They went back to the transmatter. Shifting the receiver to a far corner of the room, they set the rheostats for the proper distance, then placed a shiny steel ball-bearing in the transmitter. It appeared in the receiver, unchanged. McEvoy insisted on trying the funny pencil again. This time it disappeared altogether; McEvoy bellowed in outrage, but the receiver plate was empty. For two hours more they worked, transmitting a dozen small objects—pins, neckties, cigarettes—with varying degrees of success. Finally McEvoy threw up his hands. “Hank, is there any reason you can see why this thing should be working so erratically?”
“I can’t see why it works at all,” Hank said. “But it does. Even if it fouls things up. The cigarettes went through unchanged. The key was reversed, and the light bulb exploded the instant it appeared in the receiver. Something isn’t working right in the scanner plates, the ones that are hooked in, or in the receiver, or somewhere. I don’t know. Maybe if I tear it down and re-analyze—”
“Tear it down?” McEvoy roared. “Never! Build another one, following the pattern of this one but don’t even touch this one until we know why it’s doing what it does.”
“But I can always rebuild it.”
“Maybe. And maybe not.” McEvoy turned to him. “Look, Hank, think for a minute.
Whatever makes it go, we’ve got a working transmatter on our hands! That by itself will hold up any government action until we can get the bugs ironed out.”
McEvoy pulled on his hat and coat. “I’ve got to get on the line to Washington now and get some planning started. You order up any work crew that you need, spend whatever you need, but keep this thing working and make it work right. And we’ll clamp down a security blackout with full government sanctions. If word of this thing leaks out, you’ll have every TV
and newspaper reporter in the hemisphere sitting on your doorstep tomorrow morning.
We’ve got half an answer here; now we’ve got to get the rest of it. But we can’t afford a news break until we have something to say.”
Hank Merry went back to the transmatter, while McEvoy went up to begin dragging sundry company and government officials out of bed and onto scrambled telephone circuits.
Hank was glad McEvoy could handle that; for him it was enough for one day to be facing an enigma he couldn’t explain, the designer of a machine that couldn’t possibly be working, but was, all the same. It would be a sleepless night, and somehow he had a sneaky hunch that the news would leak out, and that Telcom Labs would be neck-deep in newsmen by morning, no matter what security measures were taken. He was glad to let McEvoy worry about that, too.
After a quick cup of coffee he sent out a call for an overtime crew of technicians and engineers. A few minutes later he was back at work again. He was right about the sleepless night, but many hours later, as dawn was lightening the eastern sky, he learned that he was wrong about the reporters. They had a bigger story to cover, far more amazing than the vague rumors that had filtered out from Telcom Laboratories. During a coffee break, Hank switched on an early morning newscast, and learned that during the night the lower end of Manhattan Island had swiftly and silently vanished into the sea.
—5—
Robert Benedict stamped the snow off his insulated boots, checked the safety on the old shotgun on his arm, and sat down on a handy stump, pushing blond hair out of his eyes and staring across the fields to the lights of the city beyond the valley.
He was on a rise of land near the edge of the woods, with a good view across the Massachusetts countryside. He wriggled his toes in the wet boots, heard the water squish inside them, and grimaced. Mom would have a fit if she found out he had gone hip-deep through the ice in the swampy woodland area where he had been hunting. She was dead sure that he was going to drown one day, but then, Mom worried about everything, as if he were five years old instead of seventeen. After all, if you were going duck hunting, you had to go where the ducks were and take a calculated risk of getting doused once in a while.
It wasn’t really the wet boots or his mother’s worry that was bothering Robert Benedict just now. He had been out tramping the woods since classes were over at three o’clock, counting on his usual short cut to get him home quickly when it began to get dark, and now he was wishing that he hadn’t taken the short cut even this far. It was a two-mile hike down across the valley to town in wet boots, but he wasn’t about to cross back to the Other Side again to shorten the walk.
Not now. Because something was wrong on the Other Side, and that was what was worrying Robert Benedict.
He scratched his head and tried to pin down what had bothered him when he crossed through earlier to start on his trip back. It was hard to get hold of. No particular change over there, exactly, yet something had been very different on the Other Side. Different enough to shake him up thoroughly for a moment, even to frighten him, and with Robert Benedict, that was something that took some doing.
After all, he had been crossing the Threshold back and forth for as long as he could remember. The Other Side was as commonplace to Robert as this side was. But always, before, he had crossed freely and easily, and this time, for a long, jarring moment, it had seemed that something on the Other Side was trying to keep him from crossing back.
He stood up now and started down the hill. It was almost dark, but he knew the trail well.
Of course he could cross through again for a short cut…but he shook his head and plodded on. Better not to, until he could at least check with Mom. She was a pain about some things, but she had some pretty sharp ideas about how to deal with things on the Other Side.
Half an hour later, as he reached the paved road and weather-screen of Springfield District, Robert was wondering if he might have been imagining things. This had been a funny day in other ways. First, Mom and Dad had left for the Center at Cambridge just as he was getting up, which was unusual in itself. When Mom had to go in at all, she had always planned things so that he had had breakfast and gotten holed up with the tape scanner in the study before she left. Then during TV classes today he’d been called on four times in a row and couldn’t answer once, thanks to skipping his tape-reading the night before, so he got an extra hour of reading assigned for tonight. And then those crazy news reports about Manhattan District…some kind of earthquake, except that the reports were so garbled they didn’t seem to make sense.
All in all, he’d been glad to get away by himself this afternoon; sometimes he got to feeling awfully cramped and hemmed in. Dad once said that it was probably part of the price he had to pay for being able to cross through to the Other Side at will, nice to know, maybe, but strictly no help when he needed open air and space to move around in.
Now he shrugged the thought aside. Here under the weather shield there was no snow, but he was cold and wet and wanted to get home. He flagged down a cruising aircar, and soon was riding high above the ranks of tall apartment houses of Springfield, using his father’s bank code for the fare register. He could square the fare with Dad somehow at the end of the month if Ed Benedict happened to notice it on the bill. Sometimes he even squeaked by free.
—4—
As it was, nobody seemed to notice Robert’s watersoaked boots when he came into the Benedict living room, nor his unusual lateness either. His father and mother were both watching the late newscast; when he tramped in, Gail just waved to him abstractedly and Ed shushed him up when he started to say something. There was an odd tension in the room, as if he had interrupted a heated argument that he wasn’t supposed to know about.