
Victor handed me the disc player, and I kept my hand on the button. When I stopped it, the hypersphere continued to ring and echo for a moment, and, during that moment, I could act.
I put my hand 'over' the line and into the safe. I could touch the surface—one of the many surfaces of its hypersurface—of the sphere with my fingers, but I could not budge it from its location.
I pulled my hand back down into three-space.
I pushed the play button again; space flattened; the flatness set the sphere to ringing; I pushed pause and reached again. I tried to pick up the other objects in the safe: a book, a photo, a vial of fluid, a necklace.
Nothing moved. It was as if they were frozen in ice.
Vanity said, 'Gosh, that looked weird.'
I glanced at her. 'What did you see?'
She said, 'Your hand got small. Not like it was shrinking, but like it was receding down a tunnel. You know.'
'Parallax,' Victor said.
'Yeah. Parallax. But the wall of that metal cabinet thing. Still looked like it was closer, even though the hand, your hand, in front of it, looked farther away. Um. And it turned red.'
'Doppler shift,' said Victor.
Quentin said, 'Your hand turned ghostly. I saw a red light, too. But it wasn't exactly what Vanity just described.'
Victor said, 'Chaos. Our brains are each programmed to interpret it according to a mutually exclusive metaphor.'
Colin said, 'No. I saw. Her hand woke up. This dream, this false world we are all in, it gave way. Look, you are all logical people. If the safe was real, could she put her hand through it, into it, without leaving a hole? No. The safe is an illusion. It is only there because we think it is there.'
Victor said, 'I cannot seem to penetrate the safe wall with my magnetics. I cannot manipulate the lock.'
He turned. 'If your theory is correct, Colin, you could open the safe just by willing it to open.'
Quentin muttered, 'It is not a theory. Not disprovable. Article of faith.'
Colin frowned, looked determined, strode forward with a quick and steady step, plunged his hand down as if to brush the substance of the safe aside like mist…
Cracked his knuckles loudly on the steel sides of the safe, and sprang back, yelping and waving his hurt hand in the air.
Vanity said sweetly, 'Illusion hurt you?'
Colin gave her a dark look. 'Bugger you. Nightmares scare people, okay? They are still not real. No one dies on roller-coasters, but everyone screams on them.' He wiggled his fingers gingerly. He muttered to himself, 'If Cat- woman had been in that safe, damn safe would have melted…'
I said to the group, 'I can touch the sphere, but for some reason, I cannot move it. Any theories?'
Colin sat down on the desk, still nursing his hand. He said, 'You know more than any of us do about what's happening here.'
I said, 'Wait a minute. While we are waiting, let's catch up on what we intended to do.'
I looked at Victor, reached into his monad, and realigned it, so that it illuminated all the darkened sections of his nervous system.
Vanity shrieked.
'What?' I said.
'You just stuck your hand through his head!'
