GALLERY OF FRANK R. PAUL's SCIENCE FICTION ARTWORK
artwork (c) Frank R. Paul estate
Cover art by Frank R. Paul for October 1931 Wonder Stories, for "Between Dimensions" by J. E. Keith.
Summary of the story from Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years, by Everett F. Bleiler with Richard J. Bleiler, Kent. St. Univ. Press, 1998, p.209-210:
The narrator, Dahn, a retired chemical engineer, visits his friend Rogers in the North Woods [of Wisconsin]. On one occasion he has to leave Rogers and fly (in his rocket plane) to Chicago for an ailing tooth and is delayed returning. Arriving back at the cabin, he finds no trace of Rogers despite an extensive search in the nearby woods. * The next day, when he awakes, he sees that the cabin is not in the northern woods, but in a blinding desert. Taking a gun he starts to explore, but finds nothing except the desert and a mile-high cliff, off which he slips. * He does not land fatally at the bottom, however, but after falling a few feet he comes to Earth in a pleasant meadowy land. Following a yellow brick road, he sees a huge city that is inhabited only by living machines. At first they pay no attention to him, but then he finds himself paralyzed and carried into laboratories, where he ix examined by various mechanical devices. He manages to escape - and now recognizing that velocity causes a change in worlds - leaps off a wall back into the desert world, where he meets Rogers. * They compare notes and work out a periodicity for the cabin, which shifts from our world to the desert world according to a schedule. At the proper time they reenter the cabin and find themselves back in Wisconsin. Just before they left the desert dimension, an invisible monstrosity attacked the cabin; since bullets would only leave the other dimension because of their speed, and the men escaped, they must have killed the monster just after it [followed] them into our world. * The two men plan in a general way to make their experiences known, but when the cabin disappears again and fails to return, they decide to be silent. Until the day of his death Rogers never knew the explanation of what had happened. * Thirty years later, however, Dahn learned that Scanlon, a great mathematical physicist, had been conducting experiments nearby. Scanlon's work involved the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction and dimensions. * Intelligently written and readable.
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