“That’s right,” Gail said. “If the Thresholders really did try to contact him before, they got nowhere and dropped it. When their overtures fell flat, when they got what seemed like nothing but idiot responses, they quit bothering. After all, he wasn’t hurting anything, then. But now, suddenly, they have to establish contact with him, idiot or not. Because something this side of the Threshold is doing something that threatens them, something so terrible that they’re lashing back at us.”
McEvoy looked at Robert. “And you’ve come to a dead end? You can’t think of anything else you can do?”
Robert spread his hands. “Remember this no-contact thing works both ways, Dr.
McEvoy. If I’m an idiot to them, they’re also idiots to me. If I only had something to stand on—one single thing to get hold of—but I can’t think what. I can’t even find out what they’re so terribly afraid of. Any more than Hank can figure out why his machine in there is working in spite of him. When you think of all the air that that thing has moved aimlessly from one side of that lab to the other—”
Hank Merry looked up suddenly and snapped his fingers. “Yes,” he said softly. “Exactly.
I knew there was something.”
They looked at him. “What do you mean?” Robert asked.
“Something inconsistent. All that air, moving from Point A to Point B. Or those testing blocks, moved from Point A to Point B. We can’t deny it happened, and it seems to be driving the Thresholders to distraction, for some reason.”
“But what’s inconsistent?” asked Robert.
“You are,” Hank said. “This machine moved a test block from one side of the lab to the other, and caused trouble. But you picked up a test block in your hands and moved it from one side of the lab to the other and didn’t cause trouble. Why not?”
“Why, because I—I—well, I’ve been doing the same thing for years!”
“So I understand,” Hank said. “Without any trouble. But this gadget tries it, and there’s more trouble than you can shake a stick at, then and there. Why?”
Robert saw his point then. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. It must mean that from their standpoint we aren’t doing the same thing. From our standpoint, the test block gets from Point A to Point B in either case. But when I carried it, I carried it the right way, and when the transmatter carries it, it carries it the wrong way—”
“Like walking through a plate glass window to get outside,” Hank said.
John McEvoy looked up. “I don’t follow you,” he said.
“Well, suppose you wanted to move from Point A inside a room to Point B just outside a plate glass window in the yard. If you walk over to the door at the right, go outside, and then walk back to the window, the way is clear. Of course, you could go directly from Point A to Point B, too, but you’d have to go through the window to do it. You’d get where you wanted to go, but at the expense of a mess of broken glass.”
“But nobody in his right mind would do that!” McEvoy said.
“Not if he knew the difference,” Robert said. “But I think Hank’s right. Suppose you didn’t know the difference between the right way and the wrong way! Suppose you couldn’t see either the door or the plate glass window at all. You might do a whale of a lot of damage without knowing it, and then wonder why the landlord was suing you.”
“Exactly,” Hank said. “Apparently you have been going through to the Other Side the right way, and the transmatter has been shoving things through the wrong way. And as a consequence, we’re in trouble and getting into much worse trouble very fast.” He looked up at Robert.
“I wonder what would happen if you were to go through the wrong way, once. Through the plate glass window.”
In the silence that followed, Robert turned and looked at the transmatter, witlessly humming away and shoving volumes of air from Point A to Point B.
—18—
Gail Benedict protested the idea with a tenacity and stubbornness which surprised even McEvoy, first indignantly, then angrily, then bitterly, at last almost tearfully.
“It’s bad enough that the boy is the only contact we have at all, and it’s bad enough that he can’t even go through now without getting tormented and frightened and trounced. But now you’re talking about using him where you know there’s danger. You’re asking him to try something he may not be able to control at all, and to take chances that you can’t even guess at, much less begin to measure, and I’m not going to stand here and let you get away with it.”
“It’s the same universe over there, regardless of how he gets there,” Hank Merry argued.
“And he’s the same person, with the same brain and the same knowledge.”
“Maybe it’s the same universe and maybe it’s not. How do you know? The things you push through that machine are stirring up trouble. Robert never did. There’s a reason, there has to be. You have a volcano that may be about to explode and you want somebody to crawl down in the crater to find out why!”
“There’s no other way to find out, as far as we know. And Robert is the only one who has a chance.”
“But how do you know that even Robert has a chance?” Gail stormed. They argued on while Robert listened, looking thoughtfully at the transmatter. Even McEvoy stewed and fumed and wondered whether some other approach—he didn’t know just what—shouldn’t be tried first.
But ultimately, of course, it was Robert who decided. “There isn’t much choice,” he pointed out to Gail. “I’m scared to go through even the usual way, and I’m not getting anywhere doing that. Apparently they can reach out and grab me any time they want to, or at least they could up in Massachusetts. Maybe they had a fix on me up there so they could grab me easily, and now that I’ve gone somewhere else they’ve lost their co-ordinates.
Maybe they’re taking bites out of our living room right now, trying to grab me. I don’t know.
“It certainly looks like they’re trying to center in on this laboratory in a grand style, hit or miss, a grab here and a grab there at random. If you check the map, their aim is getting closer. That’s a guess—maybe they don’t even know there is a transmatter. And I can’t tell them anything, either. But maybe if I let the transmatter push me through, I can get some idea why it’s taboo and the usual way isn’t. If I can’t tell them that we want to help, maybe I can at least show them. If they can recognize me right at the center of the source of trouble, right down in the volcano’s crater, then maybe they’ll recognize that we at least know we’re causing some trouble and are trying to do something about it.”
Gail shook her head. “You don’t know what distortion there might be, going through that way. You don’t know what might happen to you, or what shape you might be in when you got back out. You don’t even know there’d be any way out again. Maybe the transmatter really is tearing things down and putting them back together again.”
“Well, what about it?” Robert challenged Hank. “Do you think that’s so?”
“No,” Hank said. “I don’t think it’s doing anything at all to the molecular structure of things. I can’t see any way it could be. It’s half dismantled. I don’t think now that it ever actually did what it was supposed to do. I think it’s been taking things and shoving them bodily through someone else’s backyard, that’s what I think, and somehow tearing up the neighbor’s garden in the process. I don’t think we’re dealing with subatomic forces here. I think we’re talking about spatial dimension and direction. We may be talking about the whole energy-structure of a universe. I’m not sure what we’re talking about, but I think we have to find out and very soon.”