Brian Lumley - The Source

'Good!' Mobius applauded him. 'And their moons?'

'Eh?' Harry was taken by surprise. 'I read only the problem you'd set yourself and the answers to the problem as you arrived at them! There were slight deviations — percentages of error, I suppose — but…' He paused.

'But? But?' Harry could almost picture Mobius raising his eyebrows. 'All the clues were there in the equations, Harry. No? Very well. I'll tell you:

The inner world has no moon, but the "percentage of error", as you call it, for the outer world was just too big to be ignored. I have checked it and it indicates an almost spherical nickel-iron moon three kilometres in diameter orbiting the parent at a distance of twenty-four thousand planetary circumferences. Now that is what we call a calculation! Of course, I shall prove it by going there and seeing it for myself.'

Harry shook his head in defeat, offered a wry grimace. 'You're too good for me,' he said. 'You always will be.' And after a moment: 'Do you want me to let this "leak out", as it were? I could do that easily enough, with just sufficient information to set the entire astronomical fraternity jumping! It could be done anonymously, by an "amateur", you understand, on the solemn promise that when the calculations are shown to be correct, then one of the two worlds should be named Mobius!' Mobius was stunned. 'Could you really do that, Harry?' 'I'm sure I could find a way.'

'My boy… God!' Mobius was overjoyed at the prospect. 'Harry, how I wish I could shake your hand!'

'You can do rather more than that,' Harry told him, growing serious in a moment. 'You remember the last time I came to see you I had a problem? Well, now I have an even bigger one.'

'Let's have it, then,' said the other at once, and Harry told him of his quest for his wife and son. He finished by explaining:

'And so you see, it's no longer simply a question of my family, but I also have the British agent Michael Simmons to consider.'

Mobius seemed nonplussed. 'And you've come to me for help? Well, obviously you have — but for the life of me I can't see what I can do! I mean, if they're not here, these three people — if they have physically ceased to exist in this universe — then how can I or anyone else suggest where or how to find them? The universe is The Universe, Harry. Its very name defines it. It is THE ALL. If they're not in it, then they're not anywhere.'

'That was my line of reasoning, too.' Harry admitted, ' — until recently. But you and me, why, don't we both contradict that very fact?'

'Eh? How's that?'

'The Mobius Continuum,' Harry answered, by way of explanation. 'You yourself admit that it's a purely metaphysical plane, not of this universe. Step into the Mobius Continuum and you step out of the three mundane dimensions. The Mobius Continuum not only transcends the three dimensions of mundane space but time also, and runs parallel to all of them! And what of a black hole?'

'What of it?' (Mobius's mental shrug.)

'Well, isn't a black hole an exit from this universe? That's how they've always been explained to me: a focus of gravity so great that space and time themselves are drawn into the whorl. And if they are exits from the here and now, then where the hell do they lead?'

To another part of the universe,' Mobius answered. That seems the only likely explanation to me. Mind you, I haven't really looked at black holes yet. I have them scheduled, though.'

'Are you missing the point or deliberately avoiding it?' Harry wanted to know. This is my question: if a black hole goes somewhere, emerging maybe light-years away, what of the space in between? Where is the material which is drawn into the hole, between its disappearing and its reappearing? You see, to me this all seems very much like our Mobius Continuum.'

'Go on,' Mobius was fascinated.

'OK,' said Harry, 'let's look at it this way. First we have the… let's call it the mundane universe. And we'll say it looks like this:'

He showed Mobius a mental diagram.

'Why the bends?' the mathematician was immediately curious.

'Because without them it would just be a pair of straight lines,' Harry told him. 'The bends give it definition, make it look like something.'

'Like a ribbon?'

'For the purpose of the exercise, why not? For all I know it could be a circle, or maybe a sphere. But this way we can envisage a past and a future, too.'

'Very well,' Mobius conceded.

'Now in this diagram of the universe,' Harry went on, 'we can't go from "A" to "B" without crossing the edge. We can go up the ribbon from "A" to the edge, then down to "B". Or down to the edge and up, it makes no difference. The edge represents the distance between "A" and "B", right?'

'Agreed,' said the other.

'Now this is how I see the Mobius Continuum,' said Harry:

And he continued: 'It's the ribbon universe we know with the half-twist of your Mobius strip. "Now" has turned through ninety degrees to become "forever". Which means that "A" and "B" are now on the same plane. We no longer have to cross the edge. We can go from one to the other instantaneously — "now"!'

'Go on,' said Mobius again, but much more thoughtfully.

'Previously we've thought of it like this:' said Harry. 'Like… like putting on a pair of seven-league boots and striding to our destinations in seconds. Covering distances that should take hours in minutes. But I've checked it out and it's not like that. In fact we go there instantaneously — accordingly to Earth-time, anyway. It's not simply that we go there faster, but that the space in between actually disappears!'

After a little while Mobius said, 'I think I understand. What you want to know is this: if for us the space between "A" and "B" reduces to zero — if it disappears — '

'Exactly!' Harry cut in. 'Where does it go to?'

'But it's an illusion,' Mobius cried. 'It's still there. It's we who have disappeared — into the Mobius Continuum, as you insist upon calling it!'

'Now we're getting somewhere,' Harry took a deep breath. 'You see, the way I see it, the Mobius Continuum is no-man's-land, it's limbo, it's the middle ground between universes. "Universes" — plural! It has doors to the past, the future, and to every point in present time. Using it, we can go everywhere and — when — or at least I can, because I still have a life-thread to follow. But the point I'm trying to make is this: I believe there may be other doors which we haven't found yet. We don't have the equations for them. And I believe that one of those doors, when I find it, will — '

' — Lead you to your wife and son, and to Michael J. Simmons?'

'Yes!'

Mobius nodded (in his fashion) and gave it some thought. 'Other doors,' he mused. Then: 'Grant me this — that I know more about the Mobius dimension than you do. That I have had one hundred and twenty years to examine it more thoroughly than you could ever hope to. That I discovered it, and have used it to go places you can never go, not in your lifetime.' 'Oh?' said Harry.

'Oh?' Mobius raised his eyebrows again. 'Oh? And can you go to the centre of a star in Betelgeuse to measure its temperature? Can you visit the moons of Jupiter or sit in the middle of that planet's monumental tornado which we call the Red Spot? Can you journey to the bottom of the Marianas Trench and every other deep on Earth to calculate the mass of water in this world? No, you can't. But I can — and have! Now grant me this: that I know the Mobius Continuum better than you do!'

When the point was made like that, there seemed little use in arguing it. Harry could only agree, but: 'I think you're going to tell me something I don't want to hear,' he said.

'You know I am!' Mobius told him. 'There are no other doors we haven't discovered, Harry. Not in the Mobius Continuum. Other universes? — which seems to me something of a contradiction in itself — I can't say. And in any case you're talking to the wrong man, for I only deal in the three-dimensional worlds we know. But of one thing I'm sure: you won't find your way into any parallel world through the Mobius Continuum…' He fell silent as Harry's disappointment swelled like a physical thing, until it hung heavy over Mobius's grave like a blanket of fog.