YOU could say that everything went black, or you could say that everything went white. I was . . . elsewhere.
But not alone.
“Hey, Fletcher,” came the familiar voice, “you have to help me.”
“Harry? Where are we?”
“Superspace, naturally.”
“What’s superspace?” I felt around for my body and couldn’t find it.
“Thoughtland, Fletch, the cosmos. Pure mentation. Abstract possibility. Infinite dimensions. The class of all sets. God’s mind. The pre-geometric substratum. Hilbert space. Penultimate reality. White . . .”
“Cut the crap, Harry. I was having a good time till you butted in. Put me back.”
“You don’t want to rush back there. This is much cooler. This is eternity, Joe, this is the secret of life.”
“Oh come on, Harry. I’m not interested in the secret of life. I just want to go home and be with Nancy. She and Sondra are going to be at Alwin Bitter’s.”
“Hold it.” Contrasts appeared in the black-or-white void around me. Streamers, clumps, hazy patches. “Can you see it now?”
“I can’t see anything. I might as well be looking at clouds.”
“You see clouds? Wait.” The fog folded in on itself. Colors appeared. Definite forms began to congeal. One of them was Harry, and one of them was me.
“That’s better,” I said, tentatively moving my arm. The arm disappeared.
“Your arm’s in another dimension now,” Harry explained. “We’re in a three-dimensional cross section of infinite-dimensional superspace. If you try, you can get your arm back.”
I tried. And then my arm was back, though the hand was still missing. I examined the stub where my arm ended. It looked as if my hand had been chopped right off. I could see the bone and its marrow, the muscle tissues, and the round mouths of the veins. Yet no blood was spurting out.
“Flip your wrist,” urged Harry.
I flipped my wrist some funny way, and suddenly my hand was back. This was pretty interesting. I gave Harry’s head a push, and watched it disappear. Peering down into his neck, I could see the insides of his lungs and stomach. But then his head snapped back.
“Where’s our universe?” I asked Harry. Our two bodies seemed quite definite now, though nothing else did. Everything else was just shifting patterns of colored light.
“It’s that spot there,” said Harry, pointing at a small, egg-shaped blob of hazy white.
“What are all the other spots?”
“Other universes, of course. I’ve been here before. Briefly. When I got blunzed the first time, I came here to find the Looking-Glass World.” Harry indicated a reddish patch of light near the white one that was home.
“Why are they so small?”
“That’s from our position on the size axis. There’s an axis for everything here.”
I floated closer to our universe and peered at it. The hazy white light was patterned into whorls and dots. Galaxy clusters.
“Right now we’re in a space parallel to our universe’s time,” said Harry, taking my arm. “But we can turn sideways.”
He yanked at me and everything changed again. Now our universe egg was striped like a watermelon, filamented like a gooseberry. Bright lines stretched from one pole to the other.
“The Big Bang is down there,” said Harry, pointing at one end. “See how some of the loops lead back? That’s what you were doing when you got blunzed. Leading them back.”
Looking more closely, I could see that our universe was really made up of a single tangled thread, a bright line that wove forward and back and in and out. It was like an endlessly knotted wire, a tangle of yarn, the Gordian knot. I looked at some of the other universes, knotty eggs all around us. We were really behind the scenes.
“. . . different axis for each property,” Harry was saying.
“Can we change the scale? I’d like to be able to see Earth.”
“Sure.” Harry tugged my arm again, and things changed like images in a kaleidoscope. I felt dizzy and longed for something to stand on.
No sooner thought than done. We were standing in a hallway with peeling yellow walls. The universe egg floated in front of us, an infinitely detailed image in a crystal ball.
“Is this real?” I scuffed at the dirty floor. Spit, cigarette butts, hair.
“This is the transport axis. We see it our own way. I think we can get a scale change up ahead.”
Walking down the hall, we passed several closed doors. I wondered who or what lay behind them. I wondered, but I didn’t want to know. I kept having the feeling that we were being watched by some cool, detached intelligence just out of sight.
At the end of the hall were some rotten-looking stairs. When I put my foot on the first step, the wood broke through and scraped my leg. “We better hug the wall,” I suggested. “That’ll be more solid.” I had the feeling that something was following us. Surely Harry and I were not the only beings to have entered Superspace.
We hurried up the decaying staircase as best we could. The universe egg stayed always a few meters ahead of us. With each step, the detail in it grew finer. I could see individual stars now, and one star that I imagined to be the Sun.
The staircase stopped abruptly. Peering over the edge, I could see down into the light-patterned chaos of before. There was a frayed rope dangling over the abyss. I reached out and pulled on it. Slowly the board we were on began to rise. It was as if we were on a painter’s scaffold.
Harry helped me pull at the rope, and we rose up and up into the cluttered dark, the universe egg always just above us. You could see Earth now, North America, New Jersey—my hand slammed into a rusty pulley.
“I don’t think it goes any higher, Harry.” Our platform was swaying and my footing began to slip. I was sure I could hear someone breathing nearby. “Get us out of here, Harry, something’s after us!”
“Wait, I’ll imagine a way out. Yes!” He yanked me sideways and I heard a great creaking. A kind of bench came floating over to us. Crumbling metal struts led from the bench to some distant machinery. It was like a giant carnival ride, a cross between a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel. We both jumped for the bench, and the scaffold’s rope snapped.
For a moment I thought we weren’t going to make it. Hanging there for that split second I finally found the courage to look over my shoulder.
There was a man behind us, a run-down man with short hair and lambent eyes. He had the taut features and heavy stubble of a drifter. His lips were slightly parted to show his crooked teeth. Seeing me notice him, he gave the barest flicker of response—a twinge of gloating, a pulse of lust. His cool, hungry stare filled me with horror. I reached out for the now-receding bench with all my strength—and made it.
The bench was cast-iron with a leather seat. I grabbed it so hard that my tendons crackled. Harry was next to me, blandly enjoying the ride. The bench bore us higher into the gloom and the universe egg hovered before us, ever-changing. I was scared to look back again.
Princeton was in the egg, and then Alwin Bitter’s house. Our bench lurched this way and that, and the house’s age jerked back and forth through time. Then we were sailing along smoothly, and I could see Alwin Bitter sitting on his porch.
“Move your head,” said Harry, lolling back in his seat. “Move your head and you can see him all different ways.”
Following Harry’s example, I turned my head this way and that. Alwin’s body warped and shifted, split into cross sections and rejoined. From one angle he was no longer a flesh-body, but rather a luminous egg like the universe itself. Inside this Alwin-egg I could sense the bright cascade of his mental processes, a fleet torrent that threatened to wash my selfhood all away.
I twitched my head again and saw Alwin one hour earlier, at the moment when we’d all been blunzed. He was thinking of me and Harry, and making a wish—a strange, unbelievable wish. It was like Nancy had said—Alwin Bitter was wishing us into existence! He was making Harry and me be born and live our lives the way we had! Staggered and upset, I snapped back into an awareness of our bench.
We were on rails now, clacking through the dark like a fun-house car. Still the egg with Alwin’s porch floated before us. I glanced around, anxious lest something horrible leap out at us from the dark. Fun houses have always terrified me. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing the terrible hungry face of the man who watched. Perhaps Alwin had dreamed me, but that man had dreamed Alwin.
“Let’s go home, Harry. What are we here for anyway?”
“When Nancy got me blunzed, I thought the best escape would be to come here to Superspace. This is the Cosmos, not just some little universe. I like it here. It’s like looking inside a radio or going down under a city’s streets. You get to see how everything works.”
“But a lot of it’s imagination,” I insisted. “The stairs and the scaffold and this bench. We’re just making it up.”
“That’s right,” said Harry with sudden venom. “We’re making it up and not Alwin Bitter.”
“You saw his wish?”
“He thinks he dreamed us up. That just—”
“Don’t worry so much, Harry. There’s level after level.” Alwin’s porch was beginning to fade. I jumped to my feet, and the bench swayed dangerously. “Come on, Harry, we’re going back!”
He tried to twist away from me, but I had a good, solid grip on his hand. I leaped at the universe egg before it could change again.