And I know I can’t do it by myself.”
Sharnan shook her head violently. Was she actually crying, or was it the way the light caught those strange eyes? Her voice was pleading, vehement but incomprehensible.
“I know you’re afraid,” Robert said. “Just as much as I am, but sooner or later it’s going to have to happen, isn’t it? You know that.”
More magic talk, with the girl still shaking her head as if in despair.
“I’ll shield you the best I can,” Robert said. “If I can protect you, I will. But there has to be some contact with them now, real contact, and you have to help me make it.”
Strangely, Hank Merry began to understand. They were talking together, in a way, and their talk had to do with the Threshold universe, and going there together. “Robert, wait!” he said in alarm.
Robert looked up. “What is it?”
“Are you thinking of taking her to the Other Side with you?”
“Of course. What else?”
“But you can’t do that! This girl is a cripple. She isn’t even compos mentis; only sick minds make up their own languages—”
Before he had finished Sharnan whirled on him angrily. Hank’s scalp prickled; she had understood him perfectly. Not his words—his thoughts. But Robert interrupted. “She’s not sick,” he said. “And she’s no more crippled than I am. Different, yes. Crippled, no.”
“Robert, you’re forgetting. Even a high-adaptive like your mother can’t stay on the Other Side for long. You know what happened to McEvoy’s men. And you can’t help anybody else handle what they’d run into over there.”
“That’s right,” Robert said. “Nobody else except Sharnan.”
“What makes her so different from anybody else?”
Robert smiled. “Just the fact that she can go through by herself and do just fine. She can cross the Threshold back and forth just as well as I can, maybe better. She’s not even afraid for herself, so much, going together; she’s afraid for me.”
“You mean somebody else has been trained to cross the Threshold the way you were trained?”
“In a way, yes, but not quite the way you mean.” Robert looked up at his friend. “Hank, where do you think this girl came from?”
Hank blinked as Robert’s words hit home, and he stared at the girl, met her violet eyes and the blank wall that lay behind them. “Moons of Mars,” he said softly. “From the Other Side.”
“Of course,” Robert said. “Now you see why she’s different, and why she might be able to help. And why she is just as frightened as I am.”
—9—
Later, Robert tried to explain the best that he could. “The Thresholders obviously have known of our existence just as long as we’ve known of theirs,” he said. “Maybe longer. I’m not at all sure that they hadn’t already pushed a Threshold through from their side long before McEvoy started fiddling with his low-temperature vault. There are some things that have always made me wonder—time travel reports, for instance; unexplained disappearances; that Nagasaki bomb that failed to go off and that nobody could ever find.
Maybe they had a Threshold and we just didn’t know it. But at least from the time Gail walked into McEvoy’s vault on, they’ve known.”
They were all more comfortable now. Ed Benedict had brought up some lunch when he joined them; Sharnan did not eat, but she was over her anger, working quietly at the tape machine, apparently giving it her full attention except for an occasional glance at Robert.
Hearing every word, Hank Merry thought, and not understanding a single one. But catching the thoughts just the same.
“So it isn’t surprising,” Robert continued, “that they should have sent someone across, just as we did. We learned how to train someone to cope with their universe—namely me—and to cross through at will. So did they. Sharnan is my counterpart from the Other Side. Whether she was trained the same way I was, I don’t know. I know she’s special; no other Thresholder comes through. And I know that our universe, here, is just as confusing and incomprehensible to her as their universe on the Other Side is to me. She looks pretty much like us, over here, but then I probably look like one of them when I’m on the Other Side.
I don’t know if I have a language over there or not. Maybe what thoughts I have come through as their counterpart to language.
“Certainly I stick out like a sore thumb over there now, when they’re expecting me…but there may have been a long period when they didn’t even know I was crossing through. She wasn’t so lucky: when she first crossed over she turned up stark naked in a midtown Manhattan intersection, babbling nonsense, and they had the riot squad out in two minutes flat. The police dumped her in the city Psych ward, and they sent her to the Hoffman Center as fast as they could. Then once she got her crossing co-ordinates straight, and crossed back and forth a few times to the same place, Dad got word of it and knew exactly what was happening. So he called me.”
“But the language—”
“Yes, we worked on that first. We had every linguist in the Western hemisphere fooling around her trying to crack it, and they couldn’t do it. Like the ancient Mayan hieroglyphs, there were no referents, so there was no way to break the language. The same word-sound seems to mean something different every time she uses it, or else there are soundwave overtones that we’re missing, or else there’s a telepathic auxiliary that we can’t pick up, grooved right into the language. “It’s like trying to understand a language tape when half the words are cut out and the tape is running through the reader backwards. Well, we got nowhere with the language, but some things did get through, at least between Sharnan and me. She didn’t understand my words, but she could pick up thought patterns, and I seem to read her, too, part of the time. That looked promising, until she started crossing back to try to find specific answers to things I wanted to know, and started to get more and more scared every time.”
Hank looked puzzled. “Scared of what?”
“I’m not sure, except that it had to do with me. Just as I might be scared if I could see some kind of threat to her because of her crossing through to this side, because I wouldn’t want her hurt.”
Sharnan looked up suddenly, staring intently at Robert. He grinned at her. “Hit it right on the head, didn’t I?” he said.
There was a slight movement, a flicker of her eyes. Not a nod, but an affirmative nevertheless.
“But you know we can’t make any real contact from here, don’t you?”
Again, a reluctant affirmative.
“We have to go through to your side together, and you’re afraid this might hurt me in some way, and you’re trying to protect me.”
The girl took a deep breath, and put her hands to her head avoiding his eyes.
“Isn’t that so?”
Most reluctantly, she nodded.
“But you know we’ve got to do it. Because we’re in trouble, both sides—our universe and yours.”
A strong affirmative from the girl. Even Hank could feel it, deep in his mind, along with a cold wind of fear.
“Something has gone badly wrong,” Robert went on, “and if we don’t make contact somehow, both sides are going to be hurt. And you’ll be hurt too, and I don’t want to risk that.” He looked directly at the girl. “Don’t try to protect me, Sharnan. You’re only putting things off. We’re going to make a try together, whether I get hurt or not.”