[Image at right: artist’s rendering of a four-dimensional hypercube, or tesseract]
Walter Tevis, who died in 1984, was the author of several popular novels made into very successful movies: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But he began his career writing straight-up science fiction. Among his earliest stories was “The Ifth of Oofth,” originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1957 and anthologized numerous times thereafter.
In the story, the narrator visits a friend of his named Farnsworth. The latter has constructed a little doohickey of a gizmo which he wants to share, and hands it to the narrator:
