THE HOUSE ON SPACE-TIME LANE

Chapter One
QUINN IN THE TENTH DIMENSION
by Galen Hardesty

~*~

Standing at Daria's bedroom door, Quinn asked, "Daria, can I ask you a question?"

"You just did." Daria replied, rather indistinctly due to being unable to move her jaw. It was supporting the weight of her head. She was lying face down on her bed, head hanging over the foot end, reading a book that was lying open on the floor below.

"Can I talk to you?"

"Apparently."

"Uuhh! What are you doing?!"

Daria sighed, sat up, and wiggled her jaw. "Giving myself a severe underbite, attempting unsuccessfully to read this book, dying the death of a thousand dumb questions..."

"Daria, I've been feeling... strange lately."

"That's way too easy."

"Come on!"

"If you insist. Okay, come over here and let me feel you. Ba-dum-bum. Funny, you don't look strange. You look goofy, like always. Ba-dum-bum."

"Daariaa!"

"Don't blame me, it was your straight line."

Quinn's look pleaded mutely. Her lower lip quivered.

Daria sighed. "All right, all right, put away the lip. Expand on 'strange'."

Quinn made vague gestures with her hands. "It's hard to describe. Like there's something... wrong. Like things aren't the way they seem. Like there's something I need to do. Like someone's in trouble."

"Oh. That strange."

Quinn waited, but Daria didn't seem about to continue. "What do you mean, 'Oh, that strange?' You've felt it too? You know what it is?"

Daria gave her sister an appraising look. "Well... I don't know if you're ready for this, although if you're feeling it, that may be a moot point. Part of it is this house, or something associated with the house."

Quinn gasped and put her hand to her lips. "You mean... ghosts?"

"Maybe something a lot scarier than ghosts. It appears to be a distortion of the space-time continuum."

"What? Daria, did you stay up all night watching one of those Star Trek marathons?"

"Not lately. Sit down at my desk, get a sheet of grid paper out of the drawer, and draw a plan of the first floor of the house."

"Are you trying to change the subject?"

"No, this is the best way I know to show you the distortion. Use the whole page; draw the front wall at the bottom... good. Put the front door right in the center of the front wall, and the staircase right behind it. They divide the house in half. Now in the family room on the left side, put the fireplace and the back door in the back wall and the entertainment center against the end wall. Now draw in the sofa and love seats."

Quinn started to draw the sofa, then paused with the pencil almost touching the paper. "All that space..."

"Yeah. The family room looks much bigger on the floor plan than it does when you're in it, doesn't it? Forget the sofa for now, and draw in the kitchen and breakfast nook. Don't get too detailed; just indicate the counters and table. Good. Now draw in the garage."

Quinn drew a couple of lines, then stopped again. She stared at the paper, a look of puzzlement changing to concern and then to something like fear. "Oh, my gosh. Oh... my..." the pencil fell from her nerveless fingers.

Daria nodded grimly. "Now you're starting to see it. In the space that's left between the kitchen and the garage are the dining room, the laundry room, the downstairs guest bedroom, the downstairs bathroom, and the basement stairs. Only there is no space left between the kitchen and the garage."

"Daria, what is it? What could scrunch all those rooms into that little space like that?"

"An excellent question. Shortly after I noticed it, I did some rough calculations. To generate a distortion field of this power and this uniformity over this spatial extent would require a seventeen solar mass black hole."

"Omigod! A black hole? Where?"

"Another excellent question. I could never get the numbers to tell me where in relation to the house the black hole would have to be, except that it would be seventy-two feet from the laundry room door. And anyway, a black hole would cause the distortion by its incredibly powerful gravitational field, a field that would swallow this entire planet in a few seconds or microseconds or thereabouts. Besides, there are no gravitational anomalies around here, not even small ones. I checked. And I don't see how a black hole can explain the... other thing."

"What other thing?"

"The interconnectivity."

Quinn looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"I mean which rooms are connected to which other rooms. Draw another diagram that shows how many other rooms you can get into from each room. I'm going to see if there's any coffee left from this morning. I'll be right back."

When Daria came back to her room, she found Quinn sitting on her bed, next to the headboard. She looked like she was afraid of the piece of paper she'd been working on minutes before, and wanted to get as far away from it as she could.

"Something wrong?" she asked rhetorically.

"It's impossible!" Quinn exclaimed. There was an edge of panic in her voice. "A house like this can't exist!"

Daria sipped her coffee. "And yet, it does exist. A fascinating puzzle, don't you think?"

"No, I do not," Quinn snapped back, some of her fear of the unknown turning to anger. "Are you gonna tell me the answer, or are you gonna stand there and do your Vulcan impression?"

Daria smiled a little at that. "The answer is, if you qualify your statement by saying 'A house like this can't exist in three spatial dimensions,' you're correct."

Quinn's blank look changed after a second to her trying-to-remember-something face. After a few seconds she said, "Daria, I'm no science geek, but I thought that's all there were."

Daria nodded. "You and just about everyone else. Lately a few physicists have been saying that there are actually ten or more dimensions, but they're not holding out any hope that we'll be able to get at them anytime soon. But somehow, every time you go from the laundry room to the basement stairs, or from the kitchen to the garage, you're traveling through at least one extra dimension."

Quinn looked alarmed. "I don't want to travel through other dimensions! They might be full of monsters!"

"I believe Columbus's crew said something very similar to that when they mutinied," smirked Daria. "You should be able to avoid it fairly easily, though."

"Great! How?" Quinn asked eagerly.

"Just stay out of the house. Pitch a tent in the back yard. I'll hand your meals out the door to you."

"Oh, ha ha, Daria."

~*~