The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  And Robert Benedict was writhing and twisting and screaming in the center of cataclysm.

  There was no other word for it. This was no Threshold universe he had ever seen; this was a Threshold universe fantastically wrong, twisted, disordered all out of proportion to the ordered insanity he had known here before. His mind reeled, helpless in the storm of roaring destruction raging around him. The circles were twisted, bent into squarish masses, wrenched out of shape. Everything was out of shape, as though he had been taken from a balmy, quiet day in summer, from the midst of green hills and blue sky and billowing white clouds and dropped without warning into the heart of a tropical hurricane.

  His thoughts congealed in an awful realization. Somehow, they had heard him. Now they were showing him what was wrong. His spearhead of thought had leaped the barrier, and they had brought him here. And here everything he knew about the Threshold universe was invalid. Everything he had learned, every perception … inapplicable. His survival data was suddenly invalid, here. Wrong answers meant sudden death, and here every answer was wrong.

  He knew he had to hide, to protect himself somehow. Everything here was impossibly different. There were sudden, glaring flashes of green and purple light where light had never been. He cringed at the intolerable glare; he wanted to curl up into a tiny ball, to hide himself and cry out at the torture. The very shape and warp of space itself was wrenched into frightful wrongness here; the cymbals crashed and crashed and he felt himself caught up in a cataclysmic eddy, swept on against his every effort to stop, to hold. He felt his body being knotted and twisted and sliced; he burned with an unbearable heat, and knew that things — other things — were being twisted through him, taking part of him along, turning him inside out in a sort of monstrous vice.

  Catacylsm. A universe gone mad. He screamed out, fought to back away, heard his own scream reverberating and echoing again and again, fainter and fainter, as though down an infinitely long hallway. And then, abruptly, he was out of the maelstrom, and they were around him again. Miraculously, his body was intact. But he was frightened as he had never before been frightened in all his life.

  He had to get back. His control, so rapidly swept away and then regained from that storm of destruction, was disintegrating. He couldn’t hold on much longer; he was too frightened to hold on. He struggled against the force that seemed to hold him, trying to move himself back to the crossing place again, feeling their thoughts like arrow shafts: “Don’t go! You have to understand, don’t go now!” But he thrust their thoughts away, too frightened to care any more, frantic to get away from that swirling maelstrom at any cost. With the last of his strength he struggled to move back to the place where he had crossed — not far, but it seemed like miles — and reached it just as their holding force began to tighten and draw him away. He twisted himself through the angle of the Threshold and collapsed panting on the floor, with Gail and Hank kneeling beside him, wiping his forehead and his eyes as he sobbed, trying only to forget that horrible fear.

  He heard a gasp from Gail as the west wall of the laboratory vanished in a sudden gust of moving air. Whack! Then the top of the building went — whack! — and a chunk from somewhere beneath them, so that the floor sagged and tilted down at a crazy angle. Whack! Then the center of the floor went — whack! — only a small bite, a neat, circumscribed, perfectly focused bite that happened to take transmatter, circuit banks, Hunyadi plates and all, leaving a perfectly polished, concave circular hole in the metal floor of the laboratory.

  At last it stopped. They looked numbly at the tiny whirlwinds of microscopic dust that spun like devils through the air and settled like a gentle mist, a moment or two before Robert Benedict saw Gail and Hank and the ruined laboratory begin to spin around him, and passed gratefully into an obliterative, exhausted sleep.

  20

  SOMEWHERE AT a distance he heard a voice, McEvoy’s voice, roaring and indignant: “Let me get my hands on him. Let me get my hands on him and I’ll break his skinny neck.” And Hank Merry’s voice, farther away, shaken but steadier, saying, “John, don’t be a fool, he was only trying to help us.” Robert opened one eye a slit, saw McEvoy across the room clenching and unclenching his fists.

  “Help us! He did it purposely. He led them here. They couldn’t hit it, they hadn’t gotten anywhere close to it until he went through there and showed them exactly where it was and how to get it and now they’ve got it, lock, stock and barrel, and what have we got? Nothing is what we’ve got. No transmatter. No ore, no steel, no oil. Bankruptcy is what we’ve got. A planet with people on it so thick they’re smothering. And we smother, too: everybody smothers. We go broke. We fall apart. The ones that survive go back five hundred years. All because of that brat and his dirty, treasonable — ”

  Robert opened hish eyes and looked at the Telcom man. “Dr. McEvoy, why don’t you shut up?”

  McEvoy whirled on him. “So! All rested up now? Do you have a nice, clean-cut explanation figured out to feed us? Any bright ideas how to get our little gadget back from them? Or what I’m supposed to tell the Joint Conference? Or what we’re going to do without that machine? Well? What about it?”

  “They had to take it,” Robert said. “They had to get it stopped. It was tearing them apart.”

  “You led them to it!”

  “Maybe so. I wasn’t trying to but they must have known that I came through the transmatter this time, and grabbed until they got it. And we’re lucky they did follow me, and get it this easily.”

  “Lucky!”

  “Lucky. Because they would have kept right on taking bites until they got it, even if it meant splitting this Earth in two. They had to, because it was tearing their world apart at the seams.”

  “How?” McEvoy charged.

  “I don’t know, except that that machine of Hank’s was no transmatter. I’m not sure what it was, but it set up a force field that wrenched open another Threshold. Just the way your low-temperature pump did once before, a different application of force, but just as effective. At least the first Threshold was innocuous. It didn’t do any damage to them. But this machine set up a force field strong enough to shove things through a corner of their universe and out the other side. A force they couldn’t combat, but strong enough so that it was ripping up their universe by the very roots. Twisting their space, distorting it, destroying it.”

  McEvoy threw up his hands. “I never heard such nonsense in all my life.”

  “Look, I was there. I saw what it was doing. They showed me. And I got out quick enough to survive the shock, but they have to live with it.” Robert shook his head, pushing back the memory of his own panic. “No wonder they were afraid. It was tearing their universe to shreds. Warping their dimensions into pretzels. Like turning an inner tube inside out. You can do it, but you don’t have an inner tube when you get through, just a torn, twisted gob of useless rubber. In their universe, your transmatter was twisting material objects through places they simply couldn’t go. Something had to give, and it was their universe that was giving, pulling apart at the seams. So they had to grab whatever was creating that force on this side. What else could they do?”

  There was a long silence. McEvoy mopped his forehead. Then Gail said, “Robert — you said they showed you this destruction. How did they know you wanted to see it?”

  “I told them.”

  “You mean you contacted them?”

  “In a way. I seemed to be getting ideas that originated from them, so I tried to push an idea back at them. That was when they moved me to the place where the chaos was going on. But it was odd — ” He shook his head, trying to remember the first strange, distorted impression he had when he was forced through by the transmatter. “There was a moment when their universe didn’t look the way it always looked to me before. It looked like an ordinary three-dimensional world with length and height and breadth, different from ours, but with the same dimensions. Just turned around at a slightly different angle from ours, so that a fourth spacial dim
ension had to be crossed through to see that one.”

  “Nonsense!” McEvoy muttered.

  “What I’m trying to say is that maybe to them their universe has very much the same form and structure as ours has to us. To them it may be only a three-dimensional universe. But I got just a glimpse of that before it shifted back to the old distorted picture again.”

  “But you did contact them?” McEvoy said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then contact them again.”

  “No,” Gail said. “He’s done enough contacting.”

  “You keep out of this,” McEvoy snapped at her. “This is between me and the boy. He contacted them. He led them here. And thanks to him, they got what they wanted, for the moment, anyway. But they went too far. I’d have turned the transmatter off if I knew how. I already had it half torn down, but I would never have thrown it out. Maybe it was hurting them, but their taking it is going to hurt us just as much. All right, you gave it to them; now you get it back.”

  “Suppose I can’t?” Robert said.

  “You can try. You can try for your very life.”

  “Suppose I won’t try?”

  “Then I’ll build another one. Merry will help me.”

  Hank shook his head. “Don’t count on it, John. Don’t count on it for a minute.”

  McEvoy glared at him, and his jaw set tight. “Then I’ll get someone else to build it. I’ll turn the whole thing over to the Joint Conference Committee — the blueprints, the circuits, the math, everything. They could find someone to build it, but it would take them time, and there’s no guessing what the Thresholders might be doing in the meantime.” He turned back to Robert. “Is it really asking too much? To try to tell them why we need that machine? Can’t you tell them, somehow, that their problem may be solved for the moment, but that ours isn’t? That sooner or later they’re going to have their problem right back in their laps again because we have to solve our problem some way regardless of what it means to them? Can’t you tell them we’re as desperate as they are?”

  “I don’t know how,” Robert Benedict said miserably. “The contact was so vague, so fleeting; I don’t know how to do more.”

  “But can’t you at least try?”

  There was a long moment while they looked at each other — the older man, still angry but pleading now, the boy fighting to control his own dread and fright and helplessness and not winning the fight very well. Yet knowing at the bottom of it all that McEvoy was right, that they had to be told, somehow, and that he was the only one who could possibly tell them.

  For a moment, as he stared at John McEvoy, Robert knew what it meant to really hate and fear a man. Yet at the same time he knew that McEvoy was not to blame. McEvoy was no more hateful or fearful than anyone else. He was simply trapped, just as Robert was trapped, and fiighting just exactly as Robert was fighting, just as anyone would fight when he was trapped and saw no way out. Hate and fear McEvoy, yes, but far more than that, Robert knew in this moment that he admired this man, and that because he admired him he would go back to fight for him.

  “All right,” he said, and turned away. He pulled his jacket tighter around his neck. Reaching out, he touched Gail’s hand softly and briefly; then, without a word he made a slight turn, and vanished from the room.

  21

  HE DID not know what to do, nor how to do it. He felt drained and helpless, and incredibly tired. If he could have seen some hope, some possible chance, he might have felt different. But he could see no hope whatever.

  It was an impossible task to convey to the Thresholders that a gadget — a simple, foolish machine — meant the difference between survival and disaster in his world, to convey all the things that that simple gadget meant to the people of Earth: raw materials from distant planets to shore up an exhausted economy; a place to go, a place to spread out to, for a people who had always had to grow, to explore, to spread, to move on; a people who had never throughout their history faced a future without a frontier and now had no frontier left because the only frontier they had was closed off and unattainable; a people who would ultimately die and decay without that frontier; slowly, perhaps, fighting valiantly every inch of the way; but ultimately doomed to wither and die.

  For want of a nail.

  It was this he had to tell them, make them understand, and he had no words to use. This was part of him, as well, important to him as to any other man, and no way to say it. No bridge of understanding, no real contact with them except that vague fleeting touch he had felt so briefly before.

  It was dark, and the Threshold universe was in turmoil. No more fear, the fear was gone. But they knew he had come back, and they were strangely excited, eagerly crowding around him, acknowledging that he was there. The moment he crossed through they were all about him, as if they had been waiting impatiently for him to return.

  His heart was heavy, his strength nearly gone. He had no stomach for this now; he was frightened, and desperate. But he had to try to convey to them that his world also had needs, that the transmatter was a part of those needs, if the people were to reach for the stars. As they gathered, he felt the hopelessness of telling them. If only I could show them the way they showed me, he thought. But that was impossible. What he had to tell them was only in his mind, and how could he show them his mind? He couldn’t. Unless …

  It struck him then, clear as crystal. He had already done it, part way. He had conveyed an idea, without words, before; a spearhead he had hurled at them from his own mind. That spearhead had come from deep in his mind, from his memory and knowledge of his own universe, mixed with words he and Gail and Ed had used again and again to try to describe something that couldn’t be described in words. Yet he knew that the Thresholders had consciousness, they had demonstrated it, they had not only forced their ideas into his mind, they had received his own.

  Suddenly he felt something akin to hope. Suppose thought was a force in itself. Suppose that over here abstract mental images, without words, could be passed from one to another! Suppose the Thresholders used no words or symbols, but had minds so sensitive to receiving thought, so capable of transmitting it, that there was no need for words. Robert had two brains, two memories, two parallel sets of knowledge and experience in his mind, one set related to his own universe, the other to this strange universe across the Threshold. So far he had used only the Threshold part of his brain here.

  But why couldn’t he show the Thresholders what was in the other side?

  Instinctively, he groped for an anchor, rooted himself as solidly as he could. Then, deliberately, he tried to close down the perception ‘he had always used here, to withdraw from his Threshold-mind, to move his mind back to his own world and throw it open while he still remained here. All he needed here was enough for bare survival. With all his strength he grappled with it, as he might struggle with a huge frozen switch, trying to wrench it closed and cut in the full force of his human mind over here, so that they could see what was there.

  It was agony, because the very act wanted to force his body to shift back through to his own side, to tear him away from there. He clung doggedly, twisting and writhing but hanging on. There was pain in his mind, growing and growing; it seemed as though a shorted wire were heating up in his mind — smoking, glowing hideously red, melting, fusing, burning out.

  The pain ended. Abruptly. It had lasted only for an instant, but he knew he had done it. He had opened an alien mind — his alien mind — to these Threshold people around him. He had pulled back the curtain for a flickering instant, revealed to them what lay behind it. Not for long; he couldn’t have survived for long. But for the barest instant he had done it.

  And now … silence. Absence of all motion. What was it? Shock? Horror? Amazement? Or a sudden, absolute clarity of understanding? Yes, that was it! Like a grand pause in a symphony — a sudden, incredible gasp of comprehension. Like that instant that passes from the time a finger touches a hot stove to the time it is jerked away, and then to the time th
at the pain is felt, an incredulous, empty pause of understanding.

  And then the Thresholders were there, all around him, reaching out to him, twisting him around, wildly excited. There was a subtle alteration from the normal patchwork of whirling motion. He was turning, moving. Or rather, they were turning him, moving him. They were taking him somewhere.

  Back to that crater of chaos again? He drew back in horror. Not that — he had seen that, and understood it; why take him back there? But then where? Frightened beyond control, Robert fought them, frantically, but they continued moving him, on and on. Not so much a long distance as through a slightly different angle than he had ever moved before. And then, without warning, he was thrust out.

  In the flicker of an eye the Threshold universe was gone. So were the Thresholders. He was back in his own universe again, but there was no sign of the laboratory, nor of McEvoy, nor Merry, nor Gail.

  No sign of anybody. It was night and he had fallen a few inches to the ground. In the sky above him a bright moon shone down on the dark sand beneath. It was very cold; he shivered as he pulled himself to his feet and dusted himself off. He seemed hungry for air, actually gasping for air like a man from sea level suddenly dropped on top of a 15,000-foot mountain peak. A cold breeze brushed his cheek, ruffled his hair.

  Confused, he shook sand from his jacket, peering about him. He was on a sandy hillside. Not a tree in sight, not a leaf, not a blade of grass. Behind him, in the dim moonlight, a vast expanse of desert and dunes spread out as far as he could see, stretching to the horizon. To the right, a long, low range of worn-down mountains. Ahead of him, blocking his view, a rocky crag and a smaller hill.

  This was not New Jersey, nor Massachusetts, nor any other place he had ever seen before. The cold dry air seared his lungs as he struggled breathlessly up the hill, slipping in the sand, stopping to pant every two or three feet. The sand under his feet was cold, smooth, unmarked. Where was he? Could they have moved him through the wrong angle in the Threshold? Dropped him on the desert by mistake? Surely this was a desert, but where? and why?