The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  And now, Hank knew, there was no question. The puddle of molten iron had originally been four hundred miles of ten-inch steel pipe shipped from Earth via the heavy-transport Threshold chambers in Los Angeles, under a doubtfully moral but unassailably legal license from the International Joint Conference to Interplanetary Oil, Incorporated.

  Hank had to explain why to an angry Jonathan Tarbox, doubly indignant because he had been shadowed across country by a shadow Hank Merry had certainly not assigned, for reasons that Hank couldn’t begin to fathom.

  Hank walked to the window and stared out at the spindly buildings and ramps and archways of the Martian city, Ironstone architecture was strangely anachronistic on this ancient and moldering planet; bright sharp crystalline lines and pointed spires in a place where all the sharp edges had been worn down by eons of sandstorms and the howling, unremitting winds. From the forlorn, primitive outpost of five years ago Ironstone had grown. Grown! Hank almost laughed at the understatement. Like discovering one of the original ice-bound Antarctic outposts transformed into a modern sky-scraping metropolis overnight and saying that it had “grown.” Ironstone had burgeoned, blossomed, exploded, once Threshold contact had been established.

  Some of the builders lived here permanently, fond of the alien desert surroundings; most of them commuted daily, thanks to the Benedict Threshold. But all of them had thrived as the iron ore began pouring back to Earth, and the marble, and the beautifully streaked red sandstone, and the radioactive ores. People had poured into Ironstone, bringing clever architects to plan the buildings suitable to the low-gravity conditions. “The grace of willows, the strength of steel,” was the slogan, and it was true. Ironstone had become a beautiful, graceful city, a thriving place, working to support a once-again-thriving Earth.

  The Threshold stations had made it possible, of course. Whenever Hank thought of the old, silly, desperate idea of building ships to carry men and materials back and forth, he had to laugh. It could never have been done, that way. There would have been no Ironstone. A few stinking underground hovels and nothing more. They could never have brought the cement and steel and crystal. They could never have built the dome to cover the city. They could never have brought the hydroponics to supply food and oxygen here; or even if they could have, slowly, at economy-shattering expense, they could never have shouldered the expense of sending things back to Earth. And the Benedict Threshold made it so easy. No problem, no work, no power required, no technology. Just walk into a chamber and press a button and you were there!

  But things had happened along the way, things neither Hank nor Robert Benedict himself could either explain or cope with. A puddle of iron on the Martian desert, for example. A slowly growing list of odds and ends of things that had never gotten through, or had gotten through wrong, of time delays, of altered personalities. Hank knew about them. So did Robert, and Robert had tried to straighten them out, time and again, and thought he had succeeded time and again, but they continued to happen. Jonathan Tarbox, facing Hank now in arrogant fury, knew only about a lost load of pipe, not about a puddle in the desert. And nobody but Hank and Robert and a few high government officials knew, for instance, that the exploratory party to the surface of Saturn had gone there by way of the Treshold and not by the scout ship reported in the news, and had never gotten to the surface of Saturn at all, as far as anybody knew.

  Now Hank Merry turned to the Interplanetary Oil man. “Do you have any idea how a Benedict Threshold station works?”

  Tarbox shrugged with tremendous indifference. “A vague idea. Who cares? Something about a fourth-dimensional warp, and little monsters or something trotting people back and forth. A very haphazard arrangement, it seems to me. But the government endorses it.”

  “Not so haphazard. And no ‘little monsters’ that we know of. Things are propelled through a fourth-dimensional warp, that’s true. And as a means of interplanetary commerce it’s without equal in speed, efficiency and reliability. The time-slip is annoying sometimes, but it’s a 1000 per cent improvement over any propelled rocket craft you ever dreamed of.” Hank threw up his hands in disgust. “The Threshold is no magician’s wonder. There’s no hocus-pocus about it. It’s a universe, a complete, organized, populated universe, co-existent with ours, contiguous with ours, probably using the same atoms and molecules as ours at the same time, but a universe with four spacial dimensions.

  “It’s an incomprehensible place; it drove men crazy until Robert Benedict made contact with the people there and showed them that we needed the planets and that our effort to get to them with a transmatter was causing all the chaos they were suffering. So they bargained. We would stop using disrupting force-fields, and they would provide transport. For them, this amounts to turning things through an angle, maybe only a few millimeters across, but popping them out again on Mars. Or Venus. Or any place else in the universe we want to go. Robert Benedict worked out the system with the Thresholders, and he continues to work with them, setting up stations, trying to settle on load limits, helping with routings and policing the system as well as anybody can police it.”

  Jonathan Tarbox pulled the cigar out of his mouth. His eyes narrowed at Hank Merry. “Policing,” he said. “Now that is an interesting choice of word.”

  “Well, it doesn’t mean what you think. Keeping the strings straight, maybe. Trouble-shooting, or finding solutions when problems turn up.”

  “But it also implies keeping track of people,” Tarbox said. “Policemen shadow people they’ve interested in — right? Only they don’t usually use a teen-ager with white-blond hair for a shadow. Too easy to spot. And in my case, altogether too hard to shake; wherever I was, he seemed to be there too, even when he couldn’t have known where I was going.” The little man looked at his cigar speculatively. “You know this Robert Benedict, I gather? Just out of curiosity, what color is his hair?”

  Hank stared at the little man for a minute. Then he said, “His hair is blond. You might even say white-blond.”

  4

  ROBERT BENEDICT knew before he had been awake two minutes that something was wrong. He lay on the bed, his blond hair tousled, staring through the oval window at the fast reddening sky, catching the odd whisperings outside the door that always greeted him. His small Rigellian attendants would, as always, be hovering outside the chamber, waiting for some sign from him that he wanted to rise and eat. He smiled to himself. If only they would just bang on the door, but no. Their infuriating sense of propriety would never permit any open move to waken him, yet they knew just as well as he did that their whispering and giggling outside the door would waken him as quickly and effectively as someone rushing in and screaming “Fire!” Today there seemed to be more quiet commotion out there than he could ever remember.

  He sat up, stretched, breathed deeply of the carefully prepared air that flooded the chamber from the circulator near the door. From outside the window came the faint sounds of gathering business in this incredibly beautiful and busy city on this incredibly beautiful planet, seventh from the sun called Rigel, with its small, kindly, immensely polite and propriety-bound people. The Rigellians looked for all the world like green furry monkeys, yet more than once their intelligence and insight had given Robert cause to stop and think. Now he reviewed his agenda for the day ahead, wondering what might be upsetting his little green friends. There had been no commotion when he went to sleep twelve hours before.

  Item: Contact Sharnan at the Philadelphia Hoffman Center at the earliest possible moment and start working with her again. Most important. That lead had been so bright and promising to begin with, only to have the promise fade out as that old familiar fog of fear started building up in her mind. Robert was certain that somehow, in some way, Sharnan had the answer to the problem of communicating with the Thresholders, the final answer, yet every time he tried to move closer, she blocked him because of her fear.

  Item: Check with Hank at Ironstone, first thing. He shouldn’t have ignored Hank’s call even this long.
He was sure it was about that oil company deal, and Robert was positive there was the threat of overload there, as well as the danger of some serious economic and sociological problems that would undoubtedly turn up if it were carried out. Problems which would have to wait until the communication problem was solved, of course, but couldn’t be ignored in the meantime.

  Item: Check again on the whereabouts of one Jonathan Tarbox, Earthman. The uneasiness in Robert’s mind suddenly crystallized. Something wrong there, very wrong indeed. The tie-in with Interplanetary Oil and all the rest. Tarbox was on Earth now — correction — on Mars, and if that was what Hank’s call had been about —

  Robert scrambled out of bed and started groping for his clothes. Almost instantly the door opened and the soft, fluid syllables of his small Rigellian attendant floated up to him: “May I serve, good sir?”

  Robert looked down at the tiny creature which had hopped up to perch on the bed post. “Trouble, my friend?” he asked.

  “Trouble? Oh, no, good sir, but another message came from Dr. Merry, marked ‘very urgent.’ We waited only for you to waken.”

  “I know.” Robert groaned to himself. If they could only have called him! But he responded to the creature with the proper formula of oblique compliments and effusive thanks. “No, no breakfast, thanks. I’m going to have to go immediately.”

  The little green creature blinked his sad eyes at Robert with an expression of infinite reproach. “So soon? But the good sir said his stay would be long this time.”

  Robert smiled down at the creature, touched the soft green fur behind its ears. “I know,” he said quietly. “I would like nothing better, but I can’t. Of course, I’ll be back.”

  The Rigellian watched him somberly. “You’re going to the Otherworld.”

  “For a while. There’s trouble.” Robert smiled again as confusion crossed the little elfin face. “I know, you don’t understand. No trouble for you, little one, just for me.” He strapped his trousers around his waist. “Better go now,” he added. “You know it bothers you, the way I go.”

  The little creature hopped down from the bed and scurried to the door. “Take care, good sir.”

  Robert stared about the room for a moment, undecided. He wanted most of all to see Sharnan first, but there was no choice now. Urgent from Hank meant really urgent, so Ironstone it was.

  Filled with apprehension, he made a curious half-turn and vanished from the room on Rigel VII. A brief instant later he appeared on the platform of the Threshold station in Ironstone, Mars.

  5

  TO HANK MERRY it was always a shock to see Robert these days. He looked so very young, virtually unchanged since they had first met at the Telcom Laboratories in New Jersey those five long years ago. The time had aged Hank, bringing touches of gray to his hair and tired lines around his eyes; but Robert Benedict had spent a large part of this time in the Threshold universe, and there was something about time there — something neither Hank nor Robert understood — that seemed to retard aging. Hours, days or weeks spent across the Threshold seemed like only a few seconds elapsed time on Earth, and Robert, for all his twenty-two years, still looked exactly like a seventeen-year-old high school senior.

  Now Merry greeted him with obvious relief. “Friend, you had me worried. I couldn’t stir you up anywhere, and I was beginning to wonder.”

  “I know,” Robert said, “It was mostly my fault. I’ve been bushed, the last few days, and then you had Rigellian protocol to deal with, too. There are certain things those imps just will not do, and waking me up with a message is one of them.”

  Robert looked out the window at the busy streets and ramps of Ironstone. The sun, fainter than on Earth, but without the eerie red coloring of the Rigellian sun, seemed to emphasize the lights and darks here. Ironstone was a city of black shadows and brilliant, crystalline highlights.

  “The place is booming, I see,” he remarked. “That one over there — apartment house? — wasn’t there two weeks ago. And the dome has been extended.”

  “You can do wonders with pre-fabs,” Merry admitted. “And lots of people object to the commuting. Of course, a lot of them move back in a few months. Let’s face it, Mars isn’t much more varied than the Gobi Desert. Once you’ve seen a sandstorm or two from inside the dome, and gotten used to our two little moons, the novelty wears off. But even a few months, with steady turnover, is good.” He sat down at his desk, the desk he hadn’t left for almost twenty hours now, and sighed. “Unfortunately, some other things aren’t so good.”

  “I know,” Robert said, sprawling in a chair across from Hank’s desk. “That Saturn business, for instance. I still don’t know what happened to those men, and I can’t seem to find out. Except that something obviously did, because they’ve never shown up anywhere.”

  “No progress on communicating with the Other Side?” Hank said.

  Robert hesitated, thinking of Sharnan. “No progress to report, let’s put it that way. I thought I had a real live lead, for a while, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “Well, I’ve run into some snarlups, too,” Hank said. “Bad ones. One of them has red hair and smokes smelly cigars and I almost had to sedate him forcibly to get him out of this office a few hours ago.”

  “Oh, yes,” Robert said without enthusiasm. “Him.”

  Hank looked up. “You know about Jonathan Tarbox?”

  “I know about him, all right. I’ve had to keep somebody on him for months, and now with things really tight I’ve been trying to keep tabs on him myself, and of course he spotted me. So now I don’t know what to do. I keep hoping he’ll break a leg or something.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Hank said sourly. “Those people never oblige. And Tarbox has an unassailable claim on us now, all tied up in pink ribbons. A shipment of steel pipe left Earth two days ago, four hundred miles of it, in two-yard sections. The shipment was legal, transport rentals paid, everything tidy. It just never arrived in Ironstone, and I haven’t told him yet that his pipe is a frozen puddle of iron out in the desert right now. I haven’t had the guts.”

  “Don’t tell him,” Robert said. “Just get a test crew out there to analyze the contents of that puddle before you worry yourself to death.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Tarbox is a thief,” Robert said flatly. “With full blessings of Interplanetary Oil. That pipe was packed with more concealed hardware and junk than you could shake a stick at: machine tools, disassembled drilling equipment, nuts, bolts, extra underwear, everything else. To say nothing of five thousand pounds of candy bars.”

  “Ouch,” Hank Merry said.

  “Yes. So you know about candy bars on Mars.”

  Hank nodded. The Hoffman Center doctors had never pinned it down precisely … something about the amount of cosmic radiation, or the Martian atmosphere components used to dilute the bottled oxygen used under the dome, or magic, or spooks, or something … but these were subtle changes in human metabolism here which involved the body’s utilization of glucose, so that the more sugar you ate on Mars, the more you wanted, craved, had to have, would do anything to get. Candy and sweets had been legally banned on Mars since the first colonists came back with a strange, insatiable craving, and everyone who employed men on Mars was watched with high suspicion to see that no one slipped any of the habit-forming stuff to the work crews on the sly, at least not while they were on Mars.

  “You mean Interplanetary Oil had that pipe stuffed with all that junk?” Hank said.

  “They were taking you to the cleaners,” Robert said. “Paying for the pipe weight and using it to ship about twice the weight in contraband, transport-free, with a little smuggling thrown in on the side. Unfortunately, they overloaded the heavy-transport chamber in the process. More solid volume than the chamber could handle per unit time, which is how I first got onto it.”

  Hank Merry shook his head. “Robert, if you knew all this, why haven’t you tipped off Security to put the arm on this red-headed plague
who’s been crawling down my throat all day?”

  “Use your head,” Robert said. “Tarbox is Interplanetary Oil’s contact man. He’s a pain, but at least we know whom to watch. And we can stop them when we need to. The trouble is, there’s more to it than that. I thought at first that the Thresholders dumped all that stuff someplace — anyplace they could get rid of it fast enough — because of the overload. But as far as I can tell now, they thought they’d delivered it to Ironstone in spite of the overload.” Robert stood up, a worried frown on his face. “Hank, there have been too many misfires lately. Something is sour and getting more sour all the time. I don’t know why, but there have been too many odd things happening. Like that very thin colonist who just turned up here from the Cygni system.”

  Hank gaped at his young friend. “Now how did you know about that? The man just turned up here a few hours ago, along with three others. The medics are still trying to figure him out.”

  “I’d like to figure him out, too,” Robert said, “especially because I don’t think the medics are going to succeed. And I don’t know why.”

  “Want to see him?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “Then let’s go,” Hank said, “because if you can figure this out, you’re a better man than I am. And this bird may not be around to see for very long.”

  6