THE FIFTH DIMENSION (3)
By:
May 15, 2023
HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize Clare Winger Harris’s “The Fifth Dimension” (which first appeared in Amazing Stories, December 1928) here at HILOBROW.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4.
John was ready to make a business trip to the south and had purchased his railroad ticket early in the afternoon. The train was scheduled to leave town at 8:15 P.M. The supper dishes had just been cleared away and John had hurried upstairs to pack his grip, when the feeling that this had all happened before came upon me; more realistically than I had ever before experienced it, and this time it was accompanied by a premonition of the same nature us that which had warned me of Mrs. Maxwell’s fatal trip to her garage.
I lost no time in hurrying up to John’s room, where I found him sorting over the things to take with him on his trip.
“John, don’t go this evening, I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “There is morning train at 11:53. Can’t you take that instead of going tonight?”
My husband carefully tucked his hair brush into his satchel, and for moment deigned me no reply.
“I’m afraid to have you go tonight, John,” I continued. “I’ve had a — a sort of warning. You know what I mean.”
John closed and locked his grip. “Are you afraid here alone? he asked, after what seemed an interminable silence.
“No. It’s not for myself that I fear danger, but for you. Won’t you defer your trip?” I persisted.
“Now see here, Ellen,” John responded with a show of irritation, “I’ve already bought my ticket and laid my plans for meeting Hopkins in Atlanta on Friday and I can’t and won’t stop because of some fool notion of yours. I had supposed you had forgotten about this fourth dimension time-cycle business!” He picked up his satchel. “But whether you’ve forgotten it or not, the 8:15 sees me ensconced on my way to Georgia.”
“But, John, dear.” I cried in desperation, “remember the Maxwell affair. If I had only obeyed my impulse to rush out and warn poor Mrs. Maxwell, she would be living now!”
John paused and looked at me as if considering, but it was only for a second; then he resumed his descent of the stairs.
“No,” he said. “I’ve got to be in Atlanta on Friday or stand a chance of losing one of the biggest orders we’ve had in months.”
Then it seemed as though something snapped in my brain and I heard my voice as though it were another’s coming from a distance, “The Juggernaut, Fate, grinds mortals beneath its wheels and there is no hope.”
I soon became conscious of the fact that I was sobbing hysterically and that John was holding me in his arms.
“Ellen, Ellen,’ his dear voice was saying, “I’m going to fool Fate a trick and let Hopkins wait. I leave tomorrow at 11:53. Let’s see what’s on the radio for the rest of the evening.”
I gazed up at him with incredulity. “Oh, John,” I cried ecstatically, “do you think we can prove that the cycles of time are not inexorable?”
“We can at least give the theory a fair trial,” he said smiling.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.