“Oh, Robert, honestly!” Gail said, the relief and annoyance in her voice fighting it out to a draw. “I told you not to go anywhere.”
“I didn’t, exactly,” Robert said.
“Then how did you end up two feet off the ground?”
“I don’t know about that. I just know I was plenty scared. Something is way out of key on the Other Side and I haven’t got the slightest idea what. Except that I was right in the middle of it and they were all around me.”
“The Thresholders?” Ed said.
“Yes.”
“I thought they always ignored you.”
“They always have, before. Not this time.” Robert pulled off his shirt; it was dripping with sweat. “We’ve got one answer, though: they know when I’m there, all right. They were waiting this time, and they moved in on me fast.”
“But why?” Gail said. “They’ve never bothered you before.”
Robert shook his head. “I don’t know. They seemed to be trying to keep me there, trying to keep me from moving, or maybe pushing me some direction they wanted.” He took a deep breath. “Whatever “it was, it scared me silly. And then when I tried to cross back, something seemed to hold me, and then all of a sudden something shoved me out. I didn’t come of my own accord.” He paused, scratching his head. “But I had the funniest feeling that they were threatening me.” He frowned. “No, not threatening, exactly. More as if for the first time they were trying to tell me something.”
Gail and Ed Benedict looked at each other. Robert got to his feet, tested his legs, and sank wearily onto the couch. “Well,” Gail said finally, “I’m afraid I agree with your father. Too many coincidences. The news blackout on McEvoy’s transmatter project, this business in New York, and now something funny going on across the Threshold…it’s too much.” She looked at her son. “Was there anything else you can pin down?”
“Not that I can think of, except…well, there was something there that was colored. I’ve never seen colors before. This was red and yellow and green, I think, something that got closer to me just before I was pushed out. I almost felt I had something in my hand when I came back through, but I couldn’t have…or else I dropped it…”
He broke off, staring at the object that was lying on the floor where he had fallen. Gail Benedict reached down, picked it up. A simple thing, with red, yellow and green spirals running down its length…but it had not been in the room before. Gail looked at it closely, then held it up for Ed and Robert to see. “I guess we can forget about coincidences,” she said flatly. “If we needed proof that John McEvoy is fooling with the Threshold again, here it is.”
The object was an ordinary lead pencil, painted in colored spirals, with the words Telcom Laboratories printed on its side in gold leaf.
—10—
The aircar journey down from Massachusetts to central New Jersey was abnormally long and difficult. Aircar routings were ordinarily handled automatically by the traffic-pattern computers in Atlantic City District of the eastern metropolis, but today they had been thoroughly disrupted by the strange disaster in New York. The whole lower Manhattan area was barred to traffic except for emergencies and official vehicles; some routings had been taken over by human operators to try to avoid bottlenecks and pileups. Even so, Robert and Gail had to wait almost two hours while several thousand south-bound cars were delayed over Westchester District, and then were ultimately re-routed north as far as Buffalo before circling south again toward their destination. Both Gail and her son were tired and tense, totally uncertain what reception would greet them at the Telcom Laboratories. And their apprehension was increased tenfold by a sudden flurry of garbled reports from the aircar radio that the top three floors of an office building in central Philadelphia had suddenly vanished in to thin air at eight thirty that morning, executives, typists and all…
The appearance of the colored pencil in their Springfield District apartment the evening before—the pencil Robert had inadvertently brought back from the Other Side—had made it obvious that something had to be done. There was only one possible conclusion: someone at Telcom Laboratories was tampering in some way with the Threshold project again, and the New York disaster could not possibly be coincidence.
The question was, what to do, and how? Robert and his parents had talked half the night, trying meanwhile to contact Dr. John McEvoy by telephone. No success: all messages to the Telcom switchboard were being answered by mechanical servos that stolidly requested names and numbers so that calls could be returned, but offered no information.
Ed Benedict then tried to reach McEvoy through Hoffman Center channels; supposedly there was close liaison between the huge medical and psychological research center and Telcom. But even these channels had failed. A security curtain had fallen that nothing seemed to pierce.
“But we have to reach him,” Gail said. “It might take weeks for McEvoy to return our contact, if he ever does, and we don’t dare wait that long. He may not even know what he’s doing. Oh, I think he probably does, but we can’t be certain.”
“He may not listen to you, even if you do reach him,” Ed pointed out.
Gail sniffed. “He’ll listen to me, all right, don’t worry about that. He may try to wring my neck—but he’s been wanting to talk to me for a long, long time. And if we’re right that he’s fooling with the Threshold again, he’ll have to listen, sooner or later.”
“Why?” Robert said. “Suppose he’s just scratched you off his list.”
“Look—if that city business was a planned, purposeful reaction on the part of the Thresholders to something that somebody is doing to them on this side, it isn’t going to be the last disaster that occurs. I don’t know what they did with that chunk of Manhattan, or how they did it. I can’t even guess what they might be able to do if they wanted to. But we do know they recognize that Robert comes from this side, and that pencil business suggests that they’re trying to communicate something to us in some way. We’ve just got to contact McEvoy.”
Ed Benedict puffed on bis empty pipe. “Well, there’s one other way. The Hoffman Center has an emergency line to Telcom that can bypass a Condition B blackout if necessary.” He sighed, picked up the phone, and threw the scrambler switch. “I may have to tell the Medical Director a pretty colorful story to convince him it’s really an emergency without saying just why, but he can put the arm on McEvoy.”
Thirty minutes later Gail heard a familiar voice on the line—angry, impatient, but unmistakably McEvoy. And fifteen minutes after that, as morning light was breaking over Long Island Sound, Gail and Robert were in an air-car heading south.
They hadn’t heard of the Philadelphia incident, then.
—11—
John McEvoy looked much older than Gail had expected, when she and Robert were shown into the small office on the eighth floor of the Telcom Laboratories building. She had seen him on TV often enough in recent years, but she was not prepared for the white hair or the tired crow’s-feet around his eyes. He pushed back from a desk as she came in, rising to his full six feet and glowering at her.
“So,” he said heavily. “Gail Talbot, after twenty years. Except that it’s Gail Talbot Benedict now, and this time it’s you coming after me.”
“That’s right,” Gail said.
“You don’t do things by halves, do you?” McEvoy said bitterly. “When you ran out on me, back then, you picked the worst possible time you could have chosen. Then you got married to the one man who might have helped me get you back to work with me, and damned near had me jailed for invading your privacy. So now you turn up again, at the worst possible time you could have picked. I haven’t got enough trouble in my own lab, I have to have this New York business dumped in my lap as well, and now the same thing happening in Philadelphia…” He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Do you have any idea of the number of people I’ve had crawling down my throat in the past twenty-four hours? Eighteen hours I’ve spent just talking on that phone—” he stabbed a finger at the offending instrument—“trying to make up answers to questions I don’t know the answers to, and now you, of all people, have to turn up. Well, I don’t have time to chat, especially about a lead pencil of all things!” He tossed the colored pencil down on the desk in disgust.