Something was horribly wrong, but he could not guess what; all he knew was that it frightened him, and he wanted to get away from it, get away.
Then he remembered the pencil and the flashlight battery. He had come here to give them those. He was aware that they were still part of his own shadow-body, and suddenly he hurled them away from him, crying out silently in his mind, “Here, take these, make something of them, I can’t do anything more, I don’t know how.”
Something changed. Like a sudden lull in a violent gale, he felt the Thresholders’ fear recede. The pencil and the battery, part of his shadow-body before, now moved apart to form their own individual patterns of circles, and there was a pause, silent, breathless, waiting.
Suddenly, something else joined the pattern of circles of his shadow-body, and Robert felt something cold to his senses, smooth and metallic. He couldn’t tell what it was but suddenly the sense of fear in his mind was gone, replaced by a feeling of warmth and reassurance. Once again he felt himself being moved, the strange object moving with him.
Then he was back to the original crossing place, and nothing was holding him back now.
Feeling drained and exhausted, he turned through the proper angle—
And flinched at the sudden, familiar light of the apartment, with Gail and Hank Merry and his father staring down at his perspiring face. Robert stood up (he had come back sitting on the floor) and shook his head to clear away the familiar queasy sensation of crossing through.
It was then that he saw the strange object in his hand: a dull gray metallic box.
“What is it?” Gail Benedict asked, when she was sure Robert was all right. She took the box from his hands and turned it over. “How did you get it?”
Robert shook his head. “I don’t know. They gave it to me, I think.”
“But what are you supposed to do with it?”
“I don’t know.”
Ed Benedict looked at his son sharply. “You look bushed,” he said. “They didn’t try to hurt you, did they?”
“Oh, no…no. Nothing like that.” Robert rubbed his head. “It’s confused. They were really trying to get something across to me, this time, and they were afraid. Then when I gave them the pencil and the battery, they gave me that, whatever it is.”
Hank took the box from Gail and studied it closely. It was square, with beveled edges all around, colored a dull metallic gray. About six inches square, Hank guessed, weighing a pound and a half. It felt solid. In the center of one side were four shiny studs; otherwise, there was no break anywhere in its surface. Hank turned it over in his hand, shook it, held it to his ear. “Beats me,” he muttered finally. “It seems to be sealed at all the seams.”
Ed Benedict looked at the box and handed it back to Robert. “Try to think, son. What could this thing be?”
Robert shook his head again. “I just haven’t any idea.” He examined the box, trying to remember the last, fleeting sensation he had felt before crossing back—the sudden relaxation of fear and threat, the odd feeling of warmth and encouragement. “I know it sounds silly,” he said, “but I had a peculiar feeling when they gave me this that it was a toy of some kind. Something for me to play with. They were afraid, and they were threatening me, in a way—maybe even trying to frighten me. Yet I felt they were giving me a toy. To play with!”
Robert frowned and bent over the odd gray box, fingering the shiny studs on the side.
“Maybe it’s supposed to make music,” he said. “Or maybe if I press one of these buttons the thing will open up—”
Hank Merry shot out his hand in alarm, trying to stop the boy, but he was too late. Robert had already pressed the first button on the side of the box—
And they watched appalled as the entire wall between the living room and kitchen crumbled gently into dust.
—16—
For a long moment they stood staring in disbelief. The wall had been there a bare instant before, with its painting, its bookshelves, the door into the kitchen. Now tiny whirlwinds of dust rose from a heap of dry powder, and a slight gust of air stirred through the gaping hole.
Robert Benedict stared first at the wall, then at the gray box, horrified. Gail whispered,
“Robert! What did you do?”
His hand trembled, and he dropped the thing as if it had burnt him. “Nothing. I just pushed a button, nothing more. It—it didn’t even make any noise!”
Hank Merry was down on his knees examining the box again. He touched the smooth surface gingerly, felt the slight increase in warmth. Ed Benedict joined him, but Hank shook his head. “Don’t come near it,” he warned. “Don’t even touch it.” He leapt to his feet and crossed the room to peer at the smooth edges of the gutted wall. No ragged border, no rubble, as though a sharp knife had sliced a hole out of the middle of it, eight feet in diameter. The cut edges looked totally undisturbed, almost polished.
Hank picked the box up again and looked at Robert. “That’s quite a toy you brought back,” he said soberly. “Didn’t they warn you about it?”
“When they gave it to me? No. Just the opposite, in fact. I had the feeling that they wanted to please me, make me feel better. They seemed to know I was scared half out of my wits, and this was supposed to make up for frightening me, or something.”
Ed Benedict walked through the hole in the wall into the kitchen. A corner of the table was gone there, but no other damage. He stooped to run his fingers through the pile of dust.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “They must have been trying to tell you something, or show you something.”
“They were,” Robert said. “I’m certain of it. They were trying urgently to contact me. That was part of what was different. They’ve never seemed to want to bother, before.”
“But this time they did,” Hank Merry said grimly.
“I thought so,” Robert said helplessly. “Oh, they’ve tried to contact me before, in a way.
Every now and then I’ve gotten impressions from them. Feelings, inside me, the way you suddenly feel very happy about something, or suddenly feel bad because you’ve done something wrong. Only those feelings I had were never really mine. I knew that I wasn’t feeling anything at all; whatever it was, was being pushed into my mind from outside, from them. Their feelings, the Thresholders.”
“Only this time something new was added,” Ed Benedict said.
“Yes,” Robert said. “At least, this was the first time I ever felt fear. They were afraid of me, or of something to do with me. And I had the feeling that unless I did “what they wanted, they would do something to me, and that made me afraid. And then they gave me that box.”
Hank Merry had been listening quietly through all this. Now he turned to Ed Benedict.
“Maybe I’m dense, but something here just doesn’t add up. In all the time Robert has been crossing into this…universe…he’s never felt any threat at all?”
“Not in the slightest. Any more than walking into a dark closet and closing the door would be a threat. If he’d ever been menaced in any way, we would have stopped it then and there, at least until Robert started doing his own deciding,” Ed smiled ruefully. “We don’t decide for him, now. He does his own thinking, and he can be very stubborn when he wants to. Just like his mother.”
“But even though he can cross through at will, there’s still a barrier between him and these Thresholders?”
“Not a physical barrier,” Ed said. “More of a semantic barrier, a barrier of symbols and meanings. Look at it this way: two people can only talk about something if they both use the same symbols—words, for instance—to refer to the same thing. You and I can talk about that gray box there, and discuss it, and puzzle over it, and perhaps reach some conclusions about it, because we’re both using the same words and referring to the same thing: a gray box that we both saw behave in a certain peculiar way. But if we were discussing hunting, and I talked about going hunting bear, and you talked about going hunting bare, and neither one of us realized we weren’t referring to the same thing, we’d have trouble reaching agreement, wouldn’t we?”