"Take hold of it! My own heart? Why, it's inside me, between my ribs—I couldn't, possibly!"
"Sure you can! That's your intellect talking now, not your brain. You're four-dimensional now, remember, and what you used to call your body is nothing but the three-dimensional hypersurface of your new hyperbody. You can take hold of your heart or your gizzard just as easily as you used to pat yourself on the nose with a powder puff."
"Well, I won't, then—why, I wouldn't touch that thing for a million dollars!"
"All right; watch me feel mine, then. See, it's perfectly motionless, and my tongue is, too. And there's something else that I never expected to look at—my appendix. Good thing you're in good shape, old vermiform, or I'd take a pair of scissors and snick you off while I've got such a good chance to do it without—"
"Dick!" shrieked Dorothy. "For the love of Heaven—"
"Calm down, Dottie, calm down. I'm just trying to get you used to this mess—I'll try something else. Here, you know what this is—a new can of tobacco, with the lid soldered on tight. In three dimensions there's no way of getting into it without breaking metal—you've opened lots of them. But out here I simply reach past the metal of the container, like this, see, in the fourth dimension? Then I take out a pinch of the tobacco, so, and put it into my pipe, thus. The can is still soldered tight, no holes in it anywhere, but the tobacco is out, nevertheless. Inexplicable in three-dimensional space, impossible for us really to understand mentally, but physically perfectly simple and perfectly natural after you get used to it. That'll straighten you out some, perhaps."
"Well, maybe—I guess I won't get frantic again, Dickie—but just the same, it's altogether too perfectly darn weird to suit me. Why don't you pull that switch back out and stop us?"
"Wouldn't do any good—wouldn't stop us, because we have already had the impulse and are simply traveling on momentum now. When that is used up—in some extremely small fraction of a second of our time—we'll snap back into our ordinary space, but we can't do a thing about it until then."
"But how can we move around so fast?" asked Margaret from the protecting embrace of the monstrosity that they knew to be Martin Crane. "How about inertia? I should think we'd break our bones all to pieces."