"16844" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burks Arthur J)

Trin

by Arthur J. Burks
TRIN 1                   TRIN       By Arthur J. Burks                                                                                                                                    TRIN 2                   TRIN by Arthur J. Burks      Twelve years ago, in Marvel's famous first issue, we published Arthur J. Burks' "Survival" and it was immediately acclaimed an all-time stf classic. Will this sensational new book-length novel by "America's most daring imagination" win even greater renown?      I wanted a man willing to sign himself over to me body and soul, so I anticipated some strange applicants. But I didn't anticipate Joe X. When I warned Joe X the job might cost him his life, he replied that was impossible, he couldn't be killed. And when I told him at he might be driven insane, Joe X assured me that that was impossible too--because he had no brain!                  CHAPTER I JOE X      HE WAS young, not over twenty-five, and black-eyed and black-haired--a good six: feet of vigorous, sturdy manhood at, say, one hundred and eighty pounds. He presented himself at my laboratory bearing the ad I'd put in the Times:. . . . .       WANTED: MAN UNDER THIRTY WITHOUT TIES, AMBITIONS,       FEARS OR EXPECTATIONS. WRITE BOX X47, THE TIMES.      "How did you know where to come?" I demanded. "That's a blind ad."      He held up his big right hand, as though to calm me.      "I didn't get your address from the newspaper, or anyone else, I don't know how I got here. I often have lapses like this. My name is Joe X."      Like that, it began. Well, I wanted a man willing to sign himself over to me body and soul, risking his life for science, hourly and daily, as I myself did, so I expected unusual applicants. I'd                              TRIN 3            run that ad for six months, and had quickly discouraged scores of curiosity seekers. I put it to "Joe X" at once, straight from the shoulder, as I had to all the others.      "The job is dangerous," I said. It may cost you your life."      "I can't be killed," he said. "It's quite impossible."      That kind of brought me up again, but I pushed on with my standard interview without comment.      "You may be driven insane," I continued.      "No," he smiled a bit sadly at me. "That's impossible, too. I have no brain!"      That was the real jolt. This liar intrigued me.      "I'm an orphan," he went on. "Nobody ever wanted me. Once when I was nine and all the other kids spent Christmas with families, and nobody asked for me, I decided to commit suicide. I swallowed the contents of three aspirin bottles. As I fell into a deep sleep a shining figure appeared before me, shook his head, said: 'This is not the way; you must live your time!' I was found, pumped out, lectured, chastised. At twelve I decided to make sure. I went into a closet with a new one-inch rope, hanged myself. But the same shining figure appeared, shook his head sadly and said: 'I hate to disappoint you, but I have to cut the rope!' He did, too, with a big scissors. You won't believe it, nor has anybody else, but when I regained consciousness the rope had actually been cut!"      Naturally," I said. "Spooks do it all the time!"      "Go ahead and laugh," he said. "Everybody does who hears it--of whom there are not many."      "Proceed," I said. "I can't call you a liar because I can't check back on you."      "Oh, but you can. I thought you must know that! I'll give you all the data, if we agree on something, so that you can check on the truth of my assertions! I early realized that I could not die by accident, of diseases, or suicide, or be murdered. Everything of the kind had a chance to kill me and failed. I won't detail the incidents except those which can be checked for truthfulness.      During World War II I was aboard a ship which was torpedoed in chill waters fifty miles off the west English coast. Waves were miles high. I was thrown into the water and instantly separated from everybody else. All others were, I was told, lost. I swam easily, knowing it impossible to live in the mountainous seas. Here at last is certain peace, I thought. But the figure I had seen so many times before suddenly stood on the water near me and said: 'Keep swimming, for this is not the time!' I kept swimming, wishing I did not have to. I swam for hours when I was picked up by a British destroyer. Everybody aboard said it was impossible I should be alive, unhurt, not even very tired."                              TRIN 4            "Make it good!" I said grimly.      "It's all a matter of record," said Joe X. "I'll give you the name later, if we get together." He grinned. "After all, if you can use a blind ad, why can't I make my application under a blind name?"      "Go ahead!" I went on.      LATER ON I was part of a special flight mission over The Hump. Somehow we got far off course. I think it was intentional, and for a purpose, but nobody told me. I was an enlisted man. After many hours we were over a portion of Tibet. That's what the pilot said. We were all on oxygen. I remember the pilot saying that Tibetan authorities had forbidden flyers of all nations to fly over this particular area. No sooner had he said this than our entire left wing broke off and vanished. We were flying at fifteen thousand, but most of inhabited Tibet is at an average of ten thousand feet above sea level. We were not far above land."      "So you crashed and you were the sole survivor!" I said.      "That's right," said Joe X. "It's a matter of record."      "You provided the record, being the only survivor," I went on.      "No, the pilot lived long enough to tell about it, in writing!"      "Oh," was all I could think of, somehow, to comment.      "The shining figure," went on Joe X, "stood on the good wing and told me I could not die in this crash, that the time was not yet, that I must do my job. Trouble has always been I've never had the slightest idea what my job is, my real job, I mean."      Joe X left the story for a moment, stared at the wall.      "You said you were brainless," I said. "How does that happen?"      "I was on furlough in Shanghai," he said. "I wandered into Kiukiang, off the Bund. I had never been in China before, yet the further I went along the gloomy street the more familiar it became. I had traveled it hundreds of times through hundreds of years maybe--that's how it seemed. I knew just what lay ahead, around each turn. I was in a ricksha. We were approaching a dead end. The coolie said we could go no further. I told him the way turned left. He insisted, I insisted, he refused to take me on, so I walked, and the way did turn left. I knew. I came to a silent compound with an ancient temple on its far side. I was met by two yellow-robed Tibetan monks. They smiled at me and one said: 'You have been slow in coming!' It must have been in English, for it's the only language I know. The other monk called me by the name I shall give you if we make a deal!      "Nice fantasy," I said. "But what about the missing brain?"                        TRIN 5            "Why," he said, arching his brows, "the monks took mine and put something in its place. It was supposed to make me perfect, but I have small lapses that frighten me. Otherwise I feel about as I always did. They said I would. They did it that way so I should not feet strange to myself."      "And what happened to your original brain?"      "They kept it. I shall reclaim it one day, they told me!"      "A neat, impossible job of trephining, I suppose, done by Tibetan monks," I said. "Up to there I could have believed you, if the surgeons were the world's best. But to remove the entire brain and supply something else--no, not even if the world's best did it, and told me so in person!"      "I didn't expect you to believe it," said Joe X. "The operation was done without pain. They used something that smelled liked incense, as an anesthetic. I saw no instruments of any kind."      "And of course they left no marks on your skull!" I sneered.      "Oh, but they did!" said Joe X. "You may look."      I LOOKED. It wasn't just a simple trephining job that had been done on this increasingly mysterious liar; the whole top of has skull had been completely removed and restored. The line was there to show where it had been done. I shuddered. I got the shakes for fair. I got the shakes more than most men would, I think, because of the lifetime task I had set myself.      I'm Chester Lowre, forty years of age, a scientific recluse, bent on probing the secrets of the human brain. We are told that only one eighth of the brain is used even by geniuses. Seven eighths of it is a mystery. But Nature does not construct to no purpose. The other seven eighths of the brain....      Well, I didn't know, but I had probed deeply enough to have been wishing, the last four years, that I could manage to live for two or three hundred years, that I might dig the more deeply into the great human secret.      I studied that skull. It had the shape of high evolvement. This man could be a genius, if skull shape meant anything--which I knew it did.      "One other thing," Joe X just tossed it in, as of no account, "I can't be hurt, either, not since the removal of the brain. I can feel inner hurt, like sorrow, heartache, loneliness, but not pain. I guess all the pain I should have known was transferred to my Inner...."      "You spoke of lapses," I suggested, interrupting to get him away from something I felt to be creepy, and better left to a later time. "Just what did you mean?"      "One of them brought me to your door," he said, "told me to knock. It's like this: I'll be walking south, here in New York City, for instance, say on Fifth Avenue. I'll notice the cross street. Let's say it's 110th. I notice what time it is. I find I don't care whether cars run me down or not, so I                        TRIN 6            pay no attention to them, or to traffic lights. I think perhaps I'll walk down to the Battery. There is a lapse. I am at the Battery, sitting down, looking out on the water. I look at my watch. It is ten minutes since I realized I was walking south on Fifth Avenue--at 110th Street! There is no way, no way at all possible, by which I can travel so far so fast--not by taxi or subway...but there I am. It often happens."      And that's how you located me?"      "Yes. I saw the ad, clipped it, went out on the street. I guess I was going to the newspaper office, or maybe to some hotel to write a letter to you. Next thing I knew I had already knocked on your door!"      I stared at the liar, the insane Joe X. After all, my supreme interest is the secret brain. What did it matter to me if Joe X was a pathological liar, insane?      "My funds are limited," I said. The hours are long. You may have to sit very still for as long as seventy-two hours. But you live here, eat with me. I have a good cook. Her husband waits on you, will wait on you. They never ask questions."      "Funds," he said, "don't matter. I always have the money I need."      "Indeed?" I arched my brows. "I wish I could say that. I never have enough for my scientific work. May I ask the source of your funds?"      "I don't know," he said simply. "I keep on spending what I have in my purse, but it is always there!" He raised his hand to silence me. "It isn't always the same bills or small change! In fact they're never the same, just the same amount, sufficient for the needs of the day, week, month! It isn't counterfeit money, either."      "You'll be very handy to have around, Joe X," I said. "Now if you just had a scientific background too--"      "Ask me questions!" said Joe X tersely.      I began asking. I made the quiz tougher and tougher. He never missed once, not even the most abstruse mathematical query. I began to ask him about formulae and experiments of which only I knew--and he knew all about those too, grinning, as if he enjoyed mystifying me!      So when I had done I said bluntly: "If you think you can stand me, I can stand you. Maybe this is the work you're here to do, if you believe in predestination.. Now, your right name, please."      "My orphanage name." he corrected me. "I never knew my right one, or whether I had a right one. They used to tell me my mother was unutterably lovely. They never mentioned a father though I must have had one. The orphanage name is Carse Ryal Smith. They made it odd to distinguish me from other Smiths."                              TRIN 7            I WAS GOING to ask about him by telegram to Washington. But there could be other Carse Ryal Smiths. He himself suggested I take his fingerprints. The information I wanted about Joe X wasn't available to outsiders, usually, but I wasn't an outsider. I did secret work for Washington when Public Enemies were questioned.      I queried the orphanage, sending along a picture Joe X gave me, taken when he was twelve, just after the rope with which he had tried to hang himself had been "cut." I satisfied myself that it was a picture of this Joe X.      I had answers from Washington in forty-eight hours. Joe X had told the truth about his two escapes from certain death. Authentication was based on unimpeachable evidence, other than Carse Ryal Smith's own. Fingerprints matched.      The orphanage reports were true, also, but a bit of information, under a seal of secrecy, that made my hair stand on end, was this: Carse Ryal Smith was a trin, a triplet if you prefer. There were two trin brothers, still alive. It had been thought best to keep Joe X ignorant of this fact since the trio had to be separated anyway. I was still not to tell him. Queer, but there it was, and why I, a stranger to the orphanage officials, should be given the forbidden information voluntarily, I had no idea.      Plenty of mystery remained for which there was no confirmation, or only partial corroboration, so that I knew I had something of vast interest with which, and with whom to work.      Had Joe X's entire brain been removed? I saw the marks of the operation, which proved nothing, implied much.      What about Joe X's "lapses?" I could only answer that question by asking another, also unanswerable: how had he got to my door with nothing to help him but a blind ad?      And what about his inability to feel pain? Medical records proved that homo sapiens were occasionally born lacking the sensation of pain. Such a one had to be guarded constantly until old enough to know his condition, else he could die--by burning for instance--without feeling the pain and so avoiding it.      This was easy to settle.      "You can't feel pain?" I asked, that first day, before I had answers to my telegrams.      He grinned at me. He looked at the gear on my work table, selected an electric soldering iron, switched it on, allowed it to come to whiteheat--then deliberately grabbed it!      I yelled at him, called him a fool. The smell of his roasting palm filled my laboratory instantly. Joe X just grinned at me, clearly undisturbed. But he dropped the iron, showed me his hideously marred right palm.      This was true, too, then; Joe X felt no pain.                        TRIN 8             And what about that which happened immediately after he proved to me that he could feel no pain? What attribute of mystery was it that restored his hand to health and wholeness faster even than it had been charred, while I watched, and while the odor of burnt flesh still hung in the laboratory?      These mysteries must all be solved. If Joe X, after that, had tried to leave my service I believe I would have forcibly made him my prisoner, provided, that is, any bonds or bars could hold him. He might "lapse" himself out of them.      His "shining figure" was, of course, hallucination. No scientist could accept that.      "Our first work," I told Joe X, whom I continued thereafter to think of as Joe X because, if mankind was ever an unknown quantity, Joe X was the epitome thereof, "will be with my newly developed zranthon tube."      "Yes," he said gravely, "I know about it."      He did, too, and told me much of its details--not one of which, as far as I knew, had ever got out past my door. The name zranthon I had in that instant coined; he nodded his head when he heard the name, as if he had always known it!            CHAPTER II of Trin      THE ZRANTHON TUBE                  I AM ESPECIALLY interested in people belonging to what "normal" folk call the "lunatic fringe." I am acutely aware that Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, the Wright Brothers, Louis Pasteur, Paracelsus and many others, belonged to the fringe in their own time. Then they became the "greats" of the world. I've no intention, personally, of passing up any of them. I spend my spare time digging in old book stores--there are many down around Astor Place--for fiction and nonfiction done by members of the lunatic fringe which have ended up where, I dare say, "normal" people feel it belongs.      I am interested scientifically in the esoteric. I do a lot of wondering about mediums, seances, fortune tellers, geomancers, people who not only believe in reincarnation but insist they can remember past lives--who's to prove they can't?--and people who know what's going to happen in the ages to come.      If they're specific in their "findings" I take their material into my laboratory. If some lunatic fringer "remembers" machinery used in Atlantis, like nothing modern man ever dreamed of, I'm never satisfied until I have a look at the possibilities.                                    TRIN 9            My current investigation, and so far the most interesting, was based on the "prophecies" of a lunatic fringer raised to the nth power. He held that there was a perfect way to communicate between persons, and that future races would make use of it. If, for example, I am thinking of a road, and use the word "road" in my conversation with another, the road of which I speak, and the road he sees in his mind when he hears me speak the word "road" are invariably and inevitably vastly different. Our experiences are different. The esotericist said that the time would come when man, naturally, would show exactly what he meant when he used a word or phrase, because the picture of his thought would appear on a natural screen beside his head as he spoke. What he said would be so carefully and exactly detailed on the screen that nobody could possibly misunderstand his meaning. Newspapers, books, radio, television, contracts, blueprints, machines, plans, maps, prospectuses, letters, paintings, drawings--all these and many more were, he said, the forerunners of what he called the "mental screen" with which man would one day be born.      I found it intriguing, and...I was about to say reasonable, but that I wouldn't be able to say, one way or the other, until I had exhausted every investigational possibility. My interest was in the submerged seven eighths of the human brain. Dreams, nonsense, hallucinations, spooks, prophecies, visions of past lives, even the belief in past lives, were all mentally produced somehow, and therefore matters of legitimate interest.      I took nobody into my complete confidence about these matters in detail. I personally did not care to be considered as being in the "lunatic fringe."      But I told Joe X that I was interested in developing, if scientifically possible, the "mental screen." The screen itself, since man was not yet born with it, had to be made. I had worked with it for two solid years, with little rest and with little thought as to whether it would be commercially valuable.      I began with the cathode-ray tube. I developed it to the place where I could project an image of my thought, somewhat blurred, upon an electrical field. I did not question whether the brain radiated electrical impulses. I didn't care. I wanted to discover. I was able to set up a field of unknown dimensions, in a given area of ordinary atmosphere, which was different from anything outside it. I knew it was different, but not how, for not only was my tube, the zranthon tube, inside the "field", but I had to be also! In other words, I couldn't study the mental projection for much the same reason a man can't lift himself by his own bootstraps. I couldn't go and stay at the same time.      I had to have someone with whom to work. It had to be his mental images, inside the zranthon field, so that I could study them without concern. Man and tube must stay inside the field, for the tube made the field, and the man thought forth the images. How? I wasn't yet sure. That it was cumbersome there was no doubt. What good was a means of communication if the communicator couldn't go anywhere or say anything? But many beginnings are discouragingly cumbersome.      I wanted to measure the field. I wanted. . . . .                              TRIN 10            "You want a mental screen," said Joe X softly. "You want to prove that such a screen is possible. Too bad, isn't it, that I have no mind?"      HE HAD A sense of humor, then, and therefore a mind, no matter of what it was made, natural or synthetic.      "You'll do," I said. My laboratory was far out on Riverside Drive, in a greystone house inherited from generations of Lowres, all of whom had strange avocations. I was no antisocial, but I couldn't do all I wished and spend time talking to friends and neighbors. There was so much to do, so little time. One day I would make sleep unnecessary...but that was something else again. "But remember, it may blow up and scatter the house, me, the laboratory and you all over New York City."      "No," he said, "I'll walk out of any such explosion without a scratch, unless," he looked hopeful, suddenly, "it happens to be my time when it happens!"      "I wish you wouldn't act as if you couldn't endure life!" I said to him sharply. "You may well be in a position right now to do something sublimely great for humanity!"      "That would be too bad!" he answered. "Why should I?"      I could think of no reason why he should, nor did I try to argue. Man must settle his own arguments with life, people and destiny.      "Can you think of anything better to do?" I asked.      "Yes, do the thing that keeps me from being unutterably bored! That's why I answered your ad. When do we start?"      Joe X became a member of my household then and there. Somehow he contrived not to seem strange to Hattie Hyde and her husband Zack. I noted that Hattie often stared at him as if he had three heads, and that Zack never spent much time around him, but that wasn't unusual. They both behaved much the same way toward me. Maybe they thought I had produced Joe X in my laboratory!      Joe X seated himself comfortably in an easy chair in the middle of my workshop. I cleared everything away around him for a distance of fifteen feet in all directions. I did not believe that the field extended further than that; nor higher than the ceiling, also fifteen feet and the reason why I decided on fifteen feet for the other two dimensions.      The zranthon tube was two feet long, six inches in diameter, and if I hadn't told Joe X he wouldn't have known where it was. No, that's wrong, he knew! It was the "third arm" of the easy chair. It swung between the two regular arms to form an arm rest, slid back in slots in the two arms so that it could be near to or far from the person in the chair. Contact with the sitter was, apparently, required. A man could sit with his elbows on it, face in hands, could sit forward and                              TRIN 11            nap with his forehead or cheek on it, do anything with it he wished, so long as there was contact. But principally, he thought.      Contact with any part of the human body by the zranthon tube rendered it operative. It began to build the zranthon field as soon as Joe X sat down and swung the third arm into position. I could call the field "magnetic" or say that it was an area of "ionized air" and be approximately correct. The zranthon tube's operations were, however, somewhat different. The tube built the field, invisible brick by invisible brick, or whatever it was that was used--one of the thing I hoped, with the help of Joe X, to find out.      I moved away from Joe X, sat down facing him, to watch. We were just two ordinary human beings, staring at each other from a distance of fifteen feet, like mute idiots. In a few moments I spoke to Joe X. He touched his ears, shook his head. He could not hear me. He knew I spoke because he could see my lips move. A few moments after that I knew he could not see, either. He just sat, and stared. I got scared, though it had gone no further than it had with me, dozens of times. But Joe X, with that scar around his skull, might not be able to stand all I knew I could. I rose determinedly and strode toward Joe X. I couldn't reach him. I stopped stockstill, almost fifteen feet from him. I wasn't up against a stone wall. I was up against something intangible, invisible, but real. I was stuck! I could approach no nearer.      I went all the way around Joe X. He seemed to be surrounded by, to be comfortably sitting in, an invisible cylinder. He did not follow me with his eyes. He might already be dead. If no images of his thoughts appeared I would soon know he was dead. Some minutes must yet elapse before the images could be expected.      I went clear around the cylinder. Then I got a stepladder, stood close against the cylinder, climbed, fumbled at the top. There was a space of perhaps ten inches between the cylinder's top and the ceiling. Unimportant, maybe, but one never can be sure, so I recorded it.      I WAS SOON aware that Joe X had been much concerned because I had doubted some of the things he told me. His first mental image, quite clear in the depths of the cylinder, standing near Joe's right hand, was what I knew to be his "shining figure!" I stared in amazement and unbelief. I had seen statues of that type by the hundreds. But this image seemed to be alive. It could see me. It smiled at me, bowed slightly, raised its hand. I'm an atheist. I don't believe .... but a scientist can't say he doesn't believe anything, not until he has proved its untruth.      I was an investigator. I now investigated. As I had just circled the cylinder, so I now circled the shining figure. It did not turn to face me as I walked. It, simply, continued to face me without moving at all! I gulped, swallowed. Could this really be something in the way of communications, indicating that the man of tomorrow, equipped with my invention, or naturally, would be understood in his words and thoughts by anyone who could see him, whether facing him, back to him, or in profile? I was going too fast. This was just an image.      But was it just an image? I had neglected to take away the step-ladder I had climbed to determine the dimensions of the cylinder. It stood, sidewise, almost in contact with the cylinder. I almost bumped into it. As I would have touched it a queer thing happened: the "shining figure" shot                        TRIN 12            forth a hand as if to remove the stepladder from my path. The hand touched the ladder, pulled. The ladder tilted over into the cylinder and completely vanished! It was, suddenly, neither in nor outside the cylinder.      Moreover, the "shining figure" dissolved into something else: a street scene in Shanghai. I knew it because I knew Shanghai. I would have known it anyway because of Joe X's story. I saw Joe X entering a compound. I faced the temple about which he had told me. Two yellow-robed Tibetans came out of the temple. Tibetans? They were no more Tibetans than I am! They were dressed as Tibetans. They had long hair, like Tibetan sorcerers. Their headdress pulled their faces so that their eyes slanted ever so little; but they were not Tibetans. They were . . .      Both figures were staring at me. When I thought, "They are not Tibetans", both men touched fingers to lips, shook their heads. I tried to erase "no Tibetans" from my mind. Thereafter they ignored me. They took me through the operation of which Joe X had told me, which Joe X never saw but now did, the one in which his brain was removed and something left in its place. I would have accepted what I saw as gospel truth but for one thing: it proceeded from Joe X! Even so, as a study of the human mind, it was interesting. Actually, it looked as if the brain of Joe X were taken from his skull in a weird bit of bloodless surgery, and lowered carefully into a huge transparent jar of some colorless liquid where, I knew, it continued to live!      But if they put anything in the brain's place when they readjusted the skull--which I watched them to with immense admiration for their technique--I didn't see what it was. It could have been nothing. Joe X, if this were true, could be brainless, literally!      SUDDENLY the cylinder was empty of anything but Joe X, the easy chair, the zranthon-ray tube.      I could see into the cylinder far enough to see Joe X in some detail. I could not see through it. I heard an odd sound, such as the stepladder might have made if, while standing, it were jiggled. I couldn't see it. But I went around the cylinder, and there it was, somehow returned from the "field."      Then, for ten solid hours there was absolutely nothing! Just Joe X, the zranthon-ray tube, and the easy chair. The field was not extending. I knew, but its force was building up. I could see it the subtle changing of Joe X's body. I could feel it all around me. The atmosphere seemed to crackle without actually crackling. Great power was growing here.      Preparation was being made for something cataclysmic, and I began to be afraid. I could not communicate with Joe X by any regular means. He could only communicate with me via the field, but could neither see nor hear me. I don't like being afraid. It isn't a good way for any scientist to feel. I couldn't rescue Joe X. He could only get himself out. I had explained to him just how to do it. Had I made a mistake by giving him credit for knowing more than any man of twenty-five could possibly knew?      Maybe he could understand, at that, for suddenly Joe X's voice broke in.                              TRIN 13            "It's all right, Mr. Lowre, it's going forward properly." He grinned at me, too, clearly now able to see me.      "Can you hear me also?" I asked.      "Of course. The field is now complete. The time has come to probe more deeply. But there is no way I can help you, Mr. Lowre, and remain inside the field, as I must--and you are going to need help. You need two qualified assistants."      I sometimes used assistants. I had a working arrangement with several laboratories, some private, some industrial. I began running them over in my mind. I was looking at Joe X as I thought.      "There are Crandall and Bogan, at the M.A.C. Labs," I thought.      Joe X shook his head! He kept right on shaking his head until, stumped, I shook my head in turn, after naming every young assistant available to me, whom I had ever used.      "Run through your Red Book Directory," suggested Joe X. "Pick the laboratory that sounds right, telephone and explain that you need someone who knows how to work. . . ."      "I'm still running this laboratory and this experiment," I told Joe X stiffly. "I think I shall know what to tell an assistant!"      "I'm sorry, Mr. Lowre," said Joe X, instantly contrite. "I guess I'm too deeply interested in the experiment."      "I'm sorry, too," I retorted. "Inflated ego has no place in this kind of an investigation!"      I felt ashamed as I thumbed through the Red Book, picked an outfit, dialed, told someone on the other end what I wanted. Two young GI's were available and eager to pick up a little extra change. They would be with me in an hour. Their discretion could be relied on. Uncle Sam had used them both in top secret jobs and still did when needed.      The two young men, serious, neatly dressed, were about the same age as Joe X.      I shook hands with them. One was Clyde Baird, a brunet, the other Dan Partos, a redhead.      They introduced themselves. I shook hands with them. I knew I had never seen either before. But they looked vaguely familiar, a feeling that continued to grow inside me. It nagged at me, made me uneasy. If either had ever seen or heard of me before, neither gave any sign. I wished I hadn't sent for them, and instantly regretted my suspicion.      Both men stared at Joe X when I took them into my laboratory. Joe X stared back. I introduced everybody. Clyde Baird started forward to shake hands, stopped as I was stopped. Dan Partos stood fast, noting that something held his companion as if he had frozen in place.                              TRIN 14             Both turned and looked oddly at me.       "Ionized air, but more advanced," I explained, this explaining nothing.      What really interested me at the moment was that Joe X seemed not to know either man, nor did they show any signs of recognizing Joe X. Why I had suspected they might, I don't know, for I had chosen no laboratory suggested by Joe X. He hadn't suggested any; yet since he had mentioned the Red Book, he had suggested all of them that used telephones!      I explained what the two needed to know, told them it was highly secret. They nodded. We agreed on an honorarium. This done we turned our attention to the cylinder, Joe X. . . . and the three baseball-sized black balls which were a feature of the first scientific image. They rested at three corners of a kind of rack, also ebon, that seemed to stand, not float, just inside the cylinder, within easy reach of all three of us.            CHAPTER III of Trin      THE BIG MARBLES                  I NOTICED for the first time that the easy chair no longer sat squarely on the floor. It had risen to a foot or so above it. If Baird and Partos noticed they gave no sign. They did notice the black balls in the tray, or rack.      "What are they?" asked Partos.      I didn't know. I wasn't ready to explain.      "It's routine to turn solids into gases," I said, "by fire, by gas, by any number of ways. It's easy, simple, to reduce created things, forms, to their component parts rendering them, usually, invisible, though often still fragrant for a time. Here we are reversing the process We're taking what we need from the atmosphere and giving it visible form."      "How?" asked Baird. "And what are the black balls?"      "I don't know," I said. "We're trying to find out."      For some minutes we stared at the three black balls in the equally black tray. Each ball seemed to rest in a pocket, half of its sphere above the level of the tray. The balls were at the apices of an equilateral triangle about two feet on each side. I hadn't the slightest idea of what they were composed, or how they came to be where they were. I waited for enlightenment while Baird and Partos circled the cylinder, sat beside me again and said they could see the three blacks balls in the black tray, inside the cylinder, all the way around back to the starting point. But neither tray nor balls seemed to move.                        TRIN 15            There seemed no sense in what we saw. There was no possibility of getting close to them. They seemed to be about six feet inside the cylinder, above the spot where the shirking figure had stood, where the "Tibetans" had performed their weird operation. All three of us had had the experience of trying to step into that field. None had made it.      But nothing happened. There were no new figures, no change in the balls. Several minutes that seemed like hours, passed. Then the tray moved toward me until one side of it, in which was the pocket containing one of the balls, appeared to be outside the field.      It was a peculiar way for an "image", a "thought form", to behave. Theoretically, my theory was that only inside the field built up by the zranthon, was it possible for a mental image to be seen. Here was part of one proving the theory false.      It would not be tangible, of course. Like the shining figure and the Tibetans it was a thought, or thought sequence, empty of substance, weightless, intangible, virtually nonexistent.      I looked at Partos, to my right, at Baird to my left. They were waiting for me to make the obvious move. I made it, expecting no sensation whatever--and touched a solid thing with my extended hand! I felt the edge of the black tray. I touched the shape of the black ball clearly outside the zranthon field. It felt like a huge marble. It was somewhat larger than a baseball.      I came to a decision. I caught the tray by the corners, as a waiter would have done, withdrew it from the field. It remained intact. The black tray and the three black balls were still visible, tangible. I held the tray in my left hand, my hand under the tray's center. The whole thing weighed, at a guess, twenty pounds. I touched each of the three black balls with my fingers. All tangible, actual, of some material I did not know, causing a sensation in my fingertips like nothing I had ever experienced.      "Somehow," I muttered, "we've reversed a natural process. But what have we constructed? It isn't metal, wood, plastic...I don't know what it is."      I turned to the two assistants. I held my hand over one of the balls. I told Baird to hold one, Partos the third, to keep them from crashing to the floor, if they were free in their pocket, when I inverted the black tray.      Each of us held one of the black balls. Without looking, I placed the tray, with its three "pockets" on my chair. I didn't turn and look at Joe X. I sensed that he was watching. What did his "brainless" brain see in all this? I am frank to admit that I had no idea what we had done with my zranthon-ray tube, my zranthon field, and the strange brain of Joe X. Our real investigations began right here; we must find out. We might have something useful, something dangerous, something utterly without value. But we had manifested it.      I WAS AWARE of a peculiar happening. I moved, apparently without my own volition. Baird moved, his eyes popped on the ball held up in both hands. Partos moved. All three of us halted and I noticed that the three balls, as held by us, were now in the same relative position to one another as they had been when first seen inside the field.                        TRIN 16            But were they? What made me think this? I could see no differences between them. They were black-ball triplets, a quick visual examination indicated. I was trying to make too much of a mystery out of them. But I called the assistants' attention to the fact I have mentioned.      Deliberately then we shifted positions.      "Put the balls down on the floor!" I commanded.      We bent together, placed the balls carefully, holding them a few seconds to make sure none of us imparted impetus to any one of them. Of their own accord, then, they rolled, halted . . . in the same relative position they had been when first seen on the tray in the field!      There was still no reason to believe anything more than that of their own natural accord they rested in the form of an equilateral triangle, like water seeking its natural level. The balls still had no individuality.      I picked up one. Partos took one. Baird took the third. We separated by many feet, held the three balls high, allowed them to drop. I distinctly heard all three balls drop. They hesitated for a moment after they landed. Then they began to roll, to converge on one another.      They came close together, paused, moved this way and that as if maneuvered by invisible hands- -came to rest a second time in the shape of a black triangle! I thought, then, of turning to look at the tray on which they had manifested, at Joe X sitting inside the field. The black tray, with its empty pockets, seemed to be laughing at me, showing toothless black gums.      Joe X just sat. There were now no other images in the field. We three closed on the black balls, lifted them. They had been dropped, had made sounds ....      "The floor made sounds, not the balls!" I told Baird and Partos. "Do either of you have any idea what these balls are made of?"      "No!" they told me together. The balls seemed to be perfectly round, without blemish of any sort. I took time to examine each of the three. And dropping them on the floor hadn't so much as scratched one of them. Rolling in the dust which was never entirely absent from my laboratory, had left no dust on any of the three.      The balls had an eerie lustre of their own. I could not see into any of the three, nor did any one of them reflect my face. I suspected that they did not absorb or reflect light.      I placed a ball in the hand of each of my assistants, kept one.      "Find out what you can about them for two concentrated hours!" I commanded. They fell to with a will. So did I. I started first with my own hydraulic press. I shoved a ball into it, applied the pressure slowly at first. Nothing happened that I could see. The press touched the ball and stopped, literally, completely. Nothing I had ever before pressed so had failed to "give." Nothing                              TRIN 17            could. But the ball did. Even the most exacting vernier reading, before and during, indicated no difference. Maximum pressure was sixty-three thousand pounds.      The black ball, of unknown--as yet--material, was totally unaffected by the pressure. It was impossible. It was also true, unless I was seeing things.      And this ball came out of some eerie combination of Joe X's brain, the zranthon-ray tube, and my theories--working on the wild idea of a member of the "lunatic fringe!"      I took the ball out of the hydraulic press.      I examined it with my best microscope. Sixty-three thousand pounds of pressure hadn't so much as smudged it, or left a rough place on it. I could feel with my fingers--or find with my most precise micrometers!      It seemed to be a huge pupil-less black eye, staring at me, unblinking. I was almost afraid to stare back.      This thing had come somehow out of the brain of Joe X. I thought what would happen to his poor head, with the mark of trephining all the way around it, if I were to put the skull under the press and start applying it. It would crack like an eggshell at far less than the pressure applied to the black ball. Yet somehow, by thought, Joe X had produced it.      I had been seeking to show thought images, electrically manifested spooks if you will. I had never dreamed of producing form, certainly not spheres, trays, pockets in metal trays, triangles.      I let the ball rest for a moment, put the tray into the hydraulic press. I could do nothing with the tray, nothing. It seemed to be of the same material as the three balls. I tossed it aside. I caught up the ball again, as it was rolling toward the balls held by Baird and Partos, attempting to take position again, I knew.      I lighted a Bunsen burner, held the ball over the flames with a pair of tongs. No smudge appeared on the ball. Moreover the flame, when it touched the ball, stopped. It didn't penetrate, did not spread, and there was no slightest suggestion of soot!      I withdrew the ball, wetted my forefinger with saliva, touched the ball where the fire had touched it. I need not have been afraid of burning. The temperature had in no way been altered by the flame from the Bunsen burner!      I thrust the ball into my beer refrigerator, left it for half an hour, while I watched the frantic efforts of Baird and Partos to mar smudge, scratch or shatter the other two black balls. Then I removed the ball from the refrigerator. Its response to extreme cold was the same as to heat--nil!      DURING those two hours we smashed those three balls together. We flung them at the walls. We operated on them with diamond drills. We dropped them into a vat of acid that came as close to being a universal solvent as anything so far produced. The effect was--none! We dropped all                        TRIN 18            three balls into the vat at the same time, watched them roll into position, form the inevitable triangle.      I began to wonder about the triangle. So did the other two. We tried something. I pasted a green one-cent stamp to one ball, a red two-cent stamp to a second, a blue three-cent stamp to a third. Then we allowed the balls to form their triangle, took measurements.      The triangle formed was always definitely equilateral, each side 23.978-plus inches long! We experimented a score of times. The triangle always formed in the same way, exactly. The ball bearing the green stamp always took a position which would have placed it directly on a due north-south line. A perpendicular drawn from the center of a line connecting the other two balls, extended northward, would have passed directly under the center of the green-stamp ball.      Why?      What was the significance of the triangle? Of the three balls? What eerie force, acting outside the field which had brought them into visible actuality, pulled them back into the triangular shape when they were free? Why did nothing we did to them effect them in the slightest?      But wait a moment, the stamps stuck to them! As if in answer to the thought, the stamps fell off!      We had exhausted our ingenuity for a moment. We had done everything we could to smash, mar, smudge, shatter or smear the three black balls. Nothing had happened. We stood above the triangle, staring down.      As if our concentration were an awaited signal, as if The Moment had come, all three balls rolled about, each about its own apex of the triangle, with a startling eccentricity, considering that they were perfect spheres. They wobbled! We hadn't altered the shape of any of the three. Now, apparently, something had!      But what?      We bent, lifted the black balls.      I discovered the odd bars on the surface of the ball I held. Baird exclaimed. Patros[sic] swore. There were odd bars on each of the three balls. I couldn't see the bars in the one I held, because they were merely upraised ebony. But they formed a triangle on the surface of the ball, a triangle which my fingers told me was equilateral, later proved correct. The same measurement proved that a perpendicular drawn from the exact center of either of the three sides to the opposing angle, the junction of the other two sides, was exactly 3.769 inches long!      Each ball was exactly the same size. Each triangle on the face of each sphere was the same throughout!                                          TRIN 19             Out of the zranthon field, then, had come three exact measurements--those of the triangle formed by the balls in relation to one another, the three triangles on the surfaces of the three balls, and the sizes of the three balls.      These mathematical facts must have some meaning.      I had not the slightest idea what it could be. Neither, I realized, had Baird or Partos.      No three men had ever been more enthusiastic for investigation.      We went to work on the small triangles with our fingers--as if they had been the dials of ebon safes.            CHAPTER IV of Trin      WHITHER PARTOS?                  SINCE MY experiments for years had been with mentality, with thoughts, I could scarcely have picked a better assistant than Joe X. He was the supreme egocentric. Since he had been very little he had been anti-social. All his thoughts, feelings, emotions, had turned inward, to a complete absorption in self. His life was almost entirely mental. It had been so for almost his entire twenty-five years. If his background had really been what he must often have feared, if he had been, were, illegitimate, his mother's mental and spiritual turmoil must have had its effect on him in his infancy.      He was perfect for my purposes. I knew that with his help I would discover the facts about the mental screen the lunatic fringer had foreseen for man, when he should have advanced, far in the future, to a place beyond anything yet known.      I began to form some queasy suspicions about Joe X; suspicions which nevertheless filled me with excitement.      These black balls were in our hands via the mind of Joe X. I did not for a moment believe him mindless in spite of what I had seen in the field with reference to his "operation." He could have made that for me, deliberately, to bolster his own story of his past.      Joe X seemed to know everything--why did he not know, why was he kept from knowing, that he was a trin?      I liked mystery, but was never satisfied until I had solved it, and the more abstruse the better. There had been no bumps, certainly no raised triangles, on the three black balls. Now there were. Their number had significance. Three balls. Three triangles Three sides of each triangle the same length. The balls themselves naturally rolling to a position fanning a larger triangle.                        TRIN 20            Here was a means of communication grown out of another, far in the future, means of communication.      I fetched a small table, set the tray in its exact center. I took the north ball position, placed Baird to my left near the second ball, Partos to my right near the third ball.      "We'll experiment on something new in Chinese checkers," I said. "I'll keep track. This is the way safe crackers of real skill find the combinations of safes. They keep eliminating. Now, raise your hands above the black balls. Your left hands, since I must use my left, my right being occupied by a pencil and paper."      They obeyed me, first moving the balls in the tray pockets until an apex of each equilateral triangle was directly opposite each man's chest.      "Now, with your left thumb," I said, "press on the left side of your triangle. Run your thumb up and down, back and forth. Twist. Keep working it until I tell you to stop--just the one side!"      We all did the same. I wrote down what we were doing, to avoid future duplication of effort. Nothing happened that we could see.      "Now, use your thumb on the right-hand side!"      This we all did. I made the record.      "Now, thumb on right side, forefinger on left side. Twist, press, run your thumbs and forefingers up and down!"      Still nothing happened. Three black eyes seemed to stare and glare at me, to mock me utterly. I felt like a fool, but in working with the human mind--and what else is there--one often does.      Press both thumb and forefinger on the base of your triangle as if you were operating a telegraph key!"      That produced nothing, either.      I tried every combination of which I could think, carefully recording each one. In every possible way we twisted, pulled and hauled on the three triangles. In an hour we were sweating from head to foot. Then I called for time out, copied off what we had so far done, gave each man a slip, turned them loose to experiment as they saw fit. I could think of no fresh combinations of three.      ALL THE time Joe X sat in the zranthon field as if in a catyleptic[sic] state. I wondered if he were conscious of all we did.      Were we, with all our blundering, actually twisting and turning the brain of Joe X? The thought gave me the shudders. I had applied the hydraulic press, we had smashed the things to the floor, against walls, worked diamond drills on them, dropped them into acids. And yet, if we actually                        TRIN 21            were taking liberties with some strange offshoot of the brain of Joe X, could we be shocking it any more than life had so far shocked Joe X himself? It occurred to me that the human brain, even the one eighth part which science claimed to know a little about, was about the toughest thing in existence. Even insanity didn't harm it much.      I was looking at Dan Partos when it happened, but I couldn't for the life of me detail just what occurred. Partos swore, became impatient. He raised his right hand high, brought it down, palm flat, against the triangle on his black ball. That action was one I hadn't thought of, though it was the most obvious of all.      I think I saw Partos' palm contact the triangle. I wouldn't swear that it actually touched. There was no time involved. I saw the palm, swiftly descending, driven by Partos' anger, frustration and impatience--and Partos no longer existed! That's what I said. His chair was empty! It was as if he had never even been there. I stared at the ball he had slapped. Nothing had happened to it. Baird looked at me with something utterly queer in his face. Then he felt in the empty chair for Partos. His hand played through the space which Partos had occupied. It encountered nothing he could, in any way, feel.      Partos was not!      The first expression of macabre humor then came from Joe X, out of the zranthon field. An eerie chuckle came, unmistakably, from the lips of the man whose mind we were using in this series of experiments. We had no idea where Partos was.      Baird slid into Partos' chair, stared at the black ball.      "It's smooth again," he said softly. "The triangle is gone!"      I stared at my own black ball. It still had the raised bars, the perfect triangle. Baird, his face white as a sheet, slid back into his own chair, stared at the third ball. It bore the bars which formed the perfect triangle. Only Partos' ball was smooth again, as if his slap had driven the raised portions back into the ball. But we knew that sixty-three thousand pounds of pressure could not do that, for we had had one of the balls, triangle uppermost, in the press. Not the slap, but the combination, had altered Partos' black marble!      "Dollars to doughnuts," croaked Baird, "Partos dived right inside the black ball!      Joe X answered that, to my startlement.      "No! He's in the room, unhurt!"      Joe X was again the topflight liar. We could see everywhere in the laboratory, and Partos simply wasn't anywhere. He was as big a man as Joe X, could not be hidden, any more than he could have been compressed into the black ball.                                    TRIN 22            Just the same, Baird and I rose and began hunting for Partos. We looked in the most unlikely places. He wasn't anywhere.      One place, the one we could not search, was the only spot left: the zranthon field. We had never so far been able to enter it.      "He's inside the field," I said, "but he's not a mental image. The ball must have provided some channel into the field, since it came out of it.      THE OBVIOUS thought came to me, making my heart stop. There was only one way to be sure and I doubted if I had the nerve to try it. It was like volunteering to die to find out what happened during death, with only someone's theory to make you feel secure that there was a mechanical return available.      I stared at Baird. His face was at least as white as mine must be. We didn't have to exchange words to understand that the same thought had struck both of us. I could volunteer to go hunting into the invisible, or into the field, but that would leave Baird alone outside, lacking my meager knowledge of the attributes of the zranthon-ray tube. I could not go and leave Baird.      I could not send him, deliberately, not knowing how to return him. I could not rely too much on Joe X, whose brain had produced the incomprehensible black balls, the series of triangles, one of which had disappeared now with Dan Partos.      "Both Plato and Socrates," I had read somewhere, "required students who wished to master philosophy to take courses in pure mathematics. Both great teachers regarded mathematics as the correct introduction because cold reason was needed in all solutions, which could in no wise be effected by emotion."      The black balls, the main triangles, the small triangles, were symbols, signals, code! But try and prove it!      "If something happens to us," I said, as Baird and I faced each other across the remaining two balls on which the raised trilogy appeared, "Joe X, Carse Ryal Smith, will be all right. He can exit from where he is at will!"      "I wasn't thinking of him," said Baird quietly, firmly, "but of my friend Dan Partos. I'm afraid, but wherever he is, he may need my help. Let's go!"      We held up our palms to begin the slap. It was like a mutual salute. We looked down at the balls so as not to miss. We held our breaths as our hands went down, struck the two balls.      There was no effect whatever!      The combination which had worked for Partos did not work for either of us. The balls, then, were individual. Each was different from the other, though in no way we could yet explain. Yes, there                              TRIN 23            was now an explainable difference: our two balls bore the triangles, Partos' big marble did not. But much good did the knowledge do us!      Yet in the smooth ball and perhaps the two triangled black spheres was hidden the mystery of the disappearance of Dan Partos. It nested also, I felt sure, in the brain of Joe X.      "Where is he?" I asked Joe X.      "It has to be a matter of record to be worth anything," said Joe X. "There is an experiment which will show it. It must be made. Otherwise it remains the figment of your mind, my mind, and the zranthon-ray tube's diffusion of the two together!"      That really made a lot of sense, didn't it?      "We've got to try again with both balls," said Baird. We sat down to it. We went over the combinations again. Both of us twisted the balls in their pockets, altering the locations of the apices--and crashed our palms down on them, to no effect. We twisted the tray around. We did everything, and nothing was of any use.      FINALLY we set the two barred balls aside and concentrated our attention on the smooth one. After all it had figured somehow in the disappearance of Dan Partos. We got nowhere.      "I wish it were small enough to swallow!" said Baird in exasperation. "Or that I had a big mouth!"      "The only way we can consume the ball," I said, "is by doing it mentally. After all, it's a thought- form! We can try."      We placed the ball on the table between us, pushing aside the tray which held the other two balls. We stared into it, or at it, since one could not see into it. I don't know what Baird did, but I tried to enter into the ball, to become one with its secret, to merge with it. I blanked out everything else, and for some minutes several queer things happened. I found myself swimming in mountainous seas. I had been, I knew, torpedoed. It was so real I could have yelled in terror, if the shining figure hadn't stood upon the water beside me and told me I was not to die. I was picked up by a British destroyer, and that was also very real.      I began to realize that if I could "hold a thought" with this ball as the center, I could participate in the life of Joe X. I could test the truth of his stories, could experience his experiences, all written indelibly on his subconscious, whence the balls and tray had come. I deliberately switched to the orphanage, and found myself hanging by a stout rope. Again the shining figure, and I was literally cut down.      I would know, now, about the missing two trins...      It did not seem possible that Joe X should be in ignorance of them. Nor was he! He knew, but did not know that he knew. The two brothers-in-one-birth were part of Joe X, but he had never                        TRIN 24            consciously known of them, as so carefully had his past been hidden from Joe X, he had never suspected with his outer mind. But it was utterly impossible to separate from one another, completely, three who had lain together in the womb.      Excitement grew in me.      The three black balls were, in some eerie fashion, Joe X himself and his brethren! The desire on Joe X's part to sluff[sic] off life grew out of his inability to rejoin his trin brothers. He did not know of them, only that something was missing from him, from his spiritual inner, which he felt he would never find.      Where were those two brothers? I sought the answer, while concentrating on the black ball, in the orphanage, somewhere out west. I got nowhere. They had never been in the orphanage which had had charge of Joe X. I had to go back beyond that in time, but could not, because Joe X had never been back beyond that--as far as his brethren--during his conscious life.      I began to realize that the tray had a bleak, sinister, fearful meaning! Normally, it held the black marbles. It must also hold their secrets!      Had Joe X hated his mother? Was that why the tray was black?      I was deeply involved in these and other absurd questions which might or might not have meaning, when I was jerked back to consciousness of my surroundings.      Joe X, somewhat fearful and restrained, was calling me by name. I looked around. Clyde Baird was no longer present!      I LOST no time clutching the remaining two balls, studying their surfaces. Two balls were now entirely smooth. The Unknown had swallowed Clyde Baird as completely as it had swallowed Daniel Partos!      I stared at Joe X.      "Where's Baird? Did you see him go?"      "I saw him go," said Joe X. "He wasn't even watching the other two balls. He was staring into the smooth ball as you were. Without apparently thinking about it, he put his hand aside. He must have touched one of the balls in the right way, or...I don't know. He just disappeared."      "Where is he?"      "With Partos!"      "And where is Partos?" I demanded, my voice utterly shrill with my rising terror.                                    TRIN 25            "Baird and Partos are the answers to your experiment, over in the back of the book," said Joe X. "You could get the answers from me, perhaps, but the method of attaining them would remain forever unknown. You have to work it out!"      "I need help, plenty of help," I complained. But I can't keep getting assistants from other laboratories, to have them vanish without trace. What am I going to say to their employers when they don't show up, anyway?"      "They must show up," said Joe X. "We must find them, restore them to here! Somehow, I must help you. I don't see how, but we can experiment. I can always return to the field if things don't go right, and you'll be no worse off than you now are!"      Joe X stepped down from the easy chair, pushing aside the zranthon armrest. He walked easily out of the field to stand beside the table with me. He stood there, studying the three balls. Just so, I thought, a man might stare at his own brain if by some weird necromancy it could be removed, the man remain alive to stare!      One thing I had to get set right now. I had to give us plenty of time. I couldn't have the laboratory which had sent Baird and Partos, bringing police in on us. How could we explain the inexplicable? Not even the most enlightened cop was going to listen very long to my story of the zranthon ray while two young ex-GI's were obviously missing. They'd take the laboratory apart, cart Joe X and me off to jail.      That I knew, would spell catastrophe.      I telephoned the laboratory, explained somewhat haltingly that I was in the midst of a delicate experiment and would need the services of Baird and Partos for at least seventy-two hours more, perhaps even longer.      The director of that laboratory, with whom I was sure I had negotiated for the services of Baird and Partos, answered me with a delicate sarcasm--which still had the effect of a battering-ram smashed against the skull.      "In view of the fact that, not since I have been this laboratory's director, and that's been for fifteen years, have we had any assistants named either Baird or Partos, you may keep 'em from now on for all of me!"      Thoughtfully I clicked down the receiver, turned back to the table where Joe X studied the black balls.      I studied this strange, unearthly now outre-seeming man with a new fascination. He looked like anybody else, more or less, his size and shape. He appeared a fairly decent sort of chap.      But was he anything whatever that he appeared to be, however queer or normal?                                    TRIN 26            CHAPTER V of Trin      BOOTSTRAPS OF JOE X                  JOE X seemed trying his best to help me, but ever and anon I thought I detected a secretive smile on his face. I early began to wonder if he were not in some fashion the monster to my Frankenstein. A tremendous change had taken place in him, caused, I thought, by his lengthy immersion in the zranthon field.      After Joe X came out of the field I tried to enter it, just to discover if his emergence changed it in any way. It did not. The field remained. I returned to Joe X, busily hunting the way to the solution of any basic problem. I had proved to my own satisfaction that the mental screen was possible, not in some future age, but here and now. Future ages might produce people naturally endowed with the screen; I'd settle for it as a mechanical thing which men could sell--like telephones, radio, television.      I sat down across the table from Joe X, who was handling the black balls, staring at them almost stupidly. The man appeared to be hypnotized still.      Immediately after the disappearance of Baird, but one of the three balls had been distorted by the raised triangle. Now I took all three from Joe X's hand, to discover that all three were utterly smooth!      How did it happen that the third triangle was no more, as if its mission had been accomplished, and nobody had disappeared? There had been no change at all, except that Joe X had stepped out of the field! Was that the reason?      Hitherto Joe X had seemed utterly brilliant. Now I was not so sure. He could have been a moron coming out of a coke jag.      "How do you like the zranthon treatment, Joe?" I asked.      He seemed not to hear me at first. Then he stirred, looked up at me. His tongue must have been as furred as his mind, because it was almost impossible to understand him when he answered:      "Zranthon? Zranthon? What's that?"      Yet prior to going into the field he had told me, its inventor, all about it. What had happened to the man, anyway?      I stared at the big black marbles and wondered even more. The eerie lustre seemed to be going out of them. They had hitherto seemed alive. Now I scarcely knew what to think. Good pearls come to life on the neck of a vivacious, beautiful woman. Lying shut away in a drawer they lose                              TRIN 27            their appearance of life. These huge black "pearls" were doing the same thing. They almost seemed to be dying!      "I don't know what's happening to them," I said to Joe X. "We did all we could to destroy them. Nothing worked. Now that you are out of the field, they're dying. When we put top pressure on them...."      Joe X seemed not to hear me at all. He was holding one of the balls in his right hand. Whether in answer to my statement, never completed, about applying pressure, or as a reflex action of has own, I don't know, but Joe X closed his hand on that ball. It shattered in his grip. It didn't break like an eggshell. It didn't crack, or rupture; it shattered!      Without looking up at me Joe X dribbled the ashen remains of the ball into the tray pocket whence he had lifted it. It overflowed the pocket about enough to prove to me that it had been a solid. There was nothing inside it different from what I had seen outside. The ashes of the black ball were as black as the ball had been.      Joe X reached for the second ball. I was afraid, for he was a powerful man, mentally disintegrating before my eyes.      "No, Joe," I said. I expected him to react violently, maybe even attack me, try to kill me. His brain was struggling with some problem I could not reach. I remembered his statement that he had something inside his head in lieu of a brain, the brain being kept alive in far-off Shanghai. Was the substitute now deteriorating? Was Joe X dying mentally, even as the black balls were dying?      I feared so, but I was going to take risks. There was so much I did not know. How his money was replenished, for one thing--if it was; what brought about his "lapses" and how he traveled while they lasted.      I knew, considering his obvious and continuing deterioration, that I was violating no secret with my next statement.      "You are a trin, Joe, did you know that?"      He didn't lift his head. He merely stared at the ashes of the black ball he had crushed.      "Carse Ryal Smith," I said. He raised his head, looked at me with eyes as lacklustre as the black marbles.      "You are a trin," I said. "You have two brothers, did you know that?"      "Of course," he muttered, as if someone else were speaking for him. "We all have two brothers, or two sisters. One is Yesterday, one is Self, one is Tomorrow! We always seek them. We never find them. That is why we are always empty, sad, unsatisfied, resentful, hating--we are never whole! Fate keeps us forever incomplete. But I had hoped when I came to you. . . .                        TRIN 28            HE LOST track of the thread of his speech then, could not find it again. It was as if someone had shut him off, kicked his shins under the table lest he reveal too much. What he said, if there were any sense in it, opened up a whole new realm of investigation to me. It seemed fairly obvious that a man lived in his present and his past, looking forward to the future--usually for some utopian perfection forever moving away ahead of him. Was this what Joe X meant? Was this the meaning of the esoteric statement that man was triune and timeless?      I shook my head, casting off the cobwebs spun by the lunatic fringe of whom I had read too much. A man couldn't put his past or his future on the scales and read it. Only the psychologist and psychiatrist could analyze a man's past, and who could prove whether they were right or wrong?      I set Joe X's remarks down for the babblings of a brain unguided, unsparked, last words poured out of it like last drops poured from a water bottle.      Joe X forgot the ashes of the one ball, forgot the other two balls. He rose from the chair, as if he were lifting a tremendous weight. He wasn't fat, didn't look any older, but he moved as if he weighed many times a hundred and eighty, and were an octogenarian. It was most strange. On top of that the other two balls were becoming of no interest whatever. They were almost dead. Now I could crush one myself, I thought. I did it, just to assure myself.      Then I crushed the third ball. I don't know exactly why I dumped each handful of ashes into the pocket in the tray whence the ball had come.      I took note of the tray.      It was not changing at all! It looked as mocking, as wise, as ever. I could almost hear its laughter.      Joe X had paid no attention to the tray. Now Joe X was walking around the laboratory. He looked at each implement I used in my work. My stuff was the last word, and very expensive. If I couldn't buy the best I didn't buy. Joe X lifted various items, my microcamera, my microscope, my calipers, my weighing devices, my osmotic syntheses, my electrolytic jars. He slammed each one down afterward while an expression of utter contempt touched his features. His face was now that of an imbecile--what right had he to be contemptuous of my topnotch equipment?      "What's wrong with the microcamera, Joe?" I demanded.      "Fifteen thousand years behind the times!" he said. "Thought form of a congenital idiot!"      That gave me the creeps, for certain, though everything the man said and did seemed to be a door opening. Yet when the door stood open I lacked the vision to see beyond it entirely. Just hints, glimpses, ideas. I must put them together. Then they would be something.      Heavily Joe X walked around the laboratory.                              TRIN 29            I would have sworn the floor sagged sometimes under his weight.      "Joe," I said gently, "how long has it been since you weighed? How about stepping on the scales?"      Had the zranthon field, building itself up to where it operated successfully as a mental screen, so successfully in fact that thought forms became material forms, filled Joe X himself with material, making him heavy beyond any man's right, mentally and physically?      Joe X looked around him stupidly, located the scales, lumbered toward them. He got up. I was right behind him. The urge to boost him almost overcame me. I felt he might resent it. And he was a mighty man at this point, slow though he was.      THE INDICATOR on the scales shot to the limit. There was a whirring, a crashing sound, and the scales were useless! They weighed up to an even one thousand pounds. Joe X had not been too careful, stepping up, yet if he had jumped up and down on it he could scarcely have done the damage he had now done merely by ponderously mounting.      Joe X got down, looked at me, then back at his easy chair within the zranthon field.      "Joe," I said, "where did Baird and Partos come from?"      He snickered.      "You needn't worry," he said. "they're back there!"      I thought as much, and I didn't mean by that that they were back at the laboratory where I had at first been so sure I had got them.      "Joe," I pursued my train of thought, "may I have all the money you have in your pocket?"      He didn't hesitate. He was slow, fearsomely slow and ponderous, but he delved into his pocket, came out with a worn wallet, tendered it to me. I took out all the money it held--five worn twenty dollar bills. I carefully noted their serial numbers, thinking myself a gullible fool as I did so, then thrust the bills into my pocket, returned the billfold to Joe X.      I kept trying to analyze this new mysterious, stupid Joe X. He was bigger than he had been by far, but not in size. It was as if his bigness extended outward, invisible and intangible, as if he bore an unseen burden. He was taller by far, though still but six feet. His voice was the same, but blurred, as if it were a radio being jammed, as if his tongue were thick with anesthetic or numbness.      He was a muted dynamo, a powerhouse under the sea, a blanketed lightning flash. If ever he were freed...but by whom or what could he be freed? I sensed that the freeing, and with it a murderous destructive devastation, might come at any moment. Yet knowing this, feeling that                              TRIN 30            certain security was mine only while Joe X sat inside the zranthon field, I kept putting off the moment.      If this monster who looked just as he had, yet didn't, got out of hand, went berserk, I was a dead man. I would never solve the secret of the disappearance of Baird and Partos. I'd never know the complete formula for the mental screen, or the secrets of the tray, the triangles and the black marbles.      "Joe," I said, "who took you to the orphanage? Did anybody there ever tell you?"      "Nobody took me," he answered. "I just went. I was just there. I used to ask. The women always looked at one another, scared, but nobody ever said. I asked if my mother took me. Nobody told me yes or no. But they said she was beautiful."      "How did you feel about your mother?" I went on.      "The same as I do now."      "How is that?"      "I hate her completely. If I could get my hands on her I would tear her apart. She reminds me, when I allow myself to think of her, of my blackest moments."      "And the shining figure in your escapes from death," I pursued. "Does she never remind you of your mother?"      "She?" he repeated. "The shining figure is that of a man!"      "Are you sure, Joe? Would you listen, even to save your life, if it were a woman?"      He shut up then, refusing to talk further. I looked back at the black ashes in the pockets in the tray. They were as they had been. The tray, of all things in the laboratory connected with the experiment, remained unchanged.      I had pushed time, and Joe X, and destiny, to the last split second--in the sacred name of science.      "Joe," I said, "you'd better go back into the field and sit down. We still have work to do."      OBEDIENTLY the lumbering man entered the zranthon field. Not until he was inside did I realize what a tremendous mental feat he had performed. I had not been able to do it, else I'd never have run that ad, asking for an assistant. Joe X, quitting the field to experiment with his own thought forms, to help me, give me hints, had actually, in effect lifted himself by his bootstraps. He had gone out and come in at the same time. He had risen and dropped at the same time. He had spoken and remained silent at the same time. He had done something no human being of whom I had ever heard--even the "masters" of the esoteric--could do.                              TRIN 31            Nor was that all. He sat down in the easy chair, closed the third arm, leaned tiredly on it. I heard a click from the tray, turned. There could have been no click. There was no time!      The three black balls, lustre, life and all, reposed in their pockets in the black tray. Something, something which I could not grasp mentally, for just a moment, had restored the balls to their ebon perfection from the ashes we had made of them! What? "Contact" effected when Joe X and the zranthon field again became en rapport?      Out of the field, in Joe X's normal voice, came this:      "You now have all the elements of your mystery, Mr. Lowre," he said. "I can show you no more, tell you no more! With superhuman effort I have told you more than I should have--against most impressive opposition!"      In a lefthanded way he was explaining why he had seemed such a lumbering idiot, outside the zranthon field.      Yes, I had an inkling. But some mysteries remained, of which the most important were these: (l) who were those Tibetan monks in yellow robes! (2) What, actually, was the shining figure which seemed to stand between Joe X and death? (3) Whither had Partos and Baird gone?      I knew the meaning of the triangles, esoteric as well as scientific, but could not put the meaning into words, therefore could not prove their meaning in this particular experiment.      I needed several things.      I needed, first, a physical connection for the black tray which, throughout all this mental maneuvering, had not changed in the slightest.      Leaving Joe X in the field, apparently recuperating, I left the laboratory, the house, repaired to the nearest telegraph office; where I spent every bit of cash I owned, including the one hundred dollars I had taken from Joe X.      If my theory was correct, my next assistant would be a woman, a specially selected one!      I placed these new ads by telegram, prepaid. I scattered them somewhat, feeling inspired.      Even as I did so I wondered again about Baird and Partos, particularly about the telephone call by which I had first obtained their Services. With whom, actually, had I talked? Had my selection of that laboratory been the whim I had thought it.      The silly idea came to me: It didn't matter who you telephoned, you'd have got Baird and Partos!      I really believed that; but who had them now, and why?                                    TRIN 32            CHAPTER VI of Trin      ASSISTANT FROM NOWHERE                  WILL MOTHER OF CARSE RYAL SMITH KINDLY CONTACT DR. CHESTER LOWRE 211X Riverside Drive, New York City.      That's the ad I shipped out to fifty newspapers scattered around over the United States. How did I select the newspapers? Just as I thought I had selected the laboratory which I thought had sent me Baird and Partos. I had a feeling that if fate intended me to find the woman I would find her. She would. . . I had no idea what steps she would take.      Much time must pass.      "We haven't eaten anything for forty-eight hours, Joe," I suggested.      "I could do with something," he said. That soothed me. I half expected him to ignore me or say that while he was inside the field, busy with thinking, he had no need for food. I rang for Zack, told him to bring food enough for four men. He looked around an amazement, shaking his head. He was always expecting the unexpected of me. Why was I ordering food for four when there were obviousely[sic] but two of us present?      "We haven't eaten for forty-eight hours, Zack," I said lamely, on the defensive before my underling. "Besides, we're expecting company."      Zack set up a table where I told him, just outside the cylinder. He never came in contact with it, or he would have thrown a fit. But it had its effect on him. His hair stood straight out from his head like a fright wig. He felt it, put his hand to his hair, looked at me accusingly.      "You're always funning with the old man," he said. "Only, you don't look as if it's any fun!"      "Zack," I said, "it isn't, not a bit!"      Joe X stood inside the cylinder to eat. He wolfed his food. He was rapidly becoming the Joe X I had studied at the height of his powers in the zranthon field. I was hungry enough, but nothing compared to Joe X. He ate, and ate, and ate!      When he had done I pushed the table back, Joe X returned to the easy chair. I studied the tray and the black balls, all of them now completely smooth. No, now that Joe X had returned--what other reason could there have been?--the third ball showed the black ridges of the third and last mysterious triangle. When that triangle vanished, with Joe X still inside the field, there would be some sort of solution to my problem of the future of man--the mental screen which would make misunderstandings between man and man impossible.                              TRIN 33            "Joe," I said, "I want you, if you're strong enough, to form on the screen the thought-forms I mention.      "Shoot!" he replied. "I think you're cooking with gas! You're fumbling, but do scientists of this day and age ever do anything else?"      "Should I name what I want to see, or merely think it?"      Either, but saying it makes it easier. Remember, though, what you think, and what I think when you speak, may be entirely different. Then again, Mr. Lowre, you can make thoughts on the zranthon field, from right where you are!"      "By holding the balls, one or all of them or the tray with balls, in my hands?" I asked. "I've been wondering about that."      "There are combinations, always," said Joe X. "Two combinations have been operated. They 'translated' Baird and Partos!" He chuckled, as he had once before, as if he knew something so obvious I should know.      "Let's leave it for later, Joe," I said. I wanted to work up to something gradually, not obviously, so that Joe X would not suspect my motives.      "I'm thinking, and picturing in my mind," I said to Joe X, "A winding black water stream in Central Brazil, the Cururu ...."      I saw the river very plainly as I thought it out to him. I thought it in detail, and willed him to show it on the field.      HE MANAGED a river, but it was no river I had ever seen. It represented Joe X's reflection of my thought, what he gathered from my detailed mental description. Its waters were clearly black, because I had said black--but Joe X had to fight mentally to make them black. They varied from colorless to light green, to blue, to brown, to black.      "A church," I said next. I thought of a little church I had seen in the jungles of Haiti, long ago. I named the church, began to describe it. Instantly Joe X thought it forth on the mental screen. This time the church varied in many details from what I remembered of it, but it was recognizable as the native church at Ounaminthe.      "That's scarcely fair, Mr. Lowre," said Joe X. "I've visited that identical church, within the last year!"      "Even so, it's far from the way I remember it," I said. "What I can't understand, as this experiment progresses, is how we ever manage to understand, one another at all. I'm accustomed to people reading into letters what I never wrote, and adhering to the meanings even when I insisted in person and face to face that nothing of the kind was intended, but now I can                              TRIN 34            comprehend even words of explanation are more or less wasted. People simply don't understand one another! They're not supposed to."      "Not while they are prevented from communicating directly, without the use of synthetic channels--like telephones, words, gestures, smiles. When man speaks mind to mind there will be no misunderstandings. But he must earn his way by learning!"      I shut off his sermonizing by shooting a series of words at Joe X.      "Show me a paxiuba palm tree!"      He showed me a cocoanut[sic] palm, vastly different.      "Now a two foot square of koa wood!"      He showed me a square of mahogany! Even Joe X had to laugh, a bit ruefully.      "Anyway," he said, "it's real mahogany. Take it out if you want."      I didn't. I erased the thought form by substituting another, the only way mankind can really exercise control over his thoughts.      "You 'create' mahogany, then destroy it, erase it," I said to Joe X. "I wonder if all the forms we see, everywhere in the world, are mancreated things which have escaped from mental screens?"      Joe X did not answer. I could tell that he was wondering what I was leading up to. He knew that I would not be asking questions aimlessly, just to kill time. Did he know of the telegraphed advertisements I had just broadcast? I had told him nothing of them.      "Show me a waterspout," I said next. "Now, Niagara Falls! Now, the Empire State Building" I gave him time only to outline these various things, then spoke others. "Now show me a streamlined train! Now a Skymaster plane! Now a set of pool balls, correctly numbered, racked up to start the game" he did this one quicker than the others, I'm pretty certain he didn't have the stripes and colors correct. I wasn't too sure because I couldn't myself remember! That could well be a flaw in communications when the mental screen became a commonplace: man might very well not know what he was thinking about!      "I'd like to see your shining figure again" I tried to make it casual. There was a bit of hesitation. I had the feeling, though, that it wasn't because of anything suspicious in my request. To Joe X the shining figure was one to be reverenced, a supernatural being of great spiritual power and beauty.      I SENSED, for the first time, great struggle, emotions warring against emotions, belief against lack of it. I saw the shining figure begin to take shape as a thought form. Then I saw something else: the thought form taking charge, helping Joe X to manifest the shining figure. The whole time required to bring the shining figure into such complete form as to make him seem an actual                        TRIN 35            person. My pulse hammered in my brain. The black balls were real forms, solids, material--could the shining figure be real also? In Joe X's past experiences, when he had been thwarted of committing suicide, when he had been saved from drowning, saved from death in an airplane crash, Joe X could not possibly have produced the shining figure as a thought-form. But what was hallucination but a thought-form, a phantasm?      The shining figure was no phantasm, I knew when I remembered. No phantasm could have pulled my stepladder into the cylinder which was the zranthon field.      The shining figure, if asked, if it so elected, could walk out of that field and explain itself, in words, gestures, expressions!      But as the form became more sharply etched, more material, the face became more serious. The shining figure did shine, with an unearthly brilliance. That shining did not make me think of the phosphorescence from dead things, from the tomb; it made me think of what the aura should be, if any such thing existed. It made me think of the shining aureole about the heads of angels. But there was a light around this figure, in the midst of which it stood.      I was going to call the figure by name, ask it to step forth from the zranthon field and explain itself to me. I knew positively that the entity represented there could answer any question about the mental screen I could ask. Why? Because, I felt sure, the figure knew all about it, used it, operated in some plane where man did not have to await the passage of aeons to possess the ability to operate the screen naturally.      On the verge of extending an invitation to the shining figure I came to a dead stop, mentally. The figure must have read my mind as surely as if I were using a mental screen--for it shook its head, almost imperceptibly! It was part and parcel of Joe X, but it was individual. Joe X did not shake the head of the shining figure, mentally; the shining figure shook its own head!      Yet there was promise in the headshake. The lips shaped words. I did not hear the words, was not intended to hear them, yet the thought was pictured forth in my mind in these words:      "Do not ask me now. It shall happen, very soon!"      Then the shining figure, giving me a smile in which I read a weird ineffable sweetness, a vast, awesome satisfaction--almost as if I were somehow bringing about an event long hoped for, endlessly deferred--vanished from the field, completely.      "Now, Joe," I said, "show me Cleopatra's needle! Grant's Tomb! The Lincoln Memorial!"      I stopped right there. Joe X, though he had not changed, showed me nothing after the disappearance from the screen of his shining figure. I stared at Joe X. This time he touched his ears again. He could not hear me. Soon his face took on that blank look which told me he could no longer see me. This had happened before, when something had been building up in the mental screen.                              TRIN 36            What agency was building up the force? Not Joe X's mind, not mine. I was sure, for I did not think of blocking out Joe X from normal sight and sound, and I doubted very much if it were any idea of Joe's.      For two solid hours I waited for Joe X to be in communication with me again, and it did not happen. He just sat there, motionless, as if he were solidly frozen in a cake of ice.      THUS IT was when Zack came to me, visibly disturbed, to tell me that a lady was waiting to see me in my almost-never-used reception room in the main part of my home.      "Old, Zack?" I asked softly.      "I don't know what to say sir, except that she doesn't look like the kind that aged!"      "Beautiful, Zack?"      "Mr. Lowre," he said fervently, almost reverently, "she's something out of a picture! She is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. That's not just my idea as a man. My wife says exactly the same thing, in more and better words!"      I glanced back at Joe X. He knew nothing of what went on. I followed Zack to the sitting room. The woman rose to meet me. I went forward, took her hand. It was warm, human, gentle, perfectly formed. I scarcely know how to describe Marya Madone. You lost yourself, looking into her eyes. You couldn't think anything wrong, looking at her. Her face was exquisite. Her hair was auburn. I suppose it was combed, dressed somehow, but I'll never be able to describe it- -not until the mental screen becomes natural! Yet I'll forget no slightest detail of it.      "Chester Lowre," she murmured, her voice like a far off singing breeze, "I doubt very much if you can imagine how I feel! You are making possible a meeting I had never hoped would be possible. I am afraid. I should not be afraid, I know, but I can't help it."      She spoke English, with an accent I could not place. I knew, at the same time, that no philologist, however experienced, could place it, either, for the very best of reasons: this woman's native tongue was unknown to philologists! But that's getting ahead of the experiment.      "You are the mother of Carse Ryal Smith," I said, making it a statement rather than a question. She did not bother to answer. She knew that I knew.      "I told you we should meet again!" she smiled, a smile that would go with me through eternity.      "Should Carse recognize you at once both as his mother and the 'shining figure' of his experiences, Marya Madone?"      "No! No!" she said. "It would never do! It must be done gradually. I shall be Marya Madone with which his shining figure gradually and naturally merges!"                              TRIN 37            "Then you must change more," I said. "Right now the resemblance is too close for him to miss! You answered one of my ads, of course--quite aside from your appearance, your warning, and your mental promise out of the zranthon field?"      She laughed softly. "I started the instant you made up your mind to advertise! I was enroute the moment after you put your ad into words. There will be many answers to it, but it won't matter."      "So!" I said ruefully. "All that money went to waste, including the hundred dollars I got from Carse Ryal?"      "Nothing good ever goes to waste," she said seriously, "and have you forgotten something about money, with reference to my son?"      "His store of it never diminishes!" I said. "You keep him supplied!"      "A mother's privilege, but he must never know it."      "I promise," I said, "but there is something I must ask...."      "About the father of the triplets?" she smiled, unruffled. "He has been dead fifteen hundred years. Here and now, and during the time you have lived, he would have to wait fifteen thousand years to be born!"      "Has he lived at all during the life of Carse Ryal?" I asked gently.      "No," she said, "but Carse is still not that which he has all his life feared! It was necessary that he believe, or at least suspect, that he was born out of wedlock. His thoughts must turn inward to make this experiment not only possible but useful! In spite of records to the contrary, in that orphanage, Carse Ryal Smith was legitimately born! But you already knew this, Chester Lowre!"      "I thought I knew, Marya Madone, but knowing and proving are two different things. Now I shall prove! And your other two sons, Marya?"      "Do you not know that also, Chester Lowre?" she asked, grinning as if vastly pleased with herself.      I told her what I thought and believed.      "Of course," she said, "what else could it possibly be? Now, if I can change, somehow .... "      "I'll fix it," I promised. I called Zack's wife. "This is Mrs. Madone," I told her. "She is going to help Mr. Smith and me in our laboratory work. Will you fix her up in the ordinary costume of a nurse?"                                          TRIN 38            I could think of nothing more different from Marya Madone's excellent, neatly fitting cloth of gold garment than the rustling white of a nurse's costume, starched as I knew Zack's wife would starch it.      "There should be a touch of rouge and of lipstick," I added to Marya Madone. "It's customary."      She needed neither one, except to hide her own natural exquisite complexion by way of additional disguise.      In less than an hour I conducted nurse Madone into the laboratory. It was almost impossible for me to grasp the fact that in this competent looking nurse, clearly interested only in her work, was two other people: Joe X's mother, and his "shining figure!"      How could that be, scientifically?      It was, though, and I knew I should, with her help, and Joe X's, prove it to the hilt!            CHAPTER VII of Trin      AGAIN THE MARBLES                  MARYA MADONE sat across the table from me. Between us was the tray. In the pockets of the tray were the three black balls. Marya Madone watched me, but not until she had looked long at the still figure in the easy chair inside the zranthon field. Such love for Joe X looked out of her eyes as I could not remember seeing in any other woman's face, ever.      Marya's love for her son was limitless.      I remembered what he had said to me, that if he could he would kill her; she represented the blackest moments in his life.      "When the tray and the balls become as white as your light," I said to nurse Madone, "the experiment will be completed, is that so?"      "Yes," she said softly, "and then .... "      "Then I shall lose you and Joe X as I have lost Baird and Partos!"      "Nothing once possessed is ever entirely lost," she said, "and you may see us again, somewhere in time. But during your life you will see us no more--after the tray and the balls are completely light!"      "Are you going to explain it all to me?"                        TRIN 39            "That I am not authorized to do!" she said. "It is not given man to know the future by abnormal means. But if you read the signs given you, and interpret them yourself, I can agree or disagree without violating the universal law."      "Then I shall begin with you," I said, "since all life begins with the mother! It is true that, according to time as it is known by me and my contemporaries, you will not be born for fifteen thousand years yet! According to your reckoning, there is no time!      Her smile was radiant. She said nothing. But the smile was above all encouraging, triumphant. I had spoken truly.      "The black tray," I went on, "represents you. It is the mother, as if the three pockets were the womb. The three black spheres represent Joe X and his two brothers, of whom I do not yet know for certain, though I feel reasonably sure that, when they're not acting, they don't in the least resemble yellow-robed Tibetans!"      Marya Madone threw back her head and laughed aloud, a musical expression that was more like an embrace than an embrace is.      "Carse Ryal was very close then," she said, "but the time was not ripe that he should know the truth! Go on, Chester Lowre. It is desired that you have the fullest enjoyment from this experiment."      "The secret of what is happening here and now, including you, Marya Madone," I said, "it partially contained in Joe X's 'lapses.' His most amazing 'lapse' was one of time--fifteen thousand years of time."      "Not quite correct," she said. "You can proceed no further until you have corrected your formula."      "I don't believe in reincarnation," I stated flatly.      "It doesn't matter whether you do," she said, "as long as you have the true scientific perspective on time!"      "That, actually, time is an invention of modern man, who thus limits himself? If that were true, Marya Madone, man always lives...."      "That of which he is composed," she said quickly, "always has been, is, always will be. He is eternal, on the basis of your own scientific thesis that no energy is ever lost. Man is a manifestation of energy."      Her intriguing accent made me pause for a moment. It also had to be explained.      "Up there in the future," I said, "English has been a dead language for countless generations, but nothing that has ever been, ever dies. Even languages do not die, though they are buried, in                        TRIN 40            human subconscious, as if they were! The perceptive, a Marya Madone, can regain any 'lost' language she needs!"      She was delighted at this explanation for her knowledge of English and her accent. I was pleased with myself. Now and again Nurse Madone looked at the silent, motionless figure of Joe X, her love seeming more each time she looked.      I WONDERED if the love did it, or the thoughts of Marya Madone, or of whoever had helped her get back here in time--but the tray and the black balls were slowly fading!      "You were expecting a child," I went on, Twenty-five years ago!"      "Fourteen thousand nine hundred and seventy-five years in the future from now!" she corrected me. "Also, you have forgotten something of vast importance!"      "You were expecting three children, triplets! You were somehow connected with a scientist, an inventor, a man or woman whose curiosity probed beyond time and space...." I was fumbling, watching her face, trying to read whether I was "hot" or "cold."      Then I took the plunge, "It wouldn't have been your husband, would it, the father of the triplets?"      "It would, indeed," she said softly, "and I only thank whatever powers there be that you have solved the problem this far. But there is still far to go."      "In that far-off future day, which to you even now is," I went on, "man is endowed at birth with the ability to think-forth, to show the picture of his thoughts to whomever he wishes."      "True," she said. "But not exactly the truth. I shall hate it if you are disappointed when you know the truth of the next step!"      "Don't tell me your husband is the real inventor of the zranthon-ray tube!"      Quickly she put forth her hand to touch mine. I hoped she would never take the hand away.      "Do not feel disappointed, Chester Lowre!" she said. "After all, you took it from him, brought it here!"      "The whole thing, the birth of Joe X here was an accident!" I said. "Your husband...."      "Ryal Madone," she said, as if she were presenting me.      "Ryal Madone was working on his zranthon-ray tube, conceiving it a possible channel by which time might be investigated in both directions, past and future! At the same time he was much concerned about the health of his wife! Working with the zranthon tube he decided on a spot in time, fifteen thousand years in the past, at the same time as he thought of his wife, and her health...."                        TRIN 41            Her face was serious, but it was telling me to go on, go on....      "He visioned the past, my time, even as he pictured the beauty of his beloved wife and was heart- deep concerned about her. It was no intention of Ryal Madone that he actually hurl his wife back into the past, so that her children be born in my time. But that's what happened! Then, though he could restore his wife to his time, he could not restore his children! He lost them in time. He has been trying since then to restore the family completely!"      "And now, thanks to you," she said, "it is coming to pass!"      I was so eager and excited it was easy to miss something important, and I knew it, intended to do nothing of the sort.      "But the brothers of Joe X," I said. "Joe never knew them or about them. Is he the eldest, youngest, middle child? Oldest! You were restored to your proper time immediately after Joe X was born--and left on the steps of the orphanage out West! So Joe X lost brothers, mother, father, all at the same moment! No wonder he felt lost indeed!"      "But we did not lose him!" said Marya Madone. "We were in touch. Using the zranthon tube...."      "Your husband thought you forth whenever your son was in danger of dying!" I ejaculated. "You manifested as a man, knowing his hatred of the mother who had deserted him!"      Now her face was very sad. She glanced again at Joe X, showering him with love. The black balls were definitely lighter now!      "By inventing the zranthon ray in my time," I said, "I began preparing the channel of reunion ...."      "You must go back further!" she hinted. "Back to...."      SOMETHING seemed to silence her. I tried to guess. Then I tried to work it out mathematically. I already had enough hints about that, that was certain--the black triangles, the big one, the three smaller ones.      "Carse Ryal's attempts to kill himself," I went on, "and his narrow escapes from death, were subconscious searches for the way to reunion with his lost family. He swallowed scores of aspirin tablets, hoping he would waken in the bosom of his family. But it wasn't possible that way. There had to be a scientific way; there was actually no esoteric one. You had to appear to so inform him .... "      "And waken the women at the orphanage," smiled Marya Madone, "so they would pump out the stomach of my very sick son!"      "Later on, still seeking a channel," I continued, "he hanged himself. But how could you cut him down, since you were not material?"                              TRIN 42            "Have you so little faith an your zranthon tube, which you had not yet invented, twenty-five years ago?" she asked, laughing a little. "I was as material, stepping out of Ryal Madone's zranthon tube, as I am now, and I have touched your hand, so you know. I touch it again, to reassure you!"      It seemed a little clearer after that.      "All you did when he should have drowned," I said, "was tell him to keep on swimming. But I'm afraid I can't see how he escaped from certain death when his plane crashed over Tibet!"      "And it is really the most significant part of the experiment!" she hinted. "It leads to the other things, right up to the...."      "Me and the zranthon tube!" I said. "He came through because he had one, the first, of his 'lapses'! Actually he wasn't even in that plane when it crashed! He just thought he was! But no, that's not possible. Nobody can make me believe...."      "He came straight to your door with a blind ad in his hand, remember?" said Marya softly. "You believe that, don't you?      "Are you trying to tell me that your husband's zranthon tube and mine are working in cahoots?" I asked.      She did not answer. She could not, or for some reason would not, tell me.      "I can believe it, I guess," I said slowly, "but if you try to make me believe that his zranthon tube and mine are one and the same. . . . "      I had to drop it there myself, my heart almost stopped beating. I knew by her face that the tube which I had so proudly invented was actually not mine--but belonged to Ryal Madone, ages up there in the future. He had worked out, with my accidental help, something usual in the time machine.      At this moment I had an eerie demonstration of something. Beginning to perspire, I got out my handkerchief, or started to. Instead I came out with my wallet. On a hunch I opened it. Marya Madone began to laugh when I drew forth, of all things, the five worn twenty dollar bills, the same ones, I had left at the telegraph office to pay in part for ads sent by wire.      "It's one of the threads," she said softly. "Nothing can be left out or the experiment is a failure."      At that moment Zack Hyde brought a telegraph messenger. It appeared that several newspapers had refused to accept the ad, and exactly one hundred dollars was being returned to me. It was "herewith", the message said. By an odd "coincidence" the total was one hundred dollars. The messenger boy looked scared to death when, fumbling in his pockets, he could not find the money! I could not tell him it had preceded him. When I showed it to him, however, he went away, shaking his head.                        TRIN 43            "It's not counterfeit, either," said Marya Madone, using words Joe X had already used to explain the fact that he was never broke. I realized that his replenishment of funds always came about, seemingly, in some perfectly normal, business-like manner.      "Formulas for the comprehension of time and space are always mathematical," I mused. "That's what the code of the triangles was telling me. The tray is the mother. The spheres are the three trins. I know it, but how I know it I am not sure. Marya, this is not the Pythagorean Theorem, which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle..."      "None of the four triangles is a right triangle!" said Marya Madone at once. "Yet you are closer to the truth even than Euclid was. I can help you no further!"      "The union of the male and female elements," I fumbled again, "which brings about conception of a third entity which may be either male or female. This is the metaphysical symbolism of the Forty Seventh Problem of Euclid! That's why the triangles have been used. . . . "      I CAUGHT my breath as realization came. Marya Madone was facing me squarely. I could not escape the profound intelligence of her eyes. I noted the high white purity of her forehead. Instantly my mind fixed on a point exactly in the center of her forehead, and drew two lines from it, slanting to right and left so as to miss the deep expressive eyes. They were two sides of a triangle. I ended them, mentally drew a third below the eyes--and I had the large triangle in the tray, with two of the "marbles" represented by the eyes of Marya Madone! The third would also have been present in the spot of origin, in the center of the forehead, if I, as a scientist, could have accepted the idea of "soul" or "spirit", which esotericists say is located behind the skull at exactly that spot.      I refused to speculate on it. I could "see" the symbolism of the triangles, and that was enough for me.      "By the raised triangles on the balls, then," I said to Marya Madone, "your husband and I have been in communication!"      "Not exactly!" she corrected me. "With them he sought to communicate with his children!"      "Baird and Partos!" I exploded. "The two Tibetans of the yellow-robes, in a silent courtyard in Shanghai!"      "Chester Lowre," she said softly, "I am more pleased with you than I shall be allowed to tell you. You have almost reached the climax, and the answer, of your experiment in building, synthetically, the mental screen of the distant future! One thing remains."      "Yes," I agreed, "it is this: where does the operation in Shanghai, the brain substitution, fit in? Of course, like the tray, the triangles, and all the rest, it could be symbolism. But I saw the marks of the trephining myself!"                                    TRIN 44            "So many human beings, even in my time," she said softly, "have to see to believe. Carse Ryal's brothers actually operated on Carse Ryal--a drastic effort to make him take his mind off those moods of depression which made him think of suicide. If he had ever succeeded we should have lost him entirely. Also, my other sons altered his brain in order to exercise some control over his 'lapses!' They also gave him the idea of returning to the United States."      "And through all of this what have I been?" I demanded. "Just a stooge? Have I been operating solely under direction from your husband?"      She hesitated a long time before she answered that one.      "Yes," she said, "but please don't feel too badly about it! The reason is inescapable. I may be allowed to tell you, somehow, at the end!"      "Well, then," I said somewhat grumpily, "two things remain! Producing Baird and Partos, and reconciling you and your trin son, Carse Ryal. But Marya, I just remembered something: identical triplets would not have different colored hair. Partos is a redhead!"      "And I," said Marya, "thanks to your Hattie Hyde, am a nurse! Really, Chester sometimes even I find you exasperating!"      "Where are Partos and Baird?" I asked.      "You must work out your own experiment," said Marya Madone.      "I think, absurd as it may sound, that they are merged with Joe X!"      "What's so absurd about it?" asked Marya Madone crisply.            CHAPTER VIII of Trin      IRREPARABLE LOSS?                  NO, THERE was nothing absurd or unscientific about the merging of the three brothers. Baird and Partos were thought forms, thought forth from the far future by Ryal Madone in a desperate effort to reunite them with Carse Ryal Smith, first step to a complete family reunion.      I realized now that Carse Ryal Smith himself was a thought form which had stepped out of the zranthon-ray mental screen twenty-five years before--from what to me was the distant future; that very same future I was trying to make available to my time by invention of the mental screen, by using the zranthon tube.                                    TRIN 45            But if Ryal Madone had invented it, far up yonder, well, no wonder Carse Ryal Smith knew so much about it. And since his origin was far in the future, what secrets could the earth of my time possibly have withheld from him? He hadn't known of his parents or his brothers simply because they were not of this time.      Now Marya Madone, a strange mixture of sadness and excitement in her face, removed the balls from the tray. They had become, all of them, almost white. Was white really for purity? Did the whiteness mean that Joe X's mother no longer reminded him of blackest moments and moods?      Marya Madone placed the white balls on the table between us. She handled them as one long accustomed. They rolled this time not to form the big triangle, but close together, as if snuggling.      Marya held the white tray close to her breast for a moment, her eyes closed almost as if she prayed. Then she moved to the zranthon-ray field, offered the tray to the field at approximately the same place and height as I had brought it forth when it had been black. The field received it, took it inward!      The white tray stood there, several feet above the floor of my laboratory. Marya Madone studied it.      What follows," she said, "is not compulsory on my part or that of my sons. But you have had so much to do with this reunion that the family is grateful beyond words. Therefore he wishes you to know! It wishes you to know all!"      The white tray began to dim, to diffuse, apparently to mingle with all the zranthon field. But the change, the transmutation, whatever it was, was speedy. First, faces and heads began to appear, grinning--the faces of Baird and Partos, both heads with black hair! I looked at Joe X. On his face was an expression of ineffable content.      Marya Madone stared at Joe X.      "He already knows and accepts me, Chester!" she murmured.      Somehow, perhaps with the help of his brothers, perhaps with the help of his "shining figure", or the help of his far-off-future father, Joe X had been kept abreast of our conversations since the arrival of Marya.      Baird stepped out of the zranthon field, moved to his mother, took her hands, dropped to one knee:      "Mother!" he murmured. Then he turned to me. "It's the same word in our language!" he said.      Now came Partos, to kneel beside his brother. Even so, the eyes of Marya Madone were fixed on Joe X, who now rose from the easy chair, pushed the armrest, the zranthon tube, away determinedly, walked to the field edge and out. He grinned.                              TRIN 46            "I always knew my lapses meant something!" he said. "Imagine 'lapsing' fifteen thousand years into the past! Fortunately, thanks to you and the zranthon tube, we can 'lapse' an equal time into the future!"      "You'll forgive the long years of hatred, mother?" he asked. I felt like an intruder. "If I had just seen you as you are, I'd never have doubted you, never! I've been longing for you so long, all of you...." and he called Baird and Partos names I had never heard before, would never hear again in my lifetime. "You'll forgive us if we hurry, Mr. Lowre?" said Joe X. "I'm anxious to get home."      I had to agree, though now I understood the sadness in the eyes of Marya Madone. Joe X turned, stepped into the zranthon field with his mother in his arms, his two brothers beside him.      They began to fade out, swiftly.      WHEN THEY were gone nothing remained of the field or the zranthon tube. It was as if the field and the tube were being denied use in my time. Yet I agreed that this was just and right.      The easy chair remained.      I don't believe in reincarnation, and what Marya Madone said just as she sped away into the future to rejoin her husband, taking the rest of her family with her, may have been a slip of the tongue. And yet, I could never believe her capable of such a slip. Hadn't she said that her family "wishes you to know all?"      There was that nagging statement of Joe X, too, when he had told me that yes, he knew he had two brother trins. "One is Yesterday, One Today, One Tomorrow!" Did he mean that individual man existed mentally not only in the past, present and futures but physically as well?      I felt, almost, as if my experiences with the zranthon field indicated an affirmative answer.      This is what Marya said to me as she vanished, her very last words:      "You have not really lost me, Ryal Madone!"                                                                                                TRIN 47                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Trin

by Arthur J. Burks
TRIN 1                   TRIN       By Arthur J. Burks                                                                                                                                    TRIN 2                   TRIN by Arthur J. Burks      Twelve years ago, in Marvel's famous first issue, we published Arthur J. Burks' "Survival" and it was immediately acclaimed an all-time stf classic. Will this sensational new book-length novel by "America's most daring imagination" win even greater renown?      I wanted a man willing to sign himself over to me body and soul, so I anticipated some strange applicants. But I didn't anticipate Joe X. When I warned Joe X the job might cost him his life, he replied that was impossible, he couldn't be killed. And when I told him at he might be driven insane, Joe X assured me that that was impossible too--because he had no brain!                  CHAPTER I JOE X      HE WAS young, not over twenty-five, and black-eyed and black-haired--a good six: feet of vigorous, sturdy manhood at, say, one hundred and eighty pounds. He presented himself at my laboratory bearing the ad I'd put in the Times:. . . . .       WANTED: MAN UNDER THIRTY WITHOUT TIES, AMBITIONS,       FEARS OR EXPECTATIONS. WRITE BOX X47, THE TIMES.      "How did you know where to come?" I demanded. "That's a blind ad."      He held up his big right hand, as though to calm me.      "I didn't get your address from the newspaper, or anyone else, I don't know how I got here. I often have lapses like this. My name is Joe X."      Like that, it began. Well, I wanted a man willing to sign himself over to me body and soul, risking his life for science, hourly and daily, as I myself did, so I expected unusual applicants. I'd                              TRIN 3            run that ad for six months, and had quickly discouraged scores of curiosity seekers. I put it to "Joe X" at once, straight from the shoulder, as I had to all the others.      "The job is dangerous," I said. It may cost you your life."      "I can't be killed," he said. "It's quite impossible."      That kind of brought me up again, but I pushed on with my standard interview without comment.      "You may be driven insane," I continued.      "No," he smiled a bit sadly at me. "That's impossible, too. I have no brain!"      That was the real jolt. This liar intrigued me.      "I'm an orphan," he went on. "Nobody ever wanted me. Once when I was nine and all the other kids spent Christmas with families, and nobody asked for me, I decided to commit suicide. I swallowed the contents of three aspirin bottles. As I fell into a deep sleep a shining figure appeared before me, shook his head, said: 'This is not the way; you must live your time!' I was found, pumped out, lectured, chastised. At twelve I decided to make sure. I went into a closet with a new one-inch rope, hanged myself. But the same shining figure appeared, shook his head sadly and said: 'I hate to disappoint you, but I have to cut the rope!' He did, too, with a big scissors. You won't believe it, nor has anybody else, but when I regained consciousness the rope had actually been cut!"      Naturally," I said. "Spooks do it all the time!"      "Go ahead and laugh," he said. "Everybody does who hears it--of whom there are not many."      "Proceed," I said. "I can't call you a liar because I can't check back on you."      "Oh, but you can. I thought you must know that! I'll give you all the data, if we agree on something, so that you can check on the truth of my assertions! I early realized that I could not die by accident, of diseases, or suicide, or be murdered. Everything of the kind had a chance to kill me and failed. I won't detail the incidents except those which can be checked for truthfulness.      During World War II I was aboard a ship which was torpedoed in chill waters fifty miles off the west English coast. Waves were miles high. I was thrown into the water and instantly separated from everybody else. All others were, I was told, lost. I swam easily, knowing it impossible to live in the mountainous seas. Here at last is certain peace, I thought. But the figure I had seen so many times before suddenly stood on the water near me and said: 'Keep swimming, for this is not the time!' I kept swimming, wishing I did not have to. I swam for hours when I was picked up by a British destroyer. Everybody aboard said it was impossible I should be alive, unhurt, not even very tired."                              TRIN 4            "Make it good!" I said grimly.      "It's all a matter of record," said Joe X. "I'll give you the name later, if we get together." He grinned. "After all, if you can use a blind ad, why can't I make my application under a blind name?"      "Go ahead!" I went on.      LATER ON I was part of a special flight mission over The Hump. Somehow we got far off course. I think it was intentional, and for a purpose, but nobody told me. I was an enlisted man. After many hours we were over a portion of Tibet. That's what the pilot said. We were all on oxygen. I remember the pilot saying that Tibetan authorities had forbidden flyers of all nations to fly over this particular area. No sooner had he said this than our entire left wing broke off and vanished. We were flying at fifteen thousand, but most of inhabited Tibet is at an average of ten thousand feet above sea level. We were not far above land."      "So you crashed and you were the sole survivor!" I said.      "That's right," said Joe X. "It's a matter of record."      "You provided the record, being the only survivor," I went on.      "No, the pilot lived long enough to tell about it, in writing!"      "Oh," was all I could think of, somehow, to comment.      "The shining figure," went on Joe X, "stood on the good wing and told me I could not die in this crash, that the time was not yet, that I must do my job. Trouble has always been I've never had the slightest idea what my job is, my real job, I mean."      Joe X left the story for a moment, stared at the wall.      "You said you were brainless," I said. "How does that happen?"      "I was on furlough in Shanghai," he said. "I wandered into Kiukiang, off the Bund. I had never been in China before, yet the further I went along the gloomy street the more familiar it became. I had traveled it hundreds of times through hundreds of years maybe--that's how it seemed. I knew just what lay ahead, around each turn. I was in a ricksha. We were approaching a dead end. The coolie said we could go no further. I told him the way turned left. He insisted, I insisted, he refused to take me on, so I walked, and the way did turn left. I knew. I came to a silent compound with an ancient temple on its far side. I was met by two yellow-robed Tibetan monks. They smiled at me and one said: 'You have been slow in coming!' It must have been in English, for it's the only language I know. The other monk called me by the name I shall give you if we make a deal!      "Nice fantasy," I said. "But what about the missing brain?"                        TRIN 5            "Why," he said, arching his brows, "the monks took mine and put something in its place. It was supposed to make me perfect, but I have small lapses that frighten me. Otherwise I feel about as I always did. They said I would. They did it that way so I should not feet strange to myself."      "And what happened to your original brain?"      "They kept it. I shall reclaim it one day, they told me!"      "A neat, impossible job of trephining, I suppose, done by Tibetan monks," I said. "Up to there I could have believed you, if the surgeons were the world's best. But to remove the entire brain and supply something else--no, not even if the world's best did it, and told me so in person!"      "I didn't expect you to believe it," said Joe X. "The operation was done without pain. They used something that smelled liked incense, as an anesthetic. I saw no instruments of any kind."      "And of course they left no marks on your skull!" I sneered.      "Oh, but they did!" said Joe X. "You may look."      I LOOKED. It wasn't just a simple trephining job that had been done on this increasingly mysterious liar; the whole top of has skull had been completely removed and restored. The line was there to show where it had been done. I shuddered. I got the shakes for fair. I got the shakes more than most men would, I think, because of the lifetime task I had set myself.      I'm Chester Lowre, forty years of age, a scientific recluse, bent on probing the secrets of the human brain. We are told that only one eighth of the brain is used even by geniuses. Seven eighths of it is a mystery. But Nature does not construct to no purpose. The other seven eighths of the brain....      Well, I didn't know, but I had probed deeply enough to have been wishing, the last four years, that I could manage to live for two or three hundred years, that I might dig the more deeply into the great human secret.      I studied that skull. It had the shape of high evolvement. This man could be a genius, if skull shape meant anything--which I knew it did.      "One other thing," Joe X just tossed it in, as of no account, "I can't be hurt, either, not since the removal of the brain. I can feel inner hurt, like sorrow, heartache, loneliness, but not pain. I guess all the pain I should have known was transferred to my Inner...."      "You spoke of lapses," I suggested, interrupting to get him away from something I felt to be creepy, and better left to a later time. "Just what did you mean?"      "One of them brought me to your door," he said, "told me to knock. It's like this: I'll be walking south, here in New York City, for instance, say on Fifth Avenue. I'll notice the cross street. Let's say it's 110th. I notice what time it is. I find I don't care whether cars run me down or not, so I                        TRIN 6            pay no attention to them, or to traffic lights. I think perhaps I'll walk down to the Battery. There is a lapse. I am at the Battery, sitting down, looking out on the water. I look at my watch. It is ten minutes since I realized I was walking south on Fifth Avenue--at 110th Street! There is no way, no way at all possible, by which I can travel so far so fast--not by taxi or subway...but there I am. It often happens."      And that's how you located me?"      "Yes. I saw the ad, clipped it, went out on the street. I guess I was going to the newspaper office, or maybe to some hotel to write a letter to you. Next thing I knew I had already knocked on your door!"      I stared at the liar, the insane Joe X. After all, my supreme interest is the secret brain. What did it matter to me if Joe X was a pathological liar, insane?      "My funds are limited," I said. The hours are long. You may have to sit very still for as long as seventy-two hours. But you live here, eat with me. I have a good cook. Her husband waits on you, will wait on you. They never ask questions."      "Funds," he said, "don't matter. I always have the money I need."      "Indeed?" I arched my brows. "I wish I could say that. I never have enough for my scientific work. May I ask the source of your funds?"      "I don't know," he said simply. "I keep on spending what I have in my purse, but it is always there!" He raised his hand to silence me. "It isn't always the same bills or small change! In fact they're never the same, just the same amount, sufficient for the needs of the day, week, month! It isn't counterfeit money, either."      "You'll be very handy to have around, Joe X," I said. "Now if you just had a scientific background too--"      "Ask me questions!" said Joe X tersely.      I began asking. I made the quiz tougher and tougher. He never missed once, not even the most abstruse mathematical query. I began to ask him about formulae and experiments of which only I knew--and he knew all about those too, grinning, as if he enjoyed mystifying me!      So when I had done I said bluntly: "If you think you can stand me, I can stand you. Maybe this is the work you're here to do, if you believe in predestination.. Now, your right name, please."      "My orphanage name." he corrected me. "I never knew my right one, or whether I had a right one. They used to tell me my mother was unutterably lovely. They never mentioned a father though I must have had one. The orphanage name is Carse Ryal Smith. They made it odd to distinguish me from other Smiths."                              TRIN 7            I WAS GOING to ask about him by telegram to Washington. But there could be other Carse Ryal Smiths. He himself suggested I take his fingerprints. The information I wanted about Joe X wasn't available to outsiders, usually, but I wasn't an outsider. I did secret work for Washington when Public Enemies were questioned.      I queried the orphanage, sending along a picture Joe X gave me, taken when he was twelve, just after the rope with which he had tried to hang himself had been "cut." I satisfied myself that it was a picture of this Joe X.      I had answers from Washington in forty-eight hours. Joe X had told the truth about his two escapes from certain death. Authentication was based on unimpeachable evidence, other than Carse Ryal Smith's own. Fingerprints matched.      The orphanage reports were true, also, but a bit of information, under a seal of secrecy, that made my hair stand on end, was this: Carse Ryal Smith was a trin, a triplet if you prefer. There were two trin brothers, still alive. It had been thought best to keep Joe X ignorant of this fact since the trio had to be separated anyway. I was still not to tell him. Queer, but there it was, and why I, a stranger to the orphanage officials, should be given the forbidden information voluntarily, I had no idea.      Plenty of mystery remained for which there was no confirmation, or only partial corroboration, so that I knew I had something of vast interest with which, and with whom to work.      Had Joe X's entire brain been removed? I saw the marks of the operation, which proved nothing, implied much.      What about Joe X's "lapses?" I could only answer that question by asking another, also unanswerable: how had he got to my door with nothing to help him but a blind ad?      And what about his inability to feel pain? Medical records proved that homo sapiens were occasionally born lacking the sensation of pain. Such a one had to be guarded constantly until old enough to know his condition, else he could die--by burning for instance--without feeling the pain and so avoiding it.      This was easy to settle.      "You can't feel pain?" I asked, that first day, before I had answers to my telegrams.      He grinned at me. He looked at the gear on my work table, selected an electric soldering iron, switched it on, allowed it to come to whiteheat--then deliberately grabbed it!      I yelled at him, called him a fool. The smell of his roasting palm filled my laboratory instantly. Joe X just grinned at me, clearly undisturbed. But he dropped the iron, showed me his hideously marred right palm.      This was true, too, then; Joe X felt no pain.                        TRIN 8             And what about that which happened immediately after he proved to me that he could feel no pain? What attribute of mystery was it that restored his hand to health and wholeness faster even than it had been charred, while I watched, and while the odor of burnt flesh still hung in the laboratory?      These mysteries must all be solved. If Joe X, after that, had tried to leave my service I believe I would have forcibly made him my prisoner, provided, that is, any bonds or bars could hold him. He might "lapse" himself out of them.      His "shining figure" was, of course, hallucination. No scientist could accept that.      "Our first work," I told Joe X, whom I continued thereafter to think of as Joe X because, if mankind was ever an unknown quantity, Joe X was the epitome thereof, "will be with my newly developed zranthon tube."      "Yes," he said gravely, "I know about it."      He did, too, and told me much of its details--not one of which, as far as I knew, had ever got out past my door. The name zranthon I had in that instant coined; he nodded his head when he heard the name, as if he had always known it!            CHAPTER II of Trin      THE ZRANTHON TUBE                  I AM ESPECIALLY interested in people belonging to what "normal" folk call the "lunatic fringe." I am acutely aware that Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, the Wright Brothers, Louis Pasteur, Paracelsus and many others, belonged to the fringe in their own time. Then they became the "greats" of the world. I've no intention, personally, of passing up any of them. I spend my spare time digging in old book stores--there are many down around Astor Place--for fiction and nonfiction done by members of the lunatic fringe which have ended up where, I dare say, "normal" people feel it belongs.      I am interested scientifically in the esoteric. I do a lot of wondering about mediums, seances, fortune tellers, geomancers, people who not only believe in reincarnation but insist they can remember past lives--who's to prove they can't?--and people who know what's going to happen in the ages to come.      If they're specific in their "findings" I take their material into my laboratory. If some lunatic fringer "remembers" machinery used in Atlantis, like nothing modern man ever dreamed of, I'm never satisfied until I have a look at the possibilities.                                    TRIN 9            My current investigation, and so far the most interesting, was based on the "prophecies" of a lunatic fringer raised to the nth power. He held that there was a perfect way to communicate between persons, and that future races would make use of it. If, for example, I am thinking of a road, and use the word "road" in my conversation with another, the road of which I speak, and the road he sees in his mind when he hears me speak the word "road" are invariably and inevitably vastly different. Our experiences are different. The esotericist said that the time would come when man, naturally, would show exactly what he meant when he used a word or phrase, because the picture of his thought would appear on a natural screen beside his head as he spoke. What he said would be so carefully and exactly detailed on the screen that nobody could possibly misunderstand his meaning. Newspapers, books, radio, television, contracts, blueprints, machines, plans, maps, prospectuses, letters, paintings, drawings--all these and many more were, he said, the forerunners of what he called the "mental screen" with which man would one day be born.      I found it intriguing, and...I was about to say reasonable, but that I wouldn't be able to say, one way or the other, until I had exhausted every investigational possibility. My interest was in the submerged seven eighths of the human brain. Dreams, nonsense, hallucinations, spooks, prophecies, visions of past lives, even the belief in past lives, were all mentally produced somehow, and therefore matters of legitimate interest.      I took nobody into my complete confidence about these matters in detail. I personally did not care to be considered as being in the "lunatic fringe."      But I told Joe X that I was interested in developing, if scientifically possible, the "mental screen." The screen itself, since man was not yet born with it, had to be made. I had worked with it for two solid years, with little rest and with little thought as to whether it would be commercially valuable.      I began with the cathode-ray tube. I developed it to the place where I could project an image of my thought, somewhat blurred, upon an electrical field. I did not question whether the brain radiated electrical impulses. I didn't care. I wanted to discover. I was able to set up a field of unknown dimensions, in a given area of ordinary atmosphere, which was different from anything outside it. I knew it was different, but not how, for not only was my tube, the zranthon tube, inside the "field", but I had to be also! In other words, I couldn't study the mental projection for much the same reason a man can't lift himself by his own bootstraps. I couldn't go and stay at the same time.      I had to have someone with whom to work. It had to be his mental images, inside the zranthon field, so that I could study them without concern. Man and tube must stay inside the field, for the tube made the field, and the man thought forth the images. How? I wasn't yet sure. That it was cumbersome there was no doubt. What good was a means of communication if the communicator couldn't go anywhere or say anything? But many beginnings are discouragingly cumbersome.      I wanted to measure the field. I wanted. . . . .                              TRIN 10            "You want a mental screen," said Joe X softly. "You want to prove that such a screen is possible. Too bad, isn't it, that I have no mind?"      HE HAD A sense of humor, then, and therefore a mind, no matter of what it was made, natural or synthetic.      "You'll do," I said. My laboratory was far out on Riverside Drive, in a greystone house inherited from generations of Lowres, all of whom had strange avocations. I was no antisocial, but I couldn't do all I wished and spend time talking to friends and neighbors. There was so much to do, so little time. One day I would make sleep unnecessary...but that was something else again. "But remember, it may blow up and scatter the house, me, the laboratory and you all over New York City."      "No," he said, "I'll walk out of any such explosion without a scratch, unless," he looked hopeful, suddenly, "it happens to be my time when it happens!"      "I wish you wouldn't act as if you couldn't endure life!" I said to him sharply. "You may well be in a position right now to do something sublimely great for humanity!"      "That would be too bad!" he answered. "Why should I?"      I could think of no reason why he should, nor did I try to argue. Man must settle his own arguments with life, people and destiny.      "Can you think of anything better to do?" I asked.      "Yes, do the thing that keeps me from being unutterably bored! That's why I answered your ad. When do we start?"      Joe X became a member of my household then and there. Somehow he contrived not to seem strange to Hattie Hyde and her husband Zack. I noted that Hattie often stared at him as if he had three heads, and that Zack never spent much time around him, but that wasn't unusual. They both behaved much the same way toward me. Maybe they thought I had produced Joe X in my laboratory!      Joe X seated himself comfortably in an easy chair in the middle of my workshop. I cleared everything away around him for a distance of fifteen feet in all directions. I did not believe that the field extended further than that; nor higher than the ceiling, also fifteen feet and the reason why I decided on fifteen feet for the other two dimensions.      The zranthon tube was two feet long, six inches in diameter, and if I hadn't told Joe X he wouldn't have known where it was. No, that's wrong, he knew! It was the "third arm" of the easy chair. It swung between the two regular arms to form an arm rest, slid back in slots in the two arms so that it could be near to or far from the person in the chair. Contact with the sitter was, apparently, required. A man could sit with his elbows on it, face in hands, could sit forward and                              TRIN 11            nap with his forehead or cheek on it, do anything with it he wished, so long as there was contact. But principally, he thought.      Contact with any part of the human body by the zranthon tube rendered it operative. It began to build the zranthon field as soon as Joe X sat down and swung the third arm into position. I could call the field "magnetic" or say that it was an area of "ionized air" and be approximately correct. The zranthon tube's operations were, however, somewhat different. The tube built the field, invisible brick by invisible brick, or whatever it was that was used--one of the thing I hoped, with the help of Joe X, to find out.      I moved away from Joe X, sat down facing him, to watch. We were just two ordinary human beings, staring at each other from a distance of fifteen feet, like mute idiots. In a few moments I spoke to Joe X. He touched his ears, shook his head. He could not hear me. He knew I spoke because he could see my lips move. A few moments after that I knew he could not see, either. He just sat, and stared. I got scared, though it had gone no further than it had with me, dozens of times. But Joe X, with that scar around his skull, might not be able to stand all I knew I could. I rose determinedly and strode toward Joe X. I couldn't reach him. I stopped stockstill, almost fifteen feet from him. I wasn't up against a stone wall. I was up against something intangible, invisible, but real. I was stuck! I could approach no nearer.      I went all the way around Joe X. He seemed to be surrounded by, to be comfortably sitting in, an invisible cylinder. He did not follow me with his eyes. He might already be dead. If no images of his thoughts appeared I would soon know he was dead. Some minutes must yet elapse before the images could be expected.      I went clear around the cylinder. Then I got a stepladder, stood close against the cylinder, climbed, fumbled at the top. There was a space of perhaps ten inches between the cylinder's top and the ceiling. Unimportant, maybe, but one never can be sure, so I recorded it.      I WAS SOON aware that Joe X had been much concerned because I had doubted some of the things he told me. His first mental image, quite clear in the depths of the cylinder, standing near Joe's right hand, was what I knew to be his "shining figure!" I stared in amazement and unbelief. I had seen statues of that type by the hundreds. But this image seemed to be alive. It could see me. It smiled at me, bowed slightly, raised its hand. I'm an atheist. I don't believe .... but a scientist can't say he doesn't believe anything, not until he has proved its untruth.      I was an investigator. I now investigated. As I had just circled the cylinder, so I now circled the shining figure. It did not turn to face me as I walked. It, simply, continued to face me without moving at all! I gulped, swallowed. Could this really be something in the way of communications, indicating that the man of tomorrow, equipped with my invention, or naturally, would be understood in his words and thoughts by anyone who could see him, whether facing him, back to him, or in profile? I was going too fast. This was just an image.      But was it just an image? I had neglected to take away the step-ladder I had climbed to determine the dimensions of the cylinder. It stood, sidewise, almost in contact with the cylinder. I almost bumped into it. As I would have touched it a queer thing happened: the "shining figure" shot                        TRIN 12            forth a hand as if to remove the stepladder from my path. The hand touched the ladder, pulled. The ladder tilted over into the cylinder and completely vanished! It was, suddenly, neither in nor outside the cylinder.      Moreover, the "shining figure" dissolved into something else: a street scene in Shanghai. I knew it because I knew Shanghai. I would have known it anyway because of Joe X's story. I saw Joe X entering a compound. I faced the temple about which he had told me. Two yellow-robed Tibetans came out of the temple. Tibetans? They were no more Tibetans than I am! They were dressed as Tibetans. They had long hair, like Tibetan sorcerers. Their headdress pulled their faces so that their eyes slanted ever so little; but they were not Tibetans. They were . . .      Both figures were staring at me. When I thought, "They are not Tibetans", both men touched fingers to lips, shook their heads. I tried to erase "no Tibetans" from my mind. Thereafter they ignored me. They took me through the operation of which Joe X had told me, which Joe X never saw but now did, the one in which his brain was removed and something left in its place. I would have accepted what I saw as gospel truth but for one thing: it proceeded from Joe X! Even so, as a study of the human mind, it was interesting. Actually, it looked as if the brain of Joe X were taken from his skull in a weird bit of bloodless surgery, and lowered carefully into a huge transparent jar of some colorless liquid where, I knew, it continued to live!      But if they put anything in the brain's place when they readjusted the skull--which I watched them to with immense admiration for their technique--I didn't see what it was. It could have been nothing. Joe X, if this were true, could be brainless, literally!      SUDDENLY the cylinder was empty of anything but Joe X, the easy chair, the zranthon-ray tube.      I could see into the cylinder far enough to see Joe X in some detail. I could not see through it. I heard an odd sound, such as the stepladder might have made if, while standing, it were jiggled. I couldn't see it. But I went around the cylinder, and there it was, somehow returned from the "field."      Then, for ten solid hours there was absolutely nothing! Just Joe X, the zranthon-ray tube, and the easy chair. The field was not extending. I knew, but its force was building up. I could see it the subtle changing of Joe X's body. I could feel it all around me. The atmosphere seemed to crackle without actually crackling. Great power was growing here.      Preparation was being made for something cataclysmic, and I began to be afraid. I could not communicate with Joe X by any regular means. He could only communicate with me via the field, but could neither see nor hear me. I don't like being afraid. It isn't a good way for any scientist to feel. I couldn't rescue Joe X. He could only get himself out. I had explained to him just how to do it. Had I made a mistake by giving him credit for knowing more than any man of twenty-five could possibly knew?      Maybe he could understand, at that, for suddenly Joe X's voice broke in.                              TRIN 13            "It's all right, Mr. Lowre, it's going forward properly." He grinned at me, too, clearly now able to see me.      "Can you hear me also?" I asked.      "Of course. The field is now complete. The time has come to probe more deeply. But there is no way I can help you, Mr. Lowre, and remain inside the field, as I must--and you are going to need help. You need two qualified assistants."      I sometimes used assistants. I had a working arrangement with several laboratories, some private, some industrial. I began running them over in my mind. I was looking at Joe X as I thought.      "There are Crandall and Bogan, at the M.A.C. Labs," I thought.      Joe X shook his head! He kept right on shaking his head until, stumped, I shook my head in turn, after naming every young assistant available to me, whom I had ever used.      "Run through your Red Book Directory," suggested Joe X. "Pick the laboratory that sounds right, telephone and explain that you need someone who knows how to work. . . ."      "I'm still running this laboratory and this experiment," I told Joe X stiffly. "I think I shall know what to tell an assistant!"      "I'm sorry, Mr. Lowre," said Joe X, instantly contrite. "I guess I'm too deeply interested in the experiment."      "I'm sorry, too," I retorted. "Inflated ego has no place in this kind of an investigation!"      I felt ashamed as I thumbed through the Red Book, picked an outfit, dialed, told someone on the other end what I wanted. Two young GI's were available and eager to pick up a little extra change. They would be with me in an hour. Their discretion could be relied on. Uncle Sam had used them both in top secret jobs and still did when needed.      The two young men, serious, neatly dressed, were about the same age as Joe X.      I shook hands with them. One was Clyde Baird, a brunet, the other Dan Partos, a redhead.      They introduced themselves. I shook hands with them. I knew I had never seen either before. But they looked vaguely familiar, a feeling that continued to grow inside me. It nagged at me, made me uneasy. If either had ever seen or heard of me before, neither gave any sign. I wished I hadn't sent for them, and instantly regretted my suspicion.      Both men stared at Joe X when I took them into my laboratory. Joe X stared back. I introduced everybody. Clyde Baird started forward to shake hands, stopped as I was stopped. Dan Partos stood fast, noting that something held his companion as if he had frozen in place.                              TRIN 14             Both turned and looked oddly at me.       "Ionized air, but more advanced," I explained, this explaining nothing.      What really interested me at the moment was that Joe X seemed not to know either man, nor did they show any signs of recognizing Joe X. Why I had suspected they might, I don't know, for I had chosen no laboratory suggested by Joe X. He hadn't suggested any; yet since he had mentioned the Red Book, he had suggested all of them that used telephones!      I explained what the two needed to know, told them it was highly secret. They nodded. We agreed on an honorarium. This done we turned our attention to the cylinder, Joe X. . . . and the three baseball-sized black balls which were a feature of the first scientific image. They rested at three corners of a kind of rack, also ebon, that seemed to stand, not float, just inside the cylinder, within easy reach of all three of us.            CHAPTER III of Trin      THE BIG MARBLES                  I NOTICED for the first time that the easy chair no longer sat squarely on the floor. It had risen to a foot or so above it. If Baird and Partos noticed they gave no sign. They did notice the black balls in the tray, or rack.      "What are they?" asked Partos.      I didn't know. I wasn't ready to explain.      "It's routine to turn solids into gases," I said, "by fire, by gas, by any number of ways. It's easy, simple, to reduce created things, forms, to their component parts rendering them, usually, invisible, though often still fragrant for a time. Here we are reversing the process We're taking what we need from the atmosphere and giving it visible form."      "How?" asked Baird. "And what are the black balls?"      "I don't know," I said. "We're trying to find out."      For some minutes we stared at the three black balls in the equally black tray. Each ball seemed to rest in a pocket, half of its sphere above the level of the tray. The balls were at the apices of an equilateral triangle about two feet on each side. I hadn't the slightest idea of what they were composed, or how they came to be where they were. I waited for enlightenment while Baird and Partos circled the cylinder, sat beside me again and said they could see the three blacks balls in the black tray, inside the cylinder, all the way around back to the starting point. But neither tray nor balls seemed to move.                        TRIN 15            There seemed no sense in what we saw. There was no possibility of getting close to them. They seemed to be about six feet inside the cylinder, above the spot where the shirking figure had stood, where the "Tibetans" had performed their weird operation. All three of us had had the experience of trying to step into that field. None had made it.      But nothing happened. There were no new figures, no change in the balls. Several minutes that seemed like hours, passed. Then the tray moved toward me until one side of it, in which was the pocket containing one of the balls, appeared to be outside the field.      It was a peculiar way for an "image", a "thought form", to behave. Theoretically, my theory was that only inside the field built up by the zranthon, was it possible for a mental image to be seen. Here was part of one proving the theory false.      It would not be tangible, of course. Like the shining figure and the Tibetans it was a thought, or thought sequence, empty of substance, weightless, intangible, virtually nonexistent.      I looked at Partos, to my right, at Baird to my left. They were waiting for me to make the obvious move. I made it, expecting no sensation whatever--and touched a solid thing with my extended hand! I felt the edge of the black tray. I touched the shape of the black ball clearly outside the zranthon field. It felt like a huge marble. It was somewhat larger than a baseball.      I came to a decision. I caught the tray by the corners, as a waiter would have done, withdrew it from the field. It remained intact. The black tray and the three black balls were still visible, tangible. I held the tray in my left hand, my hand under the tray's center. The whole thing weighed, at a guess, twenty pounds. I touched each of the three black balls with my fingers. All tangible, actual, of some material I did not know, causing a sensation in my fingertips like nothing I had ever experienced.      "Somehow," I muttered, "we've reversed a natural process. But what have we constructed? It isn't metal, wood, plastic...I don't know what it is."      I turned to the two assistants. I held my hand over one of the balls. I told Baird to hold one, Partos the third, to keep them from crashing to the floor, if they were free in their pocket, when I inverted the black tray.      Each of us held one of the black balls. Without looking, I placed the tray, with its three "pockets" on my chair. I didn't turn and look at Joe X. I sensed that he was watching. What did his "brainless" brain see in all this? I am frank to admit that I had no idea what we had done with my zranthon-ray tube, my zranthon field, and the strange brain of Joe X. Our real investigations began right here; we must find out. We might have something useful, something dangerous, something utterly without value. But we had manifested it.      I WAS AWARE of a peculiar happening. I moved, apparently without my own volition. Baird moved, his eyes popped on the ball held up in both hands. Partos moved. All three of us halted and I noticed that the three balls, as held by us, were now in the same relative position to one another as they had been when first seen inside the field.                        TRIN 16            But were they? What made me think this? I could see no differences between them. They were black-ball triplets, a quick visual examination indicated. I was trying to make too much of a mystery out of them. But I called the assistants' attention to the fact I have mentioned.      Deliberately then we shifted positions.      "Put the balls down on the floor!" I commanded.      We bent together, placed the balls carefully, holding them a few seconds to make sure none of us imparted impetus to any one of them. Of their own accord, then, they rolled, halted . . . in the same relative position they had been when first seen on the tray in the field!      There was still no reason to believe anything more than that of their own natural accord they rested in the form of an equilateral triangle, like water seeking its natural level. The balls still had no individuality.      I picked up one. Partos took one. Baird took the third. We separated by many feet, held the three balls high, allowed them to drop. I distinctly heard all three balls drop. They hesitated for a moment after they landed. Then they began to roll, to converge on one another.      They came close together, paused, moved this way and that as if maneuvered by invisible hands- -came to rest a second time in the shape of a black triangle! I thought, then, of turning to look at the tray on which they had manifested, at Joe X sitting inside the field. The black tray, with its empty pockets, seemed to be laughing at me, showing toothless black gums.      Joe X just sat. There were now no other images in the field. We three closed on the black balls, lifted them. They had been dropped, had made sounds ....      "The floor made sounds, not the balls!" I told Baird and Partos. "Do either of you have any idea what these balls are made of?"      "No!" they told me together. The balls seemed to be perfectly round, without blemish of any sort. I took time to examine each of the three. And dropping them on the floor hadn't so much as scratched one of them. Rolling in the dust which was never entirely absent from my laboratory, had left no dust on any of the three.      The balls had an eerie lustre of their own. I could not see into any of the three, nor did any one of them reflect my face. I suspected that they did not absorb or reflect light.      I placed a ball in the hand of each of my assistants, kept one.      "Find out what you can about them for two concentrated hours!" I commanded. They fell to with a will. So did I. I started first with my own hydraulic press. I shoved a ball into it, applied the pressure slowly at first. Nothing happened that I could see. The press touched the ball and stopped, literally, completely. Nothing I had ever before pressed so had failed to "give." Nothing                              TRIN 17            could. But the ball did. Even the most exacting vernier reading, before and during, indicated no difference. Maximum pressure was sixty-three thousand pounds.      The black ball, of unknown--as yet--material, was totally unaffected by the pressure. It was impossible. It was also true, unless I was seeing things.      And this ball came out of some eerie combination of Joe X's brain, the zranthon-ray tube, and my theories--working on the wild idea of a member of the "lunatic fringe!"      I took the ball out of the hydraulic press.      I examined it with my best microscope. Sixty-three thousand pounds of pressure hadn't so much as smudged it, or left a rough place on it. I could feel with my fingers--or find with my most precise micrometers!      It seemed to be a huge pupil-less black eye, staring at me, unblinking. I was almost afraid to stare back.      This thing had come somehow out of the brain of Joe X. I thought what would happen to his poor head, with the mark of trephining all the way around it, if I were to put the skull under the press and start applying it. It would crack like an eggshell at far less than the pressure applied to the black ball. Yet somehow, by thought, Joe X had produced it.      I had been seeking to show thought images, electrically manifested spooks if you will. I had never dreamed of producing form, certainly not spheres, trays, pockets in metal trays, triangles.      I let the ball rest for a moment, put the tray into the hydraulic press. I could do nothing with the tray, nothing. It seemed to be of the same material as the three balls. I tossed it aside. I caught up the ball again, as it was rolling toward the balls held by Baird and Partos, attempting to take position again, I knew.      I lighted a Bunsen burner, held the ball over the flames with a pair of tongs. No smudge appeared on the ball. Moreover the flame, when it touched the ball, stopped. It didn't penetrate, did not spread, and there was no slightest suggestion of soot!      I withdrew the ball, wetted my forefinger with saliva, touched the ball where the fire had touched it. I need not have been afraid of burning. The temperature had in no way been altered by the flame from the Bunsen burner!      I thrust the ball into my beer refrigerator, left it for half an hour, while I watched the frantic efforts of Baird and Partos to mar smudge, scratch or shatter the other two black balls. Then I removed the ball from the refrigerator. Its response to extreme cold was the same as to heat--nil!      DURING those two hours we smashed those three balls together. We flung them at the walls. We operated on them with diamond drills. We dropped them into a vat of acid that came as close to being a universal solvent as anything so far produced. The effect was--none! We dropped all                        TRIN 18            three balls into the vat at the same time, watched them roll into position, form the inevitable triangle.      I began to wonder about the triangle. So did the other two. We tried something. I pasted a green one-cent stamp to one ball, a red two-cent stamp to a second, a blue three-cent stamp to a third. Then we allowed the balls to form their triangle, took measurements.      The triangle formed was always definitely equilateral, each side 23.978-plus inches long! We experimented a score of times. The triangle always formed in the same way, exactly. The ball bearing the green stamp always took a position which would have placed it directly on a due north-south line. A perpendicular drawn from the center of a line connecting the other two balls, extended northward, would have passed directly under the center of the green-stamp ball.      Why?      What was the significance of the triangle? Of the three balls? What eerie force, acting outside the field which had brought them into visible actuality, pulled them back into the triangular shape when they were free? Why did nothing we did to them effect them in the slightest?      But wait a moment, the stamps stuck to them! As if in answer to the thought, the stamps fell off!      We had exhausted our ingenuity for a moment. We had done everything we could to smash, mar, smudge, shatter or smear the three black balls. Nothing had happened. We stood above the triangle, staring down.      As if our concentration were an awaited signal, as if The Moment had come, all three balls rolled about, each about its own apex of the triangle, with a startling eccentricity, considering that they were perfect spheres. They wobbled! We hadn't altered the shape of any of the three. Now, apparently, something had!      But what?      We bent, lifted the black balls.      I discovered the odd bars on the surface of the ball I held. Baird exclaimed. Patros[sic] swore. There were odd bars on each of the three balls. I couldn't see the bars in the one I held, because they were merely upraised ebony. But they formed a triangle on the surface of the ball, a triangle which my fingers told me was equilateral, later proved correct. The same measurement proved that a perpendicular drawn from the exact center of either of the three sides to the opposing angle, the junction of the other two sides, was exactly 3.769 inches long!      Each ball was exactly the same size. Each triangle on the face of each sphere was the same throughout!                                          TRIN 19             Out of the zranthon field, then, had come three exact measurements--those of the triangle formed by the balls in relation to one another, the three triangles on the surfaces of the three balls, and the sizes of the three balls.      These mathematical facts must have some meaning.      I had not the slightest idea what it could be. Neither, I realized, had Baird or Partos.      No three men had ever been more enthusiastic for investigation.      We went to work on the small triangles with our fingers--as if they had been the dials of ebon safes.            CHAPTER IV of Trin      WHITHER PARTOS?                  SINCE MY experiments for years had been with mentality, with thoughts, I could scarcely have picked a better assistant than Joe X. He was the supreme egocentric. Since he had been very little he had been anti-social. All his thoughts, feelings, emotions, had turned inward, to a complete absorption in self. His life was almost entirely mental. It had been so for almost his entire twenty-five years. If his background had really been what he must often have feared, if he had been, were, illegitimate, his mother's mental and spiritual turmoil must have had its effect on him in his infancy.      He was perfect for my purposes. I knew that with his help I would discover the facts about the mental screen the lunatic fringer had foreseen for man, when he should have advanced, far in the future, to a place beyond anything yet known.      I began to form some queasy suspicions about Joe X; suspicions which nevertheless filled me with excitement.      These black balls were in our hands via the mind of Joe X. I did not for a moment believe him mindless in spite of what I had seen in the field with reference to his "operation." He could have made that for me, deliberately, to bolster his own story of his past.      Joe X seemed to know everything--why did he not know, why was he kept from knowing, that he was a trin?      I liked mystery, but was never satisfied until I had solved it, and the more abstruse the better. There had been no bumps, certainly no raised triangles, on the three black balls. Now there were. Their number had significance. Three balls. Three triangles Three sides of each triangle the same length. The balls themselves naturally rolling to a position fanning a larger triangle.                        TRIN 20            Here was a means of communication grown out of another, far in the future, means of communication.      I fetched a small table, set the tray in its exact center. I took the north ball position, placed Baird to my left near the second ball, Partos to my right near the third ball.      "We'll experiment on something new in Chinese checkers," I said. "I'll keep track. This is the way safe crackers of real skill find the combinations of safes. They keep eliminating. Now, raise your hands above the black balls. Your left hands, since I must use my left, my right being occupied by a pencil and paper."      They obeyed me, first moving the balls in the tray pockets until an apex of each equilateral triangle was directly opposite each man's chest.      "Now, with your left thumb," I said, "press on the left side of your triangle. Run your thumb up and down, back and forth. Twist. Keep working it until I tell you to stop--just the one side!"      We all did the same. I wrote down what we were doing, to avoid future duplication of effort. Nothing happened that we could see.      "Now, use your thumb on the right-hand side!"      This we all did. I made the record.      "Now, thumb on right side, forefinger on left side. Twist, press, run your thumbs and forefingers up and down!"      Still nothing happened. Three black eyes seemed to stare and glare at me, to mock me utterly. I felt like a fool, but in working with the human mind--and what else is there--one often does.      Press both thumb and forefinger on the base of your triangle as if you were operating a telegraph key!"      That produced nothing, either.      I tried every combination of which I could think, carefully recording each one. In every possible way we twisted, pulled and hauled on the three triangles. In an hour we were sweating from head to foot. Then I called for time out, copied off what we had so far done, gave each man a slip, turned them loose to experiment as they saw fit. I could think of no fresh combinations of three.      ALL THE time Joe X sat in the zranthon field as if in a catyleptic[sic] state. I wondered if he were conscious of all we did.      Were we, with all our blundering, actually twisting and turning the brain of Joe X? The thought gave me the shudders. I had applied the hydraulic press, we had smashed the things to the floor, against walls, worked diamond drills on them, dropped them into acids. And yet, if we actually                        TRIN 21            were taking liberties with some strange offshoot of the brain of Joe X, could we be shocking it any more than life had so far shocked Joe X himself? It occurred to me that the human brain, even the one eighth part which science claimed to know a little about, was about the toughest thing in existence. Even insanity didn't harm it much.      I was looking at Dan Partos when it happened, but I couldn't for the life of me detail just what occurred. Partos swore, became impatient. He raised his right hand high, brought it down, palm flat, against the triangle on his black ball. That action was one I hadn't thought of, though it was the most obvious of all.      I think I saw Partos' palm contact the triangle. I wouldn't swear that it actually touched. There was no time involved. I saw the palm, swiftly descending, driven by Partos' anger, frustration and impatience--and Partos no longer existed! That's what I said. His chair was empty! It was as if he had never even been there. I stared at the ball he had slapped. Nothing had happened to it. Baird looked at me with something utterly queer in his face. Then he felt in the empty chair for Partos. His hand played through the space which Partos had occupied. It encountered nothing he could, in any way, feel.      Partos was not!      The first expression of macabre humor then came from Joe X, out of the zranthon field. An eerie chuckle came, unmistakably, from the lips of the man whose mind we were using in this series of experiments. We had no idea where Partos was.      Baird slid into Partos' chair, stared at the black ball.      "It's smooth again," he said softly. "The triangle is gone!"      I stared at my own black ball. It still had the raised bars, the perfect triangle. Baird, his face white as a sheet, slid back into his own chair, stared at the third ball. It bore the bars which formed the perfect triangle. Only Partos' ball was smooth again, as if his slap had driven the raised portions back into the ball. But we knew that sixty-three thousand pounds of pressure could not do that, for we had had one of the balls, triangle uppermost, in the press. Not the slap, but the combination, had altered Partos' black marble!      "Dollars to doughnuts," croaked Baird, "Partos dived right inside the black ball!      Joe X answered that, to my startlement.      "No! He's in the room, unhurt!"      Joe X was again the topflight liar. We could see everywhere in the laboratory, and Partos simply wasn't anywhere. He was as big a man as Joe X, could not be hidden, any more than he could have been compressed into the black ball.                                    TRIN 22            Just the same, Baird and I rose and began hunting for Partos. We looked in the most unlikely places. He wasn't anywhere.      One place, the one we could not search, was the only spot left: the zranthon field. We had never so far been able to enter it.      "He's inside the field," I said, "but he's not a mental image. The ball must have provided some channel into the field, since it came out of it.      THE OBVIOUS thought came to me, making my heart stop. There was only one way to be sure and I doubted if I had the nerve to try it. It was like volunteering to die to find out what happened during death, with only someone's theory to make you feel secure that there was a mechanical return available.      I stared at Baird. His face was at least as white as mine must be. We didn't have to exchange words to understand that the same thought had struck both of us. I could volunteer to go hunting into the invisible, or into the field, but that would leave Baird alone outside, lacking my meager knowledge of the attributes of the zranthon-ray tube. I could not go and leave Baird.      I could not send him, deliberately, not knowing how to return him. I could not rely too much on Joe X, whose brain had produced the incomprehensible black balls, the series of triangles, one of which had disappeared now with Dan Partos.      "Both Plato and Socrates," I had read somewhere, "required students who wished to master philosophy to take courses in pure mathematics. Both great teachers regarded mathematics as the correct introduction because cold reason was needed in all solutions, which could in no wise be effected by emotion."      The black balls, the main triangles, the small triangles, were symbols, signals, code! But try and prove it!      "If something happens to us," I said, as Baird and I faced each other across the remaining two balls on which the raised trilogy appeared, "Joe X, Carse Ryal Smith, will be all right. He can exit from where he is at will!"      "I wasn't thinking of him," said Baird quietly, firmly, "but of my friend Dan Partos. I'm afraid, but wherever he is, he may need my help. Let's go!"      We held up our palms to begin the slap. It was like a mutual salute. We looked down at the balls so as not to miss. We held our breaths as our hands went down, struck the two balls.      There was no effect whatever!      The combination which had worked for Partos did not work for either of us. The balls, then, were individual. Each was different from the other, though in no way we could yet explain. Yes, there                              TRIN 23            was now an explainable difference: our two balls bore the triangles, Partos' big marble did not. But much good did the knowledge do us!      Yet in the smooth ball and perhaps the two triangled black spheres was hidden the mystery of the disappearance of Dan Partos. It nested also, I felt sure, in the brain of Joe X.      "Where is he?" I asked Joe X.      "It has to be a matter of record to be worth anything," said Joe X. "There is an experiment which will show it. It must be made. Otherwise it remains the figment of your mind, my mind, and the zranthon-ray tube's diffusion of the two together!"      That really made a lot of sense, didn't it?      "We've got to try again with both balls," said Baird. We sat down to it. We went over the combinations again. Both of us twisted the balls in their pockets, altering the locations of the apices--and crashed our palms down on them, to no effect. We twisted the tray around. We did everything, and nothing was of any use.      FINALLY we set the two barred balls aside and concentrated our attention on the smooth one. After all it had figured somehow in the disappearance of Dan Partos. We got nowhere.      "I wish it were small enough to swallow!" said Baird in exasperation. "Or that I had a big mouth!"      "The only way we can consume the ball," I said, "is by doing it mentally. After all, it's a thought- form! We can try."      We placed the ball on the table between us, pushing aside the tray which held the other two balls. We stared into it, or at it, since one could not see into it. I don't know what Baird did, but I tried to enter into the ball, to become one with its secret, to merge with it. I blanked out everything else, and for some minutes several queer things happened. I found myself swimming in mountainous seas. I had been, I knew, torpedoed. It was so real I could have yelled in terror, if the shining figure hadn't stood upon the water beside me and told me I was not to die. I was picked up by a British destroyer, and that was also very real.      I began to realize that if I could "hold a thought" with this ball as the center, I could participate in the life of Joe X. I could test the truth of his stories, could experience his experiences, all written indelibly on his subconscious, whence the balls and tray had come. I deliberately switched to the orphanage, and found myself hanging by a stout rope. Again the shining figure, and I was literally cut down.      I would know, now, about the missing two trins...      It did not seem possible that Joe X should be in ignorance of them. Nor was he! He knew, but did not know that he knew. The two brothers-in-one-birth were part of Joe X, but he had never                        TRIN 24            consciously known of them, as so carefully had his past been hidden from Joe X, he had never suspected with his outer mind. But it was utterly impossible to separate from one another, completely, three who had lain together in the womb.      Excitement grew in me.      The three black balls were, in some eerie fashion, Joe X himself and his brethren! The desire on Joe X's part to sluff[sic] off life grew out of his inability to rejoin his trin brothers. He did not know of them, only that something was missing from him, from his spiritual inner, which he felt he would never find.      Where were those two brothers? I sought the answer, while concentrating on the black ball, in the orphanage, somewhere out west. I got nowhere. They had never been in the orphanage which had had charge of Joe X. I had to go back beyond that in time, but could not, because Joe X had never been back beyond that--as far as his brethren--during his conscious life.      I began to realize that the tray had a bleak, sinister, fearful meaning! Normally, it held the black marbles. It must also hold their secrets!      Had Joe X hated his mother? Was that why the tray was black?      I was deeply involved in these and other absurd questions which might or might not have meaning, when I was jerked back to consciousness of my surroundings.      Joe X, somewhat fearful and restrained, was calling me by name. I looked around. Clyde Baird was no longer present!      I LOST no time clutching the remaining two balls, studying their surfaces. Two balls were now entirely smooth. The Unknown had swallowed Clyde Baird as completely as it had swallowed Daniel Partos!      I stared at Joe X.      "Where's Baird? Did you see him go?"      "I saw him go," said Joe X. "He wasn't even watching the other two balls. He was staring into the smooth ball as you were. Without apparently thinking about it, he put his hand aside. He must have touched one of the balls in the right way, or...I don't know. He just disappeared."      "Where is he?"      "With Partos!"      "And where is Partos?" I demanded, my voice utterly shrill with my rising terror.                                    TRIN 25            "Baird and Partos are the answers to your experiment, over in the back of the book," said Joe X. "You could get the answers from me, perhaps, but the method of attaining them would remain forever unknown. You have to work it out!"      "I need help, plenty of help," I complained. But I can't keep getting assistants from other laboratories, to have them vanish without trace. What am I going to say to their employers when they don't show up, anyway?"      "They must show up," said Joe X. "We must find them, restore them to here! Somehow, I must help you. I don't see how, but we can experiment. I can always return to the field if things don't go right, and you'll be no worse off than you now are!"      Joe X stepped down from the easy chair, pushing aside the zranthon armrest. He walked easily out of the field to stand beside the table with me. He stood there, studying the three balls. Just so, I thought, a man might stare at his own brain if by some weird necromancy it could be removed, the man remain alive to stare!      One thing I had to get set right now. I had to give us plenty of time. I couldn't have the laboratory which had sent Baird and Partos, bringing police in on us. How could we explain the inexplicable? Not even the most enlightened cop was going to listen very long to my story of the zranthon ray while two young ex-GI's were obviously missing. They'd take the laboratory apart, cart Joe X and me off to jail.      That I knew, would spell catastrophe.      I telephoned the laboratory, explained somewhat haltingly that I was in the midst of a delicate experiment and would need the services of Baird and Partos for at least seventy-two hours more, perhaps even longer.      The director of that laboratory, with whom I was sure I had negotiated for the services of Baird and Partos, answered me with a delicate sarcasm--which still had the effect of a battering-ram smashed against the skull.      "In view of the fact that, not since I have been this laboratory's director, and that's been for fifteen years, have we had any assistants named either Baird or Partos, you may keep 'em from now on for all of me!"      Thoughtfully I clicked down the receiver, turned back to the table where Joe X studied the black balls.      I studied this strange, unearthly now outre-seeming man with a new fascination. He looked like anybody else, more or less, his size and shape. He appeared a fairly decent sort of chap.      But was he anything whatever that he appeared to be, however queer or normal?                                    TRIN 26            CHAPTER V of Trin      BOOTSTRAPS OF JOE X                  JOE X seemed trying his best to help me, but ever and anon I thought I detected a secretive smile on his face. I early began to wonder if he were not in some fashion the monster to my Frankenstein. A tremendous change had taken place in him, caused, I thought, by his lengthy immersion in the zranthon field.      After Joe X came out of the field I tried to enter it, just to discover if his emergence changed it in any way. It did not. The field remained. I returned to Joe X, busily hunting the way to the solution of any basic problem. I had proved to my own satisfaction that the mental screen was possible, not in some future age, but here and now. Future ages might produce people naturally endowed with the screen; I'd settle for it as a mechanical thing which men could sell--like telephones, radio, television.      I sat down across the table from Joe X, who was handling the black balls, staring at them almost stupidly. The man appeared to be hypnotized still.      Immediately after the disappearance of Baird, but one of the three balls had been distorted by the raised triangle. Now I took all three from Joe X's hand, to discover that all three were utterly smooth!      How did it happen that the third triangle was no more, as if its mission had been accomplished, and nobody had disappeared? There had been no change at all, except that Joe X had stepped out of the field! Was that the reason?      Hitherto Joe X had seemed utterly brilliant. Now I was not so sure. He could have been a moron coming out of a coke jag.      "How do you like the zranthon treatment, Joe?" I asked.      He seemed not to hear me at first. Then he stirred, looked up at me. His tongue must have been as furred as his mind, because it was almost impossible to understand him when he answered:      "Zranthon? Zranthon? What's that?"      Yet prior to going into the field he had told me, its inventor, all about it. What had happened to the man, anyway?      I stared at the big black marbles and wondered even more. The eerie lustre seemed to be going out of them. They had hitherto seemed alive. Now I scarcely knew what to think. Good pearls come to life on the neck of a vivacious, beautiful woman. Lying shut away in a drawer they lose                              TRIN 27            their appearance of life. These huge black "pearls" were doing the same thing. They almost seemed to be dying!      "I don't know what's happening to them," I said to Joe X. "We did all we could to destroy them. Nothing worked. Now that you are out of the field, they're dying. When we put top pressure on them...."      Joe X seemed not to hear me at all. He was holding one of the balls in his right hand. Whether in answer to my statement, never completed, about applying pressure, or as a reflex action of has own, I don't know, but Joe X closed his hand on that ball. It shattered in his grip. It didn't break like an eggshell. It didn't crack, or rupture; it shattered!      Without looking up at me Joe X dribbled the ashen remains of the ball into the tray pocket whence he had lifted it. It overflowed the pocket about enough to prove to me that it had been a solid. There was nothing inside it different from what I had seen outside. The ashes of the black ball were as black as the ball had been.      Joe X reached for the second ball. I was afraid, for he was a powerful man, mentally disintegrating before my eyes.      "No, Joe," I said. I expected him to react violently, maybe even attack me, try to kill me. His brain was struggling with some problem I could not reach. I remembered his statement that he had something inside his head in lieu of a brain, the brain being kept alive in far-off Shanghai. Was the substitute now deteriorating? Was Joe X dying mentally, even as the black balls were dying?      I feared so, but I was going to take risks. There was so much I did not know. How his money was replenished, for one thing--if it was; what brought about his "lapses" and how he traveled while they lasted.      I knew, considering his obvious and continuing deterioration, that I was violating no secret with my next statement.      "You are a trin, Joe, did you know that?"      He didn't lift his head. He merely stared at the ashes of the black ball he had crushed.      "Carse Ryal Smith," I said. He raised his head, looked at me with eyes as lacklustre as the black marbles.      "You are a trin," I said. "You have two brothers, did you know that?"      "Of course," he muttered, as if someone else were speaking for him. "We all have two brothers, or two sisters. One is Yesterday, one is Self, one is Tomorrow! We always seek them. We never find them. That is why we are always empty, sad, unsatisfied, resentful, hating--we are never whole! Fate keeps us forever incomplete. But I had hoped when I came to you. . . .                        TRIN 28            HE LOST track of the thread of his speech then, could not find it again. It was as if someone had shut him off, kicked his shins under the table lest he reveal too much. What he said, if there were any sense in it, opened up a whole new realm of investigation to me. It seemed fairly obvious that a man lived in his present and his past, looking forward to the future--usually for some utopian perfection forever moving away ahead of him. Was this what Joe X meant? Was this the meaning of the esoteric statement that man was triune and timeless?      I shook my head, casting off the cobwebs spun by the lunatic fringe of whom I had read too much. A man couldn't put his past or his future on the scales and read it. Only the psychologist and psychiatrist could analyze a man's past, and who could prove whether they were right or wrong?      I set Joe X's remarks down for the babblings of a brain unguided, unsparked, last words poured out of it like last drops poured from a water bottle.      Joe X forgot the ashes of the one ball, forgot the other two balls. He rose from the chair, as if he were lifting a tremendous weight. He wasn't fat, didn't look any older, but he moved as if he weighed many times a hundred and eighty, and were an octogenarian. It was most strange. On top of that the other two balls were becoming of no interest whatever. They were almost dead. Now I could crush one myself, I thought. I did it, just to assure myself.      Then I crushed the third ball. I don't know exactly why I dumped each handful of ashes into the pocket in the tray whence the ball had come.      I took note of the tray.      It was not changing at all! It looked as mocking, as wise, as ever. I could almost hear its laughter.      Joe X had paid no attention to the tray. Now Joe X was walking around the laboratory. He looked at each implement I used in my work. My stuff was the last word, and very expensive. If I couldn't buy the best I didn't buy. Joe X lifted various items, my microcamera, my microscope, my calipers, my weighing devices, my osmotic syntheses, my electrolytic jars. He slammed each one down afterward while an expression of utter contempt touched his features. His face was now that of an imbecile--what right had he to be contemptuous of my topnotch equipment?      "What's wrong with the microcamera, Joe?" I demanded.      "Fifteen thousand years behind the times!" he said. "Thought form of a congenital idiot!"      That gave me the creeps, for certain, though everything the man said and did seemed to be a door opening. Yet when the door stood open I lacked the vision to see beyond it entirely. Just hints, glimpses, ideas. I must put them together. Then they would be something.      Heavily Joe X walked around the laboratory.                              TRIN 29            I would have sworn the floor sagged sometimes under his weight.      "Joe," I said gently, "how long has it been since you weighed? How about stepping on the scales?"      Had the zranthon field, building itself up to where it operated successfully as a mental screen, so successfully in fact that thought forms became material forms, filled Joe X himself with material, making him heavy beyond any man's right, mentally and physically?      Joe X looked around him stupidly, located the scales, lumbered toward them. He got up. I was right behind him. The urge to boost him almost overcame me. I felt he might resent it. And he was a mighty man at this point, slow though he was.      THE INDICATOR on the scales shot to the limit. There was a whirring, a crashing sound, and the scales were useless! They weighed up to an even one thousand pounds. Joe X had not been too careful, stepping up, yet if he had jumped up and down on it he could scarcely have done the damage he had now done merely by ponderously mounting.      Joe X got down, looked at me, then back at his easy chair within the zranthon field.      "Joe," I said, "where did Baird and Partos come from?"      He snickered.      "You needn't worry," he said. "they're back there!"      I thought as much, and I didn't mean by that that they were back at the laboratory where I had at first been so sure I had got them.      "Joe," I pursued my train of thought, "may I have all the money you have in your pocket?"      He didn't hesitate. He was slow, fearsomely slow and ponderous, but he delved into his pocket, came out with a worn wallet, tendered it to me. I took out all the money it held--five worn twenty dollar bills. I carefully noted their serial numbers, thinking myself a gullible fool as I did so, then thrust the bills into my pocket, returned the billfold to Joe X.      I kept trying to analyze this new mysterious, stupid Joe X. He was bigger than he had been by far, but not in size. It was as if his bigness extended outward, invisible and intangible, as if he bore an unseen burden. He was taller by far, though still but six feet. His voice was the same, but blurred, as if it were a radio being jammed, as if his tongue were thick with anesthetic or numbness.      He was a muted dynamo, a powerhouse under the sea, a blanketed lightning flash. If ever he were freed...but by whom or what could he be freed? I sensed that the freeing, and with it a murderous destructive devastation, might come at any moment. Yet knowing this, feeling that                              TRIN 30            certain security was mine only while Joe X sat inside the zranthon field, I kept putting off the moment.      If this monster who looked just as he had, yet didn't, got out of hand, went berserk, I was a dead man. I would never solve the secret of the disappearance of Baird and Partos. I'd never know the complete formula for the mental screen, or the secrets of the tray, the triangles and the black marbles.      "Joe," I said, "who took you to the orphanage? Did anybody there ever tell you?"      "Nobody took me," he answered. "I just went. I was just there. I used to ask. The women always looked at one another, scared, but nobody ever said. I asked if my mother took me. Nobody told me yes or no. But they said she was beautiful."      "How did you feel about your mother?" I went on.      "The same as I do now."      "How is that?"      "I hate her completely. If I could get my hands on her I would tear her apart. She reminds me, when I allow myself to think of her, of my blackest moments."      "And the shining figure in your escapes from death," I pursued. "Does she never remind you of your mother?"      "She?" he repeated. "The shining figure is that of a man!"      "Are you sure, Joe? Would you listen, even to save your life, if it were a woman?"      He shut up then, refusing to talk further. I looked back at the black ashes in the pockets in the tray. They were as they had been. The tray, of all things in the laboratory connected with the experiment, remained unchanged.      I had pushed time, and Joe X, and destiny, to the last split second--in the sacred name of science.      "Joe," I said, "you'd better go back into the field and sit down. We still have work to do."      OBEDIENTLY the lumbering man entered the zranthon field. Not until he was inside did I realize what a tremendous mental feat he had performed. I had not been able to do it, else I'd never have run that ad, asking for an assistant. Joe X, quitting the field to experiment with his own thought forms, to help me, give me hints, had actually, in effect lifted himself by his bootstraps. He had gone out and come in at the same time. He had risen and dropped at the same time. He had spoken and remained silent at the same time. He had done something no human being of whom I had ever heard--even the "masters" of the esoteric--could do.                              TRIN 31            Nor was that all. He sat down in the easy chair, closed the third arm, leaned tiredly on it. I heard a click from the tray, turned. There could have been no click. There was no time!      The three black balls, lustre, life and all, reposed in their pockets in the black tray. Something, something which I could not grasp mentally, for just a moment, had restored the balls to their ebon perfection from the ashes we had made of them! What? "Contact" effected when Joe X and the zranthon field again became en rapport?      Out of the field, in Joe X's normal voice, came this:      "You now have all the elements of your mystery, Mr. Lowre," he said. "I can show you no more, tell you no more! With superhuman effort I have told you more than I should have--against most impressive opposition!"      In a lefthanded way he was explaining why he had seemed such a lumbering idiot, outside the zranthon field.      Yes, I had an inkling. But some mysteries remained, of which the most important were these: (l) who were those Tibetan monks in yellow robes! (2) What, actually, was the shining figure which seemed to stand between Joe X and death? (3) Whither had Partos and Baird gone?      I knew the meaning of the triangles, esoteric as well as scientific, but could not put the meaning into words, therefore could not prove their meaning in this particular experiment.      I needed several things.      I needed, first, a physical connection for the black tray which, throughout all this mental maneuvering, had not changed in the slightest.      Leaving Joe X in the field, apparently recuperating, I left the laboratory, the house, repaired to the nearest telegraph office; where I spent every bit of cash I owned, including the one hundred dollars I had taken from Joe X.      If my theory was correct, my next assistant would be a woman, a specially selected one!      I placed these new ads by telegram, prepaid. I scattered them somewhat, feeling inspired.      Even as I did so I wondered again about Baird and Partos, particularly about the telephone call by which I had first obtained their Services. With whom, actually, had I talked? Had my selection of that laboratory been the whim I had thought it.      The silly idea came to me: It didn't matter who you telephoned, you'd have got Baird and Partos!      I really believed that; but who had them now, and why?                                    TRIN 32            CHAPTER VI of Trin      ASSISTANT FROM NOWHERE                  WILL MOTHER OF CARSE RYAL SMITH KINDLY CONTACT DR. CHESTER LOWRE 211X Riverside Drive, New York City.      That's the ad I shipped out to fifty newspapers scattered around over the United States. How did I select the newspapers? Just as I thought I had selected the laboratory which I thought had sent me Baird and Partos. I had a feeling that if fate intended me to find the woman I would find her. She would. . . I had no idea what steps she would take.      Much time must pass.      "We haven't eaten anything for forty-eight hours, Joe," I suggested.      "I could do with something," he said. That soothed me. I half expected him to ignore me or say that while he was inside the field, busy with thinking, he had no need for food. I rang for Zack, told him to bring food enough for four men. He looked around an amazement, shaking his head. He was always expecting the unexpected of me. Why was I ordering food for four when there were obviousely[sic] but two of us present?      "We haven't eaten for forty-eight hours, Zack," I said lamely, on the defensive before my underling. "Besides, we're expecting company."      Zack set up a table where I told him, just outside the cylinder. He never came in contact with it, or he would have thrown a fit. But it had its effect on him. His hair stood straight out from his head like a fright wig. He felt it, put his hand to his hair, looked at me accusingly.      "You're always funning with the old man," he said. "Only, you don't look as if it's any fun!"      "Zack," I said, "it isn't, not a bit!"      Joe X stood inside the cylinder to eat. He wolfed his food. He was rapidly becoming the Joe X I had studied at the height of his powers in the zranthon field. I was hungry enough, but nothing compared to Joe X. He ate, and ate, and ate!      When he had done I pushed the table back, Joe X returned to the easy chair. I studied the tray and the black balls, all of them now completely smooth. No, now that Joe X had returned--what other reason could there have been?--the third ball showed the black ridges of the third and last mysterious triangle. When that triangle vanished, with Joe X still inside the field, there would be some sort of solution to my problem of the future of man--the mental screen which would make misunderstandings between man and man impossible.                              TRIN 33            "Joe," I said, "I want you, if you're strong enough, to form on the screen the thought-forms I mention.      "Shoot!" he replied. "I think you're cooking with gas! You're fumbling, but do scientists of this day and age ever do anything else?"      "Should I name what I want to see, or merely think it?"      Either, but saying it makes it easier. Remember, though, what you think, and what I think when you speak, may be entirely different. Then again, Mr. Lowre, you can make thoughts on the zranthon field, from right where you are!"      "By holding the balls, one or all of them or the tray with balls, in my hands?" I asked. "I've been wondering about that."      "There are combinations, always," said Joe X. "Two combinations have been operated. They 'translated' Baird and Partos!" He chuckled, as he had once before, as if he knew something so obvious I should know.      "Let's leave it for later, Joe," I said. I wanted to work up to something gradually, not obviously, so that Joe X would not suspect my motives.      "I'm thinking, and picturing in my mind," I said to Joe X, "A winding black water stream in Central Brazil, the Cururu ...."      I saw the river very plainly as I thought it out to him. I thought it in detail, and willed him to show it on the field.      HE MANAGED a river, but it was no river I had ever seen. It represented Joe X's reflection of my thought, what he gathered from my detailed mental description. Its waters were clearly black, because I had said black--but Joe X had to fight mentally to make them black. They varied from colorless to light green, to blue, to brown, to black.      "A church," I said next. I thought of a little church I had seen in the jungles of Haiti, long ago. I named the church, began to describe it. Instantly Joe X thought it forth on the mental screen. This time the church varied in many details from what I remembered of it, but it was recognizable as the native church at Ounaminthe.      "That's scarcely fair, Mr. Lowre," said Joe X. "I've visited that identical church, within the last year!"      "Even so, it's far from the way I remember it," I said. "What I can't understand, as this experiment progresses, is how we ever manage to understand, one another at all. I'm accustomed to people reading into letters what I never wrote, and adhering to the meanings even when I insisted in person and face to face that nothing of the kind was intended, but now I can                              TRIN 34            comprehend even words of explanation are more or less wasted. People simply don't understand one another! They're not supposed to."      "Not while they are prevented from communicating directly, without the use of synthetic channels--like telephones, words, gestures, smiles. When man speaks mind to mind there will be no misunderstandings. But he must earn his way by learning!"      I shut off his sermonizing by shooting a series of words at Joe X.      "Show me a paxiuba palm tree!"      He showed me a cocoanut[sic] palm, vastly different.      "Now a two foot square of koa wood!"      He showed me a square of mahogany! Even Joe X had to laugh, a bit ruefully.      "Anyway," he said, "it's real mahogany. Take it out if you want."      I didn't. I erased the thought form by substituting another, the only way mankind can really exercise control over his thoughts.      "You 'create' mahogany, then destroy it, erase it," I said to Joe X. "I wonder if all the forms we see, everywhere in the world, are mancreated things which have escaped from mental screens?"      Joe X did not answer. I could tell that he was wondering what I was leading up to. He knew that I would not be asking questions aimlessly, just to kill time. Did he know of the telegraphed advertisements I had just broadcast? I had told him nothing of them.      "Show me a waterspout," I said next. "Now, Niagara Falls! Now, the Empire State Building" I gave him time only to outline these various things, then spoke others. "Now show me a streamlined train! Now a Skymaster plane! Now a set of pool balls, correctly numbered, racked up to start the game" he did this one quicker than the others, I'm pretty certain he didn't have the stripes and colors correct. I wasn't too sure because I couldn't myself remember! That could well be a flaw in communications when the mental screen became a commonplace: man might very well not know what he was thinking about!      "I'd like to see your shining figure again" I tried to make it casual. There was a bit of hesitation. I had the feeling, though, that it wasn't because of anything suspicious in my request. To Joe X the shining figure was one to be reverenced, a supernatural being of great spiritual power and beauty.      I SENSED, for the first time, great struggle, emotions warring against emotions, belief against lack of it. I saw the shining figure begin to take shape as a thought form. Then I saw something else: the thought form taking charge, helping Joe X to manifest the shining figure. The whole time required to bring the shining figure into such complete form as to make him seem an actual                        TRIN 35            person. My pulse hammered in my brain. The black balls were real forms, solids, material--could the shining figure be real also? In Joe X's past experiences, when he had been thwarted of committing suicide, when he had been saved from drowning, saved from death in an airplane crash, Joe X could not possibly have produced the shining figure as a thought-form. But what was hallucination but a thought-form, a phantasm?      The shining figure was no phantasm, I knew when I remembered. No phantasm could have pulled my stepladder into the cylinder which was the zranthon field.      The shining figure, if asked, if it so elected, could walk out of that field and explain itself, in words, gestures, expressions!      But as the form became more sharply etched, more material, the face became more serious. The shining figure did shine, with an unearthly brilliance. That shining did not make me think of the phosphorescence from dead things, from the tomb; it made me think of what the aura should be, if any such thing existed. It made me think of the shining aureole about the heads of angels. But there was a light around this figure, in the midst of which it stood.      I was going to call the figure by name, ask it to step forth from the zranthon field and explain itself to me. I knew positively that the entity represented there could answer any question about the mental screen I could ask. Why? Because, I felt sure, the figure knew all about it, used it, operated in some plane where man did not have to await the passage of aeons to possess the ability to operate the screen naturally.      On the verge of extending an invitation to the shining figure I came to a dead stop, mentally. The figure must have read my mind as surely as if I were using a mental screen--for it shook its head, almost imperceptibly! It was part and parcel of Joe X, but it was individual. Joe X did not shake the head of the shining figure, mentally; the shining figure shook its own head!      Yet there was promise in the headshake. The lips shaped words. I did not hear the words, was not intended to hear them, yet the thought was pictured forth in my mind in these words:      "Do not ask me now. It shall happen, very soon!"      Then the shining figure, giving me a smile in which I read a weird ineffable sweetness, a vast, awesome satisfaction--almost as if I were somehow bringing about an event long hoped for, endlessly deferred--vanished from the field, completely.      "Now, Joe," I said, "show me Cleopatra's needle! Grant's Tomb! The Lincoln Memorial!"      I stopped right there. Joe X, though he had not changed, showed me nothing after the disappearance from the screen of his shining figure. I stared at Joe X. This time he touched his ears again. He could not hear me. Soon his face took on that blank look which told me he could no longer see me. This had happened before, when something had been building up in the mental screen.                              TRIN 36            What agency was building up the force? Not Joe X's mind, not mine. I was sure, for I did not think of blocking out Joe X from normal sight and sound, and I doubted very much if it were any idea of Joe's.      For two solid hours I waited for Joe X to be in communication with me again, and it did not happen. He just sat there, motionless, as if he were solidly frozen in a cake of ice.      THUS IT was when Zack came to me, visibly disturbed, to tell me that a lady was waiting to see me in my almost-never-used reception room in the main part of my home.      "Old, Zack?" I asked softly.      "I don't know what to say sir, except that she doesn't look like the kind that aged!"      "Beautiful, Zack?"      "Mr. Lowre," he said fervently, almost reverently, "she's something out of a picture! She is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. That's not just my idea as a man. My wife says exactly the same thing, in more and better words!"      I glanced back at Joe X. He knew nothing of what went on. I followed Zack to the sitting room. The woman rose to meet me. I went forward, took her hand. It was warm, human, gentle, perfectly formed. I scarcely know how to describe Marya Madone. You lost yourself, looking into her eyes. You couldn't think anything wrong, looking at her. Her face was exquisite. Her hair was auburn. I suppose it was combed, dressed somehow, but I'll never be able to describe it- -not until the mental screen becomes natural! Yet I'll forget no slightest detail of it.      "Chester Lowre," she murmured, her voice like a far off singing breeze, "I doubt very much if you can imagine how I feel! You are making possible a meeting I had never hoped would be possible. I am afraid. I should not be afraid, I know, but I can't help it."      She spoke English, with an accent I could not place. I knew, at the same time, that no philologist, however experienced, could place it, either, for the very best of reasons: this woman's native tongue was unknown to philologists! But that's getting ahead of the experiment.      "You are the mother of Carse Ryal Smith," I said, making it a statement rather than a question. She did not bother to answer. She knew that I knew.      "I told you we should meet again!" she smiled, a smile that would go with me through eternity.      "Should Carse recognize you at once both as his mother and the 'shining figure' of his experiences, Marya Madone?"      "No! No!" she said. "It would never do! It must be done gradually. I shall be Marya Madone with which his shining figure gradually and naturally merges!"                              TRIN 37            "Then you must change more," I said. "Right now the resemblance is too close for him to miss! You answered one of my ads, of course--quite aside from your appearance, your warning, and your mental promise out of the zranthon field?"      She laughed softly. "I started the instant you made up your mind to advertise! I was enroute the moment after you put your ad into words. There will be many answers to it, but it won't matter."      "So!" I said ruefully. "All that money went to waste, including the hundred dollars I got from Carse Ryal?"      "Nothing good ever goes to waste," she said seriously, "and have you forgotten something about money, with reference to my son?"      "His store of it never diminishes!" I said. "You keep him supplied!"      "A mother's privilege, but he must never know it."      "I promise," I said, "but there is something I must ask...."      "About the father of the triplets?" she smiled, unruffled. "He has been dead fifteen hundred years. Here and now, and during the time you have lived, he would have to wait fifteen thousand years to be born!"      "Has he lived at all during the life of Carse Ryal?" I asked gently.      "No," she said, "but Carse is still not that which he has all his life feared! It was necessary that he believe, or at least suspect, that he was born out of wedlock. His thoughts must turn inward to make this experiment not only possible but useful! In spite of records to the contrary, in that orphanage, Carse Ryal Smith was legitimately born! But you already knew this, Chester Lowre!"      "I thought I knew, Marya Madone, but knowing and proving are two different things. Now I shall prove! And your other two sons, Marya?"      "Do you not know that also, Chester Lowre?" she asked, grinning as if vastly pleased with herself.      I told her what I thought and believed.      "Of course," she said, "what else could it possibly be? Now, if I can change, somehow .... "      "I'll fix it," I promised. I called Zack's wife. "This is Mrs. Madone," I told her. "She is going to help Mr. Smith and me in our laboratory work. Will you fix her up in the ordinary costume of a nurse?"                                          TRIN 38            I could think of nothing more different from Marya Madone's excellent, neatly fitting cloth of gold garment than the rustling white of a nurse's costume, starched as I knew Zack's wife would starch it.      "There should be a touch of rouge and of lipstick," I added to Marya Madone. "It's customary."      She needed neither one, except to hide her own natural exquisite complexion by way of additional disguise.      In less than an hour I conducted nurse Madone into the laboratory. It was almost impossible for me to grasp the fact that in this competent looking nurse, clearly interested only in her work, was two other people: Joe X's mother, and his "shining figure!"      How could that be, scientifically?      It was, though, and I knew I should, with her help, and Joe X's, prove it to the hilt!            CHAPTER VII of Trin      AGAIN THE MARBLES                  MARYA MADONE sat across the table from me. Between us was the tray. In the pockets of the tray were the three black balls. Marya Madone watched me, but not until she had looked long at the still figure in the easy chair inside the zranthon field. Such love for Joe X looked out of her eyes as I could not remember seeing in any other woman's face, ever.      Marya's love for her son was limitless.      I remembered what he had said to me, that if he could he would kill her; she represented the blackest moments in his life.      "When the tray and the balls become as white as your light," I said to nurse Madone, "the experiment will be completed, is that so?"      "Yes," she said softly, "and then .... "      "Then I shall lose you and Joe X as I have lost Baird and Partos!"      "Nothing once possessed is ever entirely lost," she said, "and you may see us again, somewhere in time. But during your life you will see us no more--after the tray and the balls are completely light!"      "Are you going to explain it all to me?"                        TRIN 39            "That I am not authorized to do!" she said. "It is not given man to know the future by abnormal means. But if you read the signs given you, and interpret them yourself, I can agree or disagree without violating the universal law."      "Then I shall begin with you," I said, "since all life begins with the mother! It is true that, according to time as it is known by me and my contemporaries, you will not be born for fifteen thousand years yet! According to your reckoning, there is no time!      Her smile was radiant. She said nothing. But the smile was above all encouraging, triumphant. I had spoken truly.      "The black tray," I went on, "represents you. It is the mother, as if the three pockets were the womb. The three black spheres represent Joe X and his two brothers, of whom I do not yet know for certain, though I feel reasonably sure that, when they're not acting, they don't in the least resemble yellow-robed Tibetans!"      Marya Madone threw back her head and laughed aloud, a musical expression that was more like an embrace than an embrace is.      "Carse Ryal was very close then," she said, "but the time was not ripe that he should know the truth! Go on, Chester Lowre. It is desired that you have the fullest enjoyment from this experiment."      "The secret of what is happening here and now, including you, Marya Madone," I said, "it partially contained in Joe X's 'lapses.' His most amazing 'lapse' was one of time--fifteen thousand years of time."      "Not quite correct," she said. "You can proceed no further until you have corrected your formula."      "I don't believe in reincarnation," I stated flatly.      "It doesn't matter whether you do," she said, "as long as you have the true scientific perspective on time!"      "That, actually, time is an invention of modern man, who thus limits himself? If that were true, Marya Madone, man always lives...."      "That of which he is composed," she said quickly, "always has been, is, always will be. He is eternal, on the basis of your own scientific thesis that no energy is ever lost. Man is a manifestation of energy."      Her intriguing accent made me pause for a moment. It also had to be explained.      "Up there in the future," I said, "English has been a dead language for countless generations, but nothing that has ever been, ever dies. Even languages do not die, though they are buried, in                        TRIN 40            human subconscious, as if they were! The perceptive, a Marya Madone, can regain any 'lost' language she needs!"      She was delighted at this explanation for her knowledge of English and her accent. I was pleased with myself. Now and again Nurse Madone looked at the silent, motionless figure of Joe X, her love seeming more each time she looked.      I WONDERED if the love did it, or the thoughts of Marya Madone, or of whoever had helped her get back here in time--but the tray and the black balls were slowly fading!      "You were expecting a child," I went on, Twenty-five years ago!"      "Fourteen thousand nine hundred and seventy-five years in the future from now!" she corrected me. "Also, you have forgotten something of vast importance!"      "You were expecting three children, triplets! You were somehow connected with a scientist, an inventor, a man or woman whose curiosity probed beyond time and space...." I was fumbling, watching her face, trying to read whether I was "hot" or "cold."      Then I took the plunge, "It wouldn't have been your husband, would it, the father of the triplets?"      "It would, indeed," she said softly, "and I only thank whatever powers there be that you have solved the problem this far. But there is still far to go."      "In that far-off future day, which to you even now is," I went on, "man is endowed at birth with the ability to think-forth, to show the picture of his thoughts to whomever he wishes."      "True," she said. "But not exactly the truth. I shall hate it if you are disappointed when you know the truth of the next step!"      "Don't tell me your husband is the real inventor of the zranthon-ray tube!"      Quickly she put forth her hand to touch mine. I hoped she would never take the hand away.      "Do not feel disappointed, Chester Lowre!" she said. "After all, you took it from him, brought it here!"      "The whole thing, the birth of Joe X here was an accident!" I said. "Your husband...."      "Ryal Madone," she said, as if she were presenting me.      "Ryal Madone was working on his zranthon-ray tube, conceiving it a possible channel by which time might be investigated in both directions, past and future! At the same time he was much concerned about the health of his wife! Working with the zranthon tube he decided on a spot in time, fifteen thousand years in the past, at the same time as he thought of his wife, and her health...."                        TRIN 41            Her face was serious, but it was telling me to go on, go on....      "He visioned the past, my time, even as he pictured the beauty of his beloved wife and was heart- deep concerned about her. It was no intention of Ryal Madone that he actually hurl his wife back into the past, so that her children be born in my time. But that's what happened! Then, though he could restore his wife to his time, he could not restore his children! He lost them in time. He has been trying since then to restore the family completely!"      "And now, thanks to you," she said, "it is coming to pass!"      I was so eager and excited it was easy to miss something important, and I knew it, intended to do nothing of the sort.      "But the brothers of Joe X," I said. "Joe never knew them or about them. Is he the eldest, youngest, middle child? Oldest! You were restored to your proper time immediately after Joe X was born--and left on the steps of the orphanage out West! So Joe X lost brothers, mother, father, all at the same moment! No wonder he felt lost indeed!"      "But we did not lose him!" said Marya Madone. "We were in touch. Using the zranthon tube...."      "Your husband thought you forth whenever your son was in danger of dying!" I ejaculated. "You manifested as a man, knowing his hatred of the mother who had deserted him!"      Now her face was very sad. She glanced again at Joe X, showering him with love. The black balls were definitely lighter now!      "By inventing the zranthon ray in my time," I said, "I began preparing the channel of reunion ...."      "You must go back further!" she hinted. "Back to...."      SOMETHING seemed to silence her. I tried to guess. Then I tried to work it out mathematically. I already had enough hints about that, that was certain--the black triangles, the big one, the three smaller ones.      "Carse Ryal's attempts to kill himself," I went on, "and his narrow escapes from death, were subconscious searches for the way to reunion with his lost family. He swallowed scores of aspirin tablets, hoping he would waken in the bosom of his family. But it wasn't possible that way. There had to be a scientific way; there was actually no esoteric one. You had to appear to so inform him .... "      "And waken the women at the orphanage," smiled Marya Madone, "so they would pump out the stomach of my very sick son!"      "Later on, still seeking a channel," I continued, "he hanged himself. But how could you cut him down, since you were not material?"                              TRIN 42            "Have you so little faith an your zranthon tube, which you had not yet invented, twenty-five years ago?" she asked, laughing a little. "I was as material, stepping out of Ryal Madone's zranthon tube, as I am now, and I have touched your hand, so you know. I touch it again, to reassure you!"      It seemed a little clearer after that.      "All you did when he should have drowned," I said, "was tell him to keep on swimming. But I'm afraid I can't see how he escaped from certain death when his plane crashed over Tibet!"      "And it is really the most significant part of the experiment!" she hinted. "It leads to the other things, right up to the...."      "Me and the zranthon tube!" I said. "He came through because he had one, the first, of his 'lapses'! Actually he wasn't even in that plane when it crashed! He just thought he was! But no, that's not possible. Nobody can make me believe...."      "He came straight to your door with a blind ad in his hand, remember?" said Marya softly. "You believe that, don't you?      "Are you trying to tell me that your husband's zranthon tube and mine are working in cahoots?" I asked.      She did not answer. She could not, or for some reason would not, tell me.      "I can believe it, I guess," I said slowly, "but if you try to make me believe that his zranthon tube and mine are one and the same. . . . "      I had to drop it there myself, my heart almost stopped beating. I knew by her face that the tube which I had so proudly invented was actually not mine--but belonged to Ryal Madone, ages up there in the future. He had worked out, with my accidental help, something usual in the time machine.      At this moment I had an eerie demonstration of something. Beginning to perspire, I got out my handkerchief, or started to. Instead I came out with my wallet. On a hunch I opened it. Marya Madone began to laugh when I drew forth, of all things, the five worn twenty dollar bills, the same ones, I had left at the telegraph office to pay in part for ads sent by wire.      "It's one of the threads," she said softly. "Nothing can be left out or the experiment is a failure."      At that moment Zack Hyde brought a telegraph messenger. It appeared that several newspapers had refused to accept the ad, and exactly one hundred dollars was being returned to me. It was "herewith", the message said. By an odd "coincidence" the total was one hundred dollars. The messenger boy looked scared to death when, fumbling in his pockets, he could not find the money! I could not tell him it had preceded him. When I showed it to him, however, he went away, shaking his head.                        TRIN 43            "It's not counterfeit, either," said Marya Madone, using words Joe X had already used to explain the fact that he was never broke. I realized that his replenishment of funds always came about, seemingly, in some perfectly normal, business-like manner.      "Formulas for the comprehension of time and space are always mathematical," I mused. "That's what the code of the triangles was telling me. The tray is the mother. The spheres are the three trins. I know it, but how I know it I am not sure. Marya, this is not the Pythagorean Theorem, which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle..."      "None of the four triangles is a right triangle!" said Marya Madone at once. "Yet you are closer to the truth even than Euclid was. I can help you no further!"      "The union of the male and female elements," I fumbled again, "which brings about conception of a third entity which may be either male or female. This is the metaphysical symbolism of the Forty Seventh Problem of Euclid! That's why the triangles have been used. . . . "      I CAUGHT my breath as realization came. Marya Madone was facing me squarely. I could not escape the profound intelligence of her eyes. I noted the high white purity of her forehead. Instantly my mind fixed on a point exactly in the center of her forehead, and drew two lines from it, slanting to right and left so as to miss the deep expressive eyes. They were two sides of a triangle. I ended them, mentally drew a third below the eyes--and I had the large triangle in the tray, with two of the "marbles" represented by the eyes of Marya Madone! The third would also have been present in the spot of origin, in the center of the forehead, if I, as a scientist, could have accepted the idea of "soul" or "spirit", which esotericists say is located behind the skull at exactly that spot.      I refused to speculate on it. I could "see" the symbolism of the triangles, and that was enough for me.      "By the raised triangles on the balls, then," I said to Marya Madone, "your husband and I have been in communication!"      "Not exactly!" she corrected me. "With them he sought to communicate with his children!"      "Baird and Partos!" I exploded. "The two Tibetans of the yellow-robes, in a silent courtyard in Shanghai!"      "Chester Lowre," she said softly, "I am more pleased with you than I shall be allowed to tell you. You have almost reached the climax, and the answer, of your experiment in building, synthetically, the mental screen of the distant future! One thing remains."      "Yes," I agreed, "it is this: where does the operation in Shanghai, the brain substitution, fit in? Of course, like the tray, the triangles, and all the rest, it could be symbolism. But I saw the marks of the trephining myself!"                                    TRIN 44            "So many human beings, even in my time," she said softly, "have to see to believe. Carse Ryal's brothers actually operated on Carse Ryal--a drastic effort to make him take his mind off those moods of depression which made him think of suicide. If he had ever succeeded we should have lost him entirely. Also, my other sons altered his brain in order to exercise some control over his 'lapses!' They also gave him the idea of returning to the United States."      "And through all of this what have I been?" I demanded. "Just a stooge? Have I been operating solely under direction from your husband?"      She hesitated a long time before she answered that one.      "Yes," she said, "but please don't feel too badly about it! The reason is inescapable. I may be allowed to tell you, somehow, at the end!"      "Well, then," I said somewhat grumpily, "two things remain! Producing Baird and Partos, and reconciling you and your trin son, Carse Ryal. But Marya, I just remembered something: identical triplets would not have different colored hair. Partos is a redhead!"      "And I," said Marya, "thanks to your Hattie Hyde, am a nurse! Really, Chester sometimes even I find you exasperating!"      "Where are Partos and Baird?" I asked.      "You must work out your own experiment," said Marya Madone.      "I think, absurd as it may sound, that they are merged with Joe X!"      "What's so absurd about it?" asked Marya Madone crisply.            CHAPTER VIII of Trin      IRREPARABLE LOSS?                  NO, THERE was nothing absurd or unscientific about the merging of the three brothers. Baird and Partos were thought forms, thought forth from the far future by Ryal Madone in a desperate effort to reunite them with Carse Ryal Smith, first step to a complete family reunion.      I realized now that Carse Ryal Smith himself was a thought form which had stepped out of the zranthon-ray mental screen twenty-five years before--from what to me was the distant future; that very same future I was trying to make available to my time by invention of the mental screen, by using the zranthon tube.                                    TRIN 45            But if Ryal Madone had invented it, far up yonder, well, no wonder Carse Ryal Smith knew so much about it. And since his origin was far in the future, what secrets could the earth of my time possibly have withheld from him? He hadn't known of his parents or his brothers simply because they were not of this time.      Now Marya Madone, a strange mixture of sadness and excitement in her face, removed the balls from the tray. They had become, all of them, almost white. Was white really for purity? Did the whiteness mean that Joe X's mother no longer reminded him of blackest moments and moods?      Marya Madone placed the white balls on the table between us. She handled them as one long accustomed. They rolled this time not to form the big triangle, but close together, as if snuggling.      Marya held the white tray close to her breast for a moment, her eyes closed almost as if she prayed. Then she moved to the zranthon-ray field, offered the tray to the field at approximately the same place and height as I had brought it forth when it had been black. The field received it, took it inward!      The white tray stood there, several feet above the floor of my laboratory. Marya Madone studied it.      What follows," she said, "is not compulsory on my part or that of my sons. But you have had so much to do with this reunion that the family is grateful beyond words. Therefore he wishes you to know! It wishes you to know all!"      The white tray began to dim, to diffuse, apparently to mingle with all the zranthon field. But the change, the transmutation, whatever it was, was speedy. First, faces and heads began to appear, grinning--the faces of Baird and Partos, both heads with black hair! I looked at Joe X. On his face was an expression of ineffable content.      Marya Madone stared at Joe X.      "He already knows and accepts me, Chester!" she murmured.      Somehow, perhaps with the help of his brothers, perhaps with the help of his "shining figure", or the help of his far-off-future father, Joe X had been kept abreast of our conversations since the arrival of Marya.      Baird stepped out of the zranthon field, moved to his mother, took her hands, dropped to one knee:      "Mother!" he murmured. Then he turned to me. "It's the same word in our language!" he said.      Now came Partos, to kneel beside his brother. Even so, the eyes of Marya Madone were fixed on Joe X, who now rose from the easy chair, pushed the armrest, the zranthon tube, away determinedly, walked to the field edge and out. He grinned.                              TRIN 46            "I always knew my lapses meant something!" he said. "Imagine 'lapsing' fifteen thousand years into the past! Fortunately, thanks to you and the zranthon tube, we can 'lapse' an equal time into the future!"      "You'll forgive the long years of hatred, mother?" he asked. I felt like an intruder. "If I had just seen you as you are, I'd never have doubted you, never! I've been longing for you so long, all of you...." and he called Baird and Partos names I had never heard before, would never hear again in my lifetime. "You'll forgive us if we hurry, Mr. Lowre?" said Joe X. "I'm anxious to get home."      I had to agree, though now I understood the sadness in the eyes of Marya Madone. Joe X turned, stepped into the zranthon field with his mother in his arms, his two brothers beside him.      They began to fade out, swiftly.      WHEN THEY were gone nothing remained of the field or the zranthon tube. It was as if the field and the tube were being denied use in my time. Yet I agreed that this was just and right.      The easy chair remained.      I don't believe in reincarnation, and what Marya Madone said just as she sped away into the future to rejoin her husband, taking the rest of her family with her, may have been a slip of the tongue. And yet, I could never believe her capable of such a slip. Hadn't she said that her family "wishes you to know all?"      There was that nagging statement of Joe X, too, when he had told me that yes, he knew he had two brother trins. "One is Yesterday, One Today, One Tomorrow!" Did he mean that individual man existed mentally not only in the past, present and futures but physically as well?      I felt, almost, as if my experiences with the zranthon field indicated an affirmative answer.      This is what Marya said to me as she vanished, her very last words:      "You have not really lost me, Ryal Madone!"                                                                                                TRIN 47