The Ray of Displacement and other stories

"We should have to reach the Infinite
to arrive at the Impossible."

IT would interest none but students should I recite the circumstances
of the discovery. Prosecuting my usual researches, I seemed rather to
have stumbled on this tremendous thing than to have evolved it from
formulæ.

Of course, you already know that all molecules, all atoms, are
separated from each other by spaces perhaps as great, when compared
relatively, as those which separate the members of the stellar
universe. And when by my Y-ray I could so far increase these spaces
that I could pass one solid body through another, owing to the
differing situation of their atoms, I felt no disembodied spirit had
wider, freer range than I. Until my discovery was made public my power
over the material universe was practically unlimited.

Le Sage's theory concerning ultra-mundane corpuscles was rejected
because corpuscles could not pass through solids. But here were
corpuscles passing through solids. As I proceeded, I found that at the
displacement of one one-billionth of a centimeter the object capable
of passing through another was still visible, owing to the refraction
of the air, and had the power of communicating its polarization; and
that at two one-billionths the object became invisible, but that at
either displacement the subject, if a person, could see into the
present plane; and all movement and direction were voluntary. I
further found my Y-ray could so polarize a substance that its touch in
turn temporarily polarized anything with which it came in contact, a
negative current moving atoms to the left, and a positive to the right
of the present plane.

My first experience with this new principle would have made a less
determined man drop the affair. Brant had been by way of dropping into
my office and laboratory when in town. As I afterwards recalled, he
showed a signal interest in certain toxicological experiments. "Man
alive!" I had said to him once, "let those crystals alone! A single
one of them will send you where you never see the sun!" I was
uncertain if he brushed one off the slab. He did not return for some
months. His wife, as I heard afterwards, had a long and baffling
illness in the meantime, divorcing him on her recovery; and he had
remained out of sight, at last leaving his native place for the great
city. He had come in now, plausibly to ask my opinion of a stone--a
diamond of unusual size and water.

I put the stone on a glass shelf in the next room while looking for
the slide. You can imagine my sensation when that diamond, with
something like a flash of shadow, so intense and swift it was, burst
into a hundred rays of blackness and subsided--a pile of carbon! I had
forgotten that the shelf happened to be negatively polarized,
consequently everything it touched sharing its polarization, and that
in pursuing my experiment I had polarized myself also, but with the
opposite current; thus the atoms of my fingers passing through the
spaces of the atoms of the stone already polarized, separated them
negatively so far that they suffered disintegration and returned to
the normal. "Good heavens! What has happened!" I cried before I
thought. In a moment he was in the rear room and bending with me over
the carbon. "Well," he said straightening himself directly, "you gave
me a pretty fright. I thought for a moment that was my diamond."