The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  “Where did you go?” Hank Merry demanded, as the family crowded around the youth.

  “Back through again,” Robert said.

  “Oh, Robert,” Gail said. “You’ve got to tell us when you’re going. Especially after that box thing. It just isn’t safe, and if worst came to worst, I could at least go through after you.”

  Robert looked weary, tired and drained. “I thought I’d never get back; it seemed like hours in there.”

  “Only a couple of minutes, on this side,” Hank said. “But your mother’s right.”

  “That long? It’s usually only a fraction of a second on this side. I must have been there a long time.”

  “But why did you go?” Hank said.

  Robert turned angrily. “I didn’t have much choice about it, so stop climbing on me. This time they pulled me through.”

  “You mean they tried to drag you back?”

  “They didn’t just try. They did it. I didn’t even realize what had happened until I was across. And it was the same thing as before, only more so. More pressure, more fear, more tension. And then another of their little presents before they pushed me back out again.” He held up the object in his hand, blinking at it. “And the same feeling, that I should be pleased with it, somehow.”

  He turned the object over in his hands. It looked like a lump of black plastic modelling clay, irregular, but with a smooth hard pellet at one end. He molded it in his hands, fashioning a small animal figure. It took shape readily and held it. “Good clay,” he said. “See how soft and smooth it is? Now look.” He pressed the pellet in the end and tossed the figure casually to Hank. “Think fast,” he said.

  Merry caught it, then wrung his hand with a squeal of pain. The figure fell to the floor with a dull thud. Merry picked it up, gaped at it. “Why, it’s as hard as rock.”

  “I’ll go one better,” Robert said. “It looks like cast steel to me. Now squeeze the pellet again.”

  It was solid, hard, cool and metallic in his hands. Hank squeezed the pellet end sharply with thumb and forefinger, and suddenly the mass was soft and pliable as putty again. He jammed the nose of the animal figure with his thumb, leaving a deep dent from his nail, and squeezed the pellet again, felt the material abruptly congeal in his fingers, warming slightly as it hardened. He stared at it closely, tapped it with a fingernail. “It is cast steel.”

  “Yes. With a difference, as you see. They gave it to me. I think they dragged me through to give it to me. They tried to keep me there again, and they’re still frightened, plenty frightened, and they tried to frighten me again, too, but this time I was onto them. One thing I was sure of. That last gadget, the box, caused some real chagrin over there. It wasn’t supposed to disintegrate walls, at least this was the strong impression that I got. They were horrified to know that something odd had happened with it, and they knew, apparently.”

  Robert turned to Gail. “And another thing: you can quit worrying. They aren’t going to hurt me. They’re trying their best to get something across to me, I’m sure of it; they’re even afraid that I won’t ever come back through when I leave. But why do they give me things like this?”

  Hank looked dubiously at the plastic that became steel. “That,” he said, “is the prize question. I think an answer to that would clear the air a good bit.”

  “It would,” Gail agreed. “It might offer some way to communicate with them. But what’s the answer?” She glared at Robert as if he were personally responsible for bringing this new enigma about. “You’re the only one who can tell us. Honestly, I sometimes think you’re just playing tricks on us. Or else you have a touch of imbecile about you.”

  Ed Benedict, who had been examining the funny-putty thoughtfully, looked up slowly at Gail, his eyes suddenly wide. “You know, my girl, I think maybe you’ve hit the nail right on the head.”

  The room was suddenly still. Robert blinked at his father, frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “These gadgets they’ve given to you,” Ed said. “And the way they’ve tried to keep you from crossing back. And your feeling that they are suddenly, desperately trying to contact you in some way, don’t those seem to add up to something?”

  “Not much,” Robert said.

  “Well, they do to me. I’m wondering if these gadgets aren’t intended as exactly what you ‘felt’ they were supposed to be.”

  “You mean toys?” Robert said.

  “Toys. And nothing more.”

  Hank Merry shook his head. “It seems to me that this box affair is pretty potent for a toy. Like handing a loaded pistol to a five-year-old and telling him to go play with it.”

  “You mean that it seems to have some pretty potent properties over here,” Ed corrected him. “Not necessarily over there. Robert, what did that box appear like over there?”

  “A bunch of fragments,” Robert said. “Certainly not like a box. Just a collection of perfectly impossibly shaped pieces without any functional connection at all. I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before, over there, although I’ve seen things that seemed very similar. They’ve never stayed with me when I’ve crossed back, before, but now that I think of it — ” He scratched his head. “I’m not even dead sure I was supposed to bring it back. Maybe that was some part of the pressure to stay that I felt. Maybe over there that box was a perfectly innocuous, harmless toy like the steel-clay is. Maybe it wasn’t until I brought it back through to this side that it became something dangerous or destructive. Something it wasn’t supposed to be at all!”

  “Even so, it doesn’t make sense,” Hank said. “If they’re so upset about something over there, and if you’re their only real contact with this side where the disturbance seems to be coming from, why would they be fooling around giving you playthings?”

  “Well, think about it!” Ed Benedict said, suddenly excited. “Assume that they’re really in trouble, desperate trouble of some kind. And assume they think the trouble originates over here. Then take Robert, wandering back and forth for years, without hindrance, to them a person or thing or being that has access to this side. What better liaison could they look for? What better ambassador, if they could only find some kind of symbol that he could understand and reply to? Wouldn’t they leap at the chance?”

  “Probably. But why toys?”

  They sat silently for a moment. Suddenly Robert laughed. “Dad, whom do you give toys to in your laboratory?”

  Ed Benedict looked startled. “Why, to — to — ” He blinked at Robert in amazement, then burst out laughing too. “Of course. What else? I think you’ve hit it on the head!”

  “Hit what on the head?” Hank asked, now thoroughly confused.

  “The answer. Of course these things are toys! It just never entered my mind — ” He broke off. “Look, as Robert knows, we get lots of strange specimens in the Hoffman Center psych-testing labs. Murderers, psychopaths, persecution complexes, the works. We get frightened children and senile old men, mentally impaired youngsters, feeble-mind children, withdrawn children living in such a fog we can’t find any way to reach them. All kinds, and always the same problem: getting through to them. Some patients just won’t talk or respond at all. Some won’t do anything but sit in a corner and blubber, or cringe whenever anybody comes near. Some are so deranged and violent we have to stop them from screaming and climbing the walls long enough even to get their attention. And some may be so far out, so feeble-minded that we can’t even find wordsymbols we can use that will register with them.” Ed Benedict smiled. “In cases like that, when we have to make some kind of contact, there’s a technique we use — simple and kind and often very effective. We approach the deranged or feeble-minded patient and offer him candy. Or a toy.”

  “Well,” Gail snapped, “that’s fine for a mental case, or a feeble-minded child. But you can’t pretend that Robert is — ”

  “Feeble-minded? Not here, I can’t. On this side, Robert is a very bright, clever, perceptive young man. Too bright for his own good, somet
imes. He handles problems logically and usually gets the right answers. He uses words and symbols very well, and he’s learning how to use them better all the time, over here. But on the Other Side — ” The man looked at his son sadly. “I’m afraid that these toys mean just one thing. As far as the people on the Other Side can tell, Robert is nothing more nor less than a blabbering idiot. And if that is the case, and he is our sole ambassador to these people on the other side, our one and only hope of making meaningful contact with them, then we may be in trouble that nobody can get us out of.”

  17

  FOR THE FIRST time since the transmatter had started working, and the day Robert Benedict had had his first jolt of fright on the Other Side, it seemed that they had nailed down something solid. Something that meant something, that made sense. The point of a wedge driven into an impenetrable surface, a foot in the door, one simple fact that might be true on the far side of that vague, mysterious Threshold they were facing that could also be understood in its true meaning on this side.

  And it was a fact they couldn’t use. A depressing, infuriating, frustrating fact that couldn’t be acted upon, tantalizing as it was. A fact that didn’t help, that even seemed to dash all hope of help.

  They turned it over in every direction they could think of, sitting there in the Benedict living room with its ruined wall, its strange pile of dust and the two specimens on the table before them — a misshapen lump of black plastic that turned to cast steel on command and a wildly dangerous gray box with beveled edges, sealed seams and four studs along the bottom. Who could say what devastation would result from pressing the other three studs? None of them cared in the slightest to find out.

  Robert lay on the couch, half-dozing part of the time, aching in every bone and so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open. Ed and Gail were talking urgently, trying to think through the implications of the idea, unable to hide their concern for Robert, worried at the price these trips through to the Other Side were already chalking up in terms of physical exhaustion, and frightened now at whatever nameless dangers he might face if he crossed through again (or was pulled through again; there was that also to consider now, all the more frightening because there was no way they could think of to prevent it or control it). Hank Merry paced the floor, McEvoy’s panic call still fresh in his mind, with the ever-present awareness that a machine, his machine, his own creation, was somehow not obeying the commands it was given any longer, and was drawing them all into some kind of vortex of fury that he didn’t even dare think of. They talked, and argued, and flared up in anger, and cooled down again, seeking somehow to find some answer that seemed to make some sense or offer some hope.

  They came up with nothing whatever but a frustrating sense of failure, and the uneasy certainty that that failure was somehow, inexorably, leading to disaster beyond their imagination.

  A busy, overpopulated planet, bursting its seams, hungry for the materials with which to build and grow, utterly unable to reach out for them because of the extortionate, bankrupting cost of reaching. A planet whose people violently needed, not just wanted, but needed those inaccessible materials if they were ultimately to survive. A people faced with the alternatives of war and waste, hatreds, pogroms, riots, bloodshed, violent depopulation, and reversion to conditions so primitive that no one alive could begin to remember what they were like; and along with that reversion, the loss of all that had been gained by those people over the centuries, the utter waste of their minds and capabilities, an end to the growth of knowledge and potential that had always been the legacy of human beings.

  And so pointless, with the goal so near. For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe a horse was lost; for want of a horse a battle was lost; for want of a battle, a kingdom was lost.

  Men searched for that elusive nail and found only a pile of iron filings with no means to fashion a nail from it. Not that it couldn’t be done; the laws of Nature declared that iron filings and an iron nail were part and parcel of the same substance. It was the how that baffled men. It was natural law that bound men and their space ships to the surface of their planet with the steel hoops of gravity, and natural law that made the transport of precious ores from Mars to Earth an economic disaster to contemplate. But other laws of Nature had hinted vaguely (as laws of Nature do) that other means of transport could be found, and the Transmatter Project was born — a way to bypass the barrier of gravity and the exhaustingly costly rocket launchings and the staggering problems of re-entry with worthwhile payloads. To men like Hank Merry, confident that the laws of Nature could be discovered and then used in the service of men, the transmatter had been a challenge, a problem to be solved, nothing more. Vastly important, that problem, but solvable.

  And so it was, perhaps, until suddenly the transmatter had seemed to leap the barrier of natural law and behave as nothing could behave, uncontrolled and uncontrollable by the men who had devised it in flat contradiction of what ought to be so. In Hank’s search for a way to harness natural energies, his machine had inadvertently trespassed into a terra incognita, an area not even suspected, much less understood, where the laws of Nature seemed suspended, with what grim results nobody could guess.

  And in a laboratory in New Jersey a machine, never actually completed, now half-dismantled, continued quietly to hum away, busily moving molecules of air from Point A to Point B in its own obscure fashion, and trespassing upon … what? … at the cost of … what? … and controllable … how? … and with something else … what? … on the receiving end not liking it a bit … and slashing back … how? and why? and to what end?

  Above all, why? and to what end?

  They had talked, and argued and speculated and come up with no answers. Merry told them of McEvoy’s frantic plea. “I’ve got to go back, and without delay,” Hank said. “I’ve got to try to find out why that wretched machine continues operating when it can’t be operating, and see what, if anything, I can do to stop it.” The others had to agree to that, and then there was the Joint Conference to think of, and McEvoy to think of, and the destruction of eighteen months of hard, painstaking work to think of. There was also physical danger to think of, if bits and pieces of the eastern seaboard were being chopped off and carried to perdition by some angry force across the Threshold. After much discussion it was finally decided that Robert and Gail should go back with Merry, if only in the hope that John McEvoy, on hearing what they had discovered, might think of some fresh lead for them to follow.

  For Hank it was especially infuriating because something was in his mind, just out of reach of his consciousness; something that he had thought of before that was now eluding him, that might offer a route of exploration. He wasn’t sure if it was something he had just forgotten, or something he had rejected as ridiculous, back when many things had seemed ridiculous that didn’t seem so ridiculous now; but forgotten or blocked, it kept nudging his mind, and grope as he would, he couldn’t quite recapture it.

  So ultimately they had flown back down to New Jersey, after considerable argument from both ends with Security to guarantee unobstructed passage, and at length were met by a gray-faced McEvoy who looked old and tired and didn’t seem to know whether to greet them with his usual half-angry bluster or to burst out crying. It was a baffled McEvoy, bad enough to Hank, who could not remember ever having seen McEvoy truly baffled before; and worse, a helpless McEvoy who somehow couldn’t seem to do the right thing no matter which way he turned. Consequently, perhaps for the first time in his life, he simply sat there immobilized, not so much because he couldn’t figure out what to do as because he couldn’t figure out what not to do.

  In the laboratory office, with the transmatter making its ominous whirring sound in the vaulted lab outside the door, they told McEvoy what they had found, what had happened, what conclusions they had drawn from these things. Hank made a swift examination of his machine, already dismantled far more than he had imagined McEvoy would dismantle it, and still puffing away at the air like some ki
nd of idiot steam engine. McEvoy, for once in his career, had listened with care, and not interrupted with his own burgeoning ideas, and nodded when he caught something and ticked down a note when there was something he thought he had missed.

  McEvoy came to the same conclusion that they had come to earlier. “So our contact man is an idiot, to them,” he said glumly. “Or seems to be, at least.”

  “Probably only seems to be,” Gail offered. “A newborn baby in this world behaves like an idiot, too, you know, to someone who doesn’t know any better. It has no symbols in its mind, nothing but instincts at first. The baby may have enormous potential, but until it learns about its surroundings from experience, and then learns to connect words up to things, he continues to respond like an idiot.”

  “That I can understand,” John McEvoy said. “But Robert isn’t a newborn baby.”

  “He may be the perfect equivalent on the Other Side,” Gail said. “Robert can cross the Threshold, something he learned how to do, and has been practicing for a long time. And he can observe that universe on the Other Side. But what he observes is limited by his human nervous system. The physical universe around him there is tolerable because one part of his brain is packed full of experience — information for survival — that applies to that side of the Threshold. But the way Robert’s brain is constructed, he simply can’t handle their symbols. He isn’t built right. It’s like trying to teach a dog to sing ‘Mother Machree.’ All you get are barks and howls, if you get anything at all. The dog simply hasn’t got the equipment to sing ‘Mother Machree,’ and if the ability to sing is your criterion of dog intelligence, then in that framework every dog on Earth is a canine idiot and always will be.”

  McEvoy nodded, fiddling with the black modelling clay. He had looked at the gray box earlier, but didn’t touch it; he was nervous having a gadget around that could disintegrate walls at the touch of a button. “So if the Thresholders have symbols to express their thoughts, Robert can’t pick them up, so his reactions continue to seem imbecilic to them.”