The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  “I don’t know.”

  Ed Benedict looked at his son sharply. “You look bushed,” he said. “They didn’t try to hurt you, did they?”

  “Oh, no … no. Nothing like that.” Robert rubbed his head. “It’s confused. They were really trying to get something across to me, this time, and they were afraid. Then when I gave them the pencil and the battery, they gave me that, whatever it is.”

  Hank took the box from Gail and studied it closely. It was square, with beveled edges all around, colored a dull metallic gray. About six inches square, Hank guessed, weighing a pound and a half. It felt solid. In the center of one side were four shiny studs; otherwise, there was no break anywhere in its surface. Hank turned it over in his hand, shook it, held it to his ear. “Beats me,” he muttered finally. “It seems to be sealed at all the seams.”

  Ed Benedict looked at the box and handed it back to Robert. “Try to think, son. What could this thing be?”

  Robert shook his head again. “I just haven’t any idea.” He examined the box, trying to remember the last, fleeting sensation he had felt before crossing back — the sudden relaxation of fear and threat, the odd feeling of warmth and encouragement. “I know it sounds silly,” he said, “but I had a peculiar feeling when they gave me this that it was a toy of some kind. Something for me to play with. They were afraid, and they were threatening me, in a way — maybe even trying to frighten me. Yet I felt they were giving me a toy. To play with!”

  Robert frowned and bent over the odd gray box, fingering the shiny studs on the side. “Maybe it’s supposed to make music,” he said. “Or maybe if I press one of these buttons the thing will open up — ”

  Hank Merry shot out his hand in alarm, trying to stop the boy, but he was too late. Robert had already pressed the first button on the side of the box —

  And they watched appalled as the entire wall between the living room and kitchen crumbled gently into dust.

  16

  FOR A LONG moment they stood staring in disbelief. The wall had been there a bare instant before, with its painting, its bookshelves, the door into the kitchen. Now tiny whirlwinds of dust rose from a heap of dry powder, and a slight gust of air stirred through the gaping hole.

  Robert Benedict stared first at the wall, then at the gray box, horrified. Gail whispered, “Robert! What did you do?”

  His hand trembled, and he dropped the thing as if it had burnt him. “Nothing. I just pushed a button, nothing more. It — it didn’t even make any noise!”

  Hank Merry was down on his knees examining the box again. He touched the smooth surface gingerly, felt the slight increase in warmth. Ed Benedict joined him, but Hank shook his head. “Don’t come near it,” he warned. “Don’t even touch it.” He leapt to his feet and crossed the room to peer at the smooth edges of the gutted wall. No ragged border, no rubble, as though a sharp knife had sliced a hole out of the middle of it, eight feet in diameter. The cut edges looked totally undisturbed, almost polished.

  Hank picked the box up again and looked at Robert. “That’s quite a toy you brought back,” he said soberly. “Didn’t they warn you about it?”

  “When they gave it to me? No. Just the opposite, in fact. I had the feeling that they wanted to please me, make me feel better. They seemed to know I was scared half out of my wits, and this was supposed to make up for frightening me, or something.”

  Ed Benedict walked through the hole in the wall into the kitchen. A corner of the table was gone there, but no other damage. He stooped to run his fingers through the pile of dust. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “They must have been trying to tell you something, or show you something.”

  “They were,” Robert said. “I’m certain of it They were trying urgently to contact me. That was part of what was different. They’ve never seemed to want to bother, before.”

  “But this time they did,” Hank Merry said grimly.

  “I thought so,” Robert said helplessly. “Oh, they’ve tried to contact me before, in a way. Every now and then I’ve gotten impressions from them. Feelings, inside me, the way you suddenly feel very happy about something, or suddenly feel bad because you’ve done something wrong. Only those feelings I had were never really mine. I knew that I wasn’t feeling anything at all; whatever it was, was being pushed into my mind from outside, from them. Their feelings, the Thresholders.”

  “Only this time something new was added,” Ed Benedict said.

  “Yes,” Robert said. “At least, this was the first time I ever felt fear. They were afraid of me, or of something to do with me. And I had the feeling that unless I did what they wanted, they would do something to me, and that made me afraid. And then they gave me that box.”

  Hank Merry had been listening quietly through all this. Now he turned to Ed Benedict. “Maybe I’m dense, but something here just doesn’t add up. In all the time Robert has been crossing into this … universe … he’s never felt any threat at all?”

  “Not in the slightest. Any more than walking into a dark closet and closing the door would be a threat. If he’d ever been menaced in any way, we would have stopped it then and there, at least until Robert started doing his own deciding,” Ed smiled ruefully. “We don’t decide for him, now. He does his own thinking, and he can be very stubborn when he wants to. Just like his mother.”

  “But even though he can cross through at will, there’s still a barrier between him and these Thresholders?”

  “Not a physical barrier,” Ed said. “More of a semantic barrier, a barrier of symbols and meanings. Look at it this way: two people can only talk about something if they both use the same symbols — words, for instance — to refer to the same thing. You and I can talk about that gray box there, and discuss it, and puzzle over it, and perhaps reach some conclusions about it, because we’re both using the same words and referring to the same thing: a gray box that we both saw behave in a certain peculiar way. But if we were discussing hunting, and I talked about going hunting bear, and you talked about going hunting bare, and neither one of us realized we weren’t referring to the same thing, we’d have trouble reaching agreement, wouldn’t we?”

  “Well — of course. That’s simple basic semantics. You’ve got to agree about what your word refers to.”

  “Fine. But suppose there’s nothing in the Threshold universe that we can describe with any words or symbols. Suppose there’s nothing in our universe that the Thresholders have any word or symbol to describe. How do we communicate? How do we make any contact at all? We see a gray box here that plays funny tricks; it came over to this side in Robert’s hands. But suppose that gray box is something completely different on the Other Side.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know … any more than Robert does.” Ed Benedict spread his hands. “Dr. Merry, we’ve been trying to breach this barrier ever since Robert was knee-high to a grasshopper. We’ve never made it. He has literally grown up in two universes, this side and that side. We’ve had every psychological investigator in the whole Hoffman Center organization climbing the walls trying to figure out what is actually happening in Robert’s mind. Nobody has any answers, except that Robert probably has a brain that is different from any other human brain in the world.”

  Merry frowned. “You mean its physical structure is different?”

  “Oh, no,” Ed said quickly. “Not anatomically. A neuroanatomist would find that he has a brain made up of nerve cells just like anybody else’s, in roughly the same number as anybody else, arranged in the same way, with the same circuits. There’s no physical difference. It’s a difference in the behavior of those nerve cells, and a difference in the way data is stored in his mind. For one thing, we’re virtually certain that Robert is actually using a lot more of his brain than most human beings.

  “Normally,” Ed went on, “a human being has a bilateral brain structure, a brain divided into two symmetrical halves, with nerve connections just like computer circuits connecting them. And since the early 1900�
��s we’ve known that the human body is controlled almost entirely from one side of the brain, except for the visual apparatus and some other sensory centers, taste, touch and so forth. But almost all body movement, voluntary or involuntary, and practically all the memory storage is handled by one side only. Usually for a right-handed person it’s the left side of the brain that does the work, and vice versa for the left-handed person.”

  “Okay,” Hank said, “but I don’t see what that has to do with Robert.”

  “Maybe quite a lot,” Ed replied. “Usually if the inactive side of the brain is damaged suddenly — a bad concussion, say — there isn’t much change in control of body activity. But if the controlling side, the dominant side, is injured the same way, you can have all sorts of changes: paralysis, loss of memory, the works. If too much controlling brain tissue is damaged too suddenly, the party is out of luck. But sometimes when the damage to the dominant side comes on slowly — say from a brain tumor slowly destroying nervous tissue — the brain’s control can be transferred to the inactive side. People who have been partially paralyzed by strokes or bullet wounds can sometimes even be taught to use the undamaged side of the brain, a transfer of data and function on a large scale. And if it works, they can often be restored to normal function in spite of the damage.”

  Ed smiled at Robert, who was examining the gray box again closely. “As far as we can tell, Robert is different from most people. He doesn’t have this transfer of information from one side to the other in the ordinary sense of the word. He doesn’t seem to have any large inactive brain area, either. Instead, it appears that he may have grown up with two separate and distinct nervous systems, each one controlled by a separate half of his brain. One side for this universe, one for the other. Two completely separate sets of data, experience, knowledge, with no significant crossover between them at all.”

  “But there must be some connection,” Hank said. “Some way to correlate information on one side with information on the other.”

  Ed hesitated. “Well, there are certainly cross-connections between the two sides, one thing that Gail doesn’t have. That’s what makes it possible for Robert to cross through and back in comfort. The data in his mind for one side is completely useless on the other, but he can correlate to some degree by comparison or analogy. He can also remember on one side what happened on the other. In fact, he can tell us practically everything that his senses pick up over there; he just can’t tell us what those things mean. Nor has he ever been able to use his experience to predict what happens next. Of course, that was all right as long as it was safe for him to go through, as long as he wasn’t frightened, or hurt, or damaged in some way. But when it comes to bringing back little nightmares like that box there, we’re dealing with something else altogether.”

  “I guess we are!” Hank agreed. He walked over to inspect the disintegrated wall again. “And he thought it was a toy! More like a loaded gun, I’d say. For a toy, it packs a whale of a wallop. Well, at least it’s something tangible he brought back from that side, and he left something over there that he didn’t bring back. I’m just very glad that transmatter is turned off until we can explore what’s going on over there, hard as it may be on the boy. I’d hate to think what they might start doing if they really got mad at us.” Hank frowned, looking around. “Speaking of Robert, where did he go?”

  Across the room the video-telephone suddenly rang, cutting sharply into the quiet room. Gail Benedict flipped the speaker switch, listened a brief moment. “Just a moment,” she said. “I’ll put him on.” She nodded to Hank, her eyes puzzled. “It’s McEvoy,” she said, “and he says to use the scrambler.”

  Hank crossed the room to the phone, saw McEvoy’s worried face on the screen. As he was punching the buttons of his personal scrambler code to unlock the electronically garbled words from the wire, he realized vaguely that Robert had been gone from the room for some time. “Well, John, what is it?”

  McEvoy looked terrible, with his face unshaven and his eyes incredibly tired and harried. His voice sounded terrible too, a scratching grate that was half incoherent even unscrambled. “Hank, you’ve got to get back down here, no matter what’s going on there. This gadget of yours is running amok.”

  Something stirred in Hank’s mind, something very unpleasant. “I thought you’d shut it off,” he said sharply. “You mean it’s still operating?” He glanced around the room again; where was Robert?

  McEvoy’s voice dissolved into a string of expletives. “You bet your life it’s still operating!” he howled. “What do you think I’m talking about? You leave me with this Frankenstein here, and you take off on a joy ride. I tell you — ”

  “John, what’s been happening down there?”

  “I can’t stop it, that’s what. Look — I spent six hours yesterday with the Joint Conference Committee. I laid it on the line to those vultures, told them outright that the transmatter had to go off for a while. I even took the legal staff with me to block any move they might make. Yes, they were ready to slap an injunction on us to keep it operating, with the weight of the World Court behind it. I invoked the Rights of Privacy laws and endangered our whole Joint Conference budget for the next ten years and finally won twenty-four hours, twenty-four hours, mind you, before they would get a court order to take possession of our blueprints and wiring diagrams to turn them over to somebody else to work with. I understand some Russian has been using Hunyadi plates too, and could pick right up where we quit. But I got twenty-four hours’ grace, and called on the spot for your boys to break the circuits, and they broke the circuits, all right, cut off all the power — ”

  Hank took a deep breath of relief. “Then it is off, at least, for twenty-four hours.”

  Another howl from McEvoy. “That’s just it! It’s still running. It hasn’t got any power source, but we put a test block on the transmitter plate and it goes poof and turns up on the receiver — or disappears — or what have you, just the same.” McEvoy mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Hank, I just got through testing air-flow in that laboratory. That machine is busy sucking atmospheric air in one end and pushing it out the other when we aren’t feeding it something more solid. It’s moving two cubic yards of laboratory atmosphere from one side of the room to the other every minute, molecule by molecule.”

  Hank stared at his chief’s face on the screen. “John, it can’t be operating without power.”

  “Well, maybe it can’t, my friend, but it is. And whoever took those bites out of Manhattan and upstate New York isn’t any happier than before.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “More land grabs,” McEvoy said. “Security blacked them out, as soon as I’d talked to the Joint Conference, but the bottom floor and two sub-basements of a Camden District office building went about an hour ago — just vanished — and the whole forty stories above it fell into the hole. Talk about a mess. And now a theater in Jersey City has been hit. Sliced the whole thing off four feet from ground level, people and all. Only thing it missed were a couple of small children and the theater cat — ”

  “Like sighting in a rifle,” Hank muttered.

  “Huh?”

  “The old time rifles the Germans used in the First World War,” Hank said. “No sight adjustments, so they had to guess distance and windage. Took about three shots before the sniper could get his range. But that fourth shot — hoo, boy!”

  “Look, man, I don’t know what German rifles have got to do with — ”

  “I mean that these aren’t random strikes,” Hank said tightly. “I don’t think they’re retaliation, either. They want that thing stopped; they’re grabbing for the chunk of our universe that has that transmatter in it, and their aim is lousy but they’re getting closer. And I don’t think they’re going to stop until they hit target zero.”

  “But I’m trying to stop it for them,” McEvoy groaned. “If you have some other ideas — ”

  Hank shook his head, thinking furiously. Some kind of feedback c
ircuit or reverberation that kept it operating with the power cut. The way a radio would keep operating for a few milliseconds after it was unplugged; only a “few seconds” in this case could mean days, maybe weeks —

  “John, dismantle the thing.”

  McEvoy shook his head. “I don’t dare. The Joint Conference made that clear. If we tear it down, we’re vulnerable to arrest. We’ve got hold of one we can’t let go, Hank. A working transmatter has been too critically important for too long. If word ever got out that one was operating and then was dismantled, every stock exchange in the world would fall apart at the seams. It’s that bad. The economy would just crumble.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Anyway, I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work. At least I’ve dismantled some of the circuitry that could be reassembled quickly. It doesn’t seem to make a bit of difference. You’ve got to get back here and help me get it stopped.”

  “I’m working at it,” Hank said. There was an idea in his mind — where was Robert? — only vaguely formulated, but an idea. “I’m getting some impression of what we’re dealing with, this other universe, I mean. There isn’t any real contact, but there has been some exchange. Something we’re doing is stirring up trouble over there, maybe trouble like we never dreamed of. And even dismantling the transmatter may not help now. Look, give me a couple more hours here, and then I’ll be back. If there are any more strikes, getting any closer to the lab geographically, call me at once. And John — ” Hank hesitated, then took the plunge. “Be sure you have constant contact with at least three points outside the lab, including one on the West Coast and one in Asia, with orders to call me here if — well, if contact is broken.”

  “You mean you’re thinking — ”

  “ — the same thing you are,” Hank said. “That the Thresholders’ aim may get better. That they may hit target zero and get the transmatter and you with it.”

  He flipped off the connection before McEvoy could protest and turned back to the room again just as Robert Benedict reappeared, out of nowhere, with a curious black object in his hand.