The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  As though they realized, as he had realized, that a final breaking point had come. As though they knew that now, at last, the gulf had to be permanently bridged, that something new, perhaps something very dangerous, had to be attempted.

  He agreed. He knew it too, he had forced it. But now he was floundering. Maybe so … but what?

  Suddenly, he felt something stirring in his mind. It was an odd feeling, as though a hesitant voice was speaking without words, very cautiously, very gentle, deep in his mind. A girl’s voice, not violating him or forcing its way in, but merely tapping for admittance, gently tapping. Sharnan, of course. There was no mistaking that. A different Sharnan than he had yet known, but clearly Sharnan, tapping for attention, trying not to frighten him. It was similar to the faint, feeble touch of her thoughts and feelings that he had felt in his mind there at the Hoffman Center, but so much sharper, so much deeper, that the keenness left him breathless. ‘Robert, don’t be afraid, but there is something we have to do. Mostly you … it is more natural for me. Words are no good, and side-stepping words is too limited. We have to go beyond that.’

  ‘But how?’ he answered her.

  ‘By opening your mind to them all the way. It’s the only chance. It may be dangerous, we don’t know. You stood it briefly before, but this must be far longer and deeper. If I can shield you, be a buffer for the blow, soak up some of the shock, it may work.’

  Holding himself tight, Robert tried to focus his mind as he did once before, in a single channel, to get through one idea, but this time directed at the girl: ‘I’m willing to try, but how?’

  ‘Mostly just let it happen; don’t panic and don’t fight. Just remember that nobody here will willfully hurt you, and try not to fight.’

  And then, as his assent seemed to touch her, he felt other thoughts moving into his mind, the Thresholders, not just Sharnan, probing gently, then more firmly, then fiercely. He tried to open his mind, to fight down the panic that was growing suddenly, even against his bidding, as contact grew, came closer and closer. He held tight and forced himself, like sticking out his finger to touch a red-hot stove. He knew it would burn; he had to force it, inch by inch, closer and closer, but he had to now, there was no turning back —

  It burned. In a violent burst, pain and fear and grief flared in his mind; blinding pain, the sort of pain that comes from suddenly staring into the full glare of the noonday sun. He flinched, fought, flailed against it, but Sharnan was there too, fighting to protect him, helping to hold him, acting almost as a buffer, a channeling device for the force of thought that came pounding at him; encouraging him, reassuring him, and channeling his thought to the Thresholders as well.

  The pain and fear exploded and billowed in his mind and still he went on, letting them in, trying not to fight.

  And then, amazingly, thoughts were passing back and forth, not tenuously, but clear as crystal. At the same time the Threshold world seemed to be changing, drawing into focus. It had happened once before, fleetingly, when he had come here through the distorting energy-field of the transmatter; he had seen a comprehensible world about him then, for just an instant. Now he saw it again, for more than an instant. It seemed to materialize from the fog, and he knew that it was Sharnan who was doing this. He was actually seeing through Sharnan’s eyes, hearing through her ears, catching the thought of other Thresholders through her mind, and they were receiving his thought clearly, also through her mind. But if it was hurting him, it was hurting her, too. ‘Sharnan! Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, yes … all right … and you?’

  Relief, and something more. ‘Yes. It’s harder than I dreamed. But I’m all right.’

  Then listen. Listen closely.’

  For a moment, a confusion of thought, muddled and incoherent. Then, a spokesman, not Sharnan but another Thresholder. ‘Can you understand me? Can you hear?’

  ‘Yes, I can hear.’

  ‘Then you know there is trouble. Something is wrong, the routes we arranged aren’t working all the time. Sometimes we get off slightly and things go to the wrong places.’

  Wrong places? Robert struggled to comprehend. ‘What places? What other places are there …’

  ‘Many other places, of course. Who knows what places, or how many?’

  He was really confused now. ‘But there is my universe and yours. Where else?’

  A long pause, then amazement, confusion. ‘Yours and ours, of course … but surely you don’t think that your universe and ours are the only ones that exist!’

  Something flickered in Robert’s mind, a horrible, sinking sense of comprehension. Other places … other places …

  ‘What about 61 Cygni? What happened to that man?’

  ‘We were off, somehow. We must have been off, the routing wasn’t right. But we couldn’t control it. We followed your routing as closely as we could but the angle was off. Maybe only infinitesimally off, but off, and he went to another Cygni.’

  ‘Another Cygni? How many 61 Cygnis are there?’ Incomprehension, as if he had asked them, “How green is red?” Silence, awful and abysmal.

  Then a babble of puzzlement and confusion. The Thresholders seemed to be conferring, and then a thought came through, very tentatively: ‘We don’t understand. There are as many Cygnis as there are. We’ve never explored or tried to count … how could we? The natural laws are all so different. And who cares? Should there be just so many and no more? Does it matter?’

  Now it was Robert who was confused. What could they mean? The effort to hold his thought in tight control was getting out of hand, draining him, and he was suddenly terribly frightened. ‘I don’t understand … can you show me what you mean?’

  (More conferring.) ‘Far too dangerous. But some pictures might help.’ Something changed. It was not that they released his mind, but something was superimposed on their thoughts, a series of images or pictures, each clear as crystal, changing rapidly from one to the next, with Sharnan very close to him, helping and holding and channeling the pictures. Pictures of places, of planets, each sharply in focus, utterly incredible, but clear, unmistakable:

  A 61 Cygni IV where hot things got hotter and cold things got colder; a Cygni which was part of a totally different universe than his; a Cygni that looked the same but existed under different natural laws. Robert knew what had happened to Mike Janner and his party and what had happened to the colony they were returning to, a colony that had never existed on that 61 Cygni.

  A Mars like any Mars should be, except that on this Mars there was no Ironstone, and steel melted at normal atmospheric temperature into a puddle of slag, melted so very quickly that it was fluid before the Thresholders could pull it back through and try the angle again. And then in their horror and confusion, they overshot their mark on the right Mars by 850 miles; and just as well for the Ironstone on that Mars, too, even if displeasing to a red-haired man with a fat yellow cigar in his mouth.

  A Saturn like any other Saturn except that the protons of its atoms carried a negative electrical charge and its electrons a positive charge; a contra-terrene Saturn where any atoms from Robert’s universe touching it would instantly be annihilated, and annihilate the corresponding contra-terrene atoms in return, all vanishing poof in a horrendous, silent, total transformation of mass into energy, more violent than a thousand hydrogen bombs silently erupting simultaneously. Heartsick, Robert knew why neither men nor Threshold station had ever again been seen after their tragic, inadvertent encounter with that Saturn instead of the one they had been heading for.

  A strange planet in a universe where the speed of light was six hundred feet per second and the “sunlight” the inhabitants were seeing one day was the “sunlight” radiated from their sun long years before, just before the sun went nova, so the inhabitants one day were fried in their shoes with no warning. A strange universe in which any aircraft that traveled more than 150 miles an hour became noticeably more massive, and could not stay aloft at three hundred miles an hour because of its mass. A
universe so utterly at the mercy of the relation between time and distance that the energies of a great and brilliant race had been turned to understanding the nature of time and control of travel through it, a goal they were within a hairs-breadth of achieving, with all the benefits and paradoxes inherent in time travel just a brief step away …

  Another planet in a universe where other physical constants were different, a universe whose quanta were such that most phenomena appeared as step functions, instead of continuous movement, like a motion picture film being shoved through the projector bump-bump-bump, one frame at a time, frame … pause … frame … pause … frame … pause …

  And another planet … and another … and another … all impossible, yet all real, all existing. A multitude of universes, an infinity of universes, some parallel, some at dimensional angles, some sharing the self-same atoms and molecules of his own, some using one phase of subatomic vibration while his own used another phase … incredible, beautiful, rich, frightening universes …

  Slowly, the pictures faded from Robert’s mind, or rather dissolved back into the Threshold universe again, but a Threshold universe he could see more clearly than ever before. A Threshold universe of cities, aircars, people, Sharnan, scientists crowding around him. ‘Do you understand now? Do you understand why we can’t hit the target right, all the time? We can’t control the routing. It may be mathematical, or technological, but we don’t know what to do.’

  And Robert knew the answer, then, so very simple. ‘We have scientists, mathematicians, engineers. A man like Dr. Merry could solve that problem for you. He could plan and plot the routing angles to fifty decimal places if necessary. He could build automatic routing devices, and pass them and their blueprints and their theory through me to you. It would solve our immediate problem, and yours, and open the door …’

  Open the door! Incredible. A door he never even knew existed.

  The Thresholders heard him, eagerly, excitedly. ‘Yes, yes, we need to know how. We don’t have the knowledge to do it alone, but together, perhaps together …’

  Abruptly, Robert Benedict seemed to reach a limit, a saturation point. It was as much as he could take. Sharnan sensed it too; sharply, quickly, she moved in blocking off the wave of Thresholders’ thoughts, covering for him as he closed the doors of his mind, urging him now to cross back to the place he knew best, to the universe from which he had come. For now.

  She did not cross back with him. It was not necessary, now. They both knew that the first work would have to be done on her side. And he would come back and carry on from the place he had stopped this time, if he found that his own mind had stood the shock and that he was intact.

  An instant later he was back in Shaman’s room in the Hoffman Center. He was exhausted, drained, like a man strained to his bottommost limits, but Hank Merry and Ed Benedict were there, and the room was there, and he saw the fading daylight outside and knew that his mind was intact, that soon he could go back through again and that Sharnan would be waiting.

  And that the doors could indeed be opened.

  11

  HE WENT BACK, of course, again and again, before he told anybody very much of what was going on. That first return, all he could do was sit and pant, catching his breath, brushing aside Hank’s questions, and then eating and eating and eating … he felt as though he was starving … and finally falling into a solid twenty-four hours of sleep troubled by the wildest nightmares he had ever known. But before that he told Hank to order all the Threshold stations closed down. There need be no panic, it would only be a temporary interruption of service except for real emergencies: like stopping a train until a hotbox cooled.

  When he woke up he immediately crossed through to the Other Side again, without telling a soul. That time he came back equally starved but looking brighter of eye and firmer of cheek. He ate another huge meal and then had a long huddle with Hank, explaining about the routing problem and the task Hank had in front of him. Hank went back to Telcom Laboratories and disappeared into a fog of mathematics and electronics and dimensional mechanics while Robert went back to the Other Side a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth. By then Hank was beginning to comprehend some small part of what Robert was asking him to do, and beginning to have some faint glimmering of an idea of how to go about doing it.

  “They can’t control the routing,” Robert explained. “They just don’t have the science, or the math, or the technology. It was blind luck as much as anything else that the particular Mars they shipped me to that first time happened to be the right one, and not a Mars with negative entropy so I just baked in my own skin.”

  “Well, the routing can be handled,” Hank said. “It’s got to be a matter of fixing exact angles for each and every destination, exact to fractions of seconds of degrees, and then taping the angles and feeding them into their transport mechanism on computers so that the exact same route co-ordinates are used every time. That means somebody is going to have to go to every destination point we need, to make sure they’re the right ones, and to get the exact angles fixed.” He looked at Robert. “And I guess you will be the goat, you or Sharnan, and I doubt if she could tell for sure whether she was going right or not. We’ll have to cook up some kind of an advance scanner to be sure you don’t get into a contra-terrene universe, and I’ll have to find some device you can use to record the angles, so that you can bring back the data for me to punch into the tapes. Wow! No wonder the Thresholders were at sea. We’re not all that far ahead, but without the math there would be no way in the world that they could have done this alone … and no way in the world that we could have done it alone, either.”

  “And no way in the world that we could do it together without communication,” Robert added. “Without full, free exchange of thoughts, ideas, understanding.”

  “I still don’t follow what happened.”

  “I know. It’s hard to comprehend. Without some anchor to hang onto, some place to start, there wasn’t any way to establish contact. Just an unbridgeable gulf. But an anchor on one side wasn’t enough, either. They had to have one, too. We managed to bypass it before, because of the violence the transmatter was bringing about and the crashing urgency to stop it. But they knew perfectly well that my mind couldn’t tolerate the sort of raw, naked contact that real communication with them would require. They knew what happened to McEvoy’s early workers, too. They knew that Gail was stronger than the others, in some way … her own adaptability, as we know. They knew that I was not only stronger, but different as well, the anchor on our side, but the one time they really tried to touch my mind, or I theirs, it was almost all I could stand even briefly under pressure of violent urgency.

  “And at that time Sharnan, whom they were training along the same lines I had been trained, wasn’t yet skillful enough to help. So they limped along and hoped, and unfortunately their worst fears were correct, even though they did remarkably well, for what they knew. Sort of like figuring out the general trajectory of a moon rocket based on orbital timing calculated on an abacus, and then hurling the rocket out in the right general direction, hoping it might connect. Fine for a start, but they knew all along that the flaws in the system were going to catch up with us all sooner or later.”

  “And these other universes — ” Hank scratched his head, searching for words. “There’re … there? They really exist?”

  “They’re there, all right. They’re here, too. They’re everywhere. They’re a part of existence, a part we never dreamed of, a part we’ve never been able to perceive, but they’ve always been there. The Threshold universe hadn’t perceived them, either, until a few decades ago, when they started focusing energy in odd ways in their own research and found out they were truly a Universe Between … a touch-point for multitudes of universes. Maybe we are too, and just haven’t yet discovered it. But they seemed to be like a universe in a very flimsy tissue-paper bag. They couldn’t see outside, but every place they touched they pushed a hole through into somewhere else. And
then one ‘somewhere else’ suddenly pushed a hole through to them, and very shortly started to tear the bag apart as well. Not particularly comfortable for them, and it’s a measure of the kind of minds they have that they worked to seek a solution, instead of just indiscriminately striking back.”

  Robert stood up and stretched. “The trouble was, they couldn’t do it without having their own anchor, Sharnan, to work with me. They were afraid that if they forced access to my mind, I would go to pieces just like McEvoy’s workers did. But by working through Sharnan, using her mind as a filter, you might say, they thought it might work. They weren’t sure. Sharnan was afraid, deathly afraid, for me. But it did work, and now each time, it works a little easier. Each time there is a little more contact.”

  “And now the first job is the routing,” Hank Merry said.

  “That has to come first. Without it, our Earth is in trouble. But that’s the easiest part. After that — Hank, the door is open. There are a million universes, maybe an infinity of universes, to explore. Universes of every kind conceivable, just waiting on the other side of the door. The Threshold universe is a route through; I have a hunch that none of those universes would be accessible to us here without the Universe Between as a touch-point and traffic center. But we have the touch-point, and the Thresholders want to explore every bit as much as we do. And what there is to explore!”

  Robert laughed. “Did you know that there was a time when the physicists and chemists on this Earth of ours thought they had learned all there was to learn? That they knew all the answers, or all the ones that mattered? That all that was left was a sort of mopping-up exercise? Of course, that was before anybody discovered radioactivity, or X-rays, or atom bombs. That was before scientists started publishing their ideas about relativity, and that was just in this universe, our own private little corner of existence.”