Last Monday I met Mr. Mobius again. He looked quite like his old self. His mole had shifted back to the left side of his face. And his squint was back in his left eye instead of his right – which is where it had been the whole of last year.
He shook hands with me, a little disorientedly. “I’ve been using the other one for a whole year,” he said, after mistaking my left for my right.
“That’s not the only thing you’ve been doing that’s strange – ”
Mr. Mobius looked around quickly and then smiled innocently at me.
“Sharp, aren’t you? Was it the mole you noticed? Or the sudden bouts of ambidexterity?”
“Both. Well, specially the mole. You’ve – you’ve changed. Twice in the last year.”
“Not changed, child. Just laterally inverted. Like what happens to you in a mirror.”
All sorts of strange ideas floated around my head.
“You’ve been through a mirror?”
“No,” he said. “Through is difficult. Around – that’s an easier trick. I’ve been around.”
“Around a mirror?”
“Just around the Universe.”
I stared.
“How?”
“In my Expansion Capsule. It uses a plane of relativity where there’s no such thing as the distance around the Universe.”
“So this spaceship – your Expansion Capsule thingy that bends space to nullify distances – ”
“It doesn’t bend space, child. Gravity does that. It just spaces out your molecules so you can become comparable to the size of the Universe – which has a pretty spaced out molecular structure – and you can slide across the gravity curves.”
“…bends space to nullify distances, it – it inverts you?”
“No. It’s just space that does that. The Universe twists before it loops back in on itself. So every time you travel around it – you come back laterally inverted. (And upside down too – but that’s easily corrected in an upside down world.) Your mirror image comes back instead of you. It’s like traveling around a Mobius Strip.”
“Seems to me that you’re the one who twists everytime you travel out there. Not the Universe.”
“That’s it. I’m the man who likes to twist around the farthest reaches of the last collapsible dimension and come back to tell the tale.”
“Also twisting himself a little bit in the process.”
Mr. Mobius smiled his strange lopsided smile and said:
“You look older today, child. You’ve had a long year, too, haven’t you?”
