“It scared me, and I got out of there as fast as I could. I was half sick to my stomach for some time afterwards, it gave me such a jolt. So I decided to walk home.” Robert hesitated.
“I decided maybe I’d better talk to you before I crossed through again. And then all this hubbub at home. What’s wrong, anyway?”
Ed Benedict looked at his son and then at Gail. “I guess mostly we just don’t like coincidences,” he said. “We’re worried about something going on that we don’t know about.”
“Like what?”
“Like the disaster in New York last night,” Gail said. “Something took a bite out of New York City, a big bite, and nobody has any idea what the something was, or what happened to the piece that got bitten off. It was no earthquake. The cleavage line is sharp and clean as polished marble. It took a great hole out of the harbor below the waterline, too. I don’t know any force on earth that could do that without leaving some sign of something in its wake. And neither does anybody else, as far as I can see. “It’s almost—” she hesitated—“almost as if it vanished into another world.”
Robert Benedict saw what Gail was trying to say, and a shiver crept up his back.
—7—
“It doesen’t make sense,” Robert said later, when dinner was over. “There’s never been a Threshold big enough to engulf a whole chunk of a city. And even if there were, why? Why connect this business up with the Other Side at all? It seems to me you’re making an awful reach.”
Ed Benedict filled his pipe, settled back in the soft living room chair. “I suppose it is,” he said, “except that there are some other things, too. Coincidences, maybe, but just too many coincidences. For one thing, there’s a transmatter being built down at the Telcom Labs in Jersey, and all of a sudden the security lid has gone down on it so tight that nothing is coming through. Up until now, there’s been no great mystery, just a bright young guy building a prototype machine, with regular news reports on his progress. Now all of a sudden, the guy and his machine are in the middle of a Condition B news blackout which began within an hour or so of the New York thing. Coincidence, of course, except that a transmatter project is fooling around with enormous physical energies focused on an extremely small area of space.”
“You think a transmatter just dissolved the whole tip end of Manhattan?” Robert asked incredulously.
“Well, not quite,” Ed replied. “Not without the energy going somewhere, and there’s been no sign of it. It’s just that—well, look: if you knew somebody was busy building a magnifying glass out in space big enough to gather half the radiant energy of the sun and focus it on Earth, and then all of a sudden the world caught on fire, you’d suspect some connection, wouldn’t you?”
Robert scratched his head. “I suppose so. But I thought transmatters were just laboratory toys, at this stage.”
“They always have been, but Dr. Henry Merry has been using a different approach to matter transmission than most other people who had fiddled with it.” Ed shrugged. “Okay, that coincidence I could choke down, but the fact that there’s a man named John McEvoy mixed up in the middle of it I can’t choke down.”
“You mean the research director at Telcom?”
Ed Benedict nodded. “He was the one who opened up the first Threshold, twenty years ago. Your mother worked with him briefly, until she found out why unprepared people couldn’t deal with the Other Side, or even investigate it. She left the project then, and McEvoy was very bitter about it. But he dropped it, all the same.”
“At least we thought he did,” Gail added. “Now we’re beginning to wonder.”
“I see,” Robert said. “You think there’s a connection between a transmatter project and the Other Side and a piece of New York disappearing. I don’t get it, but I know something was different on the Other Side today. And I’d surely like to know what, if I’m going to keep on going through there.”
“That’s what your father and I were arguing about,” Gail said. “We don’t think you should go through, until we know what’s going on. But somebody needs to go through, to try to find out if something has happened over there. I think it should be me.”
Robert stared at her. “What good would that do? You know how it shakes you up, even when you’re just taking a short cut. Let’s face it, you’re pretty clumsy in there. If somebody has to find out something on the Other Side, it had better be me.”
He was right, of course, and Ed and Gail both knew it. Now Robert realized that that was precisely the thing that had been troubling them all evening. Because he, at least, could cross back and forth with impunity. He, at least, could move from the orderly three-dimensional universe he lived in through the curious, twisting angle into that other world with all its dimensional nightmares and geometric absurdities without having his wits jogged loose. He had been crossing through and back from infancy; now the crossing that was so violently disturbing to unprepared, rigid adult minds was as commonplace to Robert Benedict as tying his shoelaces.
He knew that that incomprehensible universe did indeed exist, side by side with his own three-dimensional universe. And that universe across the Threshold was just as real to him on the Other Side as a dish of ice cream was real on this side. It was just built differently, shaped by a different geometry, with at least one more spatial dimension than this universe.
He got bogged down trying to explain it to anyone, or even to understand clearly himself just precisely what the Other Side was “on the other side of,” but he could go there when others couldn’t. His mind had enough experience with the Other Side so that he could tolerate what he found there where other minds blocked, rejected and short-circuited out.
But comprehend or explain—that was something else.
How do you explain the unexplainable? It was the wrong wording, of course. All his life Robert had been tripping over words that weren’t quite right to express what he had experienced on the Other Side. How do you describe something that you know exists because you’ve encountered it time and again, but which nobody else can fit into the world they know about in any way, shape or manner? How do you express feelings when you aren’t sure yourself what they are? Gail and Ed had patiently tried to help him get around this very strange barrier of meanings, yet even Gail and Ed were helpless. They knew that what he told them about the Other Side meant something…they just couldn’t understand what it meant. Only he knew what it meant, sometimes, in rare flashes of comprehension, but even he couldn’t explain what it meant in this world.
Some things he knew. There was a world that lay just across the Threshold, a Threshold to a dimension that didn’t exist in three-dimensional space. That world was real; there were people there, or creatures, or beings, or inhabitants, or whatever you wanted to call them.
These “Thresholders” were intelligent; Robert was certain of that. They lived in a structured universe governed by natural laws just as Robert’s own three-dimensional universe was governed, except that the natural laws were different from any that existed in Robert’s world.
And he was able to pass through…to cross over this dimensional Threshold…into the universe on the Other Side with perfect ease and simplicity, just by turning a corner. But he couldn’t point out that “corner” to anyone else. In fact, “turning a corner” was a totally inaccurate way to describe what it was that Robert did to get there. “Corner” implied three dimensions: length, width and height; and the “corner” that Robert “turned” had nothing to do with any of these. When he used that phrase, he was like the blind man who said, “I see that John is here,” when he heard the voice of a close friend in the room. The blind man actually