At the same time Seaton felt a painless, but unutterably horrible, transformation of his entire body—a rearrangement, a writhing, crawling distortion; a hideously revolting and incomprehensibly impossible extrusion of his bodily substance as every molecule, every atom, every ultimate particle of his physical structure was compelled to extend itself into that unknown new dimension.
He could not move his eyes, yet he saw every detail of the grotesquely altered space ship. His Earthly mentality could not understand anything he saw, yet to his transformed brain everything was as usual and quite in order. Thus the four-dimensional physique that was Richard Seaton perceived, recognized, and admired as of yore his beloved Dorothy, in spite of the fact that her normally solid body was now quite plainly nothing but a three-dimensional surface, solid only in that logically impossible new dimension which his now four-dimensional brain accepted as a matter of course, but which his thinking mentality could neither really perceive nor even dimly comprehend.
He could not move a muscle, yet in some obscure and impossible way he leaped toward his wife. Immobile though tongue and jaws were, yet he spoke to her reassuringly, remonstratingly, as he gathered up her trembling form and silenced her hysterical outbursts.
"Steady on, dear, it's all right—everything's jake. Hold everything, dear. Pipe down, I tell you! This is nothing to let get your goat. Snap out of it, Red-Top!"
"But, Dick, it's—it's just—"
"Hold it!" he commanded. "You're going off the deep end again. I can't say that I expected anything like this, either, but when you think about things it's natural enough that they should be this way. You see, while we've apparently got four-dimensional bodies and brains now, our intellects are still three-dimensional, which complicates things considerably. We can handle things and recognize them, but we can't think about our physical forms, understand them, or express them either in words or in thoughts. Peculiar, and nerve-wracking enough, especially for you girls, but quite normal—see?"
"Well, maybe—after a fashion. I was afraid that I had really gone crazy back there, at first, but if you feel that way, too, I know it's all right. But you said that we'd be gone only a skillionth of a second, and we've been here a week already, at the very least."
"All wrong, dear—at least, partly wrong. Time does go faster here, apparently, so that we seem to have been here quite a while; but as far as our own time is concerned we haven't been here anywhere near a millionth of a second yet. See that plunger? It's still moving in—it has barely made contact. Time is purely relative, you know, and it moves so fast here that that plunger switch, traveling so fast that the eye cannot follow it at all ordinarily, seems to us to be perfectly stationary."
"But it must have been longer than that, Dick! Look at all the talking we've done. I'm a fast talker, I know, but even I can't talk that fast!"
"You aren't talking—haven't you discovered that yet? You are thinking, and we are getting your thoughts as speech; that's all. Don't believe it? All right; there's your tongue, right there—or better, take your heart. It's that funny-looking object right there—see it? It isn't beating—that is, it would seem to us to take weeks, or possibly months, to beat. Take hold of it—feel it for yourself."