—14—
They had a quiet dinner, while Robert told Hank more about his experiences on the Other Side. Ed Benedict had little to say; he was upset about the brush with Security and worried about switching the aircar to manual to escape the dragnet. “Those people aren’t stopped by the Privacy laws if they don’t want to be,” he said. “Which means they’ll be fixing on you here in short order if we can’t block them. And Robert can’t drag the whole crew of us through to the Other Side to avoid them.” He looked at his son and shook his head.
“You’and your bright ideas! I’d better get the Medical Director on the line and brief him; maybe he can help discourage the Security people for a while. But if you have an idea of what can be done to untangle this mess, you’d better put it to work before we’re all in detention.”
“I wish I really had a good idea,” Robert said. “All I can think is that somehow we have to make some kind of contact with the…the people…on the Other Side, to find out how the transmitter has been disturbing them.”
“Have you ever had any contact with them before?” Hank asked.
“Not really, that I can remember.”
“Are you sure there are people there?”
“Some sort of people, or beings, yes. And I’m sure they’ve been aware of me crossing back and forth.”
Hank shook his head, perplexed. “It seems to me they must have made some kind of effort to communicate with you, at some time, if that were true.”
“I think they have,” Gail interrupted. “A long time ago.” She looked at Robert. “Don’t you remember back when you were six or seven, those funny things you kept coming back with?
Bits of metal, wood, paper? We never understood what they were supposed to be, but you used to tell us that you thought they were trying to make friends with you, and you didn’t know what to do about it.”
Robert nodded. “Yes, I remember. They did seem to be interested, then, but nothing ever got through. And then they seemed to give up, and there hasn’t been any hint of it for a long time, for years.”
“But now apparently there is, again,” Hank said.
“Apparently.”
“I wonder what would happen if you deliberately tried to contact them, in some way that might connect you up with the transmatter business.”
“My idea, exactly,” Robert said. “But how?”
“Well, it seems to me one form of contact would be an exchange of artifacts. It sounds as if they handed you that pencil for a purpose. Suppose you took it back to them, along with something else, say a flashlight battery. That might demonstrate that we have knowledge of electricity and magnetism, something we would practically have to be sharing with any physical universe.”
Robert considered. “It might work,” he said finally. “Certainly it’s worth a try, and if we could exchange things that have any meaning to the Other Side, we’d have a chance of moving on from there—” He looked at Gail. “Can we find a flashlight battery around here?
And that pencil? I think I’d better go back on through right now.”
—15—
Once again, there was something indefinably different when Robert Benedict turned the odd corner to cross over into this strange, dark, silent place.
Once again, he tried to sense what the difference was. After the first shock of the change, he stood very still, listening, peering around him, searching for the source. He was aware of the familiar jumble of confusing impossibilities here, the same distorted geometrical sensations as always, but there was something else now, too. It seemed to him, suddenly, that there had always been something more to his perception of this strange universe than the things he perceived with his ordinary senses. There had always been a strange atmosphere here as well, an aura, a vague, unnameable awareness, as though there were things he could feel about this Threshold universe from deep in his mind, as well as the things he could see and touch and hear. And now the difference he could feel that way was a sense of dreadful wrongness here which he had never felt before, and the overpowering feeling that this time the Thresholders had been waiting for him to come through.
He felt the thump-thump of his heartbeat and his own labored breathing, as fear and panic began swelling in his mind. But this time he fought for control, deliberately forcing his mind into the hard, tempered channels that had always kept him safe here before.
Something was wrong…but what? No sense of menace or danger…not that. Welcome? Not that either, exactly. Expectation? Perhaps. Hope? Closer…closest of all, maybe. A sense of hope combined with threat. Above all, a sense of time running out, a sense of desperation.
He began moving. Not walking—his legs were a part of the crazy patchwork of geometrical shapes that whirled about him in this place, and he could not control them. But in response to the mental impulse that had always allowed him” to move before, he and his body-patchwork began to shift and slide, floating gently downward, it seemed, to some other area of this place. It seemed to him that his body image—his shadow-self, as he had always thought of it—was split-up more intricately than usual, separated in an odd fashion. As always, the shadow parts whirled about him in concentric circles, clearly ordered and revolving in perfect sequence (except that they turned corners). Not strange to Robert; that geometry had always seemed right over here, to his practiced young mind, the eternal kaleidoscopic switch and counterswitch of an insane but orderly geometry. A greater intricacy when he moved, but now something else as well. He paused, watched, listening, trying to crystallize the vague feeling in his vitals, the feeling he had never encountered before in seventeen years of crossing the Threshold.
Fear.
It swept through him like an icy draft, sending chills through his mind. Raw, naked fear, cutting into his mind like a razor, cold and unmistakable. Fear…but not his fear. Their fear.
The Thresholders were desperately afraid!
He knew they were all about him now, appearing as aberrations in the crazy-quilt pattern of things around him. As he moved, they moved with him, and their fear struck him like a physical blow, driving through him in waves, like a tightly directed beam. They were afraid, and more: they were trying to let him know they were afraid. Was that why they had detained him, before? Maybe. He couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure now of anything but this one certain thing: here, now, in this place, the Thresholders were in mortal terror of something.
He racked his brain, trying to remember. Long ago, it seemed to him, he had sensed emotional contact of this sort before. Back when there had been some attempt to contact him he could remember sensing almost-human emotions here that he had thought were his own, yet clearly came from the universe around him: joy, elation, disapproval, even disciplinary impulses of depression and desolation. But never this desperation, this almost overpowering sense of fear.
The impact was staggering. His own fear began to grow again, responding to the sense of impending disaster he felt here. He probed again with his mind, trying to gather impulses, something that he could comprehend, from the shower of emotion washing through his mind.
They were afraid, they were trying to tell him so, but behind their fear was a grim, cold, sense of threat. They were trying almost frantically to make clear contact with his mind, but there was a barrier there, like a brick wall seven feet thick, that stopped them.
And stopped him…as it always had. A barrier, unscalable, unbreakable, totally rock solid.
Suddenly he wanted most desperately to cross back, to talk to Gail, to ask her what to do. He felt utterly helpless here, and longed for Gail’s steady eyes and careful way of trying to help him think. He was suddenly deathly afraid to stay here, afraid because of their fear.