Gault was watching his assistant's antics with a bleak expression that changed to sardonic satisfaction as he realized Pillbot was in a predicament like his—only more so. Abruptly he frowned, staring ahead, and Harper guessed that Pillbot had located Gault's torso in the other realm, was nudging him to indicate the fact.
Suddenly Harper knew that he himself must enter this fourth dimensional realm. That strange instinct told him the solution to everything was there—somewhat as a woman's intuition impels her to act in a certain way, without knowing why.
How to get there? Another paper cutout? He glanced toward the Professor—the occupied trousers, and swimming above it, the man's head. The head was watching him, the expression savage.
No, there must be no more cutouts, Harper decided. While the four dimensional entity distinguished between the outlines of a thin silhouette and a fat one, something in between, like Harper's form, would be testing It too far.
He, Harper would take the place of his own cutout!
Gault's head reared up, glared fixedly at his assistant as the young man swung his legs onto the desk, then lay down flat. A moment he lay there, in "Flatland"—then leaped to his feet.
It was as though he had leaped into a different world. He was no longer in the laboratory. He wasn't on any, floor at all, as far as he could make out. His feet rested on nothing—and yet there was some sort of tension under him—like the surface tension of water.
He was—he suddenly knew it—standing on a segment of warped space! There was a spacial strain here that acted as a solid beneath him!
Harper looked "up"—that is, overhead. There was nothing there but vast stretches of emptiness—at first. Then he saw that this emptiness was lined and laced with filmy striations, like cellophane. They bore a strange resemblance to his "doodlings," as though that strange faculty of his enabled him to somehow perceive this place of the fourth dimension. And instinctively Harper knew that these lacings were the boundaries of a vast enclosure—a four dimensional enclosure, the "walls" of which consisted of joined and meshed space-warps.