Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 122: what you’re looking at

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

HIGHER MATHEMATICS rope, and were paying it out, hand over hand, into a patch of negatively curved space three feet from the floor. Opinion as to the value of this manceuvre was once again divided, some maintaining that so long as he stayed near the entrance, he might be able to get hold of the knotted scarves and drawhimself out again, while others, among them the earnest student with the Moebius band, held there was no such thing as a speci- fic entrance to infinity, and that, therefore, they were wasting their time. The truth of this argument was not disputed, but, on pulling on the end of the rope, the portion which had just vanished reappeared again, so it was felt that there was some hope. There are some people who must prove their point, how- ever, and the earnest student was one of them. He proved this most successfully by crawl- ing under the infinity patch and standing up rather sud- denly, the suddenness being due to the considerable charge on the copper plate in the floor. They didn’t quite catch his feet as he disappeared. One of the more irreverent of the bystanders wrote: 121 “Score—Two - nil’ on the board, and the infinity fisher- men paid out some more rope. If there are some people who must always prove their point, there are others who will not accept a point even when it has been proved. A Physiologist wanted to know whether the air in an infinite volume of negatively curved space would support life. . “‘There isn’t any air,’’ said the Professor. The fishermen stopped pay- ing out scarves, discouraged. “If there isn’t any air,” said the Physiologist, “‘then there must be a vacuum. And if there’s a vacuum, why isn’t the air from this room being sucked in?’ *“Must be self-sealing, like an aeroplane petrol tank,” said an Applied Physicist. “IT think,” said the Profes- sor, “that you are all con- fusing the practical with the theoretical issues. This is not a case of crawling through a manhole into infinity, you know. The volume of the region in question is only theoretically infinite. If it were practically so, there would be no room for us on the outside of it, would there ?”’ He looked around with the comiclooks.conn