Then a babble of puzzlement and confusion. The Thresholders seemed to be conferring, and then a thought came through, very tentatively: ‘We don’t understand. There are as many Cygnis as there are. We’ve never explored or tried to count…how could we? The natural laws are all so different. And who cares? Should there be just so many and no more? Does it matter?’
Now it was Robert who was confused. What could they mean? The effort to hold his thought in tight control was getting out of hand, draining him, and he was suddenly terribly frightened. ‘I don’t understand…can you show me what you mean?’
(More conferring.) ‘Far too dangerous. But some pictures might help.’ Something changed. It was not that they released his mind, but something was superimposed on their thoughts, a series of images or pictures, each clear as crystal, changing rapidly from one to the next, with Sharnan very close to him, helping and holding and channeling the pictures.
Pictures of places, of planets, each sharply in focus, utterly incredible, but clear, unmistakable:
A 61 Cygni IV where hot things got hotter and cold things got colder; a Cygni which was part of a totally different universe than his; a Cygni that looked the same but existed under different natural laws. Robert knew what had happened to Mike Janner and his party and what had happened to the colony they were returning to, a colony that had never existed on that 61 Cygni.
A Mars like any Mars should be, except that on this Mars there was no Ironstone, and steel melted at normal atmospheric temperature into a puddle of slag, melted so very quickly that it was fluid before the Thresholders could pull it back through and try the angle again. And then in their horror and confusion, they overshot their mark on the right Mars by 850 miles; and just as well for the Ironstone on that Mars, too, even if displeasing to a red-haired man with a fat yellow cigar in his mouth.
A Saturn like any other Saturn except that the protons of its atoms carried a negative electrical charge and its electrons a positive charge; a contra-terrene Saturn where any atoms from Robert’s universe touching it would instantly be annihilated, and annihilate the corresponding contra-terrene atoms in return, all vanishing poof in a horrendous, silent, total transformation of mass into energy, more violent than a thousand hydrogen bombs silently erupting simultaneously. Heartsick, Robert knew why neither men nor Threshold station had ever again been seen after their tragic, inadvertent encounter with that Saturn instead of the one they had been heading for.
A strange planet in a universe where the speed of light was six hundred feet per second and the “sunlight” the inhabitants were seeing one day was the “sunlight” radiated from their sun long years before, just before the sun went nova, so the inhabitants one day were fried in their shoes with no warning. A strange universe in which any aircraft that traveled more than 150 miles an hour became noticeably more massive, and could not stay aloft at three hundred miles an hour because of its mass. A universe so utterly at the mercy of the relation between time and distance that the energies of a great and brilliant race had been turned to understanding the nature of time and control of travel through it, a goal they were within a hairs-breadth of achieving, with all the benefits and paradoxes inherent in time travel just a brief step away…
Another planet in a universe where other physical constants were different, a universe whose quanta were such that most phenomena appeared as step functions, instead of continuous movement, like a motion picture film being shoved through the projector bump-bump-bump, one frame at a time, frame…pause…frame…pause…frame…pause…
And another planet…and another…and another…all impossible, yet all real, all existing.
A multitude of universes, an infinity of universes, some parallel, some at dimensional angles, some sharing the self-same atoms and molecules of his own, some using one phase of subatomic vibration while his own used another phase…incredible, beautiful, rich, frightening universes…
Slowly, the pictures faded from Robert’s mind, or rather dissolved back into the Threshold universe again, but a Threshold universe he could see more clearly than ever before. A Threshold universe of cities, aircars, people, Sharnan, scientists crowding around him. ‘Do you understand now? Do you understand why we can’t hit the target right, all the time? We can’t control the routing. It may be mathematical, or technological, but we don’t know what to do.’
And Robert knew the answer, then, so very simple. ‘We have scientists, mathematicians, engineers. A man like Dr. Merry could solve that problem for you. He could plan and plot the routing angles to fifty decimal places if necessary. He could build automatic routing devices, and pass them and their blueprints and their theory through me to you. It would solve our immediate problem, and yours, and open the door…’
Open the door! Incredible. A door he never even knew existed.
The Thresholders heard him, eagerly, excitedly. ‘Yes, yes, we need to know how. We don’t have the knowledge to do it alone, but together, perhaps together…’
Abruptly, Robert Benedict seemed to reach a limit, a saturation point. It was as much as he could take. Sharnan sensed it too; sharply, quickly, she moved in blocking off the wave of Thresholders’ thoughts, covering for him as he closed the doors of his mind, urging him now to cross back to the place he knew best, to the universe from which he had come. For now.
She did not cross back with him. It was not necessary, now. They both knew that the first work would have to be done on her side. And he would come back and carry on from the place he had stopped this time, if he found that his own mind had stood the shock and that he was intact.
An instant later he was back in Sharnan’s room in the Hoffman Center. He was exhausted, drained, like a man strained to his bottommost limits, but Hank Merry and Ed Benedict were there, and the room was there, and he saw the fading daylight outside and knew that his mind was intact, that soon he could go back through again and that Sharnan would be waiting.
And that the doors could indeed be opened.
—11—
He went back, of course, again and again, before he told anybody very much of what was going on. That first return, all he could do was sit and pant, catching his breath, brushing aside Hank’s questions, and then eating and eating and eating…he felt as though he was starving…and finally falling into a solid twenty-four hours of sleep troubled by the wildest nightmares he had ever known. But before that he told Hank to order all the Threshold stations closed down. There need be no panic, it would only be a temporary interruption of service except for real emergencies: like stopping a train until a hotbox cooled.
When he woke up he immediately crossed through to the Other Side again, without telling a soul. That time he came back equally starved but looking brighter of eye and firmer of cheek. He ate another huge meal and then had a long huddle with Hank, explaining about the routing problem and the task Hank had in front of him. Hank went back to Telcom Laboratories and disappeared into a fog of mathematics and electronics and dimensional mechanics while Robert went back to the Other Side a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth. By then Hank was beginning to comprehend some small part of what Robert was asking him to do, and beginning to have some faint glimmering of an idea of how to go about doing it.
“They can’t control the routing,” Robert explained. “They just don’t have the science, or the math, or the technology. It was blind luck as much as anything else that the particular Mars they shipped me to that first time happened to be the right one, and not a Mars with negative entropy so I just baked in my own skin.”