The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  Ed Benedict stood up, walked to the window and stared out across the growing jumble of buildings of the newly established Hoffman Medical Center. A high-riser was just now about halfway finished, its girders bare to the wind. A sign announced it as the Center’s future Administration Building and Main Evaluation Clinic.

  “Do you have any idea of the kind of work we’ve been doing in my laboratory, Dr. McEvoy?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Patterns of adjustment. Given a new or altered environment, one man can adjust and survive while another breaks down and withdraws to avoid facing new circumstances. We’re trying to find out why. Young people usually adjust far more readily than adults. We’re trying to learn why. What is the mind’s mechanism of adjustment? How does it work? How can someone change his thinking to cope with a new environment? Why can one person adjust and another not? That’s what we’ve been working on.”

  “And your results?”

  Benedict shrugged. “We keep learning as we go. Confront a man with a sudden, radical change in the world around him and he has to do something — adjust or withdraw. His mind is full of things that he’s learned to help him stay alive in his old familiar environment. In the new environment he gets the wrong answers; the data in his mind is no good. So he can do one of two things. He can try to get by on the wrong-answer data, and end up with anything from a mild nervous breakdown to frank derangement, depending on how badly the new environment threatens him. Or — which amounts to the same thing — he can devote himself to wrenching the environment back to the old familiar pattern; okay if it works except that it seldom does and he just ends up frustrated as well.

  “Alternatively, a man can recognize that his mental data is wrong, chuck it out as ‘no good under these circumstances’ and proceed to search for new data that is good. Of course, he has to relate what he can understand to what he can’t and use that for a starting place — sometimes a very tough job. But if he can do it, eventually he can adjust. Some people are just naturally good at it. They adjust readily, especially when they’ve had some training and practice. Others stumble, get wrong answers to begin with, end up with even more dangerously wrong answers, and get so confused and frightened that their minds just block the whole thing off and adjustment becomes impossible.”

  McEvoy nodded. “But it all depends on having something understandable to hang onto. And you’re talking about environments that are only partly different, say an ice station in Antarctica, or an exploratory post on the Moon. What would happen if one of these high-adaptive people were suddenly faced with an environment so completely foreign and incomprehensible that there was nothing he could relate to the world he knew before? No place to stand. What would he do then?”

  Ed Benedict took the tennis ball from the desk and studied it for several moments before answering. Then he looked up at McEvoy. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’d want to be responsible.”

  McEvoy’s face fell. “You mean you think there’s be no chance of success?”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that. Take someone with a very high degree of adaptability, someone with a keen mind and plenty of resourcefulness, and he might find something to work with in such an incomprehensible environment. You’d be amazed at the overload a human nervous system can take without cracking. We’ve tried everything we could devise on some of these youngsters. Ever try living on a forty-hour day? It’s an experience. Varied temperatures, disorientation, persistently irritating noise effects, distorted spacial environments like tilt-houses and such, induced successive dilemmas — everything. We’ve weeded out dozens of high-adaptives; when one threatens to crack we pull him back, let him get his feet on the ground, and then get him to help us devise new tests for the others. And some don’t crack.”

  “We need someone like that,” McEvoy said. “But I can’t go sending a child into that vault.”

  “Of course not. The one I’m thinking of is seventeen years old, and decidedly not a child. Just about the most perfectly adaptable human being I’ve ever worked with. Fully cooperative, intelligent … possibly just the one you need.” The psychologist paused, looked intently at McEvoy. “Possibly. I think I would have to counsel against it, but I couldn’t say yes or no. Nobody has the right to make that kind of decision for another person.”

  “I know, I know.” McEvoy nodded excitedly. “But do you think he might be willing to try this with us?”

  Ed Benedict smiled. “She might. Why don’t you ask her and find out?”

  4

  GAIL TALBOT disliked John McEvoy from the first moment she set eyes on him. For one thing, he was positively ancient — forty years old at least, and therefore utterly uninteresting to a lively girl of seventeen who regarded anyone over twenty-eight as practically in the grave.

  But there was more to it than that. There was a violent, ruthless intensity about this man that scraped her nerves. She had encountered this type before: the raw, unyielding, hard-driving and ambitious ones. Everything went fine, just as long as you agreed with them, but cross them just once, and whammo! She knew. Her father had been like that — just one of the twenty-odd reasons she had spent about half her time in juvenile court during the last four years, until somebody at the Hoffman Center had checked out her psych-testing scores and noticed the staggering discrepancy between her social performance and her actual intellectual potential.

  The judge had been glad enough to get rid of her, especially after Ed Benedict had practically guaranteed that the way things were going the court was soon going to have a highly intelligent, belligerent and incorrigibly anti-social young lady on its hands — and she had been ordered to Hoffman Center custody. Her father had been glad to get rid of her, too; he was already bone-weary of the court appearances, the fines and warnings, the rebellion and anger and night-long battles that always started out as “reasonable discussions” and ended up screaming fights. And as for her mother … Gail blocked on that one and turned her blue eyes to McEvoy. At least McEvoy was sober.

  He was telling her eagerly about something he wanted her to investigate — a “phenomenon,” he kept calling it — and she was confused and bored, but she listened. She yawned, and nodded cleverly in all the right places, and pushed her black hair down into place behind her right ear, a nervous habit that was a red flag to Ed Benedict but of which she was only dimly aware. “This cube isn’t like anything you’ve ever seen before,” McEvoy was saying. “And you could have trouble, because it might affect you in some completely unforeseen way. It just hangs there in space all by itself, and glows a little. We think it may be a three-dimensional slice through a fourth dimension, and so far nobody has even been able to look at it without getting badly shaken up or killed.”

  Gail stared at him in disbelief. “You mean you just want me to go into a room and look into a box or something?”

  “Well … yes,” McEvoy said lamely.

  “And tell you what I see inside? Is that all?”

  “That’s right. I mean, no! I mean, it may not be all that simple …” McEvoy floundered, thrown completely off balance now by this quiet, black-haired girl who was watching him with a slightly malicious gleam in her clear blue eyes. “I mean, it may require more than you expect, but we need somebody to look at it — ”

  “Why bother?” Gail cut him off flatly.

  “Because there’s something there we don’t understand.” McEvoy was getting angry and raising his voice. “Because we have to know what it is.”

  “That’s fine for you and your physicists. But what’s in it for me?”

  “Maybe nothing. Nothing but helping to investigate something that somebody has to investigate. Maybe nothing but having a part in a really major discovery.”

  “Maybe nothing but having my brains jogged loose,” Gail said. “So why me?”

  “Because you may be the only person in the world who can do it,” McEvoy roared in exasperation. “One more disaster and we’re finished. All through! We’ll have to close it down.” />
  The girl studied him. Bored or not, she was not stupid. She had heard everything McEvoy had been saying about this project; he had been fair, which was good because there was nothing she hated worse than a liar, and she understood the danger perfectly. Of course, she had been warned in advance, as well. Ed Benedict had urged her to stay away from McEvoy and his project; he’d practically begged her to say no. Now McEvoy reminded her strangely of Ed … some of the same intensity of purpose, the same contagious aura of excitement. Of course, there was no comparison, really; nobody was quite like Ed Benedict, and her feelings toward him always made her feel goopy and confused. Yet oddly enough she knew she wanted to say yes to McEvoy now just precisely because Ed Benedict had begged her to say no. After all, he didn’t own her.

  “All right,” she said. “When do we start?”

  “Start! Well … right now. I mean, as soon as we can get you briefed.” Once again McEvoy was off balance; the resistance had crumbled too easily. “But you have to understand that this little ‘box’ you’re going to look at may be dangerous. It may affect you very strangely.”

  Gail Talbot sighed. “Mister, after all the garbage I’ve had thrown at me in the past four years, I think I could take anything. You name it.”

  McEvoy eyed her sourly for a minute. “Yes,” he finally agreed. “I think you probably could.”

  5

  IT WAS cold in the vault, and very dark. As the door clanged shut behind her she paused, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the glow emanating from the center of the room. She stood shivering in the dead silence of the place, and for the first time in her seventeen years Gail Talbot realized that she was afraid.

  She knew that in a way she wasn’t really alone in there. Outside the vault a dozen people were watching every move she made through thick, insulated panels of oneway glass. McEvoy sat at the main power switch, clenching the intercom microphone in his hand. Ed Benedict was there, too, still furious that his last-minute attempt to talk her out of it had failed. Poor, good-hearted Ed, who had tried so hard to be fair, and then when the chips were down practically fell over himself trying to make her decision for her! And all the others: the Hoffman Center medical team, half a dozen engineers and technicians from McEvoy’s staff, help available at any instant if she needed it.

  Yet for all that, she knew that it was really she and she alone who was standing in this dark, cold room. All the help in the world might not be enough, if she needed it. There was danger here, and she had to face it alone. It was too late now to turn back. Others had tried and failed, but they had had no preparation at all. Now she was the best hope they had of finding out about this glowing cube that shimmered in the center of the vault. Maybe their last hope; they couldn’t keep on this way. She had the training, the experience, and the one odd, vital ability that the others had lacked. Yet now, in the darkness and silence, she was terribly afraid.

  The tiny earphone clicked and she heard McEvoy’s voice. “Gail? How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Cold. Waiting for my eyes to adjust.” Her own voice sounded scratchy in her ears.

  “Good. Can you see it?”

  “Oh, yes. I can see it, all right.” Through the earphone she could hear the faint swish-swish of a tape recorder and the whirr of the refrigerating pumps below the vault. “It’s like you said … kind of a cold blue, almost phosphorescent. It wavers … I can’t really focus on it.”

  “You’ll have to go closer,” McEvoy said. “Try to describe it, the best you can.” He paused. “And Gail, don’t be a heroine. Anything funny, let out a yell.”

  “I know. If it would just hold still a minute.” She moved toward the center of the room, her eyes fixed on the luminescent spot in the center. It was clearer now as her eyes adjusted to it. Or at least brighter; the outlines were still indistinct and shimmering. As she moved closer the coldness seemed to increase. She rubbed her hands together, pushed back her hair, and peered into the gloom.

  A ghostly thing, she thought suddenly. Shaped like a cube, six inches square, except that the angles weren’t quite right. Before the pumps began, it was a block of tungsten on a tripod. Now, just this wavering something, hanging in mid-air….

  She moved closer, stared at the shimmering outlines, glowing a frosty blue. Like a box, she thought, but not quite. Like a doorway, with a long corridor leading … somewhere … far, far beyond…. It was holding her eyes now, a strange, fascinating thing, half-hypnotizing her. She tried to look away, but the glowing cube held her gaze.

  At her ear, McEvoy’s voice: “Gail? What do you see?”

  “I don’t know.” She groped for the right words. “This is very odd … it’s … I can’t describe it. But I think … wait a minute!”

  As she stared, the shimmering cube seemed to grow larger, enveloping her as she tried to see inside. There were outlines, shapes in there … vague and indistinct, wavering just beyond her perception. A step closer, a turn of her head … if only her eyes would focus, hold it still for a moment! Somewhere, again, she thought she heard McEvoy’s voice calling her name as she was drawn toward this strange, glowing thing … but it seemed far away, unimportant. She didn’t even try to answer. Again his voice, urgent this time, calling her name, and then: “Frank, throw the switch! We’re losing her!” and the distant rattle of the vault door being thrown open.

  The last thing she heard was McEvoy’s voice shouting her name, and then, suddenly, she was inside.

  6

  THERE WAS dead silence in the place, a silence she had never even imagined before. Like a blanket that had fallen when she crossed through. No sound. No possibility of sound. Silence, and darkness.

  At first she thought she would suffocate. She could scarcely breathe; a scream rose in her throat but no sound came. As if she had suddenly crossed a threshold into another universe, the vault was gone. The glowing cube was gone. She was somewhere else. In a foreign place, if it was a place at all — utterly alien.

  Incomprehensible.

  Odd, there was no light here, yet she could see, in a way. At first it seemed that she was standing on a perfectly flat polished floor that stretched out endlessly on all sides. It was like nothing her mind had ever encountered, vast and alien. Then it wasn’t a flat surface at all, but a dark, endless tunnel stretching before her with spiraling lines leading down and down, and she was whirling around and around, down toward the vortex of the spiral. She reached out involuntarily to grasp something and stop herself, but there was nothing to grasp. There was substance here, matter, solidity, but somehow she herself was different. Her body wasn’t right; part of it seemed to be gone; part was twisted and distorted, several feet away from her, and her muscles were not working right….

  She felt panic; the initial sense of dread she had felt was melting now into blind terror. Somehow she had moved through into an alien universe, a place where everything was wrong. A dreadful place that offered her no anchor, no starting place. Nothing to hold onto. Her terror rose as she tried to block the place out of her mind, draw back from it, find a way out fast.

  Then she felt her heart thumping in her chest, felt perspiration, sensed the air moving in and out of her lungs, and she fought down her panic. Of course there was something to grasp: she was alive. Everything was wrong here, even her body seemed wrong, but her mind was still working, her heart was still beating, what more did she need? She was here, and alive, obviously.

  That was her anchor, then. Her mind narrowed on that single thought. She was here, and this unbelievable place was here, too. There was nothing she could comprehend, but at least she was surviving. All about her she was aware of lines, angles, circles, but none of them were right, the way they should be. Three perfectly parallel lines which met each other at ninety-degree angles to form a perfect square with seven triangular sides….

  It couldn’t be!

  But it was. Right here, all around her. And she was here. It has to be so, she told herself. Adjust to it! She sensed that in crossi
ng the threshold into this universe she had turned a corner, an odd corner, not like any corner she had ever seen before, but her own universe was just inches away, back around that same corner. And, even more strange, she realized that she could get back through to her own universe again any time she wanted to just by turning back through the same strange angle, now that she knew it was there.

  Like a desk with a secret drawer, she thought suddenly. Hidden, concealed from view, nobody could get in without knowing where the release spring was. Once you knew that, you could open and close it at will. Of course, you might discover the secret drawer by accident if you were sawing a corner off the desk, but even so, you wouldn’t be able to work it without knowing about the hidden release.

  What was it McEvoy had said? “We think it may be a three-dimensional slice through a fourth dimension.” And he was right. They had found the secret drawer by sawing the corner off the desk. Quite by accident the stresses they had been using on that tungsten block had inadvertently twisted a segment of three-dimensional space and torn a hole through into this place. Accidentally, they had thrown open a door, and nothing they had found inside had been comprehensible to anyone who had crossed through. A door into Nowhere … no wonder they had died of fright! With no training, no experience to fall back on. It was only her own individual experience, her own incredibly high ability to adapt that was shielding her now, and for all her skill her own mind was now reeling to maintain control.

  She knew that she could do nothing here. There was nothing that she could tell McEvoy that would make any sense, except that this place meant disaster to anyone who ventured here. No one but a high-adaptive would have the faintest chance of withstanding the mental shock she had encountered. Even she could never correlate anything inside this mad universe with anything outside. To do that, everything would have to be discarded; all the knowledge and data stored up through the years would have to be thrown out entirely, and there was no way that she could do that. No way anyone could do it … unless….