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flourish, he screwed it up into a tight little ball.

    "You see, the universe is no more flat than the Earth."

    He stared at his creation, breathing belief into it. A tiny paper ball universe balanced on an outstretched palm of thought.

    "We still have our piece of paper and stick men who can travel only on the surface but now we have something else, don't we? With our three dimensional knowledge we can see that many points on the paper have been moved closer together. Not for the stick men, because they'd still have to walk along the surface of the paper, but if they had a three dimensional capability they could reduce the distance dramatically and travel directly through the ball. That was the driving force behind SHIFT, to reduce the vast inter-stellar distances that we've measured in three dimensions by utilising some or all of the other seven. Forget all that 'no one can travel faster than the speed of light' crap and fly to the stars in a matter of minutes!"

    He paused, breathing hard.

    "Now, of course, not everyone believed that was possible. For years it was thought these extra dimensions had to be minute—rolled up upon themselves, no bigger than an atom. They had to be or else we'd see them, right?"

    He waited for Louise to nod. And then shot her down as he'd done to a thousand other students.

    "Like we can see infra-red or ultra-violet?" He shook his head. "We're adapted to sense a fraction of what's out there. The fraction we need to get by and that's it. I can't sense a magnetic field but give me the right machine and I can show it to you. Same goes for the higher dimensions. Those cameras over there. They're calibrated to display the higher dimensional energy spectrum.

    "And guess what . . . some of those higher dimensions are as infinite as our physical three."

    Another pause for effect, another sweep of his arms.

    "What followed was one of those golden eras of scientific discovery when the interests of politicians, big business and science all coincided so that everyone could pull together and make the thing work. You know—national pride, promises of new industries, new markets, undying fame. All other areas of research put on hold.

    "Which is why we now know more about travel in the higher dimensions than any other aspect of HDT. Take my research—we know little more about the mind today than we did fifty years ago. There are still eminent doctors who deny the existence of HDT or its relevance to psychology—your Doctor Ziegler, for one. If we'd had the same resources put into our research as SHIFT it might have been different. But I'm not complaining—far from it. As I said, most of my machinery comes from SHIFT or SHIFT-related research. These higher dimensional imagers and translators—all SHIFT based technology."

    He patted one again, noticed a speck of dust and brushed it away. Then he was off again. Talking of the mind and its mysterious higher dimensional component.

    "You see, most of the body's higher dimensional matter is located in the area of the brain. What we see—the visible part—is but a small component of the whole. It's like . . ." He searched for a suitable analogy, his eyes flashing and flickering. "A mushroom! Just like a mushroom. You have the fruiting body above ground—the visible component—and a vast array of tendrils and God knows what else spreading and permeating about underground—the unseen component, so easy to overlook but absolutely essential to the understanding of the organism.

    "Which brings us to John Bruce. He was supposed to be fully shielded during his journey. All his bits picked up and brought back but what if the shielding was flawed and not all of him came back. What then?"

    "Wouldn't he die?" asked Louise.

    "Depends which bits he lost. My profession used to advocate lobotomies—you know, surgically removing bits of the brain. They survived. Who's to say you couldn't lose some higher dimensional matter and survive—quite likely