“Well—of course. That’s simple basic semantics. You’ve got to agree about what your word refers to.”
“Fine. But suppose there’s nothing in the Threshold universe that we can describe with any words or symbols. Suppose there’s nothing in our universe that the Thresholders have any word or symbol to describe. How do we communicate? How do we make any contact at all? We see a gray box here that plays funny tricks; it came over to this side in Robert’s hands. But suppose that gray box is something completely different on the Other Side.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know…any more than Robert does.” Ed Benedict spread his hands. “Dr. Merry, we’ve been trying to breach this barrier ever since Robert was knee-high to a grasshopper.
We’ve never made it. He has literally grown up in two universes, this side and that side.
We’ve had every psychological investigator in the whole Hoffman Center organization climbing the walls trying to figure out what is actually happening in Robert’s mind. Nobody has any answers, except that Robert probably has a brain that is different from any other human brain in the world.”
Merry frowned. “You mean its physical structure is different?”
“Oh, no,” Ed said quickly. “Not anatomically. A neuro-anatomist would find that he has a brain made up of nerve cells just like anybody else’s, in roughly the same number as anybody else, arranged in the same way, with the same circuits. There’s no physical difference. It’s a difference in the behavior of those nerve cells, and a difference in the way data is stored in his mind. For one thing, we’re virtually certain that Robert is actually using a lot more of his brain than most human beings.
“Normally,” Ed went on, “a human being has a bilateral brain structure, a brain divided into two symmetrical halves, with nerve connections just like computer circuits connecting them. And since the early 1900’s we’ve known that the human body is controlled almost entirely from one side of the brain, except for the visual apparatus and some other sensory centers, taste, touch and so forth. But almost all body movement, voluntary or involuntary, and practically all the memory storage is handled by one side only. Usually for a right-handed person it’s the left side of the brain that does the work, and vice versa for the left-handed person.”
“Okay,” Hank said, “but I don’t see what that has to do with Robert.”
“Maybe quite a lot,” Ed replied. “Usually if the inactive side of the brain is damaged suddenly—a bad concussion, say—there isn’t much change in control of body activity. But if the controlling side, the dominant side, is injured the same way, you can have all sorts of changes: paralysis, loss of memory, the works. If too much controlling brain tissue is damaged too suddenly, the party is out of luck. But sometimes when the damage to the dominant side comes on slowly—say from a brain tumor slowly destroying nervous tissue—the brain’s control can be transferred to the inactive side. People who have been partially paralyzed by strokes or bullet wounds can sometimes even be taught to use the undamaged side of the brain, a transfer of data and function on a large scale. And if it works, they can often be restored to normal function in spite of the damage.”
Ed smiled at Robert, who was examining the gray box again closely. “As far as we can tell, Robert is different from most people. He doesn’t have this transfer of information from one side to the other in the ordinary sense of the word. He doesn’t seem to have any large inactive brain area, either. Instead, it appears that he may have grown up with two separate and distinct nervous systems, each one controlled by a separate half of his brain. One side for this universe, one for the other. Two completely separate sets of data, experience, knowledge, with no significant crossover between them at all.”
“But there must be some connection,” Hank said. “Some way to correlate information on one side with information on the other.”
Ed hesitated. “Well, there are certainly cross-connections between the two sides, one thing that Gail doesn’t have. That’s what makes it possible for Robert to cross through and back in comfort. The data in his mind for one side is completely useless on the other, but he can correlate to some degree by comparison or analogy. He can also remember on one side what happened on the other. In fact, he can tell us practically everything that his senses pick up over there; he just can’t tell us what those things mean. Nor has he ever been able to use his experience to predict what happens next. Of course, that was all right as long as it was safe for him to go through, as long as he wasn’t frightened, or hurt, or damaged in some way. But when it comes to bringing back little nightmares like that box there, we’re dealing with something else altogether.”
“I guess we are!” Hank agreed. He walked over to inspect the disintegrated wall again.
“And he thought it was a toy! More like a loaded gun, I’d say. For a toy, it packs a whale of a wallop. Well, at least it’s something tangible he brought back from that side, and he left something over there that he didn’t bring back. I’m just very glad that transmatter is turned off until we can explore what’s going on over there, hard as it may be on the boy. I’d hate to think what they might start doing if they really got mad at us.” Hank frowned, looking around.
“Speaking of Robert, where did he go?”
Across the room the video-telephone suddenly rang, cutting sharply into the quiet room.
Gail Benedict flipped the speaker switch, listened a brief moment. “Just a moment,” she said. “I’ll put him on.” She nodded to Hank, her eyes puzzled. “It’s McEvoy,” she said, “and he says to use the scrambler.”
Hank crossed the room to the phone, saw McEvoy’s worried face on the screen. As he was punching the buttons of his personal scrambler code to unlock the electronically garbled words from the wire, he realized vaguely that Robert had been gone from the room for some time. “Well, John, what is it?”
McEvoy looked terrible, with his face unshaven and his eyes incredibly tired and harried. His voice sounded terrible too, a scratching grate that was half incoherent even unscrambled. “Hank, you’ve got to get back down here, no matter what’s going on there.
This gadget of yours is running amok.”
Something stirred in Hank’s mind, something very unpleasant. “I thought you’d shut it off,” he said sharply. “You mean it’s still operating?” He glanced around the room again; where was Robert?
McEvoy’s voice dissolved into a string of expletives. “You bet your life it’s still operating!” he howled. “What do you think I’m talking about? You leave me with this Frankenstein here, and you take off on a joy ride. I tell you—”
“John, what’s been happening down there?”
“I can’t stop it, that’s what. Look—I spent six hours yesterday with the Joint Conference Committee. I laid it on the line to those vultures, told them outright that the transmatter had to go off for a while. I even took the legal staff with me to block any move they might make. Yes, they were ready to slap an injunction on us to keep it operating, with the weight of the World Court behind it. I invoked the Rights of Privacy laws and endangered our whole Joint Conference budget for the next ten years and finally won twenty-four hours, twenty-four hours, mind you, before they would get a court order to take possession of our blueprints and wiring diagrams to turn them over to somebody else to work with. I understand some Russian has been using Hunyadi plates too, and could pick right up where we quit. But I got twenty-four hours’ grace, and called on the spot for your boys to break the circuits, and they broke the circuits, all right, cut off all the power—”