The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  Hank spread his hands. “You’ve got me. I don’t know any magic word.”

  “Nor do I,” Robert said forlornly. “About all I can hope right now is that ‘Sharnan’ might be the magic word.”

  8

  To ANYONE who had never seen it before, the Hoffman Medical Center in Philadelphia District was always something of a shock. If people were looking for a great hospital, they were disappointed. Sprawling hospital facilities were there, but the Hoffman Center was no more just a hospital than it was just a doctors’ clinic, or just a research center. Originating in the early 1980’s as a central clearing house for medical knowledge and research efforts throughout the world, the Hoffman Center had grown beyond any expectation, piling building upon building, wing upon wing, spawning branch centers for specialized research in a hundred different corners of the world, in burgeoning geometric progression. Like the early sprawling Telcom organization, which had come to dominate most of the research in physics, electronics and communications by the turn of the century, the Hoffman Center now dominated all aspects of medical training and investigation. And as the last organic diseases of man began to yield to research — cancer curable, heart disease at last controllable — it was inevitable that more and more attention at the Hoffman Center was focused on the last and deepest medical mystery of all: the mystery of the human mind and how it worked.

  Hank Merry and Robert Benedict had been silent on the trip through Ironstone Threshold to the receiver station in Philadelphia. Hank was suddenly and acutely uneasy about riding the Threshold at all, Robert was just preoccupied with his thoughts. A quick aircar jaunt from the station set them down on the parking ramp of the main Hoffman Center building complex, a haphazard pile of high-rising glass-and-concrete buildings. It was only the part of the iceberg that was visible above water, Hank had heard, with many miles of underground corridors hidden below, miles of rooms, laboratories, treatment rooms, maybe even dungeons — who could say? There had always been rumors about medicine and hospitals, and there were rumors about what went on in this great medical research center, too, some of them most disquieting. But as they came down into the great reception hall and receiving room, all that Hank saw had a look of busyness and well controlled function about it. Whatever happened here, the place seemed to say, didn’t happen by accident.

  “Who is this girl?” Hank asked finally. “Where did you run into her?”

  “Oh, she’s one who’s been working with Dad,” Robert answered vaguely.

  Hank frowned. “She’s not one of the Mercy Men, is she?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. No indenture, no big fees.” Robert knew that there were still programs here using Mercy Men, the hired medical mercenaries who signed contracts to serve as experimental guinea pigs in some of the more dangerous research areas, in return for high wages if they survived. But those programs had never been very fruitful, and under the inevitable pressure of social and political disapproval, the Mercy Men were almost a thing of the past. “No, Sharnan is a healthy, interested, cooperative girl, working here because she chooses to. A very gifted girl, too, in many ways.” Robert grinned. “You’ll notice I didn’t say she’s normal, so don’t be too surprised. She’s very odd, but it’s just exactly the right kind of oddness to make her highly helpful. Not to mention that she’s a good kid and I happen to like her quite a lot.”

  They had taken an elevator up to one of the skyscraping towers, and hopped aboard a jitney heading down a long corridor. Finally they reached an office room stacked with dusty journals and a tape reader and other disordered paraphernalia, with Ed Benedict planted in the middle of it all, doing something to an electroencephalograph tracing on his desk with a pair of calipers.

  He stood up, shook hands with Hank. “Good to see you! Robert said you’d be coming along. Gail would like to have been here, but she’s still tied up with that survey McEvoy asked her to do over in England. They’re getting to be old friends, those two. And as for you, my lad — ” He turned to Robert and sighed. “What a mess you’ve got me into. That girl — ” He threw up his hands in dismay.

  “We’d like to see her if she’s around,” Robert said.

  “She’s as much around as she’s ever going to get, as far as I can tell. But these new tracings are no more help than the last ones, maybe even less. Of course, she’s still scared silly. Maybe you can cheer her up, or something.”

  “She hasn’t withdrawn?”

  “Oh, no. She isn’t that scared. It’s just — well, you know.” Robert looked relieved. “I was afraid maybe I’d scared her off altogether.”

  “The fact is, I think you’re the main reason she’s stayed,” Ed said, smiling. “Of course, that’s just a psychologist’s hunch, but you’ve caught her eye. After all, she is a girl, with a mind of her own.”

  Robert flushed. “I’ve gotten a hint or two,” he said. “Sharnan may be way out, but she’s no dope. It just seems a little ridiculous, under the circumstances.”

  Ed glanced at Hank. “Does he know anything about her?”

  “Not much,” Robert said. “I thought it might be better for him to see for himself.”

  “Maybe so,” Ed Benedict said. “Well, good luck.”

  Down another corridor they knocked on a door and walked into a spacious room, more like a well-appointed apartment than a reaction-and-behavior laboratory or a hospital suite. It was bright and cheerful, with shelves of video-tapes, and drapes covering the one-way glass windows into the control room, to insure privacy. There was also a TV screen with a functioning cut-off switch. All these things Robert had personally insisted on. In the center of the room was a girl, perhaps eighteen years old, sitting on a straight chair. She wore a green skirt and blouse; her brown hair was held back in a pony-tail. A strikingly pretty girl, Hank thought, as she rose to greet them. She regarded Hank without interest, turning to Robert with a warm smile. Instantly Hank was aware of something odd about the girl, something very odd that he couldn’t quite pin down until she looked straight at him and he saw her eyes.

  Her eyes: Not blue eyes, not gray, not green nor brown nor hazel. Incredible eyes, Hank thought, a deep, startling shade of clear violet. They set off her face; they caught your own eyes, made you look again, made you wonder if you were seeing quite right. Violet. Strange eyes, too, as though when you looked past the surface you were stopped by an impenetrable barrier.

  “Sharnan,” Robert said, “this is Dr. Merry, an old friend. He helped me with our problem, once before.”

  The girl smiled and said something to Hank in a pleasant musical voice, but Hank couldn’t quite catch the words.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” he said. “Robert has told me — ”

  She laughed, cutting him off in mid-sentence, and gestured helplessly to Robert. Again she spoke in her odd musical way. Robert shook his head at Hank. “Don’t try to catch the words,” he said. “You won’t be able to understand them. And she can’t understand a thing either of us have said.”

  Hank blinked. “Doesn’t she speak International?” he asked, amazed.

  “No. Nor American. Nor Russian, nor Swahili, nor any other language that you ever heard of. She has her own language, maybe very uniquely her own. I can’t understand it either, and she hasn’t been able to teach me, or else she hasn’t chosen to.” He paused. “She can read minds, though, sometimes, so watch your step. It can be embarrassing. Like right now: she doesn’t like what I’ve been thinking a bit.”

  And indeed, the girl’s smile had faded, and she turned her back on the two men as though they had suddenly ceased to exist. Walking across the room, she fed a tape into the reading machine, and sat watching the flickering image on the screen. After a moment or two she pressed her hands over her ears and looked up at Robert with fear in her violet eyes.

  “I know,” Robert said to her gently. “So am I. But we’ve tried everything else.” He sat down facing her, holding out his hand. For the moment Hank was totally out of it, ignored; he had the u
ncanny feeling that he was witnessing a curious dream, in which two people were talking to each other in different languages, yet understanding each other perfectly. “We’ve got to do it,” Robert was saying to the girl. “We’ve never really tried it before, not both of us. And I know I can’t do it by myself.”

  Sharnan shook her head violently. Was she actually crying, or was it the way the light caught those strange eyes? Her voice was pleading, vehement but incomprehensible.

  “I know you’re afraid,” Robert said. “Just as much as I am, but sooner or later it’s going to have to happen, isn’t it? You know that.”

  More magic talk, with the girl still shaking her head as if in despair.

  “I’ll shield you the best I can,” Robert said. “If I can protect you, I will. But there has to be some contact with them now, real contact, and you have to help me make it.”

  Strangely, Hank Merry began to understand. They were talking together, in a way, and their talk had to do with the Threshold universe, and going there together. “Robert, wait!” he said in alarm.

  Robert looked up. “What is it?”

  “Are you thinking of taking her to the Other Side with you?”

  “Of course. What else?”

  “But you can’t do that! This girl is a cripple. She isn’t even compos mentis; only sick minds make up their own languages — ”

  Before he had finished Sharnan whirled on him angrily. Hank’s scalp prickled; she had understood him perfectly. Not his words — his thoughts. But Robert interrupted. “She’s not sick,” he said. “And she’s no more crippled than I am. Different, yes. Crippled, no.”

  “Robert, you’re forgetting. Even a high-adaptive like your mother can’t stay on the Other Side for long. You know what happened to McEvoy’s men. And you can’t help anybody else handle what they’d run into over there.”

  “That’s right,” Robert said. “Nobody else except Sharnan.”

  “What makes her so different from anybody else?”

  Robert smiled. “Just the fact that she can go through by herself and do just fine. She can cross the Threshold back and forth just as well as I can, maybe better. She’s not even afraid for herself, so much, going together; she’s afraid for me.”

  “You mean somebody else has been trained to cross the Threshold the way you were trained?”

  “In a way, yes, but not quite the way you mean.” Robert looked up at his friend. “Hank, where do you think this girl came from?”

  Hank blinked as Robert’s words hit home, and he stared at the girl, met her violet eyes and the blank wall that lay behind them. “Moons of Mars,” he said softly. “From the Other Side.”

  “Of course,” Robert said. “Now you see why she’s different, and why she might be able to help. And why she is just as frightened as I am.”

  9

  LATER, ROBERT tried to explain the best that he could. “The Thresholders obviously have known of our existence just as long as we’ve known of theirs,” he said. “Maybe longer. I’m not at all sure that they hadn’t already pushed a Threshold through from their side long before McEvoy started fiddling with his low-temperature vault. There are some things that have always made me wonder — time travel reports, for instance; unexplained disappearances; that Nagasaki bomb that failed to go off and that nobody could ever find. Maybe they had a Threshold and we just didn’t know it. But at least from the time Gail walked into McEvoy’s vault on, they’ve known.”

  They were all more comfortable now. Ed Benedict had brought up some lunch when he joined them; Sharnan did not eat, but she was over her anger, working quietly at the tape machine, apparently giving it her full attention except for an occasional glance at Robert. Hearing every word, Hank Merry thought, and not understanding a single one. But catching the thoughts just the same.

  “So it isn’t surprising,” Robert continued, “that they should have sent someone across, just as we did. We learned how to train someone to cope with their universe — namely me — and to cross through at will. So did they. Sharnan is my counterpart from the Other Side. Whether she was trained the same way I was, I don’t know. I know she’s special; no other Thresholder comes through. And I know that our universe, here, is just as confusing and incomprehensible to her as their universe on the Other Side is to me. She looks pretty much like us, over here, but then I probably look like one of them when I’m on the Other Side. I don’t know if I have a language over there or not. Maybe what thoughts I have come through as their counterpart to language.

  “Certainly I stick out like a sore thumb over there now, when they’re expecting me … but there may have been a long period when they didn’t even know I was crossing through. She wasn’t so lucky: when she first crossed over she turned up stark naked in a midtown Manhattan intersection, babbling nonsense, and they had the riot squad out in two minutes flat. The police dumped her in the city Psych ward, and they sent her to the Hoffman Center as fast as they could. Then once she got her crossing co-ordinates straight, and crossed back and forth a few times to the same place, Dad got word of it and knew exactly what was happening. So he called me.”

  “But the language — ”

  “Yes, we worked on that first. We had every linguist in the Western hemisphere fooling around her trying to crack it, and they couldn’t do it. Like the ancient Mayan hieroglyphs, there were no referents, so there was no way to break the language. The same word-sound seems to mean something different every time she uses it, or else there are sound-wave overtones that we’re missing, or else there’s a telepathic auxiliary that we can’t pick up, grooved right into the language. “It’s like trying to understand a language tape when half the words are cut out and the tape is running through the reader backwards. Well, we got nowhere with the language, but some things did get through, at least between Sharnan and me. She didn’t understand my words, but she could pick up thought patterns, and I seem to read her, too, part of the time. That looked promising, until she started crossing back to try to find specific answers to things I wanted to know, and started to get more and more scared every time.”

  Hank looked puzzled. “Scared of what?”

  “I’m not sure, except that it had to do with me. Just as I might be scared if I could see some kind of threat to her because of her crossing through to this side, because I wouldn’t want her hurt.”

  Sharnan looked up suddenly, staring intently at Robert. He grinned at her. “Hit it right on the head, didn’t I?” he said.

  There was a slight movement, a flicker of her eyes. Not a nod, but an affirmative nevertheless.

  “But you know we can’t make any real contact from here, don’t you?”

  Again, a reluctant affirmative.

  “We have to go through to your side together, and you’re afraid this might hurt me in some way, and you’re trying to protect me.”

  The girl took a deep breath, and put her hands to her head avoiding his eyes.

  “Isn’t that so?”

  Most reluctantly, she nodded.

  “But you know we’ve got to do it. Because we’re in trouble, both sides — our universe and yours.”

  A strong affirmative from the girl. Even Hank could feel it, deep in his mind, along with a cold wind of fear.

  “Something has gone badly wrong,” Robert went on, “and if we don’t make contact somehow, both sides are going to be hurt. And you’ll be hurt too, and I don’t want to risk that.” He looked directly at the girl. “Don’t try to protect me, Sharnan. You’re only putting things off. We’re going to make a try together, whether I get hurt or not.”

  And then, very, very clearly, Hank Merry caught the wisp of thought, resigned, frightened, tender, massively reluctant: Yes. We have to try.

  10

  THE CROSSING this time was the same as it had always been for Robert — a sudden, breathtaking leap into the abyss — but this time it was different, too, because Sharnan had crossed with him. They had never crossed together before. Robert was quite sure that the
y had been together on the Other Side at one time or another; they had even crossed through in tandem, one after the other, on one or two occasions. But somehow crossing through together, hand in hand, at the same instant, was something quite different. Sharnan had never agreed to that, before. She had always been strangely afraid, a fear Robert could not understand but felt was always primarily fear for him, not for herself.

  But now, at last, she had reluctantly, in desperation, agreed.

  He was aware of her very close to him, almost a part of his own, wild, whirling fragmented shadow-body. He knew that he must always present to her a similar confusing, distorted geometrical appearance while she was on his side of the Threshold that she presented to him on her side, even though he could not imagine himself appearing that way to her eyes. He also knew that he carried with him here, on her side, his own memory of her as she appeared on his side — a lovely girl, graceful, attractive, with long hair and violet eyes. He knew that it was this “human” picture of her that he had found increasingly attractive, but that she must carry whatever picture of him she saw now on her own side, as her picture of him. And that this was the Robert, here, to whom she was so clearly drawn, not the Robert of his world.

  Confusing. Hard even to think about. Impossible to put into words. It seemed that he had been trying to fight his way around words for so long, in dealing with this universe beyond the Threshold, and that those rare, brief moments of contact had occurred only when — somehow — words had been brushed aside, or circumvented. Could it be that words alone were the barrier he had been fighting to break down? Maybe. Certainly part of it. Two minds, trying to understand each other, and no way to bridge the gulf of words that stood between them.

  Here, now, they moved gently downward through the darkness together, as he had moved alone before. Other Thresholders were around them as they moved. He even thought he recognized some individuals from the familiarity of the physical patterns he saw. And there was surprise here, and apprehension; not fear so much as concern and an eagerness, a tension….