Adventure Magazine Cover — page 81: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The People of the Fourth Dimension - It was exactly as if some unseen moving- picture camera had recorded his every move —years before; and with a rare feeling of hor- ror Sesson lifted his eyes from the damning record of his past to look at Laulee. Was she, too, witnessing the same scene? She was not. In that small saucer of ink, she was seeing very different pictures, and the incidents of Sesson’s life which he had seen were hidden from her. This he knew ina glance. For the girl’s face was flushed with delight. She hardly breathed. What- ever she saw, it was entrancing. Relieved and lured by a horrible fascination, Sesson stared again at the ink. But the unpleasant picture of his past was no longer there to trouble him. There was nothing there, but the placid pool of ink; and warned by his previous experience Sesson felt that it would be the wiser part to stare no more with intentness. Laulee would be none the wiser if he pretended to look deep. As a matter of fact, she was so absorbed in her visions that she had apparently for- gotten he existed. If she asked him after- ward what he had seen, he could invent something. To tell her the truth, as far as his experience had gone, would be im- possible. It was curious, very curious—this seeing the record of one’s past. Of course he had heard of such experiences, but he had never experimented. In a vague way he under- stood why he could not see what the girl saw, and vica versa. He began to theorize on the how and why of the visions—his eyes still fixed on the saucer, so that if Laulee happened to look at him she would be deceived into believing he was seeing things. a CURIOUS stuff—ink! In some way it caught all the light in the room. Of course, the light was dim —Laulee had seen to that—just enough to see the ink properly. That, no doubt, was the reason the ink had changed both in color and appearance. That cloudy, steamy, vapory stuff, now rising like a fog over a marsh—that must be due to some chemical peculiarity of ink. Sesson’s knowledge of chemistry was trifling, but he gravely tried to explain to himself why he no longer saw a saucer of ink. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t the remotest idea what he saw; but what he did cs. see reminded him of the interior of a tunnel, just after a train has gone through it. That was it. He remembered now. Funny why he had had any difficulty. Simple, when you knew how to figure it out! But, now he came to think of it, it was strange his being able to stand in the way of an express train without getting hurt. He must have been standing in its way, because the train had just gone through the tunnel, and there was only one set of rails. No, it wasn’t so strange, after all. Very dimly, but nevertheless positively, he re- membered that, for many, many years, nothing had been able to hurt him—that is, hurt him physically. He could, also, fly. That, as a matter of fact, was his natural gait. He moved his legs something like walking, swinging his arms ever so little— much less than when swimming. And, by Jove, the air held him up much better than water did. How perfectly delightful this easy motion through space. He felt like a bird. No, not a bird, exactly. What did he feel like? Oh, well, it didn’t matter. He could decide some other time. It was lonely, though. And where was he? With a great effort, Sesson took hold of himself, as one can sometimes do in a dream, and realized that something ex- ceedingly curious had happened to him. He-was not dreaming—in some way he was sure about that—but he certainly was not where he ought to be. But, where was that? Where should he be? For what seemed like several centuries, Sesson struggled desperately to remember where he should be—where he had been be- fore he found himself floating like a feather in a silent void. It was no use—he knew he was himself, but what that self was he did not know; and where he had come from was equally inexplicable. The fear and horror peculiar to nightmare began to assail him and the only answer to all his questioning was that he was lost, utterly lost, in limitless space. He struggled to awake, illogically be- cause he still felt he was not dreaming, but it was the only course of action he could think of. He believed himself to be scream- ing, praying, begging. ‘Then something deep in his consciousness told him to open his eyes. This he did, easily and naturally, finding, to his utter astonishment, that he was sitting where he had been before his CORMIGLOOOKS (E@)