“The mad inventor was once a brilliant scientist, adding much to the world’s store of knowledge, but in his old age his mind became unbalanced. In his madness he was supposed to have performed weird and murderous experiments, but—” she interpolated sagely—“he might not have been mad after all. Your people had a habit of classifying as insanity everything beyond their range of comprehension. However, whether merited or not, the appellation stuck and so we still call this the Hill of the Mad Inventor. His name, I believe, was Peter—Peter Holden.”

  “Peter Holden!” I burst out explosively. “Why, I knew him! He was a professor of chemistry before he began acting queer and was asked to resign from the university. Shortly after that he either inherited or obtained by some means an immense fortune and immediately began the construction of this—this monstrosity. Thereafter all he did was to shut himself up in that crazy tower room, where he was reputed to be trying to explore the Fourth Dimension.”

  “All of which,” commented Iris, “was not so crazy, after all. You, yourself, are now actually exploring what to you is the Fourth Dimension.”

  “It may not be crazy now,” I admitted, “but it was then, in view of the limited resources we had to work with. However, let’s explore the tower room and see what’s left of old Peter’s laboratory. I’ve always wanted to see it, but he’d doubtless turn over in his grave if he knew anyone was going to enter it.”

  “I’m afraid there’s not much there that we could fathom,” said Iris, strangely reluctant to go, I thought. “There’s just a lot of complex machinery that we know nothing about, but we have left it intact and it’s all in an excellent state of preservation.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll know something about it,” I boasted, overruling her hesitation, or more likely taking advantage of her courtesy.

  The Time Powder

  Outwardly bold, yet at the same time conscious of an ugly premonition hammering in my brain, I led her inside the crumbling ruin. Everywhere there was the odor of decay and strange batlike creatures flitted around in the half light, adding a special terror all their own. The tower room being my main objective, as it was the true lair of the Mad Inventor, I guided Iris up the narrow spiral stairway that led up to it. Looking back upon that mad adventure I cannot but admire the courage of this angel of the Golden Age when confronted by terror that actually oozed from the very walls of this charnel house of antiquity. There were suggestions lurking there like ghosts in every corner, suggestions of the sordidness and the ugliness that have passed away forever. If they even leered and gibbered at me, so shortly separated from that time, how much more so must they have terrorized the sensitive soul of Iris. But she gave no sign of fear, save to cling a little closer to me.

  Finally we entered the tower room itself, the scene of Peter Holden’s mad experiments. It looked like the den of a medieval alchemist, doubtless because of its forbidding setting, but the equipment of his laboratory was expensive and up-to-date enough in my day. I could make neither head nor tail of it, however, for I’m no scientist, and Iris, though possessing a keener brain than many an expert of 1930, was equally at a loss to explain this complex mass of wires and tubes. A curiously carved box on a table by itself attracted my attention. Oh, how I have cursed the hour that I saw it!

  “I wonder what’s in that old box?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know. We tried to open it one day, but the combination failed to respond to our thought-vibrations. We know nothing of keys. We hated to break the lock, as the box is very rare, so we decided to wait until somebody could open it. Afterwards—we forgot all about it.”

  Some satanic curiosity prompted me to open that box—to see what it contained. There was something sinister about it—something about the grinning gargoyles that were carved upon it that literally challenged me to defy their hellish guardianship. I saw at a glance that the lock was not intricate, and having once learned something about opening locks from a clever shipmate, I jerked up a piece of wire from an adjoining table and after five minutes had the thing open. At first I thought that it contained nothing but a curious sort of packing that fell to dust at the touch of my hand. Finally I touched something solid and gleaming. It was a small tube made of something that resembled aluminum, but unlike the packing, the passage of time had not seemed to affect it.

  Forgetting the adage that fools rush in where angels fear to tread, I unscrewed the tap and poured into my hand its full contents, a small pile of glittering yellow powder. Iris watched my every movement with a proud smile on her beautiful face. She was enormously pleased at my prowess in mastering the intricacies of a mechanism that her people had failed to fathom.

  To further satisfy my hellish curiosity I raised the powder to my nostrils, and idiot that I was, I sniffed it.

  The next thing I knew, a swift dizziness rushed over me, blinding me, nauseating me—a current ran through my veins like liquid fire—a thousand electric needles seemed to prick and torture me. Through it all I felt soft arms envelop me—soft lips press mine—and a despairing voice call my name, pleadingly—fearfully and rising at last to a vibrant crescendo of terror. In spite of my almost superhuman efforts to respond to that call, I slipped painlessly into a white sea of unconsciousness.

  When I awoke I found myself still in the tower room, lying on a narrow couch with old Peter Holden bending over me—shaking me, and raving like a maniac.

  “You would steal into my laboratory, you young whippersnapper,” he shrieked, “though how you got through that locked door would baffle the fiends! You would open my box and steal my powder—my Fourth Dimension powder!”

  He was raving now in earnest—frothing at the mouth, but I too, now in full possession of my senses, also went raving mad, and my own outburst silenced his.

  “Damn you and your Fourth Dimension powder!” I yelled, rising to my feet and almost throttling him. “But for you—but for your damnable powder, I should now be where your old bones have crumbled into ashes and your satanic laboratory is but a blot on the landscape, a cancer in a healthy world. You’re responsible for my being here!” I shrieked in mad unreason, “and by Heaven, you’ll send me back or I’ll kill you!”

  A look of utter astonishment came into my victim’s eyes in spite of his evident terror.

  “Let me go, you fool!” he gurgled. “Quiet yourself, and tell me exactly what you are talking about.”

  Reason came to me at these words. At least the realization was borne in upon me that it was no fault of Peter’s but my own insatiable curiosity that was responsible for my plight.

  So I sat there in the waning, spectral light of the old tower room and told him everything. Be it said to his credit, he never expressed a single doubt of my sanity, once he had fixed his eyes upon my strange apparel. His scientific mind must have told him at a glance that an art was used in the manufacture of my garments that was beyond the science of his age.

  When I had finished my fantastic tale, he jumped to his feet like a schoolboy and danced up and down in unrestrained glee.

  “So it worked!” he yelled. “It worked! Eureka! Eureka!”

  “Undoubtedly it worked,” I commented bitterly, “but it worked backwards.”

  “You poor young fool!” he exclaimed with frank contempt. “Can’t you see that it worked according to the way you took it?”

  The Return to Nirvania

  Enlightenment began to dawn. “Then that means that had I taken it here in this age, it would have transported me—there?”

  “Beyond the shadow of a doubt! And since I have the formula, I can make more of it. I’ll admit that I was a little hasty and cut up over losing the powder that I had on hand as I meant to have tried it out in a few days, as soon as I had found a subject for the experiment. You, thank Heaven, are the God-given willing subject I’ve been looking for.”

  “But how do you know that I shall be transported to that particular age instead of to another epoch infested by God knows what horrors?”

  “I think I can put your faith in the same principle by which you came back exactly eight hundred years instead of six hundred or a thousand hundred. You see the quantity of the substance determines the length of the voyage through time, the Fourth Dimension. It only remains to fill the tube again with the exact quantity that it contained before.”

  I must admit that my faith in this exactitude of his computations was anything but unwavering. But in my soul I knew that Iris was worth the risk. Like that other Anthony whom she so admired, I was prepared to lose the world for love.

  “How long did you say,” I asked eagerly, “that I must wait?”

  “Fully three weeks, you young thief!” he retorted, his anger rising with my impatience. “And meanwhile—you get out of here, and don’t show your prying nose around this place until the time is up. You can write your story while you’re waiting and send it to some fiction magazine. The consummate idiots of this asinine age would never accept it as fact—but it may give someone an idea—if there is a mind big enough to hold it.”

  “But,” I stammered, curiosity again mastering me, “won’t you tell me the principle of this—Fourth Dimension powder?”

  The old man glared at me sardonically, “I can furnish you the information, young man, but I can’t endow you with the intelligence to understand it. However, your desire to know something is commendatory, so to get rid of you, I’ll outline the principle, trying to put it in terms that your intellect can grasp.” I made a mental comment that Prof. Holden’s opinion of my intellect had always been biased doubtless by the grades I had made in chemistry.

  “This powder,” he began painfully, as though seeking adequate terms, “is manufactured from a combination of certain Oriental drugs which acts directly upon the cerebral tissues, slowing down or speeding up the vibrations of thought. These thought-vibrations, freed from the dominance of the objective senses, which are completely paralyzed at the first whiff of the powder, change the rate of vibration of the atoms of the body. Since any given organism is held together only by the affinity of its atoms, it follows that the atoms of an organism whose rate of vibration is speeded up—say, to correspond with that of organisms 500 years hence—would no longer have an affinity for the predominant rate of vibration of this age. Since every atom automatically seeks the rate of vibration for which it has affinity, it follows that any organism or combination of atoms acted upon by this powder will travel through time until it encounters the rate of vibration that corresponds with its new scientifically induced rate. The influence of certain Oriental drugs on the sense of time has long been a matter of common knowledge. Working from that point I have effected a combination that affects not only the mind, but changes the rate of vibration of the atoms of the body. And now—” he broke off angrily—“will you get out of here? But wait! Put on what the world calls a decent suit of clothes before you go, or you’ll spend your next three weeks in jail.”

  After helping myself to old Peter’s wardrobe I at last departed, much to his grim satisfaction. After the old hermit’s lucid explanation, I went with a hope in my heart and a song on my lips.

  That song soon changed to sorrow when I found myself again confronted with the bitterness, the heartache and the mad acquisitiveness of an age that, even in a few short hours of Paradise, had already become to me a horrid nightmare. I was already sorrowful when I realized that the remedy was all so simple, too simple. It needed nothing more than the realization that human brotherhood is the only remedy even from a selfish standpoint. Unwittingly I spoke my thoughts to some of my old acquaintances, only to be sneeringly asked what kind of home brew I had been using. I gave it up and surrendered myself to my dreams and the compilation of this narrative.

  Now at the end of my probation I am mailing this story to my aunt. She will understand it, and she will know what to do with it. I have settled my affairs and after a few more interminable hours I shall be on my way to the tower room. My tryst may be a rendezvous with death or the key to life eternal. If it is death that awaits me at the end of the trail he comes too late—too late to rob me of that consciousness of immortality that shall survive the transition of form. If it is life everlasting—life unbroken by the periodical specter of the Ancient Foe—then I shall live it reverently, gloriously.

  If old Peter is ready for me tonight, he will put a light in the tower room. The shadows are deepening, creeping around me languorously, caressingly, bidding me farewell. Even now I would turn back—were men not blind, would they only listen. For I have known a love that has taught me that even its own surrender is preferable to a duty cast aside. But the time has not yet come for the message to peal forth from the inner temples of the heart. Many Christs must still be crucified, many sages must go down to death, before man, the eternal prodigal, returns from his weary journey among the husks and ashes to find the flower that he has sought in a far country, before his very door.

  Ah! It is there! The light! But it is more than a light to me—it is a summons from the infinite. It is a challenge to plunge into the fathomless—to dare the Causeless—to live beyond the Law. More than all this, it is the call of Love. Across the deeps of time I hear the voice of Iris—the welcome of the Happy Laughing People, and I come! Bride of the centuries—I come!

  Take me to you.

  L(UCILE) TAYLOR HANSEN (1897–1976) was an American SF author and science journalist who published with Amazing Stories from 1929 to 1949. She was born in Fort Niobrara, Nebraska, and lived with her grandfather in Missouri before moving to Los Angeles to be with her mother and stepfather. In 1915 she matriculated at the University of Illinois, receiving her degree and then returning to the West Coast to study archaeology, anthropology, and geology at UCLA. She married A. Fred Hansen in 1924 and kept his name when they divorced a few years later. Hansen began writing SF to make ends meet, publishing a handful of stories in 1929 and 1930. She left the SF community for almost a decade, during which time she traveled extensively throughout the United States and Mexico, bore her daughter, Ione Athena Pantazos, and married lone’s father, Iwanne Pantazos.

  When Hansen returned to SF in 1941, she wrote primarily as a journalist for Raymond A. Palmer at Amazing Stories, developing a reputation for expertise in ancient mysteries for which she is still remembered (for more details, see the entry on Hansen in chapter 4, “Journalists,” of this anthology). After leaving the SF community again in 1949, Hansen continued researching and writing about Native American storytelling traditions, with particular emphasis on the recurrent figure of the Christ-like “Great White Prophet.” Her 1963 book on this subject, He Walked the Americas, remains popular today and has inspired an eighteen-part dramatization on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veVmaC9eQco).

  Like many other women involved with the early SF community, Hansen achieved several firsts: she was the first woman to work across areas of production in a professional SF magazine, and she was one of the first SF specialist authors to capitalize on popular pseudoscientific fads in her writing. Most notably, however, Hansen is remembered as one of the first major women writers to successfully masquerade as a man in the SF community. While many women who wrote SF in the early twentieth century used androgynous names or initials in their bylines, most allowed their editors to print biographies and pictures that made their sex evident. But the illustration accompanying Hansen’s 1930 story “The City on the Cloud” is clearly that of a young man, and Hansen’s letter in the July 1943 issue of Amazing Stories bears the title “L. Taylor Hansen Defends Himself.” Meanwhile, Hansen further muddied the waters by telling SF fan Forrest J Ackerman that she had never done any SF writing, but simply handled stories for her brother (Bleiler and Bleiler 164).

  Scholars debate the reasons for Hansen’s masquerade, citing everything from her desire to conform to the emergent conventions of a male-oriented popular genre to her fear that association with SF would destroy her science-writing career.9 Whatever her motivation, Hansen was not alone in her experiments with sex and gender identity. Stories by other early women SF authors (including Leslie F. Stone’s “Out of the Void” and C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau,” reprinted in this anthology) revolve around sex- and gender-based misperceptions. Meanwhile, the technique of framing stories as letters written by the acquaintance of the purported author or narrator extends back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and plays a crucial part in early SF magazine stories such as Lilith Lorraine’s “Into the 28th Century” (1930). Thus it seems Hansen created an SF persona for herself that was extrapolated from the conventions of her chosen genre, especially as interpreted by other women writers.

  “The Man from Space” demonstrates Hansen’s ability to craft an SF story that is every bit as careful and compelling as her public identity. The author’s third sale, which appeared in the February 1930 issue of Amazing Stories, relates the adventures of two college students, their astronomy professor, and an unnamed alien among the stars. As such, it evinces two of the major characteristics that Gernsback associated with good SF: it provides readers with a “charming romance” that is also “interwoven with scientific fact” (“New” 3). That “The Man from Space” does not fulfill Gernsback’s third requirement for good SF (because it does not offer “prophetic vision” of future technologies) illustrates Hansen’s sensitivity to the requirements of different editors. By the time she sold “The Man from Space” to Amazing, the retired natural history professor T. O’Conor Sloane, who had a slightly different vision for the genre than his predecessor, had replaced Gernsback. While he embraced the use of scientific facts and technical explanations to educate the public, Sloane was skeptical that SF could inspire inventors and he dismissed the possibility of space travel as outright fantasy. Accordingly, Hansen frames her story as a classic dream vision, transporting her characters from classroom to outer space through the vehicle of the narrator’s unconscious imagination rather than by means of an actual rocket. As such, “The Man from Space” pays homage to the ideals of both Gernsback and Sloane, using an epic journey through space to teach scientific facts in a manner that no classroom lecture could hope to match without violating the ideas of the scientific community’s more conservative members.