For want of a nail.
It was this he had to tell them, make them understand, and he had no words to use. This was part of him, as well, important to him as to any other man, and no way to say it. No bridge of understanding, no real contact with them except that vague fleeting touch he had felt so briefly before.
It was dark, and the Threshold universe was in turmoil. No more fear, the fear was gone.
But they knew he had come back, and they were strangely excited, eagerly crowding around him, acknowledging that he was there. The moment he crossed through they were all about him, as if they had been waiting impatiently for him to return.
His heart was heavy, his strength nearly gone. He had no stomach for this now; he was frightened, and desperate. But he had to try to convey to them that his world also had needs, that the transmatter was a part of those needs, if the people were to reach for the stars. As they gathered, he felt the hopelessness of telling them. If only I could show them the way they showed me, he thought. But that was impossible. What he had to tell them was only in his mind, and how could he show them his mind? He couldn’t. Unless…
It struck him then, clear as crystal. He had already done it, part way. He had conveyed an idea, without words, before; a spearhead he had hurled at them from his own mind. That spearhead had come from deep in his mind, from his memory and knowledge of his own universe, mixed with words he and Gail and Ed had used again and again to try to describe something that couldn’t be described in words. Yet he knew that the Thresholders had consciousness, they had demonstrated it, they had not only forced their ideas into his mind, they had received his own.
Suddenly he felt something akin to hope. Suppose thought was a force in itself.
Suppose that over here abstract mental images, without words, could be passed from one to another! Suppose the Thresholders used no words or symbols, but had minds so sensitive to receiving thought, so capable of transmitting it, that there was no need for words. Robert had two brains, two memories, two parallel sets of knowledge and experience in his mind, one set related to his own universe, the other to this strange universe across the Threshold. So far he had used only the Threshold part of his brain here.
But why couldn’t he show the Thresholders what was in the other side?
Instinctively, he groped for an anchor, rooted himself as solidly as he could. Then, deliberately, he tried to close down the perception he had always used here, to withdraw from his Threshold-mind, to move his mind back to his own world and throw it open while he still remained here. All he needed here was enough for bare survival. With all his strength he grappled with it, as he might-struggle with a huge frozen switch, trying to wrench it closed and cut in the full force of his human mind over here, so that they could see what was there.
It was agony, because the very act wanted to force his body to shift back through to his own side, to tear him away from there. He clung doggedly, twisting and writhing but hanging on. There was pain in his mind, growing and growing; it seemed as though a shorted wire were heating up in his mind—smoking, glowing hideously red, melting, fusing, burning out.
The pain ended. Abruptly. It had lasted only for an instant, but he knew he had done it.
He had opened an alien mind—his alien mind—to these Threshold people around him. He had pulled back the curtain for a flickering instant, revealed to them what lay behind it. Not for long; he couldn’t have survived for long. But for the barest instant he had done it.
And now…silence. Absence of all motion. What was it? Shock? Horror? Amazement?
Or a sudden, absolute clarity of understanding? Yes, that was it! Like a grand pause in a symphony—a sudden, incredible gasp of comprehension. Like that instant that passes from the time a finger touches a hot stove to the time it is jerked away, and then to the time that the pain is felt, an incredulous, empty pause of understanding.
And then the Thresholders were there, all around him, reaching out to him, twisting him around, wildly excited. There was a subtle alteration from the normal patchwork of whirling motion. He was turning, moving. Or rather, they were turning him, moving him. They were taking him somewhere.
Back to that crater of chaos again? He drew back in horror. Not that—he had seen that, and understood it; why take him back there? But then where? Frightened beyond control, Robert fought them, frantically, but they continued moving him, on and on. Not so much a long distance as through a slightly different angle than he had ever moved before. And then, without warning, he was thrust out.
In the flicker of an eye the Threshold universe was gone. So were the Thresholders. He was back in his own universe again, but there was no sign of the laboratory, nor of McEvoy, nor Merry, nor Gail.
No sign of anybody. It was night and he had fallen a few inches to the ground. In the sky above him a bright moon shone down on the dark sand beneath. It was very cold; he shivered as he pulled himself to his feet and dusted himself off. He seemed hungry for air, actually gasping for air like a man from sea level suddenly dropped on top of a 15,000-foot mountain peak. A cold breeze brushed his cheek, ruffled his hair.
Confused, he shook sand from his jacket, peering about him. He was on a sandy hillside. Not a tree in sight, not a leaf, not a blade of grass. Behind him, in the dim moonlight, a vast expanse of desert and dunes spread out as far as he could see, stretching to the horizon. To the right, a long, low range of worn-down mountains. Ahead of him, blocking his view, a rocky crag and a smaller hill.
This was not New Jersey, nor Massachusetts, nor any other place he had ever seen before. The cold dry air seared his lungs as he struggled breathlessly up the hill, slipping in the sand, stopping to pant every two or three feet. The sand under his feet was cold, smooth, unmarked. Where was he? Could they have moved him through the wrong angle in the Threshold? Dropped him on the desert by mistake? Surely this was a desert, but where?
and why?
He reached the top of the hill, wheezing like an old man, grasping at the rock at the top and pulling himself up to peek over the top.
Below him lay more desert—smooth and glistening in the moonlight, every line and contour remarkably sharp and clear, peaceful in the moonlight. It stretched away for endless miles, hillock upon hillock of glistening sand. The rocks on which he lay were a dull red-black in the moonlight, as if dipped in blood. And far down across the valley floor he saw a canyon, long and straight, running in a flawless line toward the far horizon, and directly beside it, parallel with it, another smaller cleft. Straight and true.
He stared down at it, his eyes wide with wonder, drinking in the valley and the blood-red sand and the clefts running straight as arrows, and even as he stood watching, a second moon crept slowly up over the horizon.
—22—
To Hank Merry and the others it seemed he had been gone only a few seconds, but he reappeared some twenty feet across the torn-up laboratory floor from where he had crossed through. He stood shivering, literally blue with cold, gasping for air and looking so ill and exhausted that Gail stifled a cry and Hank leaped across to catch his arm before he fell.
“Robert! What happened? What did they do to you?”
The boy shook his head numbly as Hank eased him to the floor and loosened his jacket.