THE FIFTH DIMENSION (4)
By:
May 24, 2023
HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize Clare Winger Harris’s “The Fifth Dimension” (which first appeared in Amazing Stories, December 1928) here at HILOBROW.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4.
I poured John his third cup of coffee, but did not feel that it had happened before! A mild thump on the front porch informed me that the morning paper had arrived. I brought it in and laid it in front of John, then I fled to the kitchen, where the odor of burning toast apprised me of the fact that I was much needed. Returning with the scraped toast, I seated myself opposite John for the purpose of resuming my breakfast.
“What news?” I asked casually.
For answer John handed me the paper and pointed mutely to an enormous headline. His face was ashen and his hand trembled.
With a sinking sensation I read the large letters: “Head-on collision demolishes engines and cars, and kills 70 persons.”
“John,’ I gasped, “is it was it — the 8:15?”
His voice was husky with pent emotion.
“Ellen, it was the 8:15, and I have been on it in theother cycles of time. I know it now.”
I gazed at him incredulously for a moment, and then half in fun, half seriously, I said, “John, you are now living on borrowed time!”
He smiled a little wanly.
“Not exactly that, dear,” he said, “but my mind has been doing some rapid thinking since I saw those headlines, and I believe I have a solution to your ever-puzzling problem of the fourth dimension, time.’
“If you can prove my time-cycles are not incompatible with progress, evolution and growth,’ I cried eagerly, “you will make me the happiest woman on earth!”
“Wouldn’t a new fur coat delight you more?” he asked teasingly.
“Well, that would help some,” I admitted, “but tell me what makes you believe that evolution and progress are fact, despite the eon-worn ruts of the cycles of time.’
“The fifth dimension,” he replied in a quiet voice.
“The fifth dimension?” I echoed, puzzled.
“Which is simply this, Ellen. There is a general progression of the Universe over and above the cycles of time which renders each cycle a little in advance of the previous one. We see and recognize this truth daily in the phenomena of humanity. Every baby born starts life a little in advance, materially and mentally, of its father. This process is very slow and we call it evolution, but it is a perceptible progress nevertheless. It may be aptly likened to the whorls of a spring as compared to a mere flat coil of wire. The earth follows an orbit around the sun, and every year it is in the same relative position with regard to the sun as it was the previous year. It has completed one of its countless cycles. But you know as well as I do that the sun and the earth, as well as the other planets, are all farther along in space together. There is a general progression of twelve miles a second on some vaster orbit. This general progression, then, is analogous to our possibility of change and growth; the power to better our conditions; in other words, it isa fifth dimension.”
“The wheels of the Juggernaut can be turned aside,” I said reverently, “and there is hope.”
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.