The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  Half an hour later, as he reached the paved road and weather-screen of Springfield District, Robert was wondering if he might have been imagining things. This had been a funny day in other ways. First, Mom and Dad had left for the Center at Cambridge just as he was getting up, which was unusual in itself. When Mom had to go in at all, she had always planned things so that he had had breakfast and gotten holed up with the tape scanner in the study before she left. Then during TV classes today he’d been called on four times in a row and couldn’t answer once, thanks to skipping his tape-reading the night before, so he got an extra hour of reading assigned for tonight. And then those crazy news reports about Manhattan District … some kind of earthquake, except that the reports were so garbled they didn’t seem to make sense.

  All in all, he’d been glad to get away by himself this afternoon; sometimes he got to feeling awfully cramped and hemmed in. Dad once said that it was probably part of the price he had to pay for being able to cross through to the Other Side at will, nice to know, maybe, but strictly no help when he needed open air and space to move around in.

  Now he shrugged the thought aside. Here under the weather shield there was no snow, but he was cold and wet and wanted to get home. He flagged down a cruising aircar, and soon was riding high above the ranks of tall apartment houses of Springfield, using his father’s bank code for the fare register. He could square the fare with Dad somehow at the end of the month if Ed Benedict happened to notice it on the bill. Sometimes he even squeaked by free.

  6

  AS IT WAS, nobody seemed to notice Robert’s watersoaked boots when he came into the Benedict living room, nor his unusual lateness either. His father and mother were both watching the late newscast; when he tramped in, Gail just waved to him abstractedly and Ed shushed him up when he started to say something. There was an odd tension in the room, as if he had interrupted a heated argument that he wasn’t supposed to know about.

  Feeling vaguely uneasy, Robert joined his parents at the wall screen. The announcer was spouting excitedly about the mysterious New York disaster of the early morning, and a TV aircar had evidently carried the cameras in close, for the pictures on the screen were exceptionally sharp and clear. Robert stared at the video image as he picked up the announcer’s words:

  “… had no explanation to offer for the disaster. Some observers near the cleavage area claimed to have seen a waterspout in New York harbor immediately after the disaster occurred, but reports have been inconsistent. This afternoon trawlers and dredges of the International Coast Guard dragged the harbor for debris from the shattered section of the city, but nothing was recovered, even at depths of three hundred feet.

  “In a moment we will have a roundup of reactions from the various world capitals, but first a special on-the-spot interview with an eyewitness to the mysterious calamity.”

  The camera shifted to an ID shot of Manhattan Island from the air, then moved in to a downtown street scene. Crowds of people, police, and uniformed troops were milling around; the mike picked up a babble of frightened voices. Then the camera centered on a reporter with a hand mike, interviewing a short, balding man dressed in longshoremen’s clothes: “… Mr. Jacob Pitkin of 124 Dykeman Street, 17th level … Mr. Pitkin, I understand you were returning home from work when the disaster occurred.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s right, I was actually walking right where it struck, not ten seconds before.”

  “Can you tell us in your own words what you saw?”

  “Yes, sir! I sure can! I was walking north about five o’clock in the morning when I thought I heard a truck coming. So I looked back over my shoulder. I was right, I saw the headlights plain as day, and then the next second the whole street was gone, truck and all.”

  “You didn’t feel any tremor or see any buildings crashing?”

  “Nothing at all. Not even any noise, at first. It was just there one second and gone the next. And then I heard a roar like the time the gas tanks blew over in Newark District, and I saw this waterspout coming up where the street had been — ”

  Impatiently, Gail Benedict flipped channels, but everywhere it was the same story. One channel was broadcasting an interview with the Russian delegate to the Joint Conference, who insisted angrily that the disaster had been caused by the explosion of a concealed atomic stockpile, but even he acknowledged that no seismograph had recorded any shock wave. On another channel the announcer was just finishing: “… attempted to contact Dr. John McEvoy, Director of Research at Telcom Laboratories, but Dr. McEvoy could not be reached by broadcast time …” Gail and Ed Benedict exchanged glances, and then Gail reached over to flick off the screen.

  “Well, was it an earthquake?” Robert asked.

  “Without a seismograph record?” Ed Benedict asked sourly. “Who taught you geology?”

  “Well what was it, then?”

  Gail looked grim. “I don’t know, but it wasn’t any earthquake.” She stood up abruptly and went out in the kitchen, looking more upset than Robert could ever remember. His father just sat glumly, not inviting conversation. Robert shucked his wet boots, now acutely aware that something was seriously wrong.

  Something had taken a chunk off the end of Manhattan during the night. If not an earthquake, then what? And why the tension here at home? Mom and Dad were usually as close as hand and glove; this strained silence just wasn’t like them. Something had upset them badly, something neither of them wanted to bring out into the open. And it had to do with the disaster in New York.

  Robert continued to puzzle over it as he joined his parents for the beginning of a silent meal. Why were they so disturbed about what happened in Manhattan District? Ed’s work was in Cambridge, at the Big Mental Adjustment Laboratory of the far-flung Hoffman Medical Center complex. Robert knew that his father was a research psychologist with more experience with problems of human adaptability than anyone else in the country, but he’d never gotten this stirred up about anything that Robert could recall. The same with Gail, who sometimes worked with her husband on special projects but spent most of her time keeping the Benedict household together and working with the Right of Privacy League.

  No matter how he looked at it, it didn’t add up. What was more, he had a queasy feeling that whatever it was had to do with him as well. Robert knew his parents too well to be easily fooled. They would sometimes block or sidestep indirect questions and subterfuge, but they never dodged a direct frontal attack. He fiddled with his food as the silence deepened, then took the bull by the horns. “Okay,” he said, looking his mother straight in the eye. “Let’s have it. Something’s wrong here, and I’m right in the middle of it. What’s the trouble?”

  Gail’s hand came up to push her hair back from her ear. She glanced at her husband and went on eating. Finally Ed shrugged. “There’s nothing wrong,” he said awkwardly.

  Robert was silent a moment. Then he said, “One time you told me to call you on it flat-footed if I ever caught you lying. So I’m calling you. If you’re not lying at least you’re dodging. Something’s wrong. You’ve never been like this before.”

  More silence. “Did you cross the Threshold today?” Gail asked at last.

  “Well, of course!” Robert blinked; he hadn’t expected that question. “I mean, I usually do. don’t I? You know that.”

  “But you were late getting home tonight,” Ed said. “How come?”

  “I walked down from Thompson’s Hill.”

  “That’s quite a walk. You usually short-cut.”

  “Well, I know. But today there was something funny about the Other Side.”

  Gail looked up at him. “Funny?”

  “Well — different, then,” Robert said. “I was even going to ask you about it. Something was out of whack over there; it even scared me a little, and that’s the first time that ever happened.”

  Both the older Benedicts had stopped eating. Ed cleared his throat. “Robert, this may be more important than you realize. What was different when you crossed the Th
eshold today? You know the Other Side far better than we do. Can you tell us what it was?”

  “It wasn’t anything so terrible,” Robert said. “I — I mean, there just seemed to be — that is, I had this strange feeling that somebody … or something …” He bogged down, unable to find the right words to describe exactly what had given him the sudden jolt he had experienced this afternoon. It was the same old story as so many times before: none of the words he could find seemed to be the right ones.

  Because there was no describing the Other Side. He’d never been able to. He’d never been able to say, in so many words, what he saw there, or what he did there, or what happened to him, or anything. There weren’t any words on this side to tell anybody those things. And the things on this side, and the words to describe them, never seemed to apply to the Other Side, either.

  “Just do the best you can,” Gail urged him. “I know it’s hard, but try. It’s important, maybe very important.”

  Robert shook his head. “All I can say is that it was different. I’ve always gone back and forth without any hindrance before, any time I wanted to. Nothing on the Other Side ever seemed to bother me, or touch me. I mean, the Thresholds are there, and sometimes when I cross through they’re around nearby and sometimes they’re not, but it never seemed to make any difference. This time it did. At least, it seemed to. All of a sudden I had the strangest feeling that they knew I was there, as if they were really aware of me for the first time. And somehow this time I couldn’t move as freely as I always have. It even seemed hard to come back out again. As if something there were trying to hold me.” He spread his hands helplessly.

  “It scared me, and I got out of there as fast as I could. I was half sick to my stomach for some time afterwards, it gave me such a jolt. So I decided to walk home.” Robert hesitated. “I decided maybe I’d better talk to you before I crossed through again. And then all this hubbub at home. What’s wrong, anyway?”

  Ed Benedict looked at his son and then at Gail. “I guess mostly we just don’t like coincidences,” he said. “We’re worried about something going on that we don’t know about.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the disaster in New York last night,” Gail said. “Something took a bite out of New York City, a big bite, and nobody has any idea what the something was, or what happened to the piece that got bitten off. It was no earthquake. The cleavage line is sharp and clean as polished marble. It took a great hole out of the harbor below the waterline, too. I don’t know any force on earth that could do that without leaving some sign of something in its wake. And neither does anybody else, as far as I can see. “It’s almost — ” she hesitated — “almost as if it vanished into another world.”

  Robert Benedict saw what Gail was trying to say, and a shiver crept up his back.

  7

  “IT DOESEN’T make sense,” Robert said later, when dinner was over. “There’s never been a Threshold big enough to engulf a whole chunk of a city. And even if there were, why? Why connect this business up with the Other Side at all? It seems to me you’re making an awful reach.”

  Ed Benedict filled his pipe, settled back in the soft living room chair. “I suppose it is,” he said, “except that there are some other things, too. Coincidences, maybe, but just too many coincidences. For one thing, there’s a transmatter being built down at the Telcom Labs in Jersey, and all of a sudden the security lid has gone down on it so tight that nothing is coming through. Up until now, there’s been no great mystery, just a bright young guy building a prototype machine, with regular news reports on his progress. Now all of a sudden, the guy and his machine are in the middle of a Condition B news blackout which began within an hour or so of the New York thing. Coincidence, of course, except that a transmatter project is fooling around with enormous physical energies focused on an extremely small area of space.”

  “You think a transmatter just dissolved the whole tip end of Manhattan?” Robert asked incredulously.

  “Well, not quite,” Ed replied. “Not without the energy going somewhere, and there’s been no sign of it. It’s just that — well, look: if you knew somebody was busy building a magnifying glass out in space big enough to gather half the radiant energy of the sun and focus it on Earth, and then all of a sudden the world caught on fire, you’d suspect some connection, wouldn’t you?”

  Robert scratched his head. “I suppose so. But I thought transmatters were just laboratory toys, at this stage.”

  “They always have been, but Dr. Henry Merry has been using a different approach to matter transmission than most other people who had fiddled with it.” Ed shrugged. “Okay, that coincidence I could choke down, but the fact that there’s a man named John McEvoy mixed up in the middle of it I can’t choke down.”

  “You mean the research director at Telcom?”

  Ed Benedict nodded. “He was the one who opened up the first Threshold, twenty years ago. Your mother worked with him briefly, until she found out why unprepared people couldn’t deal with the Other Side, or even investigate it. She left the project then, and McEvoy was very bitter about it. But he dropped it, all the same.”

  “At least we thought he did,” Gail added. “Now we’re beginning to wonder.”

  “I see,” Robert said. “You think there’s a connection between a transmatter project and the Other Side and a piece of New York disappearing. I don’t get it, but I know something was different on the Other Side today. And I’d surely like to know what, if I’m going to keep on going through there.”

  “That’s what your father and I were arguing about,” Gail said. “We don’t think you should go through, until we know what’s going on. But somebody needs to go through, to try to find out if something has happened over there. I think it should be me.”

  Robert stared at her. “What good would that do? You know how it shakes you up, even when you’re just taking a short cut. Let’s face it, you’re pretty clumsy in there. If somebody has to find out something on the Other Side, it had better be me.”

  He was right, of course, and Ed and Gail both knew it. Now Robert realized that that was precisely the thing that had been troubling them all evening. Because he, at least, could cross back and forth with impunity. He, at least, could move from the orderly three-dimensional universe he lived in through the curious, twisting angle into that other world with all its dimensional nightmares and geometric absurdities without having his wits jogged loose. He had been crossing through and back from infancy; now the crossing that was so violently disturbing to unprepared, rigid adult minds was as commonplace to Robert Benedict as tying his shoelaces.

  He knew that that incomprehensible universe did indeed exist, side by side with his own three-dimensional universe. And that universe across the Threshold was just as real to him on the Other Side as a dish of ice cream was real on this side. It was just built differently, shaped by a different geometry, with at least one more spacial dimension than this universe. He got bogged down trying to explain it to anyone, or even to understand clearly himself just precisely what the Other Side was “on the other side of,” but he could go there when others couldn’t. His mind had enough experience with the Other Side so that he could tolerate what he found there where other minds blocked, rejected and short-circuited out.

  But comprehend or explain — that was something else.

  How do you explain the unexplainable? It was the wrong wording, of course. All his life Robert had been tripping over words that weren’t quite right to express what he had experienced on the Other Side. How do you describe something that you know exists because you’ve encountered it time and again, but which nobody else can fit into the world they know about in any way, shape or manner? How do you express feelings when you aren’t sure yourself what they are? Gail and Ed had patiently tried to help him get around this very strange barrier of meanings, yet even Gail and Ed were helpless. They knew that what he told them about the Other Side meant something … they just couldn’t understand what it me
ant. Only he knew what it meant, sometimes, in rare flashes of comprehension, but even he couldn’t explain what it meant in this world.

  Some things he knew. There was a world that lay just across the Threshold, a Threshold to a dimension that didn’t exist in three-dimensional space. That world was real; there were people there, or creatures, or beings, or inhabitants, or whatever you wanted to call them. These “Thresholders” were intelligent; Robert was certain of that. They lived in a structured universe governed by natural laws just as Robert’s own three-dimensional universe was governed, except that the natural laws were different from any that existed in Robert’s world. And he was able to pass through … to cross over this dimensional Threshold … into the universe on the Other Side with perfect ease and simplicity, just by turning a corner. But he couldn’t point out that “corner” to anyone else. In fact, “turning a corner” was a totally inaccurate way to describe what it was that Robert did to get there. “Corner” implied three dimensions: length, width and height; and the “corner” that Robert “turned” had nothing to do with any of these. When he used that phrase, he was like the blind man who said, “I see that John is here,” when he heard the voice of a close friend in the room. The blind man actually “saw” nothing of the sort, nor did Robert Benedict actually turn any corner that anyone could see.

  Yet now, because something was wrong on the Other Side, he was again going to “turn the corner” and see what he could discover, if anything, that was “different” than before on the Other Side, whether he could explain it to anyone or not. His father remained adamantly opposed to his going. Gail continued to insist that she should go instead, but they both knew that Robert would make his own decision. There had been a time, when he was very young, that they had been able to influence his coming and going across the Threshold, but there had been no time since he was five or six years old that they could actually prevent it. He could go when he decided to go. And now they recognized all the earmarks of a determined young man who had made up his mind in spite of them.