Уолтер Тевис - The Ifth of Oofth

I suggested to Farnsworth that he ought to get a green patch, to match his other eye. He laughed at the idea and said he thought it might be a bit showy. He was already starting work on another pentaract; he was going to find out just what . . .　

But he never finished. Nine days after the accident, there was a sudden flurry of news reports from the other side of the world, fantastic stories that made the Sunday supplements go completely mad with delight, and we began to guess what had happened. There wouldn’t be any need to build the sixty-four-cube cross and try to find a way of folding it up. We knew now.　

It had been a five-dimensional cube, all right. And one extension of it had been in time—into the future; nine days into the future — and the other extension had been into a most peculiar kind of space, one that distorted sizes quite strangely.　

All of this became obvious when, three days later, it happened on our side of the world and the Sunday supplements were scooped by the phenomenon itself, which, by its nature, required no newspaper reporting.　

Across the entire sky of the　Western hemisphere there appeared—so vast that it eclipsed the direct light of the Sun from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Cape Horn—a tremendous human eye, with a vast, glistening, green pupil. Part of the lid was there, too, and all of it was as if framed in a gigantic circle. Or not exactly a circle, but a polygon of many sides, like the iris diaphragm of a camera shutter.　

Toward nightfall, the eye blinked once and probably five hundred million people screamed simultaneously. It remained there all of the night, glowing balefully in the reflected sunlight, obliterating the stars.　

A thousand new religious cults were formed that night, and a thousand old ones proclaimed the day as The One Predicted for Centuries.　

Probably more than half the people on Earth thought it was　God. Only two knew that it was Oliver Farnsworth, peering at a misty little spinning ball in a five-dimensional box, nine days before, totally unaware that the little ball was the Earth itself, contained in a little one-inch cube that was an enclave of swollen time and shrunken space.　

WHEN I had dropped the pentaract and had somehow caused it to fold itself into two new dimensions, it had reached out throughfifth-dimensional space and folded the world into itself, and had begun accelerating the time within it, in rough proportion to size, so that as each minute passed in Farnsworth’s study, about one day was passing on the world within the cube.　

We knew this because about a minute had passed while Farnsworth had held his eye against the cube the second time —the first time had, of course, been the appearance over Asia—and nine days later, when we saw the same event from our position on the Earth in the cube, it was twenty- six hours before the eye was “stabbed” and withdrew.　

It happened early in the morning, just after the Sun had left the horizon and was passing into eclipse behind the great circle that contained the eye. Someone stationed along a defense-perimeter station panicked—someone highly placed. Fifty guided missiles were launched, straight up, the most powerful on Earth. Each carried a hydrogen warhead. Even before the great shock wave from their explosion came crashing down to Earth, the eye had disappeared.　

Somewhere, I knew, an unimaginably vast Oliver Farnsworth was squirming and yelping, carrying out the identical chain of events that I had seen happening in the past and that yet must be happening now, along the immutable space-time continuum that Farnsworth’s little cube had somehow by-passed.　

The doctor had talked of powder bums. I wondered what he would think if he knew that Farnsworth had been hit in the eye with fifty infinitesimal hydrogen bombs.　

For a week, there was nothing else to talk about in the world. Two billion people probably discussed, thought about and dreamed of nothing else. There had been no more dramatic happening since the creation of the Earth and Sun than the appearance of Farnsworth’s eye.　

But two people, out of those two billion, thought of something else. They thought of the unchangeable, pre-set space-time continuum, moving at the rate of one minute for every day that passed here on our side of the pentaract, while that vast Oliver Farnsworth and I, in the other-space, other-time, were staring at the cube that contained our world, lying on their floor.　

On Wednesday, we could say, Now he’s gone to the telephone . On Thursday, Now he's looking through the book . On Saturday, By now he must be dialing the operator . . .　 And on Tuesday morning, when the Sun came up, we were together and saw it rise, for we　spent our nights together by then, because we had lost the knack of sleeping and did not want to be alone; and when the day had begun, we didn’t say it, because we couldn’t. But we thought it.　

We thought of a colossal, cosmic Farnsworth saying, ‘I'll show you!” and shoving, pushing and twisting, forcing with all of his might, into the little round hole, a brilliantly glowing, hissing, smoking, red-hot poker.