The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  “Don’t try to travel anywhere or do anything over there,” Gail warned. “Just stay put and see if you still feel whatever it was you felt before.”

  Robert nodded. He had been through this with Gail dozens of times before, and he understood exactly what she meant, even though they both knew that on the Other Side you didn’t actually “travel” anywhere. That would imply moving from one point to another, and on the Other Side it was all but impossible to pin down a point to travel from, or a point to travel to. Even so, there were … things … that he could do in order to cross back at some different place than he crossed through, and he wasn’t about to do any of those … things … this time. Just staying put would be enough, for now….

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t do anything rash. And I’ll be back in no time.” It was an old joke; even Gail couldn’t help smiling. And then, to Gail and Ed Benedict, it appeared that their son simply vanished from the center of the room.

  To Robert, it seemed that he had just turned a corner … twisted through a curious angle that he knew so well. One instant he was in the center of the Benedict living room; the next he was inside.

  8

  AT FIRST, as always, there was the fleeting jolt of surprise and change, a moment of mental breath-holding until he could orient himself. It was much the same as flicking off a light and plunging suddenly into darkness: you paused and waited for your eyes to adjust a little. There was even an after-image in his mind, momentarily, of the room and the people he had left behind. But that faded quickly, and then he was across the invisible dimensional line that separated these two so-different universes.

  At first, as always, it was dark in this place, utterly silent and utterly empty. He felt neither warmth nor cold; temperature, he had learned, was relative and didn’t seem to apply here. He waited; gradually his awareness of the shape and structure of things about him began to sharpen just as an image appears on a developing photograph. He looked behind him, knowing as always that it would be fruitless. He always felt that his own universe was somehow just behind him, just barely out of reach, around that “corner,” but when he looked, of course, it was always gone.

  Darkness and silence … and then, gradually, a sense of moving shapes, structures, geometric patterns all about him — wild, senseless patterns, perfectly incomprehensible, yet very commonplace to him. Here they made sense, and it was here that he was, now, not on the other side. Part of the pattern, he knew, was his own body, which seemed fragmented — disjointed and scattered in space around him at odd angles with the fragments moving about lazily in great, sweeping curves. He could see, now, though not exactly with his eyes; there was always an odd smell on this side, although it seemed to him that the smell arose from somewhere deep in his mind rather than from his nose.

  Muscular movement and position sense were useless here; although the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of his body seemed to be floating freely, any “movement” here was more a matter of wanting to go somewhere and gradually arriving there than of actually moving muscles and taking steps. And whenever he did “move,” something odd always happened: the disjointed fragments of his body began corruscating wildly, shifting and whirling in a frantic meaningless pattern until his desire to “move” was satisfied and he “arrived” wherever he wanted to “move” to.

  Ridiculous, he thought, to try to explain these sensations when the only explanation that could make sense was to be here, and being here at all was enough to drive any normal, intelligent adult out of his wits. Even Mom could just barely hold on here and she was an old and crafty hand at adapting to strange environments. But he at least was comfortable here.

  Or had been, until now …

  But this time, again, something was different. Something to do with the Thresholders themselves. Before, he had always been aware of their presence here and there, whoever or whatever they were, but they had always seemed oblivious to him. He could tell their presence by the changing of the strange structural pattern around him; he could even sense whether they were approaching him, receding from him, or going past him — but for years now he had not even been sure they were aware of him. Now, quite suddenly he sensed them around him in great numbers, and he knew, somehow, they were very acutely aware of him indeed.

  It frightened him. He felt the same panic he had felt earlier at this sudden change. Something in his mind told him to bolt, to get out of there and back to his own side fast; earlier, he had done just that, but now he fought down the urge. There was danger here. Something was terribly wrong — but this time he had to try to understand it.

  Experimentally, he tried to “move.” Nothing happened. The fragments of his body and clothing shimmered and sped about him more swiftly than before, but something seemed to be resisting him now, holding him back, restraining him, and more and more he felt surrounded and trapped by the creatures of this Threshold universe.

  Robert pushed against the restraint, his panic rising out of control now. Something was wrong here, something he could neither understand nor handle. He wanted out, wanted back across, but the more he struggled to cross back the more he felt invisible fingers clutching at him, trying to hold him here. Suddenly there was a change in the structure of things around him. Solid fragments of something other than his body suddenly seemed to join into the moving cloud about him. Colors appeared before his eyes, oddly shifting colors, but colors … and he had never before seen colors of any kind in this strange world.

  Terrified now, Robert Benedict redoubled his efforts to cross back. Whatever was happening here, he couldn’t understand it, and he felt his own mental control beginning to crack. He was still fighting this strange resistance, trying to move back through the angle to cross out again as the colored fragments swirled closer and closer, when suddenly, without a warning, he was released….

  Thrust out …

  … And dropped two feet through the air to the living room rug, trembling and terrified, as Ed and Gail Benedict rushed toward him.

  9

  HE SAT up, shaking his head to clear away the overtones of panic that still filled his mind. He realized he must have seemed stunned for a moment; Gail was clutching his hand, urging him to answer her, while Ed grabbed an opthalmoscope and began flashing it in his eyes. Robert flinched and turned his head. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m fine. But you’re making me dizzy with that light.”

  “Oh, Robert, honestly!” Gail said, the relief and annoyance in her voice fighting it out to a draw. “I told you not to go anywhere.”

  “I didn’t, exactly,” Robert said.

  “Then how did you end up two feet off the ground?”

  “I don’t know about that. I just know I was plenty scared. Something is way out of key on the Other Side and I haven’t got the slightest idea what. Except that I was right in the middle of it and they were all around me.”

  “The Thresholders?” Ed said.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought they always ignored you.”

  “They always have, before. Not this time.” Robert pulled off his shirt; it was dripping with sweat. “We’ve got one answer, though: they know when I’m there, all right. They were waiting this time, and they moved in on me fast.”

  “But why?” Gail said. “They’ve never bothered you before.”

  Robert shook his head. “I don’t know. They seemed to be trying to keep me there, trying to keep me from moving, or maybe pushing me some direction they wanted.” He took a deep breath. “Whatever it was, it scared me silly. And then when I tried to cross back, something seemed to hold me, and then all of a sudden something shoved me out. I didn’t come of my own accord.” He paused, scratching his head. “But I had the funniest feeling that they were threatening me.” He frowned. “No, not threatening, exactly. More as if for the first time they were trying to tell me something.”

  Gail and Ed Benedict looked at each other. Robert got to his feet, tested his legs, and sank wearily onto the couch. “Well,” Gail said finally, �
�I’m afraid I agree with your father. Too many coincidences. The news blackout on McEvoy’s transmatter project, this business in New York, and now something funny going on across the Threshold … it’s too much.” She looked at her son. “Was there anything else you can pin down?”

  “Not that I can think of, except … well, there was something there that was colored. I’ve never seen colors before. This was red and yellow and green, I think, something that got closer to me just before I was pushed out. I almost felt I had something in my hand when I came back through, but I couldn’t have … or else I dropped it …”

  He broke off, staring at the object that was lying on the floor where he had fallen. Gail Benedict reached down, picked it up. A simple thing, with red, yellow and green spirals running down its length … but it had not been in the room before. Gail looked at it closely, then held it up for Ed and Robert to see. “I guess we can forget about coincidences,” she said flatly. “If we needed proof that John McEvoy is fooling with the Threshold again, here it is.”

  The object was an ordinary lead pencil, painted in colored spirals, with the words TELCOM LABORATORIES printed on its side in gold leaf.

  10

  THE AIRCAR journey down from Massachusetts to central New Jersey was abnormally long and difficult. Aircar routings were ordinarily handled automatically by the traffic-pattern computers in Atlantic City District of the eastern metropolis, but today they had been thoroughly disrupted by the strange disaster in New York. The whole lower Manhattan area was barred to traffic except for emergencies and official vehicles; some routings had been taken over by human operators to try to avoid bottlenecks and pileups. Even so, Robert and Gail had to wait almost two hours while several thousand south-bound cars were delayed over Westchester District, and then were ultimately re-routed north as far as Buffalo before circling south again toward their destination. Both Gail and her son were tired and tense, totally uncertain what reception would greet them at the Telcom Laboratories. And their apprehension was increased tenfold by a sudden flurry of garble reports from the aircar radio that the top three floors of an office building in central Philadelphia had suddenly vanished in to thin air at eight thirty that morning, executives, typists and all….

  The appearance of the colored pencil in their Springfield District apartment the evening before — the pencil Robert had inadvertently brought back from the Other Side — had made it obvious that something had to be done. There was only one possible conclusion: someone at Telcom Laboratories was tampering in some way with the Threshold project again, and the New York disaster could not possibly be coincidence.

  The question was, what to do, and how? Robert and his parents had talked half the night, trying meanwhile to contact Dr. John McEvoy by telephone. No success: all messages to the Telcom switchboard were being answered by mechanical servos that stolidly requested names and numbers so that calls could be returned, but offered no information. Ed Benedict then tried to reach McEvoy through Hoffman Center channels; supposedly there was close liaison between the huge medical and psychological research center and Telcom. But even these channels had failed. A security curtain had fallen that nothing seemed to pierce.

  “But we have to reach him,” Gail said. “It might take weeks for McEvoy to return our contact, if he ever does, and we don’t dare wait that long. He may not even know what he’s doing. Oh, I think he probably does, but we can’t be certain.”

  “He may not listen to you, even if you do reach him,” Ed pointed out.

  Gail sniffed. “He’ll listen to me, all right, don’t worry about that. He may try to wring my neck — but he’s been wanting to talk to me for a long, long time. And if we’re right that he’s fooling with the Threshold again, he’ll have to listen, sooner or later.”

  “Why?” Robert said. “Suppose he’s just scratched you off his list.”

  “Look — if that city business was a planned, purposeful reaction on the part of the Thresholders to something that somebody is doing to them on this side, it isn’t going to be the last disaster that occurs. I don’t know what they did with that chunk of Manhattan, or how they did it. I can’t even guess what they might be able to do if they wanted to. But we do know they recognize that Robert comes from this side, and that pencil business suggests that they’re trying to communicate something to us in some way. We’ve just got to contact McEvoy.”

  Ed Benedict puffed on his empty pipe. “Well, there’s one other way. The Hoffman Center has an emergency line to Telcom that can bypass a Condition B blackout if necessary.” He sighed, picked up the phone, and threw the scrambler switch. “I may have to tell the Medical Director a pretty colorful story to convince him it’s really an emergency without saying just why, but he can put the arm on McEvoy.”

  Thirty minutes later Gail heard a familiar voice on the line — angry, impatient, but unmistakably McEvoy. And fifteen minutes after that, as morning light was breaking over Long Island Sound, Gail and Robert were in an aircar heading south.

  They hadn’t heard of the Philadelphia incident, then.

  11

  JOHN MCEVOY looked much older than Gail had expected, when she and Robert were shown into the small office on the eighth floor of the Telcom Laboratories building. She had seen him on TV often enough in recent years, but she was not prepared for the white hair or the tired crow’s-feet around his eyes. He pushed back from a desk as she came in, rising to his full six feet and glowering at her.

  “So,” he said heavily. “Gail Talbot, after twenty years. Except that it’s Gail Talbot Benedict now, and this time it’s you coming after me.”

  “That’s right,” Gail said.

  “You don’t do things by halves, do you?” McEvoy said bitterly. “When you ran out on me, back then, you picked the worst possible time you could have chosen. Then you got married to the one man who might have helped me get you back to work with me, and damned near had me jailed for invading your privacy. So now you turn up again, at the worst possible time you could have picked. I haven’t got enough trouble in my own lab, I have to have this New York business dumped in my lap as well, and now the same thing happening in Philadelphia…. .” He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Do you have any idea of the number of people I’ve had crawling down my throat in the past twenty-four hours? Eighteen hours I’ve spent just talking on that phone — ” he stabbed a finger at the offending instrument — ”trying to make up answers to questions I don’t know the answers to, and now you, of all people, have to turn up. Well, I don’t have time to chat, especially about a lead pencil of all things!” He tossed the colored pencil down on the desk in disgust.

  “But I think you lost it,” Gail said innocently. “We thought you might like to know it was found.”

  “There are thousands of pencils around this place,” McEvoy said angrily.

  “But this one turned up in our living room, several hundred miles from here, under rather peculiar circumstances.”

  McEvoy looked at her for a moment. Then he picked up the pencil again, inspected it closely. “I don’t get it,” he said finally. “What are you implying?”

  “I’m not implying anything,” Gail said. “I’m saying pointblank that you’ve been working on the Threshold project again.”

  “The Threshold project!” McEvoy stared at her, then burst out laughing. “Fat chance I’ve had to work on that. Do you know what you did when you ducked out of here that day after you went into the vault? You closed the Threshold project down tight, that’s what. It’s never been reopened since. We were working with an unpredictable, the directors said. Too dangerous for experimentation. Like fooling with an atom bomb in a downtown office building. They closed me down, and that was that. Thanks to you, I might say. And right now I’m too busy trying to get another project under control and raking government investigators out of my hair to want to talk about it very much, since that earthquake in New York.”

  “You think that was an earthquake?”

  “I don’t k
now what it was,” McEvoy said. “I’m just a physicist. But a lot of people seem to think I ought to know what it was. Now, if you don’t mind — ”

  “I could make a guess,” Gail said. “A very good guess.”

  McEvoy’s eyes narrowed. “Guess? What would you guess?”

  “That the New York thing was not an earthquake and that nobody so far has any explanation for it at all. And that the heat is on you, as one of the nation’s leading physicists, to try to explain it.”

  McEvoy shrugged and sank back in his chair. “All right. I haven’t been to bed in almost thirty-six hours, and my switchboard hasn’t let up for fifteen seconds in all that time. I spent three hours last night at an emergency session of the Joint Planning Conference, just trying to convince them that I didn’t know what happened in New York. So what are you getting at?”

  Gail pushed her hair back from her ear. “Another guess,” she said. “That the transmatter you and your staff have been building has suddenly started working. At approximately the same time that the tip of Manhattan vanished. But that it isn’t working quite right, somehow, and that one of the items you were using to test it was a colored lead pencil that went into the thing and never came out again.”

  For a long moment John McEvoy studied Gail’s face. Then his jaw set, and he reached for a phone. “Janet? Hold my calls — yes, all of them, I don’t care who it is. And tell Hank Merry to get up here with his transmission data, all of it, and fast.” He set the phone aside, and turned back to Gail. “All right, I think we’re going to put our cards on the table. I don’t know what you know about the transmatter, or think you know, but I can’t see any possible connection between our machine and chunks of cities disappearing. Right now my main concern is that any stories leaking out about our transmatter could very well precipitate an international crisis of major proportions.”