Robert opened hish eyes and looked at the Telcom man. “Dr. McEvoy, why don’t you shut up?”
McEvoy whirled on him. “So! All rested up now? Do you have a nice, clean-cut explanation figured out to feed us? Any bright ideas how to get our little gadget back from them? Or what I’m supposed to tell the Joint Conference? Or what we’re going to do without that machine? Well? What about it?”
“They had to take it,” Robert said. “They had to get it stopped. It was tearing them apart.”
“You led them to it!”
“Maybe so. I wasn’t trying to but they must have known that I came through the transmatter this time, and grabbed until they got it. And we’re lucky they did follow me, and get it this easily.”
“Lucky!”
“Lucky. Because they would have kept right on taking bites until they got it, even if it meant splitting this Earth in two. They had to, because it was tearing their world apart at the seams.”
“How?” McEvoy charged.
“I don’t know, except that that machine of Hank’s was no transmatter. I’m not sure what it was, but it set up a force field that wrenched open another Threshold. Just the way your low-temperature pump did once before, a different application of force, but just as effective.
At least the first Threshold was innocuous. It didn’t do any damage to them. But this machine set up a force field strong enough to shove things through a corner of their universe and out the other side. A force they couldn’t combat, but strong enough so that it was ripping up their universe by the very roots. Twisting their space, distorting it, destroying it.”
McEvoy threw up his hands. “I never heard such nonsense in all my life.”
“Look, I was there. I saw what it was doing. They showed me. And I got out quick enough to survive the shock, but they have to live with it.” Robert shook his head, pushing back the memory of his own panic. “No wonder they were afraid. It was tearing their universe to shreds. Warping their dimensions into pretzels. Like turning an inner tube inside out. You can do it, but you don’t have an inner tube when you get through, just a torn, twisted gob of useless rubber. In their universe, your transmatter was twisting material objects through places they simply couldn’t go. Something had to give, and it was their universe that was giving, pulling apart at the seams. So they had to grab whatever was creating that force on this side. What else could they do?”
There was a long silence. McEvoy mopped his forehead. Then Gail said, “Robert—you said they showed you this destruction. How did they know you wanted to see it?”
“I told them.”
“You mean you contacted them?”
“In a way. I seemed to be getting ideas that originated from them, so I tried to push an idea back at them. That was when they moved me to the place where the chaos was going on. But it was odd—” He shook his head, trying to remember the first strange, distorted impression he had when he was forced through by the transmatter. “There was a moment when their universe didn’t look the way it always looked to me before. It looked like an ordinary three-dimensional world with length and height and breadth, different from ours, but with the same dimensions. Just turned around at a slightly different angle from ours, so that a fourth spacial dimension had to be crossed through to see that one.”
“Nonsense!” McEvoy muttered.
“What I’m trying to say is that maybe to them their universe has very much the same form and structure as ours has to us. To them it may be only a three-dimensional universe.
But I got just a glimpse of that before it shifted back to the old distorted picture again.”
“But you did contact them?” McEvoy said.
“Yes.”
“Then contact them again.”
“No,” Gail said. “He’s done enough contacting.”
“You keep out of this,” McEvoy snapped at her. “This is between me and the boy. He contacted them. He led them here. And thanks to him, they got what they wanted, for the moment, anyway. But they went too far. I’d have turned the transmatter off if I knew how. I already had it half torn down, but I would never have thrown it out. Maybe it was hurting them, but their taking it is going to hurt us just as much. All right, you gave it to them; now you get it back.”
“Suppose I can’t?” Robert said.
“You can try. You can try for your very life.”
“Suppose I won’t try?”
“Then I’ll build another one. Merry will help me.”
Hank shook his head. “Don’t count on it, John. Don’t count on it for a minute.”
McEvoy glared at him, and his jaw set tight. “Then I’ll get someone else to build it. I’ll turn the whole thing over to the Joint Conference Committee—the blueprints, the circuits, the math, everything. They could find someone to build it, but it would take them time, and there’s no guessing what the Thresholders might be doing in the meantime.” He turned back to Robert. “Is it really asking too much? To try to tell them why we need that machine? Can’t you tell them, somehow, that their problem may be solved for the moment, but that ours isn’t?
That sooner or later they’re going to have their problem right back in their laps again because we have to solve our problem some way regardless of what it means to them?
Can’t you tell them we’re as desperate as they are?”
“I don’t know how,” Robert Benedict said miserably. “The contact was so vague, so fleeting; I don’t know how to do more.”
“But can’t you at least try?”
There was a long moment while they looked at each other—the older man, still angry but pleading now, the boy fighting to control his own dread and fright and helplessness and not winning the fight very well. Yet knowing at the bottom of it all that McEvoy was right, that they had to be told, somehow, and that he was the only one who could possibly tell them.
For a moment, as he stared at John McEvoy, Robert knew what it meant to really hate and fear a man. Yet at the same time he knew that McEvoy was not to blame. McEvoy was no more hateful or fearful than anyone else. He was simply trapped, just as Robert was trapped, and fighting just exactly as Robert was fighting, just as anyone would fight when he was trapped and saw no way out. Hate and fear McEvoy, yes, but far more than that, Robert knew in this moment that he admired this man, and that because he admired him he would go back to fight for him.
“All right,” he said, and turned away. He pulled his jacket tighter around his neck.
Reaching out, he touched Gail’s hand softly and briefly; then, without a word he made a slight turn, and vanished from the room.
—21—
He did not know what to do, nor how to do it. He felt drained and helpless, and incredibly tired. If he could have seen some hope, some possible chance, he might have felt different.
But he could see no hope whatever.
It was an impossible task to convey to the Thresholders that a gadget—a simple, foolish machine—meant the difference between survival and disaster in his world, to convey all the things that that simple gadget meant to the people of Earth: raw materials from distant planets to shore up an exhausted economy; a place to go, a place to spread out to, for a people who had always had to grow, to explore, to spread, to move on; a people who had never throughout their history faced a future without a frontier and now had no frontier left because the only frontier they had was closed off and unattainable; a people who would ultimately die and decay without that frontier; slowly, perhaps, fighting valiantly every inch of the way; but ultimately doomed to wither and die.