“But I think you lost it,” Gail said innocently. “We thought you might like to know it was found.”
“There are thousands of pencils around this place,” McEvoy said angrily.
“But this one turned up in our living room, several hundred miles from here, under rather peculiar circumstances.”
McEvoy looked at her for a moment. Then he picked up the pencil again, inspected it closely. “I don’t get it,” he said finally. “What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything,” Gail said. “I’m saying point-blank that you’ve been working on the Threshold project again.”
“The Threshold project!” McEvoy stared at her, then burst out laughing. “Fat chance I’ve had to work on that. Do you know what you did when you ducked out of here that day after you went into the vault? You closed the Threshold project down tight, that’s what. It’s never been reopened since. We were working with an unpredictable, the directors said. Too dangerous for experimentation. Like fooling with an atom bomb in a downtown office building. They closed me down, and that was that. Thanks to you, I might say. And right now I’m too busy trying to get another project under control and raking government investigators out of my hair to want to talk about it very much, since that earthquake in New York.”
“You think that was an earthquake?”
“I don’t know what it was,” McEvoy said. “I’m just a physicist. But a lot of people seem to think I ought to know what it was. Now, if you don’t mind—”
“I could make a guess,” Gail said. “A very good guess.”
McEvoy’s eyes narrowed. “Guess? What would you guess?”
“That the New York thing was not an earthquake and that nobody so far has any explanation for it at all. And that the heat is on you, as one of the nation’s leading physicists, to try to explain it.”
McEvoy shrugged and sank back in his chair. “All right. I haven’t been to bed in almost thirty-six hours, and my switchboard hasn’t let up for fifteen seconds in all that time. I spent three hours last night at an emergency session of the Joint Planning Conference, just trying to convince them that I didn’t know what happened in New York. So what are you getting at?”
Gail pushed her hair back from her ear. “Another guess,” she said. “That the transmatter you and your staff have been building has suddenly started working. At approximately the same time that the tip of Manhattan vanished. But that it isn’t working quite right, somehow, and that one of the items you were using to test it was a colored lead pencil that went into the thing and never came out again.”
For a long moment John McEvoy studied Gail’s face. Then his jaw set, and he reached for a phone. “Janet? Hold my calls—yes, all of them, I don’t care who it is. And tell Hank Merry to get up here with his transmission data, all of it, and fast.” He set the phone aside, and turned back to Gail. “All right, I think we’re going to put our cards on the table. I don’t know what you know about the transmatter, or think you know, but I can’t see any possible connection between our machine and chunks of cities disappearing. Right now my main concern is that any stories leaking out about our transmatter could very well precipitate an international crisis of major proportions.”
“Then you do have a transmatter working,” Gail said.
“We do. It’s working poorly, inconsistently, but it’s working.”
“And you started testing it first very shortly before the tip of Manhattan disappeared—am I right?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. About eight hours before. But I can’t see what connection there is—”
“A very simple connection,” Gail interrupted him. “What happened in New York was no natural disaster. There’s reason to think that it was a carefully calculated, premeditated blow—very possibly a retaliatory blow—and that something you have been doing with your transmatter was the direct cause of it. This thing that happened in Philadelphia may have been a second blow, and there may be more to come. Worse ones. These may just have been warnings.”
“Warnings from whom?” McEvoy demanded. “About what?”
“From the Thresholders. About what, I don’t know, except that I’m certain that it’s connected with your transmatter.”
“You mean to say that a little fourdimensional hyper-cube has some kind of power to whack off a chunk of a city the size of New York?” McEvoy stared at her, incredulous.
“Preposterous!”
“Not preposterous,” Gail said. “I’m not talking about a little four-dimensional hypercube.
There’s another entire universe that we were in contact with in the Threshold project, a whole, organized physical universe. It lies side by side with our own, except that its natural laws are different from ours. The two may be superimposed on each other, maybe even share the very same atoms, for all we know. But in that universe, from our point of view, there are extra spatial dimensions.”
She paused for a moment, while McEvoy continued to stare at her.
“There is a crossing point between our universe and theirs, like a tissue-thin divider,”
Gail went on. “A divider that’s invisible to us and probably to them too, so neither side had ever been aware of the other’s existence, until you punched a hole through the divider with your ultra-low-temperature experiments twenty years ago. You didn’t mean to do it; you didn’t even know the divider was there. But apparently you were focusing energy on a single tiny point and broke through. And you couldn’t handle it. You couldn’t even investigate, but there was a universe beyond that divider, all the same. You pulled back then because you had to; now I think you’re somehow punching more holes through, and somebody or something on the other side is getting hurt for some reason and is striking back. And we have no idea what power they may have to strike back with.”
Throughout the discussion Robert had remained silent, staring out the window at the gray, overcast sky and trying to remain unobtrusive. Until now. McEvoy had studiously ignored him, but now he sat back, staring first at Gail and then at Robert. “You keep saying ‘we,’ ” he said finally, “and you seem to know a whole lot about this—this other universe.
How have you found out about it? And just whom do you mean by ‘we’?”
Gail nodded toward Robert. “My son and I. But mostly Robert. And I don’t know a whole lot about the Other Side, other than what Robert has learned.”
“How has he learned anything?”
“From experience,” Gail said. “The only way anybody could learn anything about it—by crossing through. Robert has been going across to the Other Side and back ever since he was a baby.”
—12—
Downstairs, Dr. Hank Merry led them through a labyrinth of half-assembled-electrical and electronic equipment to the large laboratory room that housed the transmatter. Merry looked red-eyed and weary, his sandy hair askew, two days’ stubble on his chin. One lab bench was littered with paper, coffee cups and the debris from half a dozen box lunches; a cot against the wall had obviously been slept in.