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lies not in abnormal physiological conditions, but in the fourth dimension, time.”
    “Are you saying that we were thrown back in time?” Doc Brady demanded, his tone echoed perfectly in the incredulous stares that fell over Reinheiser from every direction.
    Idiots, Reinheiser thought. I knew that this was beyond them. “No,” he calmly countered, though his shrill voice took on a knifelike edge. “Not pushed back, but pushed into a different frame of reference.”
    They didn’t seem to understand.
    “Our concepts view time as relative,” he explained. “An hour to a man on a rocket approaching the speed of light would be days, weeks, even years to a man on Earth.”
    “I haven’t been on any rockets lately,” remarked an obviously doubting Mitchell.
    “Yet this illustrates what I believe has happened to us,” Reinheiser went on. “We have been pushed into a time frame where one hundred fifty years of our history has been condensed into twelve to fifteen hours, judging from the doctor’s report on the cadaver taken from the
Bella.”
    “I said that the body was in the water for about twenty-four hours,” Doc Brady corrected.
    “Yes, Doctor, but we were in this frame for approximately ten hours before the body was recovered.”
    “Wait a minute,” Del demanded, looking hard at the physicist. “If what you’re saying is true, and we’ve been down here about fifteen hours, then …”
    “Then one hundred and fifty years have passed on the surface,” Reinheiser finished. “And everyone we ever knew is dead and buried.”
    With the unreality of everything that had already happened to them, they found it hard to summarily dismiss Reinheiser’s conclusions. Shaking their heads and muttering denials, they looked around at each other, searching for confirmations to the absurdity of the explanation. This angered Reinheiser even more, not because they didn’t believe him—he hadn’t expected them to—but because of their outright trepidation, even horror, at his suggestion. Could they be so inane as to disregard the incredible implications?
    “Think of it, gentlemen!” the physicist exclaimed. “Anew world awaits us. Think of the advancements in science! In medicine, Doctor!” He was almost pleading with them, holding out hope that they weren’t as small-minded as they appeared.
    “Bullshit!” Mitchell blurted. He towered over the seated physicist, not even trying to conceal his disappointment. “Is this the best you’ve got for me?”
    “I assure you, I intend to prove my theory,” Reinheiser replied, knowing full well what Mitchell needed from him.
    “And how can you do that while we’re still down here?”
    “That shouldn’t be hard,” Del answered. Startled, both Reinheiser and Mitchell looked over at him. “Tomorrow morning we send out divers to recover two bodies, one from our ship and another one from the
Bella
. If the theory is right, Doc’s autopsy should show our crewman to have been dead in the water for about thirty-four hours and the body from the
Bella
for forty-six to forty-nine hours.”
    Reinheiser’s surprised look turned icy. He was amazed at Del’s show of reasoning, but mostly he was angry, preferring to explain his own theories without any help from a layman. “Precisely,” he snarled at Del, narrow-eyed.
    “Whether or not my theory is correct, I believe that we can escape from here,” the physicist went on. “If we can patch the holes and get the sub up, magnetic influences should force us to the funnel. A storm might push us out, just as one pushed us in.”
    “It won’t work,” Thompson said, immediately stifling the hopeful looks of the others. “No way can I make the patches strong enough to handle the kind of pressure that’s on the other side of that hole.”
    “Our hull couldn’t sustain that kind of pressure if it were intact,” Reinheiser retorted. “The hydraulic system was destroyed.”
    “Then how?” Corbin asked.
    “I’m gambling