The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  THE MAN in the infirmary bed was shrunken and emaciated, so thin and wizened that he looked like a raisin that had been left out in the sun too long. His eyes were sunken deep in their sockets, and looked dangerously bright. “At least he isn’t babbling any more,” the doctor said apologetically as he led them into the sterile observation booth adjoining the room. “He was delirious when he first got here. He’s in an ice jacket now, and his temp is still up to 104 degrees, but at least he can talk. There were three of them, you know. The others are down the hall.”

  “Why are you keeping them here?” Robert asked, horrified. “Surely the Hoffman Center — ”

  The doctor spread his hands. “These people were barely alive at all when they turned up here. They’re still in no shape to be moved anywhere, and from what this guy says, you couldn’t get him into a Threshold chamber again without a court order. Something’s funny. At first I chalked all his babbling up to fever and delirium, but he sticks to his story. Says the colony on Cygni has disappeared.

  “His body metabolism is all out of whack. Like an eight-cylinder engine trying to do twelve-cylinder work. We must have fed him 14,000 calories in the past eight hours, and he’s still lost another pound of weight in that time.”

  “And this was the colony on 61 Cygni IV?” Robert asked.

  “That’s the one,” Hank said. “Or was. I guess. The only thing identifiable about this man is his fingerprints, but they identify him as one of the Cygni colonists. He turned up here at Ironstone in one of the starjump chambers, along with his friends. From what he says, they had to get out of there and fast … they didn’t care where to.”

  Robert peered through the glass at the emaciated man lying in the ice jacket. He switched on the two-way intercom. “Can you hear me?” he asked gently.

  The man reared up on one elbow, “Who’s that? What do you want?”

  “I’m Robert Benedict. I work with the Thresholders.”

  The man stared at him, and began shouting and gesticulating. “They stole it, clean away! Gone! And what was left, we couldn’t stay in! Hot! Lordy, it was hot.”

  “Better start at the beginning,” Robert said. “I thought 61 Cygni was a paradise colony. With about five thousand people on it by now.”

  The man’s voice cracked. “It is — or it was. That’s what I’m trying to tell these idiots. They say I’m delirious.”

  “What happened, Mr. Jonner?”

  “Janner, Mike Janner. I don’t know what happened.” The man paused. “Did you say Benedict? Then you’ve seen Cygni. You scouted it in the beginning, didn’t you?”

  Robert nodded. He had scouted 61 Cygni. He remembered clearly the balmy, temperate jungle of the fourth planet of that distant star — warm, sunny, plenty of water, dozens of edible fruits and immense grazing lands for herds of beef cattle, lambs, chickens. After the transmatter trouble was settled, Robert had spent most of two years in the Threshold universe, scouting out habitable colony planets, an escape valve for Earth’s dangerous overcrowding. It had been an exhausting business because the Thresholders couldn’t tell one planet or star system from the next, from a human point of view. And most planets had flaws — too hot, too cold, wrong atmosphere, incompatible flora, dangerous fauna, uncontrollable bacteria, lethal viruses, one thing or another.

  But of all of them, 61 Cygni IV had been perfect, truly a paradise planet. After him scientific and exploratory crews had gone to 61 Cygni, checking out what Robert did not have the means or knowledge to check. Then a test colony had gone out, backed by the knowledge that they could return to Earth in an instant by way of a starjump Threshold station in the event of any trouble, and the test colony had found no trouble.

  It was a perfect planet, so perfect that half the test colony thumbed their noses at the Joint Conference’s request that they return for examination, electing to stay right there. Mike Janner was one of them, soon to become a leader and administrator of the colony, and within two years five thousand others had joined them, working to make way for the potential fifty million colonists that the planet could eventually absorb.

  “It was fine,” Mike Janner was saying now, in his dry, cracked voice. “Plenty of building materials there, plenty of men to work, so we built. Some thought they didn’t like it and came back, but most of them spent about three days on Earth and then petitioned to return to Cygni, and plenty of room for them, too. Then I came back for the Joint Conference meeting on other star colonies, with two other delegates, and starjumped back after the meeting — and the whole colony was gone! People, buildings, livestock, everything. It looked as though nobody had ever been there before — the ground wasn’t even broken, even though the Threshold station was still there.”

  Robert stared at him. “Just … gone?”

  “Gone. We thought maybe the time-slip was playing tricks on us, or that maybe the station had been moved, even though it was in the same valley, with the same background, the same trees, the same mountains. But all was empty. Nothing there, nobody….”

  “What did you do?” Robert asked.

  “We started searching. For the colony.” The man shrugged weakly. “I know, we should have turned back right then and checked with the commission first, but we never thought of it. All we wanted was to find the colony, so we started looking. And then the heat began.”

  “The heat?” Robert said. “You mean the temperature went up?”

  Janner looked at him, his sunken eyes frightened. “I don’t know. It looked like the temperature stayed just the same as it ever was, a nice, comfortable 75 degrees. Bright sun. Nice breeze, like always. No, we were the ones that started getting hot. We thought at first it was just the contrast with things back home, thought maybe our blood had gotten thicker. But we started panting, and sweating, and pretty soon it seemed like we were roasting alive and we couldn’t get cool. And hungry! Within two hours we were so hungry we could hardly stand it. I swear that in two more hours we’d started to lose so much weight you could notice the skin sagging. But it wasn’t hot outside. And then Stevie starting going barmy, babbling like he had a fever, and I felt his forehead and saw that he was burning up, and I wasn’t feeling too good then myself, and began to feel like I was going crazy.”

  The medic shook his head in warning, waved the agitated man back, but Janner crawled up to sit on the edge of the bed, his arms so skinny they looked like bones covered with parchment. “I tell you, doc — no, you’re not doc — but I tell you, we weren’t there four hours before we were roasting in our own skins! Our hearts were pounding like crazy, and no sign of the others anywhere, and losing weight and getting so weak we could hardly drag ourselves into the station again, and all the time that beautiful sun smilin’ down on us like nothing was wrong.”

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor broke in, nodding to a nurse standing by. “He isn’t in condition — ”

  “Just one more question, Mr. Janner,” Robert said. “What do you think was happening to you? What do you think was wrong?”

  “I don’t know, it just didn’t make sense, but I do know one thing — ”

  Somebody opened the cubicle door, handed Hank Merry a blue memo sheet. He looked at it and grimaced as Robert asked: “What do you know, Mr. Janner?”

  “I know what Cygni is like!” the man choked. “I’ve lived there five years, now, and you can’t fool me. I don’t know where your Threshold dumped me, but it wasn’t on any Cygni I ever saw before, or else I’m losing my mind.”

  Robert looked at the doctor. “How much weight did he lose?”

  “Seventy pounds,” the doctor said. “And not just water, either. Fat and protein as well.”

  Hank handed Robert the blue memo. “Read that,” he said.

  Robert started, then looked at the memo sheet. It was signed by Margie, marked urgent to Hank Merry. “Need you back at the office fast,” it read. “The colony on 61 Cygni IV just radioed a general alarm. Delegate Mike Janner and two others never returned to the colony. Twelve hours overdue,
and the colony is up in arms. All five thousand of them.”

  Hank and Robert looked at each other. The messenger waited. “Any reply, Dr. Merry?”

  “Yes, yes. Send somebody out there … oh, my. No, don’t. Send them a message that their delegates were delayed because of — illness — and are safe at Ironstone. And tell them to acknowledge the signal but not to send anyone back. Get that?”

  The messenger nodded and hurried out. The doctor was already in the cubicle with the nurse, helping to restrain the agitated man in the bed, who was insisting upon setting up on his spindly legs, gesticulating wildly and still talking, even less coherently than before. “Well,” Hank said finally, “we’ve got a mess on our hands.”

  “That’s the right word,” Robert said glumly. “I’m afraid that man hit it right on target. Whenever the Threshold dumped him, it wasn’t any Cygni he ever saw before — or anybody else, I’m afraid.”

  7

  LATER, in Hank’s office, they tried to piece it together. At first they had Jonathan Tarbox to deal with, waving his yellow cigar and threatening unmentionable things, but Robert dispatched a brief call to Earth, and within twenty minutes had two heavy-jawed Security men waiting in the anteroom to escort Tarbox back to Earth for interrogation, a development the little man had not anticipated. “It may be some years before they get through interrogating him,” Robert said dryly. “Security can be very thorough when it wants to be. But Tarbox and his pipeline are only part of the picture. Right now there are more important things to think about. Like a man who has lost seventy pounds of weight in four hours, for a start.”

  Alone in the office, Hank and Robert stared at each other in moody silence.

  “I don’t get it,” Robert said finally. “I don’t know where he could have been sent to. But Mike Janner obviously didn’t get back to where he thought he was going.”

  “How can you be sure?” Hank said.

  “Because colonies don’t disappear overnight,” Robert returned. “On the other hand, the odds of some other planet somewhere having the same physical appearance and characteristics as Cygni — enough to fool a resident of the place — are so slender they’re ridiculous. And the alarm message, too. Obviously, there’s a colony out there on 61 Cygni IV wondering why Mike Janner failed to arrive on schedule. Mike Janner just didn’t get to where the colony is, that’s all.”

  “Then where did he get to?” asked Hank.

  “I don’t know. Maybe the Thresholders made a mistake. They never have understood routing, as far as I can tell. That’s why I had to work with them so long; finding the routes was a hit and miss proposition. Once I had a given route established, they could follow it all right, or seemed to. But suppose now they’ve gotten the angle just a whisker off? They must have, somehow. But even so, I don’t see how the thing Mike Janner told us could have happened, Anywhere. Much less on Cygni.”

  Hank Merry scratched his chin. “I could tell you what it sounds like,” he said. “Ever hear of entropy?”

  Robert grimaced. “If I remember right, that’s one of those things that scientists all agree is there but none of them can define.”

  “It’s hard to define, all right. And it wouldn’t mean very much to most people even if we could define it. All the same, it’s a concept that we live with all the time. It has to do with the exchange of heat between objects of different temperature until equilibrium is reached. We just accept as fact that something that’s warmer than the air around it tends to cool off while the air around it tends to warm up until the temperatures are equal. Same with things cooler than their surroundings; they tend to grow warmer, while the surroundings get cooler, until the heat content is the same. That’s why you make the tea strong if you want to pour it over ice cubes. Put cold ice cubes and hot tea side by side, and the ice cubes get warmer and melt, the tea gets cooler and weaker, and you end up with an equilibrium where the ice cubes and the tea are essentially the same temperature. And if it’s a very hot day, the whole mess tends to warm up to room temperature.”

  Robert nodded. “But the room air doesn’t get any cooler.”

  “Yes it does. You just can’t notice it because there’s so little iced tea and so much room. It’s the tea that registers the measurable change in heat content.”

  “Well — okay,” Robert said dubiously. “I still don’t see what all this has to do with Mike Janner.”

  Hank shook his head. “Maybe nothing. It was just that his whole story sounded like an entropy system gone all out of whack. Certainly something happened to him. Something bad, from his viewpoint; he didn’t lose seventy pounds in four hours for no reason. And it sounds like it involves heat exchange in some way.”

  “Well, if Cygni had suddenly become terribly hot, he’d start warming up too, I suppose,” Robert said.

  “Exactly. Only the planet didn’t look any different than it ever had. A man can take pretty dreadful heat before he starts to dehydrate from it, certainly before it starts pushing his body metabolism up. Mike Janner’s body literally burned off those seventy pounds, but he didn’t see any grass turning brown around him. No parched trees, no streams dry and baked. The breeze felt cool on his cheek.” Hank Merry shook his head. “I don’t think the planet was any hotter than it ever was. But if Janner’s story is true, his body was warmer than the atmosphere when he got there — by Jove!” Hank broke off, picked up the intercom. “Jerry? What was the temperature in that star jump chamber that brought the man back from 61 Cygni?” He paused and Robert heard gabble from the phone receiver. “I see,” Hank said. “No possible mistake?”

  He hung up. “They’re still chipping the icicles off it,” he said. “It was so cold the door mechanism jammed when it arrived here. And the man inside it was roasting in his own skin.”

  “I don’t get it,” Robert said.

  “Neither do I,” Hank admitted. “A warm man on a temperate planet getting warmer and warmer, while the cool Threshold chamber that carried him there was getting colder and colder. Robert, it’s all backwards. It should have been the other way around!”

  “But it wasn’t,” Robert said.

  “I’m sorry, but the laws of Nature say it had to be the other way around. There just isn’t any place in this universe that has negative entropy. Nor in the Threshold universe either, as far as I know.”

  “No.” Robert stood up, paced the room, finally turned to Hank. “At least, then, we know that Janner and his friends will recover as soon as their body temperatures stabilize. But other things have been happening other places, too. Jonathan Tarbox’s steel pipe may have carried an overload of contraband, but it went somewhere that reduced it to a heap of molten slag before it got to Mars at all. And those men exploring Saturn — ”

  “What about them?”

  “It’s not very cheering. We’ve had Threshold chambers turn up in awkward places before, on exploratory missions, but we’ve never had one just disappear before. Those men took a chamber with them down to the surface of Saturn, to bring them back to Titan when they were ready. The spot was even triangulated and located on the surface by satellite observers, but the instant that they jumped, they and the receiver both vanished. And they didn’t vanish into the Threshold universe, either. I don’t know where they vanished to, but I think we have to find out. And it’s the same old story again.”

  “Communication with the Thresholders,” Hank said glumly.

  “Exactly. As far as I can tell, the Thresholders don’t know what’s going wrong either, but we really have to be able to compare notes and work together if we’re going to find out. A vague, fleeting contact won’t do it.” Robert sighed. “I’ve been afraid all along that it wouldn’t, that something was going to make real communication necessary. And I’m not sure it’s possible. I’ve been digging in every direction I could think of, without much change. But there’s one person who might be able to help, if we could find a way to beat out fear.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A girl. At th
e Hoffman Center. I can’t explain, you’ll have to see her. At first I thought she might lead me right to the core of the question, and then all of a sudden she was too frightened to keep working.” Robert stood up and walked to the window, looked out at the red desert beyond the city. “Her name is Sharnan, and she’s quite a girl. I think you should meet her, because I have a hunch that she’s the one hope we have of getting control of something that’s getting farther out of control every minute.”

  Something in Robert’s tone made Hank look up at his young friend intently. “You’re worried about this business, aren’t you?”

  “I’m worried sick about it. Hank, I’m out of my depth in this thing. I’m so far over my head I’ve forgotten what it feels like to breathe. And I don’t know what to do.” He turned from the window. “Do you remember the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice?”

  Hank nodded. “A foolish boy who tried to use his master’s magic spells,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Robert said. “He used magic that he didn’t understand to make a broomstick carry water for him. It worked fine at first, the broomstick came to life and started filling the cauldron with water. Too much water — the apprentice found out too late that he didn’t know how to turn the broomstick off again, and it kept right on hauling water until it nearly drowned him.” Robert shrugged. “That’s the way I feel: that I’ve started something going that I can’t understand and I can’t control it, and I can’t stop it. I don’t know what to do.”

  Hank shook his head angrily. “You can’t take all the blame. You were under terrific pressure from McEvoy, from me, from the Thresholders. It wasn’t even your fault you were the goat; your own parents put you on the spot years before, much as they regretted it later.”

  “But I’m still on the spot. And the broomstick keeps hauling that water in.”

  “The broomstick was controllable, wasn’t it? The apprentice couldn’t stop it, but there was a counter-spell that could.”

  “So who knows the counter-spell to this one?” Robert said.