This is another story which uses the convenient device of the fourth dimension for rapid spatial transport. This time, Prof. Jason Livermore is the one who disappears entirely from the face of the earth one night. Twenty years later, his assistant is brought a mysterious bottle by a construction worker; the bottle was found during a dig at a site and is made of an unbreakable, glass-like substance (an alloy similar to copper, though why it should be transparent is anybody's guess). The bottle contains a manuscript which is a first person account by Prof. Jason about his adventure on Venus.

In the manuscript, he explains how the concept of fourth dimension makes perfect sense (going through the explanation of spherical/map geometry, creatures in 2-D, convergence of parallel lines on curved surfaces, etc) and how Time itself is a relative concept, that it cannot exist without Space. Turns out that he has built an instrument called "Space Bender" which can curve two spatial positions in close proximity like the pages of a book. So he brings Venus in Earth's proximity along the 4th dimension and simply rolls off of earth on to the surface of Venus.... There he meets a humanoid species which has evolved from feline ancestors who have very strange customs. The professor hopes to escape someday and return to Earth using the Space Bender.

The manner of the bottle and the manuscript's arrival on earth is never explained or even alluded to. The story was apparently intended to be a satire on some human traits, as explained by the editor at the end of the story, but I myself failed to see it that way. A very flat story.

The theory that time was the fourth dimension, however, was something I could not accept. This involved the corollary that it was possible to travel in time the same as in any other dimension. I hold such a feat to be impossible because time does not exist!

...

All arguments relative to time travelling seemed to me to rest on a fallacy. This is the belief that things exist, even for the fractional part of a second, in a state of rest. They do not. Everything is in a state of flux. Change is eternal. In is just this change that we call life [emphasis added - ak].

Time merely measures the duration of existence....time is simply a measure of the processes of life, the same as a foot is a measure of length.

It would be an axiom of the geometry of the mapworld that parallel lines could not met. Yet, if two mapworld professors should travel sufficiently far along two of their supposed parallel lines known as meridians of longitude, they woud find that they did meet at the poles. If they were not blockheads, this fact would prove the existence of a third dimension.

Certain experiments disclosed that some of our apparently parallel lines, if sufficiently prlonged in our three dimensional space, showed a tendency to come together. This indicated the existence of a fourth dimension.