The Universe Between

by Alan E Nourse

  “That’s funny,” Robert said. “They couldn’t have spotted us so soon.”

  Hank glanced at his watch. “I’m afraid they could have. With a fast alarm, the computers could tag every aircar that took off within a fifty-mile radius of the place at the critical time, and drag them all in to the nearest control center.”

  “But we can’t face a dragnet right now,” Robert said.

  “I think we can beat it,” Hank said. “Watch.” He crawled into the front seat, threw a switch under the altimeter, and began manipulating control buttons by hand. The speaker fell silent and the car turned northward again. “Now, if we just disconnect the air-ground control, they’ll have to scan several hundred thousands cubic miles of space to be sure they’ve got us,” he said. “We may have time to get where we’re going.”

  “I didn’t know you could put these things on manual,” Robert said wonderingly.

  Merry grinned as he reached under the dash and disengaged a wire. “It’s against Federal law, except in emergencies. But they couldn’t afford to have aircars dropping like rocks all over the place just because a computer went out somewhere. And I suppose you might call this an emergency.” He leaned back, handling the controls. “There. We can worry about Federal laws later. Right now, let’s just get wherever it is we’re going.”

  Gail told him the Springfield District co-ordinates, and the aircar settled on a steady northerly course. “Fine,” Hank said. “And next, maybe you’d better tell me what this Threshold business is. I’m still in the dark.”

  As briefly as she could, Gail filled him in on the story of the early, disastrous discovery of the Threshold universe, her own first experience there, and its aftermath.

  “Then you can cross into this … this place … anytime you want?” Hank asked.

  “Pretty much,” Gail said. “I don’t very often. You got a taste of what it feels like; I have the same sort of reaction, except that I’m prepared for it.”

  “What about Robert, here?”

  “Robert doesn’t have the same trouble, partly because he’s used to it, and partly because he’s been crossing over ever since he was very small.” Gail smiled. “My mind is so used to the way things are in this universe, with its three dimensions, its light, color, sound, shape, and everything else that I can’t make any sense at all of the Other Side. Things there are just flatly impossible, to my mind. Robert at least has parallel experience with the way things are on the Other Side as well as on this side. Some of his circuits are connected, you might say. He has trouble explaining what he encounters over there, but at least everything there isn’t wrong, to him. So he can pass through and back without having his wits jarred loose.”

  Merry frowned. “Why can’t you explain what you find over there?” he asked Robert.

  “Well, maybe I can give you an example,” Robert said. “Suppose you stuck your hand in a pail of warm water. Your hand would feel warm then, wouldn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you could tell people that, and they’d know what you meant. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Then suppose you stuck your hand in a pail of soapy water, how would that feel?”

  “Well, soapy, I suppose. But I don’t see — ”

  Robert shook his head. “That’s fine, too, and other people could understand you. But suppose you stuck your hand in a pail of water and your hand felt green. How would you explain that to somebody else?”

  “What do you mean, felt green?”

  “Just what I said,” Robert replied. “Green.”

  “Well, that’s nonsense. Nobody’s hand can feel green.”

  “Ah, but suppose that with this particular pail of water, without any warning, that happens to be exactly how your hand feels — green. Not warm, not cold, not wet, not soapy — just green. How would you explain it? You wouldn’t. You couldn’t tell anybody how your hand felt, not really. You could tell them it felt funny in some way, odd, different, but you couldn’t tell them it felt green. But suppose the simple fact was that that was precisely how it felt, no other way.” Robert shrugged. “So you’re stuck. Part of your mind tells you, ‘This is nonsense, this is impossible,’ but another part is telling you at the same time, very distinctly, that your hand feels green, no matter what it looks like. And if you aren’t used to this kind of thing, you can block the idea, or deny your senses, or sit chewing your nails down to the elbows trying to figure it out but you won’t find any way to explain it, or to accept it. Hand feeling green equals nonsense, and that is that.”

  Robert looked at Hank and grinned. “Don’t look so confused,” he said. “I know what I’m talking about. Because in that Threshold universe it just so happens that your hand can feel green. At least mine can. Not always, but sometimes. Just the same way that something on my tongue can taste bright. Or that something I see looks melodic in the key of A minor. Or something sounds slippery. It’s all the same thing. None of it is possible, but it’s there. You either adjust to it, or it drives you batty. And you can’t change it to fit in with your experience. You just have to add on a new item: ‘In this place, under these circumstances, for reasons I don’t understand and in a way I can’t comprehend, my hand feels green.’ “ Robert grinned. “So there you are. Clear as mud? Or do you see what I’m talking about?”

  Hank Merry shook his head. “I’m beginning to see why McEvoy’s investigators lost their wits, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Well, that’s a start,” Robert said. “Adults get their environments lodged pretty firmly in their minds. Tilt the environment a little, and they lie to themselves to overcome the tilt. Have you seen the tilt-houses that they have at the Hoffman Center? Where the walls and ceiling are painted on a slant, and you find yourself bending over trying to climb up a steeply inclined floor, when the floor is really as flat as a desk top? It’s a shock; your senses can’t adjust, so they start telling you lies. They say the floor has to be tilting up because the rest of the house tilts up; there just isn’t any house where the walls tilt up and the floor stays flat. Therefore, it’s impossible.”

  Merry nodded. “And if you throw too many ‘impossibles’ at a man all at once, he just blocks them all and withdraws.”

  “Exactly,” Robert said. “If the jolt is too rough, he may not come back, either. He may just stay withdrawn, or deranged, or whatever you want to call it.”

  The aircar hit a down draft and dropped fifty feet, then righted itself. The concentration of lights in New Haven District lay below them now.

  “Okay,” Hank said unhappily. “I’ll try to gulp that down; but how did your mother manage to come out better than the others?”

  “A combination of native ability and experience,” Gail said. “Call it a high adjustment threshold, or high adaptability. And I’d actually been working to learn how to adjust better. Even so, I couldn’t handle the Other Side. I still can’t. I can tolerate it for brief periods, nothing more. Then everything in my mind says it’s impossible, and I have to get out of there.

  “But Robert started crossing through when he had no conscious data in his mind at all. He literally grew up with it, so that the Other Side became as much a part of his normal experience, when he was there, as this side was when he was here. After all, a tilt-house only throws you because it disagrees with what your mind says is true, from long experience. Put a new-born baby in a tilt-house half the time and in a normal room the other half, and something different happens. The baby grows up recognizing that there are two places, inside the tilt-house and outside. He knows they’re different but neither one upsets him, because his whole experience tells him that one set of rules works inside and a different set works outside. He does fine, just as long as he doesn’t try to make ‘inside’ rules apply to ‘outside’ or vice versa.” Gail paused. “My husband thinks it may go deeper than that, with Robert, that he may actually be using some nervous system connections we don’t know about, or that aren’t normally in use. But whe
n Ed gets into metabolism and neuro-physiology, even I get confused.”

  The aircar had started dropping steadily now, and Springfield District lights spread out below. As they settled down to a landing slot on the roof of the Benedict apartment, Hank Merry sat shaking his head and looking at his hands and wondering how … how … anybody’s hand could conceivably feel green.

  14

  THEY HAD a quiet dinner, while Robert told Hank more about his experiences on the Other Side. Ed Benedict had little to say; he was upset about the brush with Security and worried about switching the aircar to manual to escape the dragnet. “Those people aren’t stopped by the Privacy laws if they don’t want to be,” he said. “Which means they’ll be fixing on you here in short order if we can’t block them. And Robert can’t drag the whole crew of us through to the Other Side to avoid them.” He looked at his son and shook his head. “You and your bright ideas! I’d better get the Medical Director on the line and brief him; maybe he can help discourage the Security people for a while. But if you have an idea of what can be done to untangle this mess, you’d better put it to work before we’re all in detention.”

  “I wish I really had a good idea,” Robert said. “All I can think is that somehow we have to make some kind of contact with the … the people … on the Other Side, to find out how the transmatter has been disturbing them.”

  “Have you ever had any contact with them before?” Hank asked.

  “Not really, that I can remember.”

  “Are you sure there are people there?”

  “Some sort of people, or beings, yes. And I’m sure they’ve been aware of me crossing back and forth.”

  Hank shook his head, perplexed. “It seems to me they must have made some kind of effort to communicate with you, at some time, if that were true.”

  “I think they have,” Gail interrupted. “A long time ago.” She looked at Robert. “Don’t you remember back when you were six or seven, those funny things you kept coming back with? Bits of metal, wood, paper? We never understood what they were supposed to be, but you used to tell us that you thought they were trying to make friends with you, and you didn’t know what to do about it.”

  Robert nodded. “Yes, I remember. They did seem to be interested, then, but nothing ever got through. And then they seemed to give up, and there hasn’t been any hint of it for a long time, for years.”

  “But now apparently there is, again,” Hank said.

  “Apparently.”

  “I wonder what would happen if you deliberately tried to contact them, in some way that might connect you up with the transmatter business.”

  “My idea, exactly,” Robert said. “But how?”

  “Well, it seems to me one form of contact would be an exchange of artifacts. It sounds as if they handed you that pencil for a purpose. Suppose you took it back to them, along with something else, say a flashlight battery. That might demonstrate that we have knowledge of electricity and magnetism, something we would practically have to be sharing with any physical universe.”

  Robert considered. “It might work,” he said finally. “Certainly it’s worth a try, and if we could exchange things that have any meaning to the Other Side, we’d have a chance of moving on from there — ” He looked at Gail. “Can we find a flashlight battery around here? And that pencil? I think I’d better go back on through right now.”

  15

  ONCE AGAIN, there was something indefinably different when Robert Benedict turned the odd corner to cross over into this strange, dark, silent place.

  Once again, he tried to sense what the difference was. After the first shock of the change, he stood very still, listening, peering around him, searching for the source. He was aware of the familiar jumble of confusing impossibilities here, the same distorted geometrical sensations as always, but there was something else now, too. It seemed to him, suddenly, that there had always been something more to his perception of this strange universe than the things he perceived with his ordinary senses. There had always been a strange atmosphere here as well, an aura, a vague, unnameable awareness, as though there were things he could feel about this Threshold universe from deep in his mind, as well as the things he could see and touch and hear. And now the difference he could feel that way was a sense of dreadful wrongness here which he had never felt before, and the overpowering feeling that this time the Thresholders had been waiting for him to come through.

  He felt the thump-thump of his heartbeat and his own labored breathing, as fear and panic began swelling in his mind. But this time he fought for control, deliberately forcing his mind into the hard, tempered channels that had always kept him safe here before. Something was wrong … but what? No sense of menace or danger … not that. Welcome? Not that either, exactly. Expectation? Perhaps. Hope? Closer … closest of all, maybe. A sense of hope combined with threat. Above all, a sense of time running out, a sense of desperation.

  He began moving. Not walking — his legs were a part of the crazy patchwork of geometrical shapes that whirled about him in this place, and he could not control them. But in response to the mental impulse that had always allowed him to move before, he and his body-patchwork began to shift and slide, floating gently downward, it seemed, to some other area of this place. It seemed to him that his body image — his shadow-self, as he had always thought of it — was split up more intricately than usual, separated in an odd fashion. As always, the shadow parts whirled about him in concentric circles, clearly ordered and revolving in perfect sequence (except that they turned corners). Not strange to Robert; that geometry had always seemed right over here, to his practiced young mind, the eternal kaleidoscopic switch and counterswitch of an insane but orderly geometry. A greater intricacy when he moved, but now something else as well. He paused, watched, listening, trying to crystallize the vague feeling in his vitals, the feeling he had never encountered before in seventeen years of crossing the Threshold.

  Fear.

  It swept through him like an icy draft, sending chills through his mind. Raw, naked fear, cutting into his mind like a razor, cold and unmistakable. Fear … but not his fear. Their fear.

  The Thresholders were desperately afraid!

  He knew they were all about him now, appearing as aberrations in the crazy-quilt pattern of things around him. As he moved, they moved with him, and their fear struck him like a physical blow, driving through him in waves, like a tightly directed beam. They were afraid, and more: they were trying to let him know they were afraid. Was that why they had detained him, before? Maybe. He couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure now of anything but this one certain thing: here, now, in this place, the Thresholders were in mortal terror of something.

  He racked his brain, trying to remember. Long ago, it seemed to him, he had sensed emotional contact of this sort before. Back when there had been some attempt to contact him he could remember sensing almost-human emotions here that he had thought were his own, yet clearly came from the universe around him: joy, elation, disapproval, even disciplinary impulses of depression and desolation. But never this desperation, this almost overpowering sense of fear.

  The impact was staggering. His own fear began to grow again, responding to the sense of impending disaster he felt here. He probed again with his mind, trying to gather impulses, something that he could comprehend, from the shower of emotion washing through his mind. They were afraid, they were trying to tell him so, but behind their fear was a grim, cold, sense of threat. They were trying almost frantically to make clear contact with his mind, but there was a barrier there, like a brick wall seven feet thick, that stopped them.

  And stopped him … as it always had. A barrier, unscalable, unbreakable, totally rock solid.

  Suddenly he wanted most desperately to cross back, to talk to Gail, to ask her what to do. He felt utterly helpless here, and longed for Gail’s steady eyes and careful way of trying to help him think. He was suddenly deathly afraid to stay here, afraid because of their fear. Something was horrib
ly wrong, but he could not guess what; all he knew was that it frightened him, and he wanted to get away from it, get away.

  Then he remembered the pencil and the flashlight battery. He had come here to give them those. He was aware that they were still part of his own shadow-body, and suddenly he hurled them away from him, crying out silently in his mind, “Here, take these, make something of them, I can’t do anything more, I don’t know how.”

  Something changed. Like a sudden lull in a violent gale, he felt the Thresholders’ fear recede. The pencil and the battery, part of his shadow-body before, now moved apart to form their own individual patterns of circles, and there was a pause, silent, breathless, waiting.

  Suddenly, something else joined the pattern of circles of his shadow-body, and Robert felt something cold to his senses, smooth and metallic. He couldn’t tell what it was but suddenly the sense of fear in his mind was gone, replaced by a feeling of warmth and reassurance. Once again he felt himself being moved, the strange object moving with him. Then he was back to the original crossing place, and nothing was holding him back now. Feeling drained and exhausted, he turned through the proper angle —

  And flinched at the sudden, familiar light of the apartment, with Gail and Hank Merry and his father staring down at his perspiring face. Robert stood up (he had come back sitting on the floor) and shook his head to clear away the familiar queasy sensation of crossing through.

  It was then that he saw the strange object in his hand: a dull gray metallic box.

  “What is it?” Gail Benedict asked, when she was sure Robert was all right. She took the box from his hands and turned it over. “How did you get it?”

  Robert shook his head. “I don’t know. They gave it to me, I think.”

  “But what are you supposed to do with it?”