The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  “That’s right,” Gail said. “If the Thresholders really did try to contact him before, they got nowhere and dropped it. When their overtures fell flat, when they got what seemed like nothing but idiot responses, they quit bothering. After all, he wasn’t hurting anything, then. But now, suddenly, they have to establish contact with him, idiot or not. Because something this side of the Threshold is doing something that threatens them, something so terrible that they’re lashing back at us.”

  McEvoy looked at Robert. “And you’ve come to a dead end? You can’t think of anything else you can do?”

  Robert spread his hands. “Remember this no-contact thing works both ways, Dr. McEvoy. If I’m an idiot to them, they’re also idiots to me. If I only had something to stand on — one single thing to get hold of — but I can’t think what. I can’t even find out what they’re so terribly afraid of. Any more than Hank can figure out why his machine in there is working in spite of him. When you think of all the air that that thing has moved aimlessly from one side of that lab to the other — ”

  Hank Merry looked up suddenly and snapped his fingers. “Yes,” he said softly. “Exactly. I knew there was something.”

  They looked at him. “What do you mean?” Robert asked.

  “Something inconsistent. All that air, moving from Point A to Point B. Or those testing blocks, moved from Point A to Point B. We can’t deny it happened, and it seems to be driving the Thresholders to distraction, for some reason.”

  “But what’s inconsistent?” asked Robert.

  “You are,” Hank said. “This machine moved a test block from one side of the lab to the other, and caused trouble. But you picked up a test block in your hands and moved it from one side of the lab to the other and didn’t cause trouble. Why not?”

  “Why, because I — I — well, I’ve been doing the same thing for years!”

  “So I understand,” Hank said. “Without any trouble. But this gadget tries it, and there’s more trouble than you can shake a stick at, then and there. Why?”

  Robert saw his point then. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. It must mean that from their standpoint we aren’t doing the same thing. From our standpoint, the test block gets from Point A to Point B in either case. But when I carried it, I carried it the right way, and when the transmatter carries it, it carries it the wrong way — ”

  “Like walking through a plate glass window to get outside,” Hank said.

  John McEvoy looked up. “I don’t follow you,” he said.

  “Well, suppose you wanted to move from Point A inside a room to Point B just outside a plate glass window in the yard. If you walk over to the door at the right, go outside, and then walk back to the window, the way is clear. Of course, you could go directly from Point A to Point B, too, but you’d have to go through the window to do it. You’d get where you wanted to go, but at the expense of a mess of broken glass.”

  “But nobody in his right mind would do that!” McEvoy said.

  “Not if he knew the difference,” Robert said. “But I think Hank’s right. Suppose you didn’t know the difference between the right way and the wrong way! Suppose you couldn’t see either the door or the plate glass window at all. You might do a whale of a lot of damage without knowing it, and then wonder why the landlord was suing you.”

  “Exactly,” Hank said. “Apparently you have been going through to the Other Side the right way, and the transmatter has been shoving things through the wrong way. And as a consequence, we’re in trouble and getting into much worse trouble very fast.” He looked up at Robert.

  “I wonder what would happen if you were to go through the wrong way, once. Through the plate glass window.”

  In the silence that followed, Robert turned and looked at the transmatter, witlessly humming away and shoving volumes of air from Point A to Point B.

  18

  GAIL BENEDICT protested the idea with a tenacity and stubbornness which surprised even McEvoy, first indignantly, then angrily, then bitterly, at last almost tearfully.

  “It’s bad enough that the boy is the only contact we have at all, and it’s bad enough that he can’t even go through now without getting tormented and frightened and trounced. But now you’re talking about using him where you know there’s danger. You’re asking him to try something he may not be able to control at all, and to take chances that you can’t even guess at, much less begin to measure, and I’m not going to stand here and let you get away with it.”

  “It’s the same universe over there, regardless of how he gets there,” Hank Merry argued. “And he’s the same person, with the same brain and the same knowledge.”

  “Maybe it’s the same universe and maybe it’s not. How do you know? The things you push through that machine are stirring up trouble. Robert never did. There’s a reason, there has to be. You have a volcano that may be about to explode and you want somebody to crawl down in the crater to find out why!”

  “There’s no other way to find out, as far as we know. And Robert is the only one who has a chance.”

  “But how do you know that even Robert has a chance?” Gail stormed. They argued on while Robert listened, looking thoughtfully at the transmatter. Even McEvoy stewed and fumed and wondered whether some other approach — he didn’t know just what — shouldn’t be tried first.

  But ultimately, of course, it was Robert who decided. “There isn’t much choice,” he pointed out to Gail. “I’m scared to go through even the usual way, and I’m not getting anywhere doing that. Apparently they can reach out and grab me any time they want to, or at least they could up in Massachusetts. Maybe they had a fix on me up there so they could grab me easily, and now that I’ve gone somewhere else they’ve lost their co-ordinates. Maybe they’re taking bites out of our living room right now, trying to grab me. I don’t know.

  “It certainly looks like they’re trying to center in on this laboratory in a grand style, hit or miss, a grab here and a grab there at random. If you check the map, their aim is getting closer. That’s a guess — maybe they don’t even know there is a transmatter. And I can’t tell them anything, either. But maybe if I let the transmatter push me through, I can get some idea why it’s taboo and the usual way isn’t. If I can’t tell them that we want to help, maybe I can at least show them. If they can recognize me right at the center of the source of trouble, right down in the volcano’s crater, then maybe they’ll recognize that we at least know we’re causing some trouble and are trying to do something about it.”

  Gail shook her head. “You don’t know what distortion there might be, going through that way. You don’t know what might happen to you, or what shape you might be in when you got back out. You don’t even know there’d be any way out again. Maybe the transmatter really is tearing things down and putting them back together again.”

  “Well, what about it?” Robert challenged Hank. “Do you think that’s so?”

  “No,” Hank said. “I don’t think it’s doing anything at all to the molecular structure of things. I can’t see any way it could be. It’s half dismantled. I don’t think now that it ever actually did what it was supposed to do. I think it’s been taking things and shoving them bodily through someone else’s backyard, that’s what I think, and somehow tearing up the neighbor’s garden in the process. I don’t think we’re dealing with subatomic forces here. I think we’re talking about spacial dimension and direction. We may be talking about the whole energy-structure of a universe. I’m not sure what we’re talking about, but I think we have to find out and very soon.”

  “Then let’s find out,” Robert said shortly. He cut off Gail’s protest. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but once I’ve gone through there I think I can get back out again.” He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. “Hank, let’s get going. How do I go about it?”

  “Probably just climb up on the transmitter plate,” Hank said. “That’s where the draft is moving like smoke down a chimney. If that doesn’t do it, we’ll try —
”

  Robert shook his head impatiently and climbed up on the transmitter plate. What happened then was too fast for any of them to comprehend. Gail stared and burst out sobbing. Hank gripped the lab bench until his knuckles were white, totally immobilized. They all stood frozen as they watched, and only later tried to piece together exactly what they saw, or thought they saw, in that brief instant.

  Robert disappeared like magic from the metal transmitter plate and reappeared in the precise same instant on the receiver plate. Followed in the same instant by a second Robert, and a third, and a fourth….

  Multiple Roberts, moving jerkily back to the transmitter plate, like the images thrown by an old, shaky motion picture camera run far too slowly, like shadow images on a TV screen when the aerial is out of phase, flick, flick, flick, Robert-1, Robert-2, Robert-3, moving back and vanishing again, one by one but all together on the transmitter plate, and in the same instant another Robert reappearing on the receiver plate, but a different Robert; an oddly twisted, distorted, crooked-shaped sort of Robert, the same Robert, not so much different, not in the least horrible, but out of phase, wrong … but even if a crooked Robert, an unhurt Robert who moved back to the transmitter plate again.

  And did not reappear at all.

  19

  TO ROBERT it was different, totally different, from anything he had ever experienced crossing the Threshold before. He was unaware of what the others in the laboratory room had seen: to him it seemed that for the first time in his life he couldn’t cross through. Something, some force, was pushing him in, powerfully, but just as powerfully he was being thrust out again. He couldn’t seem to get planted, couldn’t turn the corner because the angles were all wrong, like nothing he had ever seen before, and there was this steady, almost palpable impelling force behind him pushing, and another force meeting him head-on and pushing him back. It was like a rubber ball with a dent in the side: every time you pushed in one side the other side popped out, with a net gain of zero.

  And then, after repeated tries (in spite of what they later said they saw, Robert knew he had made a dozen tries and then lost count) he caught hold of something (or something caught hold of him) and he was indeed truly inside, crossed through and holding still, the two opposing forces were suddenly gone, like a gale-force wind that dies abruptly, leaving the canvas that had been ballooning out to fall suddenly slack.

  He was through all right, but to a different universe than he had ever encountered before.

  Darkness, yes, only not the velvety black darkness he knew from before. There was a gray darkness here, a fog that wavered and swirled and obscured vision most of the time, only offering glimpses through it at rare intervals. Silence, yes … well, no, not silence so much as a continuing background layer of sound just maddeningly at the edge of audibility, bursting through sometimes, then fading (or almost fading) yet never quite gone. The same ordered confusion of the physical space around him, except that the order wasn’t quite as orderly as before, but strangely disordered part of the time.

  The same Threshold universe as before, but a strange, distorted, shadow universe that he could hardly convince himself was real. Crooked and wrong. Not threatening. Not dangerous. Not even frightening. Just not right. A shadow universe that wouldn’t quite come in focus for him, somehow, no matter how hard he tried to pin it down. A wavering in-and-out-of-phase universe, and confusing, most confusing, because he couldn’t be sure from one instant to the next that he hadn’t slid back across into his own time and space again.

  Through the fog, in brief flickering glimpses, it seemed to him that he saw his own universe … only not quite his own universe … like his universe, but with things in it that were most definitely, emphatically not his universe, structures that were no part of Earth structures, people that were almost Earth-people yet unmistakably not of Earth, lines, curves, dimensions that were almost but not quite Earth geometry and dimensions.

  And in between, the old Threshold universe that was so much more comfortable to him than this new not-Earth universe, fading in, fading out, back and forth …

  The shifting made him begin to feel dizzy; he wanted to grab something to hold onto, felt a piercing headache, tried to focus solidly just for a moment. And then, when the dizziness was reaching a point he could hardly stand, there was a moment of sharp focus, very clear, each detail etched sharp as a razor’s edge, and he stared around him at a universe he could hardly believe at all.

  Not a four-dimensional incomprehensible universe, but a three-dimensional universe of length and breadth and height. A place with buildings, people, but not his universe. The interior of a great laboratory room, but an unfamiliar room, with no sign of Gail or McEvoy or Hank Merry there; instead a room filled with strange people, odd people but unmistakably people, crowding around him in excitement. Frightened people, angry people, worried people, desperate people, looking at him, talking, gesticulating, supplicating, interrogating, all at once in a language he had never heard before, but a language — a language of words.

  It lasted only a few seconds, that brief flash of clear focus before the fog returned, and then, suddenly, the fog too was gone and he was in the old, familiar incomprehensible Threshold universe he had known for so long, and the Thresholders he had encountered before were there again, and the fear was there again, coldly, far more intense than ever before, spiraling to the breaking point. A blanket of fear pressing down as if to smother him….

  His own panic returned. Seventeen years of experience and training for a task he couldn’t perform. But it had to be performed now, he knew, and performed well. Once again he sensed that he had left behind a secure and solid universe of air and sky and cities and people and entered a universe of danger.

  The people here were afraid — horribly afraid — and their fear struck Robert now like a solid force sledge-hammering his mind, driving deep into the marrow of his bones, seeking some way to break through the barrier to touch him with ideas, with insight or understanding. They were afraid to the point of desperate action, now, and he knew that insight — real communication of ideas — was his only hope. The Thresholders were at the breaking point, desperate beyond experssion.

  But Robert knew something else, and the realization struck quite suddenly: that the Thresholders had already contacted him, in a way. He could feel their fear, sense their desperation. If he was a blind man here, he was not totally blind. If he was an idiot, there were glimmerings of comprehension coming through, because he knew their fear, he felt it, and it was something different from the fear in his own mind that rose up in response. This fear came from them, somehow conveyed to him in unmistakable form.

  Extrasensory perception? Perhaps … but more than that. An intuitive leap, a guided jump from one idea to another without any symbols to guide him. An educated guess, perhaps, but a guess based on something. No change in the barrier, perhaps, but here was a way of by-passing it. Not breaking it down; not burrowing under it or climbing over; simply letting it stand where it was and reaching beyond it.

  Guesswork! his mind told him as his fear rose steadily. Very dangerous guesswork. Who could tell if the guesses were right or wrong? But if a wild guess was all that was available, why not? They had gotten something through to him. Couldn’t he get something through to them? Something was wrong here; he needed to know what. He couldn’t ask, nor could they tell him. But maybe they could show him!

  He fought to stabilize himself, to concentrate his thoughts and focus them on a single idea, a single spearhead to thrust out. “Show me what is wrong.” He pushed aside everything else — his fear, his knowledge of the place, his memory of his own universe, everything, and thrust out with that one idea, that one bolt of thought. He thrust it out with all the concentration and strength he could muster, hoping in the face of pure hopelessness that it could pierce the dimensional armor of this universe and the people around him so that they could comprehend it: “Show me! You can’t tell me, show me what is wrong!”

&nbs
p; Incredibly, something changed. A pause, a sag, as though some terrible pressure had suddenly been released. Their fear was still there, biting into him, but there was something else. He was aware of his body around him in its curious configuration of orderly disorder, its fragments whirling about him like sections of a crazy quilt. Two concentric circles of different radii intersecting each other at three different points. Twisting cubic masses interlacing themselves into the jumbled incredibility of a geometric nightmare. The blackness was around him, the cold of the place dug into him and the fear hung around him like a cloak. He had the hallucinatory sense of being torn apart, roughly, in a jagged line from top to bottom and of seeing, unclearly, the parts of his body in mutilated distortion. Did he appear to them as some grotesque geometric distortion, a crooked, twisted, impossible mass of lines and shadows and forms? He must; they couldn’t possibly see him as he saw himself in his own place. Yet something had happened, now he could sense that the Thresholders were all around him, with a pervading sense of excitement.

  He brought his mind back to the same spearhead idea again and again, driving it out to them again and again: “Show me what’s wrong! Show me!”

  Suddenly he was moving, away and downward through bottomless areaways of inky emptiness, down a bottomless spiral, with his own fear seeping back into his mind, growing, blossoming, exploding into horrible fear as he went down and down. Now he was struggling, clinging for dear life to the brink of something into which he dare not go, yet a force was pressing him forward, hurrying him with increasing speed. Like someone banging cymbals rhythmically in his ears, louder, louder, louder, he was moving (or being moved) to a place in this universe that was utterly intolerable to be near, totally unbearable. And then, abruptly, they were no longer with him. They had brought him here — crash, crash, Crash went the cymbols, ever louder — and now they had deserted him. They were gone.