Fugitives of Chaos

the safe wall. I touched the staff to one of the surfaces of the many spherical volumes of which the curved hyper- surface was composed.

I said, 'Quickly.' Each echo was quieter than the one before.

He said quickly, 'The Eloi Adonai gave to Adam dominion over all beasts of the field and birds of the air, the bugs that swarm and the fish that swim. In token of this, King Adam granted names to all living things.

Force which binds: I am a son of Adam. You are a living thing of Earth. I name you, I dub, I christen you…'

I said, 'Faster.' The echoing in hyperspace was fading, fading. The hyperlight dimmed, like a candle flickering out. It was getting hard for me to 'see' in that direction. Hyperspace is so very dark.

'… You are Er, the alone one, who grips these talismans. I call you by your true name! Release the talismans! And you shall no longer be alone…'

Too long. The last glint of hyperlight went dark; I lost the direction. With a spray of red sparks and the thrust of pressure, both my hand and Quentin's staff were forced out of the safe.

Quentin staggered back, looking at his staff, and at my hand. 'Are you all right?'

He was talking to me, but the safe answered, with a hideous, unearthly moan, 'It hurts! It is so heavy!'

Quentin waved his staff, and said several impressive things, but the voice did not speak again.

After a moment or two, Vanity told him to stop. 'It is not listening anymore.'

Victor said, 'There was a magnetic flux near the point where the wand came out from the surface of the safe, but then it was smothered.'

Vanity said, 'I think it… died.'

Quentin had been trying to mold the psychic energy into a living being, like drawing a face in clay. He had gotten the idea from what I had done to Dr. Fell's molecular engine, which I had given free will. His thought was that he could cast a spell on a being that had a moral nature, or at least talk to it.

Quentin looked rather pale at this point. 'I wasn't expecting it to die again. I mean… I wasn't expecting that…'

Victor said, 'I have an idea, though. In your paradigm, murder is bad, right? You could argue that Boggin was responsible for that entity being killed, and…'

Colin, looking at Quentin, interrupted softly, 'Hey, maybe the thing is still alive, but just, you know, trapped in the safe?'

I said, 'Um. No. There is nothing alive in the safe.'

The face in the clay had been smoothed over and rubbed out. Unfortunately, the force was still there.

Quentin shook his head. 'Why don't you guys try something else? Do it without me. I have to sit down.'

He went to sit behind the desk.

Vanity said, 'Quentin, I hate to say this, but we're in the middle of something right now. You have to help!'

Quentin laid his head down on the desk. He spoke without raising his head. 'Okay. Fine. Here's my help.

Weight is the key. The force can barely hold the talismans as it is. Have Amelia make the thing heavier.

Eventually, the force will break.'

Vanity looked at me and shrugged. 'Go ahead and try it.'

I knelt down, turned the music on, waited for a nice running glissade to get the sphere ringing really voluminously, and put my hand 'past' the safe wall, and touched the hypersphere.

I could not manipulate the world-lines connecting its center of mass with the center of mass of the Earth. I was not sure why, but maybe the fact that it was a fourth-dimensional object, a perfectly regular sphere, made me unable to rotate it to alter its possible free-fall paths. Maybe my powers worked only because I had a higher dimension than the 'flat' 3-D matter around me.

But Miss Daw had implied that there were higher dimensions than just the four. Maybe I could manipulate them, if I could see or imagine them.

I said half aloud, half to myself, 'A five-sphere would satisfy v2+H;2+Jc2+y2+z2=r2. The 'surface' would be a set of hypervolumes made of hyperspheres, all equidistant from a single center-point. The 'volume'

would be a su-perhypervolume, and…'

Something happened. Quietly, quickly, unexpectedly. Not what I was trying to do. But something amazing.

Under my finger, the sphere changed into a five-dimensional object. I saw it.

The ringing damped even more quickly when that happened, and I yanked my hand away even as red sparks began to tremble across the safe surface.

I said aloud, 'Victor, you're good at math. What is the ratio of the surface area of a five-dimensional sphere to its volume?'

He said, 'I am not good at that kind of math. But the ratio is higher than that of a hypersurface of a globe to its content, much higher than a normal sphere surface to its volume. Remember the pie plate and the goldfish bowl. The more dimensions you have, the more water you can fill in, within the same given radius.'

I said, 'The surface area for any number of dimensions is directly proportional to 2 pi raised to the power of nil, where n is the number of dimensions. It is inversely proportional to gamma times one-half n'

Colin said, 'Oh my dear lord, she is talking in equations again. Quentin! Get your gag back out! The spirits are