“Then let’s find out,” Robert said shortly. He cut off Gail’s protest. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but once I’ve gone through there I think I can get back out again.” He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. “Hank, let’s get going. How do I go about it?”
“Probably just climb up on the transmitter plate,” Hank said. “That’s where the draft is moving like smoke down a chimney. If that doesn’t do it, we’ll try—”
Robert shook his head impatiently and climbed up on the transmitter plate. What happened then was too fast for any of them to comprehend. Gail stared and burst out sobbing. Hank gripped the lab bench until his knuckles were white, totally immobilized. They all stood frozen as they watched, and only later tried to piece together exactly what they saw, or thought they saw, in that brief instant.
Robert disappeared like magic from the metal transmitter plate and reappeared in the precise same instant on the receiver plate. Followed in the same instant by a second Robert, and a third, and a fourth…
Multiple Roberts, moving jerkily back to the transmitter plate, like the images thrown by an old, shaky motion picture camera run far too slowly, like shadow images on a TV screen when the aerial is out of phase, flick, flick, flick, Robert-1, Robert-2, Robert-3, moving back and vanishing again, one by one but all together on the transmitter plate, and in the same instant another Robert reappearing on the receiver plate, but a different Robert; an oddly twisted, distorted, crooked-shaped sort of Robert, the same Robert, not so much different, not in the least horrible, but out of phase, wrong…but even if a crooked Robert, an unhurt Robert who moved back to the transmitter plate again.
And did not reappear at all.
—19—
To Robert it was different, totally different, from anything he had ever experienced crossing the Threshold before. He was unaware of what the others in the laboratory room had seen: to him it seemed that for the first time in his life he couldn’t cross through. Something, some force, was pushing him in, powerfully, but just as powerfully he was being thrust out again.
He couldn’t seem to get planted, couldn’t turn the corner because the angles were all wrong, like nothing he had ever seen before, and there was this steady, almost palpable impelling force behind him pushing, and another force meeting him head-on and pushing him back. It was like a rubber ball with a dent in the side: every time you pushed in one side the other side popped out, with a net gain of zero.
And then, after repeated tries (in spite of what they later said they saw, Robert knew he had made a dozen tries and then lost count) he caught hold of something (or something caught hold of him) and he was indeed truly inside, crossed through and holding still, the two opposing forces were suddenly gone, like a gale-force wind that dies abruptly, leaving the canvas that had been ballooning out to fall suddenly slack.
He was through all right, but to a different universe than he had ever encountered before.
Darkness, yes, only not the velvety black darkness he knew from before. There was a gray darkness here, a fog that wavered and swirled and obscured vision most of the time, only offering glimpses through it at rare intervals. Silence, yes…well, no, not silence so much as a continuing background layer of sound just maddeningly at the edge of audibility, bursting through sometimes, then fading (or almost fading) yet never quite gone. The same ordered confusion of the physical space around him, except that the order wasn’t quite as orderly as before, but strangely disordered part of the time.
The same Threshold universe as before, but a strange, distorted, shadow universe that he could hardly convince himself was real. Crooked and wrong. Not threatening. Not dangerous. Not even frightening. Just not right. A shadow- universe that wouldn’t quite come in focus for him, somehow, no matter how hard he tried to pin it down. A wavering in-and-out-of-phase universe, and confusing, most confusing, because he couldn’t, be sure from one instant to the next that he hadn’t slid back across into his own time and space again.
Through the fog, in brief flickering glimpses, it seemed to him that he saw his own uniyerse…only not quite his own universe…like his universe, but with things in it that were most definitely, emphatically not his universe, structures that were no part of Earth structures, people that were almost Earth-people yet unmistakably not of Earth, lines, curves, dimensions that were almost but not quite Earth geometry and dimensions.
And in between, the old Threshold universe that was so much more comfortable to him than this new not-Earth universe, fading in, fading out, back and forth…
The shifting made him begin to feel dizzy; he wanted to grab something to hold onto, felt a piercing headache, tried to focus solidly just for a moment. And then, when the dizziness was reaching a point he could hardly stand, there was a moment of sharp focus, very clear, each detail etched sharp as a razor’s edge, and he stared around him at a universe he could hardly believe at all.
Not a four-dimensional incomprehensible universe, but a three-dimensional universe of length and breadth and height. A place with buildings, people, but not his universe. The interior of a great laboratory room, but an unfamiliar room, with no sign of Gail or McEvoy or Hank Merry there; instead a room filled with strange people, odd people but unmistakably people, crowding around him in excitement. Frightened people, angry people, worried people, desperate people, looking at him, talking, gesticulating, supplicating,. interrogating, all at once in a language he had never heard before, but a language—a language of words.
It lasted only a few seconds, that brief flash of clear focus before the fog returned, and then, suddenly, the fog too was gone and he was in the old, familiar incomprehensible Threshold universe he had known for so long, and the Thresholders he had encountered before were there again, and the fear was there again, coldly, far more intense than ever before, spiraling to the breaking point. A blanket of fear pressing down as if to smother him…
His own panic returned. Seventeen years of experience and training for a task he couldn’t perform. But it had to be performed now, he knew, and performed well. Once again he sensed that he had left behind a secure and solid universe of air and sky and cities and people and entered a universe of danger.
The people here were afraid—horribly afraid—and their fear struck Robert now like a solid force sledge-hammering his mind, driving deep into the marrow of his bones, seeking some way to break through the barrier to touch him with ideas, with insight or understanding.
They were afraid to the point of desperate action, now, and he knew that insight—real communication of ideas—was his only hope. The Thresholders were at the breaking point, desperate beyond expression.
But Robert knew something else, and the realization struck quite suddenly: that the Thresholders had already contacted him, in a way. He could feel their fear, sense their desperation. If he was a blind man here, he was not totally blind. If he was an idiot, there were glimmerings of comprehension coming through, because he knew their fear, he felt it, and it was something different from the fear in his own mind that rose up in response. This fear came from them, somehow conveyed to him in unmistakable form.
Extrasensory perception? Perhaps…but more than that. An intuitive leap, a guided jump from one idea to another without any symbols to guide him. An educated guess, perhaps, but a guess based on something. No change in the barrier, perhaps, but here was a way of by-passing it. Not breaking it down; not burrowing under it or climbing over; simply letting it stand where it was and reaching beyond it.