The Universe Between (the universe between)

by Alan Edward Nourse

  That was her anchor, then. Her mind narrowed on that single thought. She was here, and this unbelievable place was here, too. There was nothing she could comprehend, but at least she was surviving. All about her she was aware of lines, angles, circles, but none of them were right, the way they should be. Three perfectly parallel lines which met each other at ninety-degree angles to form a perfect square with seven triangular sides…

  It couldn’t be!

  But it was. Right here, all around her. And she was here. It has to be so, she told herself.

  Adjust to it! She sensed that in crossing the threshold into this universe she had turned a corner, an odd corner, not like any corner she had ever seen before, but her own universe was just inches away, back around that same corner. And, even more strange, she realized that she could get back through to her own universe again any time she wanted to just by turning back through the same strange angle, now that she knew it was there.

  Like a desk with a secret drawer, she thought suddenly. Hidden, concealed from view, nobody could get in without knowing where the release spring was. Once you knew that, you could open and close it at will. Of course, you might discover the secret drawer by accident if you were sawing a corner off the desk, but even so, you wouldn’t be able to work it without knowing about the hidden release.

  What was it McEvoy had said? “We think it may be a three-dimensional slice through a fourth dimension.” And he was right. They had found the secret drawer by sawing the corner off the desk. Quite by accident the stresses they had been using on that tungsten block had inadvertently twisted a segment of three-dimensional space and torn a hole through into this place. Accidentally, they had thrown open a door, and nothing they had found inside had been comprehensible to anyone who had crossed through. A door into Nowhere…no wonder they had died of fright! With no training, no experience to fall back on. It was only her own individual experience, her own incredibly high ability to adapt that was shielding her now, and for all her skill her own mind was now reeling to maintain control.

  She knew that she could do nothing here. There was nothing that she could tell McEvoy that would make any sense, except that this place meant disaster to anyone who ventured here. No one but a high-adaptive would have the faintest chance of withstanding the mental shock she had encountered. Even she could never correlate anything inside this mad universe with anything outside. To do that, everything would have to be discarded; all the knowledge and data stored up through the years would have to be thrown out entirely, and there was no way that she could do that. No way anyone could do it…unless…

  Yes. There was a way; she saw it suddenly, with blinding clarity. Find a human being with a perfect, keen, intelligent mind with no conscious information in it at all. But how? The answer was obvious: the only possible way to study this incredible place was through the only human being who would even have a chance.

  A newborn baby. Start him from birth, first on one side of the threshold, then on the other. Let him grow up, first inside, then outside. Two sets of knowledge growing up in his mind about two mutually incomprehensible worlds. Sooner or later that child could go on either side with equal ease. And perhaps the time would come when he could learn how to relate one side to the other.

  Gail collected herself and looked for an entrance back to the outside, groping for the secret release spring. McEvoy was determined to bludgeon bis way in here, but a frontal attack would never work. Even she could never explore this universe. Others would die, or lose their minds, and nothing would be gained if McEvoy were not blocked. And there was nothing she could tell McEvoy that he would comprehend. The one thing that she could do to stop the mayhem would be to block him. Make him drop this investigation, force his hand, until the right way could be prepared.

  She smiled to herself, more in sadness than malice. McEvoy wouldn’t like it. He might even try to force her, but it wouldn’t matter. If he got too rough, she could always escape, come back inside to elude him. She didn’t need an artificial entrance any more, any place could provide entrance if you knew where to look. And he didn’t know there was a secret spring.

  She chose a spot near the place she had come through. As she turned that odd corner, leaving the dark alien universe behind her, she heard the vault door bursting open, and McEvoy’s hoarse voice shouting, “Gail! Hold on! We’re coming!”

  —7—

  She stood in the corner of the vault, closing her mind to McEvoy and all the rest, staring straight ahead of her and very carefully, deliberately blocking them out of her mind. The medical team lifted her up, carried her out into the control room and placed her on a stretcher. She held herself rigid. When somebody flashed a bright light in her eyes she winched involuntarily, but gave no other sign of recognition. Even Ed Benedict, leaning over her, begging her to speak, could not draw a response though she wanted to reach out and cling to him for dear life. She knew that she must not, dare not respond until she was far away from here, and McEvoy was thwarted, and the investigation stopped.

  They wheeled her down to the first-aid cubicle, and she heard voices all around her—confused, angry, frustrated. McEvoy was beating his fist on his palm in helpless fury as the Hoffman Center doctor worked and strained and finally got her knees bent so he could sit her up on a chair. He lifted her arm and released it; she held it suspended in mid-air as she gazed ahead without expression.

  The doctor scratched his head. “I don’t get it,” he said. “It looks like paranoid withdrawal, but I don’t think it is.”

  “You mean she’s going to go like the others?” McEvoy cried.

  “No, no. The others who lived were wild. She’s alive, and she flinches at the light, she’s just keeping tight control. That’s what I don’t get. I’d swear she’s putting it on deliberately.”

  McEvoy stared at her, unbelieving. “You mean you think she has the solution?”

  “I think so,” the doctor said. “I think she’s seen something and just decided not to tell you about it.”

  “Why, you cheat.” McEvoy whirled on the girl. “You sneaky little cheat!” He slapped her across the face with a heavy hand, started to drag her out of the chair by her blouse.

  She felt anger rising swiftly, almost beyond endurance. Just to let him have it, just to sink her teeth into that arm of his, just once…she knew it was showing on her face as the fingers of her suspended hand clenched into a fist. But then…carefully, carefully…control returned and she was gazing steadily ahead again.

  McEvoy released her roughly. “She’s got to tell,” he said to the doctor.

  “Maybe. Drugs may help jar it loose from her, once she’s recovered a little. Or electroshock, if the drugs won’t do it. But Ed Benedict isn’t going to like that, I warn you.”

  “Hang Benedict! Get him out of here. Don’t let him near her. And keep her under guard around the clock. She’s going to talk, or I’m going to know why not.”

  Gail stared fixedly at the wall as they turned to leave. Poor McEvoy, she thought. He means it, too. And he couldn’t possibly understand a single thing I could tell him. She smiled.

  There was a way, eventually…but not McEvoy’s way. And she knew now that she couldn’t stay here and let them probe. A stubborn problem McEvoy could cope with. A stubborn human being was something else. As the men stopped in the corridor and turned to lock her into the cubicle, Gail took a deep breath and turned the strange, invisible corner that she had learned about.

  The last thing she saw was John McEvoy’s unbelieving face as he stared slack-jawed into a suddenly empty room.

  Part Two

  The Universe Between

  —1—

  It was going to be a bad day. Hank Merry knew that, before his feet hit the floor that morning.

  Hank was too practical a man to believe in psychic emanations, but he knew the crawly feeling of Trouble Coming Up when it met him at dawn, and this day felt like Trouble. He just didn’t know how much trouble, was all.

  First,
he’d overslept—an old failing of his that even modern twenty-first century technology couldn’t seem to beat. His alarm blew a tube during the night and failed to ring.

  The fancy multiple-mirror contraption rigged outside his fourteenth-story window also failed (the sun didn’t come out that day); and his call-signal went blinking on the lab switchboard over in Jersey for thirty-five minutes before an answering servo got a circuit free to key in his emergency wake-up call. So when the metallic taped voice from the lab finally blared out cheerfully from the telephone speaker: GOOD MORNING DOCTOR MERRY IT IS SEVEN

  O’CLOCK AND PLEASE THROW YOUR CUTOFF SWITCH AT ONCE OR I WILL BE

  LOCKED ON THIS MESSAGE FOR THE REST OF THE DAY it was really 7:45, and his regular 7:30 TV session on the mathematics of wavicle conversions was already three blackboards deep in symbols, and he was so lost it would take him two hours over library tapes that night to catch up. And at that, he would still get an absentee mark for failing to flash his check-in signal to the prof before the session began.

  With one eye on the wall screen Hank tossed a breakfast pak into the crisper to heat, and pulled the day’s fresh shirt and trousers from the shelf of disposables in the corner. He was usually quite skilled at shaving, watching the TV brain session and cooking breakfast all at the same time; but today he lost the professor’s line of reasoning, then jammed his shaver halfway through his shave. He swore at it and fiddled for ten minutes to get it running again, forgetting his breakfast until the toast was scorched, the eggs hard-boiled and the cereal very crisp indeed. He ate them sourly as the TV session progressed, doodling circuit diagrams on a handy scratch pad at the same time.

  He remembered now what was waiting for him at the lab that day. Aside from the maze of wires, tubes, transistors, transmogrifiers and activated Hunyadi plates that were always part of his day, there would be a crew of frantic technicians waiting to tell him that the circuits he’d set up yesterday hadn’t worked. He already knew this, because at eleven o’clock the night before, as he dozed off to sleep, it had dawned on him that he had totally ignored the effects of feedback in one of the critical loops. This meant that when the boys ran a test charge through it after he left the lab, the whole circuit probably went up in a cloud of smoke.

  A bad day. He just didn’t know yet how bad.

  By nine o’clock the TV session was over and Hank’s aircar was waiting on the building roof. The sky was overcast with the peculiar gray-white you saw when the city’s weather shield was catching a heavy snowfall, and he was re-routed as far south as Atlantic City District because of the low-flying traffic congestion. He stared down at the sprawling East Coast city below as the little aircar finally swung north again toward its destination: the big new Telcom Laboratories building just west of Newark District. Something caught his eye: the high-rising office buildings being erected on the concrete footings that spanned the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey. Great, bare steel girders, half-finished buildings, and not a sign of a work crew or welding flare on any of them. Another bottleneck, Hank thought grimly. No steel. Only a trickle from the mills these days, and that seemed to go to South America or Singapore or some place. Of course, sooner or later there was bound to be steel again, and soon even Manhattan District (still fighting to remain an island in the face of the ever-rising metropolitan congestion) would be indistinguishable from the rest of the tight, sky-scraping city that stretched from Maine to Virginia and from the tip of Long Island to the Alleghenies.

  Finally Hank Merry’s aircar set him down on the laboratory roof, only two hours late, and handed him an automatic receipt for his fare, which had already been charged against his bank account. In the big central dispatching room, the green blinking light on the call board showed that McEvoy hadn’t checked in yet…might not be in all day in fact. Probably more conferences down in Washington District, Hank thought gloomily.

  The chief seemed to spend most of his time down there these days, walking the tightrope for government funds and trying for the hundredth time to reassure the Joint Conference Committee on Interplanetary Resources that Hank Merry’s transmatter really did have a chance of a breakthrough, if he could just get a prototype model built for testing. Of course, Hank suspected that even McEvoy had his private doubts; Hank’s approach was radical, and so many other attempts in the last ten years had failed. Sometimes Hank himself wondered if his whole approach to matter-transmission didn’t have a hole in it big enough to throw a cat through—one reason that he was working and worrying at the lab from twelve to fifteen hours every day and spending another six hours studying anything and everything that might fill in some of the holes in his knowledge of physics, mathematics and engineering.

  Because somebody had to build a practical, working transmatter, and do it soon. There was no question about that.

  The elevator let him off in one of the sub-basement rooms where his brain-child—this awkward machine he had been building for the last eighteen months—was under construction. Already its circuits and components filled half a dozen rooms, winding through corridors and covering two full floors of lab space. It reminded Hank of a house he had once seen as a child which contained a huge pipeorgan, with the pipes filling basement and attic, packed into the walls and buried between the floors, so that when you pressed one key of the organ the whole house shook. Aside from his machine, there was a whole warehouse full of giant generators down below, standing ready for the day that the staggering amount of power he knew the finished machine would require in a full-scale test would be demanded.

  Such a simple thing, in theory. To take a single cubic centimeter of solid matter at Point A, decompose it into its component sub-atomic wavicles, transmit them like radio waves to a receiver at Point B and there reassemble them in their original order, shape and relationship, atom to atom. If you could do it with a few grams of steel, you could do it with millions of tons of ore from the deserts of Mars, eventually. Such a simple thing, matter-transmission…yet so very elusive when you actually tried to do it.

  The whole future economy of an overcrowded and slowly starving Earth hung in the balance while laboratories all over the world labored to find the secret.

  In the main workroom a couple of long-faced technicians met Hank Merry at the door with the long-faced tale he had been expecting. Not just one day’s circuitry burned out; the idiots had hooked it up to an activated Hunyadi plate during the test, fusing the delicate sheaves of silver mesh in the plate and cooking five hundred gallons of a very special colloidal protein suspension into baked custard…

  Hank Merry sighed and dug in for the day.

  —2—

  When John McEvoy trooped in some eight hours later, he found his young protégé still working amid a great heap of papers, test-calculations, crumpled-up notes, and reams of circuit diagrams. The ruined Hunyadi plate had been dismantled and its components sent up to the shop for salvage, if salvage was possible. One section of the transmatter circuits looked as if a giant hand had reached in and torn out the wiring on one great swipe.

  “More trouble, eh?” McEvoy said, surveying the wreckage.

  Hank nodded gloomily.

  “What happened?”

  “Feedback, overload, and blooey. My fault; I should have called last night. It smelled this morning like somebody had been burning feathers in here.” He waved a hand at the burned-out wiring. “Come on, give me a hand here.”

  McEvoy nodded, and together they set to work on the wiring. Hank had noticed the dejected sag of the old man’s shoulders when he came in, the tired lines around his mouth.

  John McEvoy looked far older these day than the spry sixty-three he really was; he still had his stubborn jaw and he still beat his fist against his palm when Fate refused to yield to him, but his hair was now snow white—a recent change—and he always, always looked tired.

  McEvoy had never been cut out for politics, yet now he was constantly meeting with politicians, committee heads, bureaucrats, underlings, and the t
housand other servants, leaders and hangers-on of the International Joint Conference of Nations that served as the main governing body of the world of March 13, 2001. Now, as McEvoy worked with Hank, he seemed to relax, as though getting his hands on wires, transistors and circuit breakers was a joy. He was eager as a boy with a new kampbell kit.

  “Down in Washington again today?” Merry asked casually.

  McEvoy nodded. “Another Joint Conference meeting, only full dress this time.” He broke off, waved a red-colored wire. “Where does this one go?”

  “Right there,” Hank told him.

  “Wonder you don’t go crazy every day with a ball of snakes like this to work with,”

  McEvoy grumbled. He peered again at Hank’s new diagram, then at the circuitry they were building.

  “I know,” Hank said. “And this is only one small part of it. It’ll be two more months before it’s even built, much less ready to test.”

  They worked in silence; two hours later, they leaned back to regard their new batch of wires, and grinned at each other. “That should fix this part, anyway,” Hank said. “There’s still a lot more to be built, but we can test-run this circuit.”

  “Fine, let’s try it.” McEvoy stood up and yawned. Against the west wall of the lab the transmitter plate with its plastic dome was solidly mounted on stainless-steel pillars, with the eight-inch test block of polished aluminum planted in the center of it. Thirty feet across the room was the receiver plate, similarly mounted. A technician was fiddling with a maze of wires connecting the transmitter to the long row of upright sheets of silver meshwork coated with protein colloid, standing like soldiers at attention. These were the precious Hunyadi plates so critical to Hank’s whole approach to the transmatter. Patiently now, Hank and McEvoy re-checked the newly laid circuits before testing them under power. Much of the circuitry of the machine wasn’t even devised yet, much less built, but at least Hank knew where he was going. Now he took a note pad, nodded to McEvoy and said, “Go ahead, close the circuit.”