Titans of Chaos

By the time Quentin got back, Vanity was casing the joint through the snowy twigs of the hedge,and listening to Colin and Victor give her completely contradictory advice about a plan of attack.

Vanity asked us all to report on what we could see.

I was standing farther from the hedge, two paces down the slope. I did not bother to turn my headin the direction of the modern building.

Now was my chance to show my time on the island had not been all wasted. I took my glass globeout of my pocket, unfolded it into a hypersphere. In that thick light, I could examine theimmediate fourth-dimensional environment. A trick I'd learned allowed me to send the light downone of my limbs (a part of my body that looked like a strand of music) to shine it against distantobjects. Down that same strand, I reached a cluster of sense-receptors.

The three-dimensional building was laid out before me like a blueprint. To my fourth-dimensionaleyes, it looked flat. I could see internal natures, utility, monads, all that 4-D stuff. But now, I couldagitate the photons in the area, give just enough of them free will to ask them to carryinformation back to my eyes, so that the number of nonconformist photons who went giggling offas rainbows was relatively small. In effect, I had just made the dimensional periscope Vanitymentioned earlier. Into any one of the squares of the rooms or corridors, I could dip aphoton-freeing note of energy and get a 3-D picture of what was in there, too.

I reported my findings. "He's alone. Sleeping on a cot in a cell. Window has steel netting across it,and the door is locked. I can see wires on the main doors into the wing, but no security cameras oranything like that. The alarms back on campus were more sophisticated. There is one guy onguard duty, two floors down, and he is sleeping in his chair."

Vanity said, "Can you confirm that this is the right guy?"

To them, it must have looked like I merely reached my hand up into the air and had it bendstrangely, turn red, vanish, and reappear. In my hand was a clipboard. I had merely picked it upwith a gleaming whiplike tendril, pulled it "blue" an inch or two, and then pushed it "red" into thehand of my three-dimensional cross-section. One hundred yards in three-space, slightly longerthan that in four-space, I could reach with some straining.