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.In thatsame instant, in something akin to panic and believing some' thing to beterribly wrong, I canceled all of the clock's forward motion.Again there came the mental shock of instant and complete deceleration, but inno way as devastating as that traumatic temporal shock I had known.Almostimmediately my psychic scanner cleared to afford me an unobstructed view ofthe clock's surroundings.We hung stationary, my vehicle and I, and my momentary terror was nowcompletely forgotten in the breathless contemplation of what I had wroughtwith that one petty burst of overexuberance.I knew then that my scanners hadbeen working all along, that things had only seemed to blur because of thefantastic speed I had achieved! All mathematical impossibilities to thecontrary, the clock had defied Einstein himself! I had traveled, for somethingless than one second, at a speed which must have been in excess of that oflight!And this time my machine had followed no parabolic trajectory around the curveof the Earth.Why should it when I had not demanded as much of it? Indeed, mylast mental instructions had directed the clock, albeitobliquely, at a spot ahead of me and to the left of the sickle moon.And I had reached just such a spot!To my right, half in black shadow, half in dull yellow and pinkish gray light,the moon's great pitted orb loomed huge, and away behind me Earth's grim graydisk floated like a tarnished coin in midnight vaults.I knew then that I had a machine in which I might very easily fly out beyondthe farthest stars and, despite all the unknown and unimaginable terrors ofsuch a voyage, or perhaps because of them, I admit that I was sorely tempted.But there was something I had to know first, about which I must be absolutelysure before I could contemplate any other adventures in this amazing craft ofmine, and that was the question of man and his continuation or extinction.Tomy knowledge, there was only one place where the answer might be found; and so, more carefully this time, I set my return course for the gray disk ofEarth.How long I spent orbiting the Earth at a height of some fifteen miles and on acourse designed to allow an eventual observation of the complete surface Icannot say.I know that I was completing each revolution in something lessthan two hours, and that therefore my relative speed must be in the region offifteen thousand miles per hour, but I kept no count of my revolutions for myconcentration was equally divided between control of the clock and observationof the transient terrain below.I know that toward the end of my search, whenI believed that at least I had found what I was looking for, I was very tiredand hungry and I had lost all sense of direction and orientation.Below me it was late evening, and the very last rays of the dim sun, sinkingover the curve of the Earth, strucksilvery sparks from some mile-high object towering way down by the shore of ansons-dead sea.I slowed my craft and swooped lower, hovering at a safe distance until the sunhad set proper, before determining to bring the clock down for the night at aspot some five or six miles to the west of that gigantic artifact whose merestoutlines I had glimpsed from on high.As I settled my craft down to a landinglighter than the touch of the most weightless feather, I searched the land tothe east for lights.Surely, if the edifice I had seen was a building ofsorts, the place would be illuminated at night? But there again, what if itwas simply a deserted, unused entrance way, a vast construction guarding adoor to those inner worlds I had envisioned deep within the dead crust andthat much closer to the still-warm core of the planet? In any event, otherthan the transient flaring of frequent meteorites, there were no lights, andso I settled down to sleep in the warm interior of the clock, determining thatin the morning I would fly to the strange structure and perhaps satisfy thatcraving of mine for knowledge of man's ultimate station.And here I find that I must attempt something of a description of the clock'sinterior.The clock is, well, its interior is - how might one describe it? - greaterthan its external dimensions might suggest.By that I mean that it reversesall the demonstrable laws of geometry.Its internal 'angles', like those withwhich the ancient Cthulhu spawn were familiar and which were used in theconstruction of their nightmare sepulch-ers, were non-Euclidean.It was myfirst thought that to achieve this compact enclosure of a large area within asmaller space, hyperspace principles must be involved.Such concepts makedifficult and highly conjectural theories as Mobius-strip mathematics seem aseasy as the ABC by comparison.In this, though there was no way Icould have known it at the time, I was actually understating the clock'sfantastic properties.While I myself can now visualize and understand itsbasic principles, still it is literally impossible for me to describe them inanything other than the most commonplace terms or by use of the feeblestanalogies.What I said before, about the clock being a matter-transmitter as well as aspace-time ship, has some bearing upon it.And yet perhaps such a statementgives an equally incorrect impression.Let me say instead that the clock islinked with all points in space-time.If the universe consisted of a two-inchcube composed of eight one-inch cubes - the three mundane dimensions, plustime and four others - then the clock would always lie at the exact center ofthe two-inch cube, where the innermost points or corners of the eighthypothetical dimensions of time and space meet.A mental push will send theclock itself traveling along a line parallel to any four of these dimensionsat the same time.Of course my illustration ignores the fact that there are aninfinite number of space-time dimensions, just as there are an infinite numberof stars in space, but the same principles apply
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