Seaton turned quickly to his wife, ready to minister again to overstrained nerves, but much to his surprise he found Dorothy calm and intensely interested.
"Funny-looking things, weren't they, Dick?" she asked animatedly. "They looked just like highly magnified chess knights with four hands; or like those funny little sea horses they have in the aquarium, only on a larger scale. Were those propellers they had instead of tails natural or artificial—could you tell?"
"Huh? What're you talking about? I didn't see any such details as that!" Seaton exclaimed.
"I couldn't, either, really," Dorothy explained, "until after I found out how to look at them. I don't know whether my method would appeal to a strictly scientific mind or not. I can't understand any of this fourth-dimensional, mathematical stuff of yours and Martin's, anyway, so when I want to see anything out here I just pretend that the fourth dimension isn't there at all. I just look at what you call the three-dimensional surface and it looks all right. When I look at you that way, for instance, you look like my own Dick, instead of like a cubist's four-dimensional nightmare."
"You have hit it, Dorothy." Crane had been visualizing four-dimensional objects as three-dimensional while she was speaking. "That is probably the only way in which we can really perceive hyperthings at all."
"It does work, at that!" Seaton exclaimed. "Congratulations, Dot; you've made a contribution to science—but say, what's coming off now? We're going somewhere."
For the Skylark, which had been floating freely in space—a motion which the senses of the wanderers had long since ceased to interpret as a sensation of falling—had been given an acceleration. Only a slight acceleration, barely enough to make the floor of the control room seem "down," but any acceleration at all in such circumstances was to the scientists cause for grave concern.
"Nongravitational, of course, or we couldn't feel it—it'd affect everything about the ship alike. What's the answer, Mart, if any?" Seaton demanded. "Suppose that they've taken hold of us with a tractor ray and are taking us for a ride?"
"It would appear that way. I wonder if the visiplates are still practical?" Crane moved over to number one visiplate and turned it in every direction. Nothing was visible in the abysmal, all-engulfing, almost palpable darkness of the absolute black outside the hull of the vessel.