4. The Shadow of Einstein Falls Across the Story but Passes Lightly by

by H.G. Wells

　　Section 1

　　Except for that one perplexing fact that all these Utopians hadapparently a complete command of idiomatic English, Mr. Barnstaplefound his vision of this new world developing with a congruity thatno dream in his experience had ever possessed. It was so coherent,so orderly, that less and less was it like a strange world at alland more and more like an arrival in some foreign but very highlycivilized country.

　　Under the direction of the brown-eyed woman in the scarlet-edgedrobe, the Earthlings were established in their quarters near theConference Place in the most hospitable and comfortable fashionconceivable. Five or six youths and girls made it their business toinitiate the strangers in the little details of Utopian domesticity.The separate buildings in which they were lodged had each anagreeable little dressing-room, and the bed, which had sheets ofthe finest linen and a very light puffy coverlet, stood in an openloggia--too open Lady Stella thought, but then as she said, "Onefeels so safe here." The luggage appeared and the valises wereidentified as if they were in some hospitable earthly mansion.

　　But Lady Stella had to turn two rather too friendly youths out ofher apartment before she could open her dressing-bag and administerrefreshment to her complexion.

　　A few minutes later some excitement was caused by an outbreak ofwild laughter and the sounds of an amiable but hysterical strugglethat came from Lady Stella's retreat. The girl who had remained withher had displayed a quite feminine interest in her equipment and hadcome upon a particularly charming and diaphanous sleeping suit. Forsome obscure reason this secret daintiness amused the young Utopianextremely, and it was with some difficulty that Lady Stellarestrained her from putting the garment on and dancing out in itfor a public display. "Then _you_ put it on," the girl insisted.

　　"But you don't understand," cried Lady Stella. "It's almost--_sacred_!It's for nobody to see--_ever_."

　　"But _why_?" the Utopian asked, puzzled beyond measure.

　　Lady Stella found an answer impossible.

　　The light meal that followed was by terrestrial standards anentirely satisfactory one. The anxiety of Mr. Freddy Mush wascompletely allayed: there were cold chicken and ham and a verypleasant meat pate. There were also rather coarse-grained but mostpalatable bread, pure butter, an exquisite salad, fruit, cheeseof the Gruyere type, and a light white wine which won from Mr.Burleigh the tribute that "Moselle never did anything better."

　　"You find our food very like your own?" asked the woman in thered-trimmed robe.

　　"Eckquithit quality," said Mr. Mush with his mouth rather full.

　　"Food has changed very little in the last three thousand years.People had found out all the best things to eat long before the LastAge of Confusion."

　　"It's too real to be real," Mr. Barnstaple repeated to himself."Too real to be real."

　　He looked at his companions, elated, interested and eating withappreciation.

　　If it wasn't for the absurdity of these Utopians speaking Englishwith a clearness that tapped like a hammer inside his head Mr.Barnstaple would have had no doubt whatever of its reality.

　　No servants waited at the clothless stone table; the woman in thewhite and scarlet robe and the two aviators shared the meal and theguests attended to each other's requirements. Mr. Burleigh'schauffeur was for modestly shrinking to another table until thegreat statesman reassured him with: "Sit down there, Penk. Next toMr. Mush." Other Utopians with friendly but keenly observant eyesupon the Earthlings came into the great pillared veranda in whichthe meal had been set, and smiled and stood about or sat down. Therewere no introductions and few social formalities.

　　"All this is most reassuring," said Mr. Burleigh. "Most reassuring.I'm bound to say these beat the Chatsworth peaches. Is that cream,my dear Rupert, in the little brown jar in front of you?... Iguessed as much. If you are sure you can spare it, Rupert....Thank you."

　　Section 2

　　Several of the Utopians made themselves known by name to theEarthlings. All their voices sounded singularly alike to Mr.Barnstaple and the words were as clear as print. The brown-eyedwoman's name was Lychnis. A man with a beard who might perhaps, Mr.Barnstaple thought, have been as old as forty, was either Urthredor Adam or Edom, the name for all its sharpness of enunciation hadbeen very difficult to catch. It was as if large print _hesitated_.Urthred conveyed that he was an ethnologist and historian and thathe desired to learn all that he possibly could about the ways of ourworld. He impressed Mr. Barnstaple as having the easy carriage ofsome earthly financier or great newspaper proprietor rather than thediffidence natural in our own every-day world to a merely learnedman. Another of their hosts, Serpentine, was also, Mr. Barnstaplelearnt with surprise, for his bearing too was almost masterful, ascientific man. He called himself something that Mr. Barnstaplecould not catch. First it sounded like "atomic mechanician," andthen oddly enough it sounded like "molecular chemist." And thenMr. Barnstaple heard Mr. Burleigh say to Mr. Mush, "He said'physio-chemist,' didn't he?"

　　"_I_ thought he just called himself a materialist," said Mr. Mush.

　　"I thought he said he weighed things," said Lady Stella.

　　"Their intonation is peculiar," said Mr. Burleigh. "Sometimes theyare almost too loud for comfort and then there is a kind of gap inthe sounds."...

　　When the meal was at an end the whole party removed to anotherlittle building that was evidently planned for classes anddiscussions. It had a semicircular apse round which ran a series ofwhite tablets which evidently functioned at times as a lecturer'sblackboard, since there were black and coloured pencils and clothsfor erasure lying on a marble ledge at a convenient height belowthe tablets. The lecturer could walk from point to point of thissemicircle as he talked. Lychnis, Urthred, Serpentine and theEarthlings seated themselves on a semicircular bench below thislecturer's track, and there was accommodation for about eighty or ahundred people upon the seats before them. All these were occupied,and beyond stood a number of graceful groups against a backgroundof rhododendron-like bushes, between which Mr. Barnstaple caughtglimpses of grassy vistas leading down to the shining waters ofthe lake.

　　They were going to talk over this extraordinary irruption intotheir world. Could anything be more reasonable than to talk itover? Could anything be more fantastically impossible?

　　"Odd that there are no swallows," said Mr. Mush suddenly in Mr.Barnstaple's ear. "I wonder why there are no swallows."

　　Mr. Barnstaple's attention went to the empty sky. "No gnats norflies perhaps," he suggested. It was odd that he had not missedthe swallows before.

　　"Sssh!" said Lady Stella. "He's beginning."

　　Section 3

　　This incredible conference began. It was opened by the man namedSerpentine, and he stood before his audience and seemed to makea speech. His lips moved, his hands assisted his statements; hisexpression followed his utterance. And yet Mr. Barnstaple had themost subtle and indefensible doubt whether indeed Serpentine wasspeaking. There was something odd about the whole thing. Sometimesthe thing said sounded with a peculiar resonance in his head;sometimes it was indistinct and elusive like an object seen throughtroubled waters; sometimes though Serpentine still moved his finehands and looked towards his hearers, there were gaps of absolutesilence--as if for brief intervals Mr. Barnstaple had gone deaf....Yet it was a discourse; it held together and it held Mr.Barnstaple's attention.

　　Serpentine had the manner of one who is taking great pains to be assimple as possible with a rather intricate question. He spoke, as itwere, in propositions with a pause between each. "It had long beenknown," he began, "that the possible number of dimensions, likethe possible number of anything else that could be enumerated, wasunlimited!"

　　Yes, Mr. Barnstaple had got that, but it proved too much for Mr.Freddy Mush.

　　"Oh, Lord!" he said. "Dimensions!" and dropped his eye-glass andbecame despondently inattentive.

　　"For most practical purposes," Serpentine continued, "theparticular universe, the particular system of events, in which wefound ourselves and of which we formed part, could be regarded asoccurring in a space of three rectilinear dimensions and asundergoing translation, which translation was in fact duration,through a fourth dimension, _time_. Such a system of events wasnecessarily a gravitational system."

　　"Er!" said Mr. Burleigh sharply. "Excuse me! I don't see that."

　　So he, at any rate, was following it too.

　　"Any universe that endures must necessarily gravitate," Serpentinerepeated, as if he were asserting some self-evident fact.

　　"For the life of me I can't see that," said Mr. Burleigh after amoment's reflection.

　　Serpentine considered him for a moment. "It _is_ so," he said,and went on with his discourse. Our minds, he continued, had beenevolved in the form of this practical conception of things, theyaccepted it as true, and it was only by great efforts of sustainedanalysis that we were able to realize that this universe in whichwe lived not only extended but was, as it were, slightly bentand contorted, into a number of other long unsuspected spatialdimensions. It extended beyond its three chief spatial dimensionsinto these others just as a thin sheet of paper, which ispractically two dimensional, extended not only by virtue of itsthickness but also of its crinkles and curvature into a thirddimension.

　　"Am I going deaf?" asked Lady Stella in a stage whisper. "I can'tcatch a word of all this."

　　"Nor I," said Father Amerton.

　　Mr. Burleigh made a pacifying gesture towards these unfortunateswithout taking his eyes off Serpentine's face. Mr. Barnstapleknitted his brows, clasped his knees, knotted his fingers, heldon desperately.

　　He _must_ be hearing--of course he was hearing!

　　Serpentine proceeded to explain that just as it would be possiblefor any number of practically two-dimensional universes to lie sideby side, like sheets of paper, in a three-dimensional space, so inthe many-dimensional space about which the ill-equipped human mindis still slowly and painfully acquiring knowledge, it is possiblefor an innumerable quantity of practically three-dimensionaluniverses to lie, as it were, side by side and to undergo a roughlyparallel movement through time. The speculative work of Lonestoneand Cephalus had long since given the soundest basis for the beliefthat there actually were a very great number of such space-and-timeuniverses, parallel to one another and resembling each other,nearly but not exactly, much as the leaves of a book might resembleone another. All of them would have duration, all of them would begravitating systems--

　　(Mr. Burleigh shook his head to show that still he didn't see it.)

　　--And those lying closest together would most nearly resemble eachother. How closely they now had an opportunity of learning. For thedaring attempts of those two great geniuses, Arden and Greenlake, touse the--(inaudible)--thrust of the atom to rotate a portion of theUtopian material universe in that dimension, the F dimension, intowhich it had long been known to extend for perhaps the length of aman's arm, to rotate this fragment of Utopian matter, much as a gateis swung on its hinges, had manifestly been altogether successful.The gate had swung back again bringing with it a breath of closeair, a storm of dust and, to the immense amazement of Utopia,three sets of visitors from an unknown world.

　　"_Three_?" whispered Mr. Barnstaple doubtfully. "Did he say _three_?"

　　[Serpentine disregarded him.]

　　"Our brother and sister have been killed by some unexpected releaseof force, but their experiment has opened a way that now need neverbe closed again, out of the present spatial limitations of Utopiainto a whole vast folio of hitherto unimagined worlds. Close athand to us, even as Lonestone guessed ages ago, nearer to us, ashe put it, than the blood in our hearts--"

　　("Nearer to us than breathing and closer than hands and feet,"Father Amerton misquoted, waking up suddenly. "But what is hetalking about? I don't catch it.")

　　"--we discover another planet, much the same size as ours to judgeby the scale of its inhabitants, circulating, we may certainlyassume, round a sun like that in our skies, a planet bearing lifeand being slowly subjugated, even as our own is being subjugated,by intelligent life which has evidently evolved under almost exactlyparallel conditions to those of our own evolution. This sisteruniverse to ours is, so far as we may judge by appearances, a littleretarded in time in relation to our own. Our visitors wear somethingvery like the clothing and display physical characteristicsresembling those of our ancestors during the Last Age of Confusion....

　　"We are not yet justified in supposing that their history has beenstrictly parallel to ours. No two particles of matter are alike;no two vibrations. In all the dimensions of being, in all theuniverses of God, there has never been and there can never be anexact repetition. That we have come to realize is the one impossiblething. Nevertheless, this world you call Earth is manifestly verynear and like to this universe of ours....

　　"We are eager to learn from you Earthlings, to check our history,which is still very imperfectly known, by your experiences, to showyou what we know, to make out what may be possible and desirable inintercourse and help between the people of your planet and ours. We,here, are the merest beginners in knowledge; we have learnt as yetscarcely anything more than the immensity of the things that we haveyet to learn and do. In a million kindred things our two worlds mayperhaps teach each other and help each other....

　　"Possibly there are streaks of heredity in your planet that havefailed to develop or that have died out in ours. Possibly there areelements or minerals in one world that are rare or wanting in theother.... The structure of your atoms (?)...our worlds mayintermarry (?)...to their common invigoration...."

　　He passed into the inaudible just when Mr. Barnstaple was mostmoved and most eager to follow what he was saying. Yet a deaf manwould have judged he was still speaking.

　　Mr. Barnstaple met the eye of Mr. Rupert Catskill, as distressedand puzzled as his own. Father Amerton's face was buried in hishands. Lady Stella and Mr. Mush were whispering softly together;they had long since given up any pretence of listening.

　　"Such," said Serpentine, abruptly becoming audible again, "is ourfirst rough interpretation of your apparition in our world and ofthe possibilities of our interaction. I have put our ideas beforeyou as plainly as I can. I would suggest that now one of you tellus simply and plainly what _you_ conceive to be the truth aboutyour world in relation to ours."