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The Fifth Dimension

by Clare Winger Harris

published in AMAZING STORIES, December 1928

“Why, this has happened before!” I cried as I poured my husband a third cup of coffee.

John laid down the morning paper and shrieked with laughter. “I’ll say it has, and it’s liable to happen again tomorrow morning! Did you ever know me to drink fewer than three cups of coffee at breakfast, Ellen?”

“Oh, you don’t know what I mean,” I responded, a trifle irritably. “I have reference to that feeling that we all have occasionally; that the identical set of circumstances that surround us has existed before in some remote eon of time.”

“Fiddlesticks!” ejaculated John as he set down his empty coffee cup and folded his napkin. “I’m going to get my car started, as it takes so long these cold mornings.”

In which unsympathetic mood he donned hat and overcoat and disappeared through the kitchen door. A second later his head was thrust through the reopened door, and a jovial smile spread over his features.

“Say, Ellen, it strikes me as I go out to get the old bus, that this has happened before,” he called back to me.

“Something else will strike you,” I cried playfully picking up an empty cup.

He dodged in mock consternation, then his face grew earnest.

“But seriously, my dear girl,” he said, “I hope you aren’t getting to believe in all that rot about soul transmigration. Surely you don’t think your personality has been previously decked in other corporeal trappings, do you?”

“No,” I replied, “I do not believe that. I have always been myself, and you will always be yourself (stubborn as ever)! My explanation of the oft repeated phenomenon that my life has been lived before exactly as I live it now, lies solely in the theory that time which is the fourth dimension is, like space, curved, and travels in great cycles. You cannot conceive of either the end of space or time. The law of the universe as illustrated by the movements of the stars and planets and the endless motion of the molecules and atoms and the whirling of the electrons, proves that orbital motion is a cosmic law and that all things return eventually to their starting point. And so, in the vast cycles of time and space, we repeat our existence upon this earth, and I claim that occasionally a fleeting memory of previous cycles thrusts itself into our consciousness.”

“Too deep for me,” said John with a shrug. “I must get down to the office, and by the way, an apple pie for dinner tonight would be greatly appreciated! I haven’t had any for a long time.”

“Do you like my apple pies, John?” I asked smiling.

“Do I? You are an expert at it. I suppose,” he added as he all but disappeared through the crack of the door as it stood slightly ajar, “the infinite number of times that you have baked apple pies in previous cycles of existence has made you adept in that line!”

The door closed and he was gone.

Dear John! Of course he understood the theory as well as I did, but he was forced out among associates in the business world and it was essential that his mind be continually occupied with the practical affairs of life. Dreamers might be vouchsafed glimpses of the truth, but did such visions always prove beneficial? There was no doubting that John was a greater success in life than I, whether he grasped the significance of certain cosmic truths or not!

“After all,” I mused, “the difference between the great and the small, the infinite and the finite, right and wrong, good and evil, is sometimes one of degree and not of quality. The most difficult is simple if we follow the rules. The people who make a muddle of their lives have deliberately, though unknowingly, chosen the harder way. They are law-breakers, not necessarily in our legal sense, but they are transgressors of Universal Law. Had they simply worked in harmony with the Law, success would have come easily.

“I have not always worked in harmony with the Law,” I thought. “None of us have. Do I, now in this cycle of time, possess the ability to change errors performed in previous eons, or am I a mere puppet, destined to a certain definite course of action throughout eternity? Was Henley right or wrong when he wrote, ’I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul’?”

I believed in the cycle theory of time, and yet in it I saw no hope for changing the errors of the past. My theory was a death-blow to progress and evolution!

---

I had just slipped my last pie into the oven and glanced casually out of the kitchen window when I spied my neighbor, Mrs. Maxwell, on her cinder path between her house and the garage. Suddenly I had the same sensation that I had experienced at breakfast, “This HAS happened before. I know it.”

Then, like a flash, before a seeming darkness obliterated my fleeting memory, came the warning to my consciousness that Mrs. Maxwell ought not to enter her garage. I took a step toward the door with the intention of calling to Mrs. Maxwell. There was plenty of time; the path was long and she was not a third of the way to the garage. I watched her, my heart thumping wildly. She had stopped to pick up a scrap of paper. I took another step toward the door, then paused.

“Oh, what’s the use,” I argued, “she’d think I was crazy to run out there and attempt to keep her from her errand to her garage. I wonder why I have had two sensations of this memory enigma today! Often they are weeks, even months, apart.”

Resolutely I turned and left the kitchen, intending to finish my remaining housework. I reached the first landing of the stairs when the sound of an explosion that rocked the house to its foundation, caused me to start in wild-eyed terror. In a panic of fearful premonition I rushed to a south window. The Maxwell garage was a mass of roaring flames!

“It is fate, fate,” I groaned in my anguish. “There is no hope! We mortals cannot escape. The cycles of time like the wheels of the ancient Juggernaut ruthlessly grind us to our destruction and THERE IS NO HOPE!”

It seemed that for months after Mrs. Maxwell’s funeral I could not rise above a sense of despondency. A hopelessness was ever present in my consciousness, and nothing I did seemed worth the effort. Finally realizing that my present mental state must not continue, I plunged into domestic and social duties with a vim that was most unusual for me.

Not once during many months following the Maxwell tragedy had I experienced a single recurrence of my unaccountable memory flashes. Then one day the sensation returned.

---

John was ready to make a business trip to the south and had purchased his railroad ticket early in the afternoon. The train was scheduled to leave town at 8:15 P.M. The supper dishes had just been cleared away and John had hurried upstairs to pack his grip, when the feeling that this had all happened before came upon me, more realistically than I had ever before experienced it, and this time it was accompanied by a premonition of the same nature as that which had warned me of Mrs. Maxwell’s fatal trip to her garage.

I lost no time in hurrying up to John’s room, where I found him sorting over the things to take with him on his trip.

“John, don’t go this evening,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “There is a morning train at 11:53. Can’t you take that instead of going tonight?”

My husband carefully tucked his hair brush into his satchel, and for a moment deigned me no reply.

“I’m afraid to have you go tonight, John,” I continued. “I’ve had a— a— sort of warning. You know what I mean.”

John closed and locked his grip. “Are you afraid here alone?” he asked, after what seemed an interminable silence.

“No. It’s not for myself that I fear danger, but for you. Won’t you defer your trip?” I persisted.

“Now see here, Ellen,” John responded with a show of irritation, “I’ve already bought my ticket and laid my plans for meeting Hopkins in Atlanta on Friday and I can’t and won’t stop because of some fool notion of yours. I had supposed you had forgotten about this fourth dimension time-cycle business!” He picked up his satchel. “But whether you’ve forgotten it or not, the 8:15 sees me ensconced on my way to Georgia.”

“But, John, dear,” I cried in desperation, “remember the Maxwell affair. If I had only obeyed my impulse to rush out and warn poor Mrs. Maxwell, she would be living now!”

John paused and looked at me as if considering, but it was only for a second; then he resumed his descent of the stairs.

“No,” he said, “I’ve got to be in Atlanta on Friday or stand a chance of losing one of the biggest orders we’ve had in months.”

Then it seemed as though something snapped in my brain and I heard my voice as though it were another’s coming from a distance, “The Juggernaut, Fate, grinds mortals beneath its wheels and THERE IS NO HOPE.”

I soon became conscious of the fact that I was sobbing hysterically and that John was holding me in his arms.

“Ellen, Ellen,” his dear voice was saying. “I’m going to fool Fate a trick and let Hopkins wait. I leave tomorrow at 11:53. Let’s see what’s on the radio for the rest of the evening.”

I gazed up at him with incredulity. “Oh, John,” I cried ecstatically, “do you think we can prove that the cycles of time are not inexorable?”

“We can at least give the theory a fair trial,” he said smiling.

---

I poured John his third cup of coffee, but did NOT feel that it had happened before! A mild thump on the front porch informed me that the morning paper had arrived. I brought it in and laid it in front of John, then I fled to the kitchen, where the odor of burning toast apprised me of the fact that I was much needed. Returning with the scraped toast, I seated myself opposite John for the purpose of resuming my breakfast.

“What news?” I asked casually.

For answer John handed me the paper and pointed mutely to an enormous headline. His face was ashen and his hand trembled.

With a sinking sensation I read the large letters: “Head-on collision demolishes engines and cars, and kills 70 persons.”

“John,” I gasped, “is it— was it— the 8:15?”

His voice was husky with pent emotion. “Ellen, it was the 8:15, and I have been on it in the other cycles of time. I know it now.”

I gazed at him incredulously for a moment, and then half in fun, half seriously, I said, “John, you are now living on borrowed time!”

He smiled a little wanly. “Not exactly that, dear,” he said, “but my mind has been doing some rapid thinking since I saw those headlines, and I believe I have a solution to your ever-puzzling problem of the fourth dimension, time.”

“If you can prove my time-cycles are not incompatible with progress, evolution and growth,” I cried eagerly, “you will make me the happiest woman on earth!”

“Wouldn’t a new fur coat delight you more?” he asked teasingly.

“Well, that would help some,” I admitted, “but tell me what makes you believe that evolution and progress are fact, despite the eon-worn ruts of the cycles of time.”

“The fifth dimension,” he replied in a quiet voice.

“The fifth dimension?” I echoed, puzzled.

“Which is simply this, Ellen. There is a general progression of the Universe over and above the cycles of time which renders each cycle a little in advance of the previous one. We see and recognize this truth daily in the phenomena of humanity. Every baby born starts life a little in advance, materially and mentally, of its father. This process is very slow and we call it evolution, but it is a perceptible progress nevertheless. It may be aptly likened to the whorls of a spring as compared to a mere flat coil of wire. The earth follows an orbit around the sun, and every year it is in the same relative position with regard to the sun as it was the previous year. It has completed one of its countless cycles. But you know as well as I do that the sun and the earth, as well as the other planets, are ALL farther along in space together. There is a general progression of twelve miles a second on some vaster orbit. This general progression, then, is analogous to our possibility of change and growth; the power to better our conditions; in other words, it is a fifth dimension.”

“The wheels of the Juggernaut can be turned aside,” I said reverently, “and THERE IS HOPE.”