The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  “But you saw it happen,” John McEvoy said.

  “Yes.” Hank reached for the synchronized photos they had taken of the test block on half a dozen runs. “What’s more, either that block is in two places at the same time — which even I can’t swallow — or it was transferred completely and instantaneously, as far as I can measure.”

  “And we’re back to the first question again,” McEvoy said. “How?”

  “I don’t know how,” Hank replied.

  “Then we’re going to have to find out,” McEvoy said, “and find out right soon. Because we haven’t got even a day to lose.”

  Hank Merry looked up at his chief. “What happened in Washington today?”

  McEvoy shook his head wearily. “We got the final word from the Joint Conference: get a working transmatter or go back to rocket ships, whole hog. They had everybody down there today, communications and aeronautics people from all over the world, together with the Joint Chiefs and the Space Exploration committee and the Conference treasurer. We practically had to keep him out of a fist fight, before we quit.”

  “I didn’t know it was so tight,” Merry said.

  “It’s tight. Critically tight, now.” McEvoy spread his hands. “Half the heavy construction on this continent is bogged down in priority fights. There is one-tenth enough steel to fill current demands, and the supply gets shorter every month. Oil reserves are dangerously low; if those new wells down in Brazil don’t prove out, we’ve hit rock bottom. And radioactive fuels are just as tight. There isn’t any place to turn any more, and the treasurer laid it on the line today.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Either somebody brings in a practical, operating transmatter in a few weeks, or the money goes to interplanetary cargo craft, and if it wrecks the economy of the world, it. wrecks it. That’s all.”

  It wasn’t a new story to Hank Merry, nor to anyone else, for that matter. The warning signs had been up for over a century: the irreplaceable coal and oil and iron reserves on Earth were being devoured by an ever-growing population, and sooner or later they would be gone. Exhausted. Back in the 1960’s scientists were still hoping that atomic power and synthetic building materials might take up the slack for a while, but they had not counted on the overwhelming surge of industrial development in Asia, Africa and South America after the Great Cold War ended with the establishment of the International Joint Conference. Nobody, really, had realized what was happening until the 1990’s, when the rate of growth was already uncontrollable; by then oil and steel reserves were dwindling to the vanishing point, radioactive ores were almost unobtainable, and the situation had become desperate.

  Even then, solar system exploration had raised hope. At first that hope had seemed well-founded. After the first manned Moon-landing in 1966, other exploratory teams had landed on Venus, Mars, and the larger Asteroids, and found these places rich with promise. Three-quarters of the surface of Mars was a crust of high-grade iron ore. There were unthinkable oil reserves on Venus, laid down in the eons when that planet had been a lush, hot, rain forest. Coal was there, too; and vast deposits of radioactives were found on the Moon. Enough resources to supply Earth’s needs for thousands of years.

  And no way in the world to bring those resources home to Earth. Atomic engines could raise a few tons of iron ore into orbit from Mars and bring it home to Earth. A few barrels of oil could be lugged back from Venus, a few carloads of uranium from the Moon, but all at staggering cost, and still only a drop in a very empty bucket. Bound and limited by inexorable gravity, there was no way to bring home the bacon in sufficient quantity to help. The resources were there; but the cost of obtaining them was so great that all the money on Earth could not foot the bill.

  Of course, there were plans. Bigger and better ships could be built. There were dreams of great orbiting barges sweeping back and forth from Earth to Mars. Smaller craft could carry payloads down to surface with only perhaps 25 per cent loss into the ocean and a 10 per cent mortality rate for the men running the ferries. But even these dream-ships would cost more at once than all the wars in Earth’s history.

  The one alternative, of course, was an operating transmatter, if one could be developed in time. The idea of a device to transmit solid matter from one place to another like TV signals was hardly new. Theoretically, it could work: direct shipments of ore, oil, even living human beings, from one point in space to another — even across interplanetary distances — by means of direct transmission from a sending device at one end to a receiving device at the other. Short waves could easily be transmitted from a sending station to a far-distant receiver. Light itself, with its curious wave-qualities, traveled through space at 186,000 miles per second. And scientists had long known that all the matter on Earth was ultimately composed of wavicles. Why couldn’t solid matter be broken down into its wave components, transmitted to some distant receiver, and there be recomposed into its original form? Indeed, it had already been done with hydrogen atoms, but an exotic laboratory experiment was not enough. What was needed was a transmitter on Mars that could ship uncounted tons of raw iron ore, and a receiver on Earth capable of recomposing it.

  As with so many things, the gulf between theory and practice was enormous. A hundred laboratories had been searching for a practical engineering solution to the Transmatter Project on a crash program for over ten years. Billions had been spent on research; some laboratory prototypes had even been built, but there were problems. Enormous quantities of power had been needed for their operation. Decomposition of the target load wasn’t too hard, but reconstitution of the load to its original form was something else again. One laboratory transmitted a gram of solid gold to a receiver ten centimeters away, but ended up with a chamberful of gold vapor so finely atomized that it still hadn’t settled out three months later. Other devices got peculiar things out of the receiver end but not what had been transmitted. All programs were cloaked in secrecy; what the Russians were doing nobody knew for sure, except that it was on a characteristically massive scale. Something had blacked out the whole city of Moscow for a week, but in the absence of earth-shaking announcements, it was assumed that whatever it was had been a failure.

  It was then that Hank Merry, a young mathematician at Telcom Laboratories — one of the great electronics and communications organizations that had grown up since the end of the Cold War — had come up with a whole new approach. With John McEvoy he had been working for eighteen months to build a prototype transmatter, and now it was working before it was finished. It was no wonder that they both sat staring at the machine now as if they were holding a stick of dynamite with the fuse burning down.

  4

  NOW, TOGETHER, the two men worked, checking the wiring diagrams and circuits. McEvoy ordered somebody on standby in the generator room to report on power drainage. A crew from Chemical Analysis took a scraping from the aluminum block, and sent down a fast report: normal reagent grade aluminum, with the expected coating of aluminum oxide on the outside.

  “No changes in X-ray refraction?” Hank asked sharply.

  “None we could see,” the chemistry man said.

  Hank exchanged glances with McEvoy, and placed the block under the dome in the transmitter plate. Delicate scales recorded its weight to a thousandth of a microgram. Surface temperature was recorded, and it was scanned for radioactivity. Then Hank threw the switch, and the block vanished again, to reappear on the receiver plate. No change in weight. No evidence of radioactivity. No drain on the generators. A fraction of a degree of temperature change … downward. The block was slightly colder.

  They tried it again and again. Each time, the same results. Then McEvoy said, “Let’s try something else.” He handed Hank a lead pencil from his pocket, an ordinary pencil with the red, yellow and green spiral design of the Telcom Laboratories painted on the outside. “Try that.”

  The pencil disappeared from the transmitter and reappeared on the receiver plate just as the block had. But this time, when Hank p
icked it up, he whistled. “Now, there’s a switch.”

  An ordinary lead pencil except that now it was wrong. The right shape, size and weight, but the pencil now had a solid core of wood surrounded by a thin coating of graphite on the outside.

  McEvoy looked at it, frowning. “Try that again,” he said.

  They did. The second time, the pencil had wood and graphite intermixed throughout its length. The third time, the rubber eraser turned up in the middle of the pencil’s shaft. Each time, the engineer reported only a flicker of power used, no more than if they had turned on a small electric light.

  While McEvoy continued to blink at the funny pencil, Hank picked up a small ammeter sitting on the supply bench, one of the instruments he had been using to test his circuits. “Let’s see about function,” he said. The ammeter went onto the transmitter plate, and the switch was thrown. Reappearing on the receiver plate, it looked fine but when Hank wired it into a test circuit the needle swung crazily for a moment and then fell dead as a curl of blue smoke rose from the instrument.

  “Burnt out!” he muttered. He pried it open, stared at the mass of scorched wires inside. “And how. It’s all backwards, completely shorted out in two places, with a cross-short.” He tossed the ammeter on the bench in disgust and searched for other bric-a-brac from the workbench. A screwdriver went through completely unchanged. Hank’s wristwatch appeared on the receiver plate, still ticking but with the second hand running backward. A machine bolt came through with a left-hand thread.

  Hank scratched his head. “I just don’t get it, John. Some things move just fine; others get all twisted around.”

  “So I see,” McEvoy muttered, still staring at the funny pencil. “I wonder what would happen to a tennis ball.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. I saw a lead pencil like this once before, years ago, that’s all. But there couldn’t be any connection.”

  “A pencil that was all backward?” Hank said. “When?”

  “Before your time.” McEvoy shrugged. “It was an old project, must have been twenty years ago. We never did get an answer. We were trying for ultra-low temperatures, and somehow we cut into the corner of a four-dimensional space continuum, a sort of doorway or threshold into a four-dimensional universe. Nobody ever figured out how or why … something to do with our application of power, I guess, or interference with molecular motion, or something. We couldn’t even investigate it; whatever was across that threshold was so wrong, or alien, or incomprehensible that nobody could tolerate even looking at it Except for one …”

  McEvoy’s jaw tightened, and he slammed his fist into his palm. “Well, it doesn’t matter. We lost five good men just trying to find out what it was we’d tripped over, and when we finally found someone who could look, she wouldn’t tell us what she saw. She was a high-adaptive, one of the Hoffman Center’s guinea pigs. Married one of the psych-docs there, later, a man named Benedict. But that’s neither here nor there. It’s just that when we passed a lead pencil through that four-dimensional corner, it came out like this one.”

  Hank Merry stared at the older man. “Well, what happened? You didn’t just drop it, did you?”

  “We had to. The girl was unharmed, but she clammed up. When we tried to crowd her, she used something she learned inside that doorway — to escape. She vanished out of a locked room right under our noses. And when I tried to contact her later, she invoked the Right of Privacy laws. I couldn’t even mail her a first-class letter without permission from the court.”

  McEvoy paced back and forth as if he were suddenly unbearably restless. “So that was that. We had to close down, too much risk of dead men in the laboratory. The directors dropped the whole thing into the hands of the math boys, and they’ve been trying to figure out the theory ever since. Fun for them, but it’s like the medieval monks trying to decide how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Lots of theories, but nothing much they could prove without finding some way to get hold of an angel or two.” McEvoy tossed the pencil down in disgust. “As I say, no connection, except that when we dropped objects into this four-dimensional threshold they came out funny. Backwards, inside-out, reversed.”

  They went back to the transmatter. Shifting the receiver to a far corner of the room, they set the rheostats for the proper distance, then placed a shiny steel ball-bearing in the transmitter. It appeared in the receiver, unchanged. McEvoy insisted on trying the funny pencil again. This time it disappeared altogether; McEvoy bellowed in outrage, but the receiver plate was empty. For two hours more they worked, transmitting a dozen small objects — pins, neckties, cigarettes — with varying degrees of success. Finally McEvoy threw up his hands. “Hank, is there any reason you can see why this thing should be working so erratically?”

  “I can’t see why it works at all,” Hank said. “But it does. Even if it fouls things up. The cigarettes went through unchanged. The key was reversed, and the light bulb exploded the instant it appeared in the receiver. Something isn’t working right in the scanner plates, the ones that are hooked in, or in the receiver, or somewhere. I don’t know. Maybe if I tear it down and re-analyze — ”

  “Tear it down?” McEvoy roared. “Never! Build another one, following the pattern of this one but don’t even touch this one until we know why it’s doing what it does.”

  “But I can always rebuild it.”

  “Maybe. And maybe not.” McEvoy turned to him. “Look, Hank, think for a minute. Whatever makes it go, we’ve got a working transmatter on our hands! That by itself will hold up any government action until we can get the bugs ironed out.”

  McEvoy pulled on his hat and coat. “I’ve got to get on the line to Washington now and get some planning started. You order up any work crew that you need, spend whatever you need, but keep this thing working and make it work right. And we’ll clamp down a security blackout with full government sanctions. If word of this thing leaks out, you’ll have every TV and newspaper reporter in the hemisphere sitting on your doorstep tomorrow morning. We’ve got half an answer here; now we’ve got to get the rest of it. But we can’t afford a news break until we have something to say.”

  Hank Merry went back to the transmatter, while McEvoy went up to begin dragging sundry company and government officials out of bed and onto scrambled telephone circuits. Hank was glad McEvoy could handle that; for him it was enough for one day to be facing an enigma he couldn’t explain, the designer of a machine that couldn’t possibly be working, but was, all the same. It would be a sleepless night, and somehow he had a sneaky hunch that the news would leak out, and that Telcom Labs would be neck-deep in newsmen by morning, no matter what security measures were taken. He was glad to let McEvoy worry about that, too.

  After a quick cup of coffee he sent out a call for an overtime crew of technicians and engineers. A few minutes later he was back at work again. He was right about the sleepless night, but many hours later, as dawn was lightening the eastern sky, he learned that he was wrong about the reporters. They had a bigger story to cover, far more amazing than the vague rumors that had filtered out from Telcom Laboratories. During a coffee break, Hank switched on an early morning newscast, and learned that during the night the lower end of Manhattan Island had swiftly and silently vanished into the sea.

  5

  ROBERT BENEDICT stamped the snow off his insulated boots, checked the safety on the old shotgun on his arm, and sat down on a handy stump, pushing blond hair out of his eyes and staring across the fields to the lights of the city beyond the valley.

  He was on a rise of land near the edge of the woods, with a good view across the Massachusetts countryside. He wriggled his toes in the wet boots, heard the water squish inside them, and grimaced. Mom would have a fit if she found out he had gone hip-deep through the ice in the swampy woodland area where he had been hunting. She was dead sure that he was going to drown one day, but then, Mom worried about everything, as if he were five years old instead of seventeen. After all, if you were going duck hu
nting, you had to go where the ducks were and take a calculated risk of getting doused once in a while.

  It wasn’t really the wet boots or his mother’s worry that was bothering Robert Benedict just now. He had been out tramping the woods since classes were over at three o’clock, counting on his usual short cut to get him home quickly when it began to get dark, and now he was wishing that he hadn’t taken the short cut even this far. It was a two-mile hike down across the valley to town in wet boots, but he wasn’t about to cross back to the Other Side again to shorten the walk.

  Not now. Because something was wrong on the Other Side, and that was what was worrying Robert Benedict.

  He scratched his head and tried to pin down what had bothered him when he crossed through earlier to start on his trip back. It was hard to get hold of. No particular change over there, exactly, yet something had been very different on the Other Side. Different enough to shake him up thoroughly for a moment, even to frighten him, and with Robert Benedict, that was something that took some doing.

  After all, he had been crossing the Threshold back and forth for as long as he could remember. The Other Side was as commonplace to Robert as this side was. But always, before, he had crossed freely and easily, and this time, for a long, jarring moment, it had seemed that something on the Other Side was trying to keep him from crossing back.

  He stood up now and started down the hill. It was almost dark, but he knew the trail well. Of course he could cross through again for a short cut … but he shook his head and plodded on. Better not to, until he could at least check with Mom. She was a pain about some things, but she had some pretty sharp ideas about how to deal with things on the Other Side.