Avon Fantasy Reader No. 12 — page 77: what you’re looking at

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

“I was beginning to understand the stuff now. Merely some inhab- itant or creature of hyperspace going by. As he passed through my particular spatial plane, I saw successive cross-sections of him. Just as though my body were passing through a plane, say feet first: first there would be two irregular circles; then a larger oval, the trunk, with two circles, the arms, at the sides and separate from it; and so on until the top of the head vanished as a small spot. “I followed down the line of buildings, looking around. Bizarre shapes appeared around me, changing size and shape in the wildest, dizziest, most uncouth ways, splitting into a dozen pieces and com- ing together into large, irregular chunks. Some seemed to be metal or concrete, some human flesh, naked or clothed. In a few minutes my mind became accustomed to interpreting this passage of fourth- dimensional things through my ‘plane’ and 1 studied them with inter- est. Then I slipped and fell down. Down I whizzed for a while, and everything about me disappeared. “I found mysclf rolling; and sitting up, T looked around again. There was nothing. I still seemed to be on cement or stone; and in all directions it stretched away endlessly into the distance. Jt was the most disconcerting thing I had ever seen in my life. I was just a speck in a universe of cement pavement. 1 began to get panicky, but con- trolled myself and started to walk, feeling the reassuring pull of the rope behind me. I walked nervously and saw nothing anywhere. Evidently I had slipped off my former ‘plane’ and gotten into a new one. The rope tightened suddenly; sedligps I had reached the end of it. [t jerked me backwards and I swung dizzily, my fect hanging oose. “I swung among millions of small spherical bodies disposed irregu- larly in all directions about me, even below, They moved gently back and forth in small arcs; and there were large brown bodies—— “Why go through it all? I stumbled from one spatial plane into another. Each seemed a totally different universe. I couldn't get them correlated in my mind into any kind of a consistent whole at all. For a long time I climbed over some huge metal framework; I ran into moving things that grew larger and disappeared; I struggled through a jungle of some soft, green, vegetable stuff. Just all of a sudden I made up my mind that I'd never find Sheila. “She might be within a foot of me all the time, yet I couldn't get to her, because I couldn't see out of three dimensions. I yelled her name until I was hoarse and my head throbbed, but nothing hap- pened. 1 grew panicky and decided [ wanted to go back. I pulled on the rope and dragged myself toward the direction from which it came; sometimes I slid rapiclly toward it; at others I could feel inyself dragging my entire weight with my arms. Then I could go no fur- ther, pull as I might. lt seemed like trying to reach an inch higher 1 comichbooks.com