They came up with nothing whatever but a frustrating sense of failure, and the uneasy certainty that that failure was somehow, inexorably, leading to disaster beyond their imagination.
A busy, overpopulated planet, bursting its seams, hungry for the materials with which to build and grow, utterly unable to reach out for them because of the extortionate, bankrupting cost of reaching. A planet whose people violently needed, not just wanted, but needed those inaccessible materials if they were ultimately to survive. A people faced with the alternatives of war and waste, hatreds, pogroms, riots, bloodshed, violent depopulation, and reversion to conditions so primitive that no one alive could begin to remember what they were like; and along with that reversion, the loss of all that had been gained by those people over the centuries, the utter waste of their minds and capabilities, an end to the growth of knowledge and potential that had always been the legacy of human beings.
And so pointless, with the goal so near. For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe a horse was lost; for want of a horse a battle was lost; for want of a battle, a kingdom was lost.
Men searched for that elusive nail and found only a pile of iron filings with no means to fashion a nail from it. Not that it couldn’t be done; the laws of Nature declared that iron filings and an iron nail were part and parcel of the same substance. It was the how that baffled men. It was natural law that bound men and their space ships to the surface of their planet with the steel hoops of gravity, and natural law that made the transport of precious ores from Mars to Earth an economic disaster to contemplate. But other laws of Nature had hinted vaguely (as laws of Nature do) that other means of transport could be found, and the Transmatter Project was born—a way to bypass the barrier of gravity and the exhaustingly costly rocket launchings and the staggering problems of re-entry with worthwhile payloads.
To men like Hank Merry, confident that the laws of Nature could be discovered and then used in the service of men, the transmatter had been a challenge, a problem to be solved, nothing more. Vastly important, that problem, but solvable.
And so it was, perhaps, until suddenly the transmatter had seemed to leap the barrier of natural law and behave as nothing could behave, uncontrolled and uncontrollable by the men who had devised it in flat contradiction of what ought to be so. In Hank’s search for a way to harness natural energies, his machine had inadvertently trespassed into a terra incognita, an area not even suspected, much less understood, where the laws of Nature seemed suspended, with what grim results nobody could guess.
And in a laboratory in New Jersey a machine, never actually completed, now half-dismantled, continued quietly to hum away, busily moving molecules of air from Point A to Point B in its own obscure fashion, and trespassing upon…what?…at the cost of…what?…and controllable…how?…and with something else…what?…on the receiving end not liking it a bit…and slashing back…how? and why? and to what end?
Above all, why? and to what end?
They had talked, and argued and speculated and come up with no answers. Merry told them of McEvoy’s frantic plea. “I’ve got to go back, and without delay,” Hank said. “I’ve got to try to find out why that wretched machine continues operating when it can’t be operating, and see what, if anything, I can do to stop it.” The others had to agree to that, and then there was the Joint Conference to think of, and McEvoy to think of, and the destruction of eighteen months of hard, painstaking work to think of. There was also physical danger to think of, if bits and pieces of the eastern seaboard were being chopped off and carried to perdition by some angry force across the Threshold. After much discussion it was finally decided that Robert and Gail should go back with Merry, if only in the hope that John McEvoy, on hearing what they had discovered, might think of some fresh lead for them to follow.
For Hank it was especially infuriating because something was in his mind, just out of reach of his consciousness; something that he had thought of before that was now eluding him, that might offer a route of exploration. He wasn’t sure if it was something he had just forgotten, or something he had rejected as ridiculous, back when many things had seemed ridiculous that didn’t seem so ridiculous now; but forgotten or blocked, it kept nudging his mind, and grope as he would, he couldn’t quite recapture it.
So ultimately they had flown back down to New Jersey, after considerable argument from both ends with Security to guarantee unobstructed passage, and at length were met by a gray-faced McEvoy who looked old and tired and didn’t seem to know whether to greet them with his usual half-angry bluster or to burst out crying. It was a baffled McEvoy, bad enough to Hank, who could not remember ever having seen McEvoy truly baffled before; and worse, a helpless McEvoy who somehow couldn’t seem to do the right thing no matter which way he turned. Consequently, perhaps for the first time in his life, he simply sat there immobilized, not so much because he couldn’t figure out what to do as because he couldn’t figure out what not to do.
In the laboratory office, with the transmatter making its ominous whirring sound in the vaulted lab outside the door, they told McEvoy what they had found, what had happened, what conclusions they had drawn from these things. Hank made a swift examination of his machine, already dismantled far more than he had imagined McEvoy would dismantle it, and still puffing away at the air like some kind of idiot steam engine. McEvoy, for once in his career, had listened with care, and not interrupted with his own burgeoning ideas, and nodded when he caught something and ticked down a note when there was something he thought he had missed.
McEvoy came to the same conclusion that they had come to earlier. “So our contact man is an idiot, to them,” he said glumly. “Or seems to be, at least.”
“Probably only seems to be,” Gail offered. “A newborn baby in this world behaves like an idiot, too, you know, to someone who doesn’t know any better. It has no symbols in its mind, nothing but instincts at first. The baby may have enormous potential, but until it learns about its surroundings from experience, and then learns to connect words up to things, he continues to respond like an idiot.”
“That I can understand,” John McEvoy said. “But Robert isn’t a newborn baby.”
“He may be the perfect equivalent on the Other Side,” Gail said. “Robert can cross the Threshold, something he learned how to do, and has been practicing for a long time. And he can observe that universe on the Other Side. But what he observes is limited by his human nervous system. The physical universe around him there is tolerable because one part of his brain is packed full of experience—information for survival—that applies to that side of the Threshold. But the way Robert’s brain is constructed, he simply can’t handle their symbols.
He isn’t built right. It’s like trying to teach a dog to sing ‘Mother Machree.’ All you get are barks and howls, if you get anything at all. The dog simply hasn’t got the equipment to sing ‘Mother Machree,’ and if the ability to sing is your criterion of dog intelligence, then in that framework every dog on Earth is a canine idiot and always will be.”
McEvoy nodded, fiddling with the black modeling clay. He had looked at the gray box earlier, but didn’t touch it; he was nervous having a gadget around that could disintegrate walls at the touch of a button. “So if the Thresholders have symbols to express their thoughts, Robert can’t pick them up, so his reactions continue to seem imbecilic to them.”