Guesswork! his mind told him as his fear rose steadily. Very dangerous guesswork.
Who could tell if the guesses were right or wrong? But if a wild guess was all that was available, why not? They had gotten something through to him. Couldn’t he get something through to them? Something was wrong here; he needed to know what. He couldn’t ask, nor could they tell him. But maybe they could show him!
He fought to stabilize himself, to concentrate his thoughts and focus them on a single idea, a single spearhead to thrust out. “Show me what is wrong.” He pushed aside everything else—his fear, his knowledge of the place, his memory of his own universe, everything, and thrust out with that one idea, that one bolt of thought. He thrust it out with all the concentration and strength he could muster, hoping in the face of pure hopelessness that it could pierce the dimensional armor of this universe and the people around him so that they could comprehend it: “Show me! You can’t tell me, show me what is wrong!”
Incredibly, something changed. A pause, a sag, as though some terrible pressure had suddenly been released. Their fear was still there, biting into him, but there was something else. He was aware of his body around him in its curious configuration of orderly disorder, its fragments whirling about him like sections of a crazy quilt. Two concentric circles of different radii intersecting each other at three different points. Twisting cubic masses interlacing themselves into the jumbled incredibility of a geometric nightmare. The blackness was around him, the cold of the place dug into him and the fear hung around him like a cloak. He had the hallucinatory sense of being torn apart, roughly, in a jagged line from top to bottom and of seeing, unclearly, the parts of his body in mutilated distortion. Did he appear to them as some grotesque geometric distortion, a crooked, twisted, impossible mass of lines and shadows and forms? He must; they couldn’t possibly see him as he saw himself in his own place. Yet something had happened, now he could sense that the Thresholders were all around him, with a pervading sense of excitement.
He brought his mind back to the same spearhead idea again and again, driving it out to them again and again: “Show me what’s wrong! Show me!”
Suddenly he was moving, away and downward through bottomless areaways of inky emptiness, down a bottomless spiral, with his own fear seeping back into his mind, growing, blossoming, exploding into horrible fear as he went down and down. Now he was struggling, clinging for dear life to the brink of something into which he dare not go, yet a force was pressing him forward, hurrying him with increasing speed. Like someone banging cymbals rhythmically in his ears, louder, louder, louder, he was moving (or being moved) to a place in this universe that was utterly intolerable to be near, totally unbearable. And then, abruptly, they were no longer with him. They had brought him here—crash, crash, crash went the cymbols, ever louder—and now they had deserted him. They were gone.
And Robert Benedict was writhing and twisting and screaming in the center of cataclysm.
There was no other word for it. This was no Threshold universe he had ever seen; this was a Threshold universe fantastically wrong, twisted, disordered all out of proportion to the ordered insanity he had known here before. His mind reeled, helpless in the storm of roaring destruction raging around him. The circles were twisted, bent into squarish masses, wrenched out of shape. Everything was out of shape, as though he had been taken from a balmy, quiet day in summer, from the midst of green hills and blue sky and billowing white clouds and dropped without warning into the heart of a tropical hurricane.
His thoughts congealed in an awful realization. Somehow, they had heard him. Now they were showing him what was wrong. His spearhead of thought had leaped the barrier, and they had brought him here. And here everything he knew about the Threshold universe was invalid. Everything he had learned, every perception…inapplicable. His survival data was suddenly invalid, here. Wrong answers meant sudden death, and here every answer was wrong.
He knew he had to hide, to protect himself somehow. Everything here was impossibly different. There were sudden, glaring flashes of green and purple light where light had never been. He cringed at the intolerable glare; he wanted to curl up into a tiny ball, to hide himself and cry out at the torture. The very shape and warp of space itself was wrenched into frightful wrongness here; the cymbals crashed and crashed and he felt himself caught up in a cataclysmic eddy, swept on against his every effort to stop, to hold. He felt his body being knotted and twisted and sliced; he burned with an unbearable heat, and knew that things—other things—were being twisted through him, taking part of him along, turning him inside out in a sort of monstrous vice.
Catacylsm. A universe gone mad. He screamed out, fought to back away, heard his own scream reverberating and echoing again and again, fainter and fainter, as though down an infinitely long hallway. And then, abruptly, he was out of the maelstrom, and they were around him again. Miraculously, his body was intact. But he was frightened as he had never before been frightened in all his life.
He had to get back. His control, so rapidly swept away and then regained from that storm of destruction, was disintegrating. He couldn’t hold on much longer; he was too frightened to hold on. He struggled against the force that seemed to hold him, trying to move himself back to the crossing place again, feeling their thoughts like arrow shafts: “Don’t go!
You have to understand, don’t go now!” But he thrust their thoughts away, too frightened to care any more, frantic to get away from that swirling maelstrom at any cost. With the last of his strength he struggled to move back to the place where he had crossed—not far, but it seemed like miles—and reached it just as their holding force began to tighten and draw him away. He twisted himself through the angle of the Threshold and collapsed panting on the floor, with Gail and Hank kneeling beside him, wiping his forehead and his eyes as he sobbed, trying only to forget that horrible fear.
He heard a gasp from Gail as the west wall of the laboratory vanished in a sudden gust of moving air. Whack! Then the top of the building went—whack!—and a chunk from somewhere beneath them, so that the floor sagged and tilted down at a crazy angle. Whack!
Then the center of the floor went—whack!—only a small bite, a neat, circumscribed, perfectly focused bite that happened to take transmatter, circuit banks, Hunyadi plates and all, leaving a perfectly polished, concave circular hole in the metal floor of the laboratory.
At last it stopped. They looked numbly at the tiny whirlwinds of microscopic dust that spun like devils through the air and settled like a gentle mist, a moment or two before Robert Benedict saw Gail and Hank and the ruined laboratory begin to spin around him, and passed gratefully into an obliterative, exhausted sleep.
—20—
Somewhere at a distance he heard a voice, McEvoy’s voice, roaring and indignant: “Let me get my hands on him. Let me get my hands on him and I’ll break his skinny neck.” And Hank Merry’s voice, farther away, shaken but steadier, saying, “John, don’t be a fool, he was only trying to help us.” Robert opened one eye a slit, saw McEvoy across the room clenching and unclenching his fists.
“Help us! He did it purposely. He led them here. They couldn’t hit it, they hadn’t gotten anywhere close to it until he went through there and showed them exactly where it was and how to get it and now they’ve got it, lock, stock and barrel, and what have we got? Nothing is what we’ve got. No transmatter. No ore, no steel, no oil. Bankruptcy is what we’ve got. A planet with people on it so thick they’re smothering. And we smother, too; everybody smothers. We go broke. We fall apart. The ones that survive go back five hundred years. All because of that brat and his dirty, treasonable—”