Avon Fantasy Reader No. 12 — page 76: what you’re looking at

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

“What about Sheila? Where is she?” the professor demanded. Heagey recoiled as though from some shock. He sank again into provounc depression. At first he had seemed a little happy to get ack. Apparently Sheila had been forcibly driven out of his mind for the time. “Let me tell you about it,” he began slowly. He seemed not to know just how to proceed, “That is, if t can, I don’t even know how to tell it. I know what it must feel like to go insane. “I heard the switch go down as I gave Adkins the signal, Then it seemed like an elevator starting, and that was all. Until I looked around, “I_was sitting on something that looked like rock or cement. Not far from me was that barrel-like lump of flesh with the two straps around it, just exactly as I had scen it in the laboratory. Aad then a row of shapes reaching into the dim, blue distance, The nearer ones seemed to be of concrete or cement. You've heard me jeer at the crazy, cubistic and futuristic designs on book wrappers and wall- paper. Well, those are pleasant and harmonious compared with the izzy, jagged angles, the irregular, zig-zag shapes with peaks and slants, and everything out of sense and reason except perspective, Perspective was still correct. Just a long, straight row fading into the distance. What in the world it could e, I hadn’t the faintest idea. However, I gradually reasoned it out. “Naturally, since I am a threc-dimensional organism, I can only perceive three dimensions. Even out in hyperspace I can only see three dimensions. What I saw must therefore be the spatial cross- section of some sort of buildings. 1 couldn’t see the entire buildings, but merely the cross-section cut by the particular set of coordinates in which I was, Now it occurs to me, that since that barrel-like thing looked exactly the same to me out there as it did in-the toom here, I must have been in a ‘space’ or set of coordinates parallel to the ones we are in now. “Imagine a two-dimensional being, whose life had been confined to a sheet of paper and who could only perceive in two dimensions, suddenly turned loose in a room. He could only see one plane at a time. Everything he saw would be cross-sections of things as we know them. Wouldn’t he go crazy? I nearly did. “I first started out to walk along beside the row of rock-like shapes. Suddenly near me there appeared two spheres of flesh, just like this one we have here. They rapidly increased in size, coalesced into a barrel-shaped thing with a metal-web belt around the middle, and then dwindled quickly; there were three or four smaller gobs of stuff and then ten or a dozen little ones: finally au irregular, blotchy, melon-like thing which quickly disappeared. In fifteen seconds it had all materialized and gone. 74 comichbooks.com