“Well, the routing can be handled,” Hank said. “It’s got to be a matter of fixing exact angles for each and every destination, exact to fractions of seconds of degrees, and then taping the angles and feeding them into their transport mechanism on computers so that the exact same route co-ordinates are used every time. That means somebody is going to have to go to every destination point we need, to make sure they’re the right ones, and to get the exact angles fixed.” He looked at Robert. “And I guess you will be the goat, you or Sharnan, and I doubt if she could tell for sure whether she was going right or not. We’ll have to cook up some kind of an advance scanner to be sure you don’t get into a contra-terrene universe, and I’ll have to find some device you can use to record the angles, so that you can bring back the data for me to punch into the tapes. Wow! No wonder the Thresholders were at sea. We’re not all that far ahead, but without the math there would be no way in the world that they could have done this alone…and no way in the world that we could have done it alone, either.”
“And no way in the world that we could do it together without communication,” Robert added. “Without full, free exchange of thoughts, ideas, understanding.”
“I still don’t follow what happened.”
“I know. It’s hard to comprehend. Without some anchor to hang onto, some place to start, there wasn’t any way to establish contact. Just an unbridgeable gulf. But an anchor on one side wasn’t enough, either. They had to have one, too. We managed to bypass it before, because of the violence the transmatter was bringing about and the crashing urgency to stop it. But they knew perfectly well that my mind couldn’t tolerate the sort of raw, naked contact that real communication with them would require. They knew what happened to McEvoy’s early workers, too. They knew that Gail was stronger than the others, in some way…her own adaptability, as we know. They knew that I was not only stronger, but different as well, the anchor on our side, but the one time they really tried to touch my mind, or I theirs, it was almost all I could stand even briefly under pressure of violent urgency.
“And at that time Sharnan, whom they were training along the same lines I had been trained, wasn’t yet skillful enough to help. So they limped along and hoped, and unfortunately their worst fears were correct, even though they did remarkably well, for what they knew. Sort of like figuring out the general trajectory of a moon rocket based on orbital timing calculated on an abacus, and then hurling the rocket out in the right general direction, hoping it might connect. Fine for a start, but they knew all along that the flaws in the system were going to catch up with us all sooner or later.”
“And these other universes—” Hank scratched his head, searching for words.
“There’re…there? They really exist?”
“They’re there, all right. They’re here, too. They’re everywhere. They’re a part of existence, a part we never dreamed of, a part we’ve never been able to perceive, but they’ve always been there. The Threshold universe hadn’t perceived them, either, until a few decades ago, when they started focusing energy in odd ways in their own research and found out they were truly a Universe Between…a touch-point for multitudes of universes.
Maybe we are too, and just haven’t yet discovered it. But they seemed to be like,a universe in a very flimsy tissue-paper bag. They couldn’t see outside, but every place they touched they pushed a hole through into somewhere else. And then one ‘somewhere else’ suddenly pushed a hole through to them, and very shortly started to tear the bag apart as well. Not particularly comfortable for them, and it’s a measure of the kind of minds they have that they worked to seek a solution, instead of just indiscriminately striking back.”
Robert stood up and stretched. “The trouble was, they couldn’t do it without having their own anchor, Sharnan, to work with me. They were afraid that if they forced access to my mind, I would go to pieces just like McEvoy’s workers did. But by working through Sharnan, using her mind as a filter, you might say, they thought it might work. They weren’t sure.
Sharnan was afraid, deathly afraid, for me. But it did work, and now each time, it works a little easier. Each time there is a little more contact.”
“And now the first job is the routing,” Hank Merry said.
“That has to come first. Without it, our Earth is in trouble. But that’s the easiest part.
After that—Hank, the door is open. There are a million universes, maybe an infinity of universes, to explore. Universes of every kind conceivable, just waiting on the other side of the door. The Threshold universe is a route through; I have a hunch that none of those universes would be accessible to us here without the Universe Between as a touch-point and traffic center. But we have the touch-point, and the Thresholders want to explore every bit as much as we do. And what there is to explore!”
Robert laughed. “Did you know that there was a time when the physicists and chemists on this Earth of ours thought they had learned all there was to learn? That they knew all the answers, or all the ones that mattered? That all that was left was a sort of mopping-up exercise? Of course, that was before anybody discovered radioactivity, or X-rays, or atom bombs. That was before scientists started publishing their ideas about relativity, and that was just in this universe, our own private little corner of existence.”
They sat in silence for a moment, the graying physicist and his youthful, blond-haired friend. The sunset had faded and it was night outside. Tomorrow another sunrise. They both were thinking of a door opening, a door that no one had ever known was there before, opening into a segment of existence that had been guessed at, perhaps, but never really proven or identified.
After a long while Hank Merry broke the silence. “It looks as if there’s work to be done. A lot of work. For me, for you, for anybody else that feels like working in the least.”
“There’s work to be done, all right.”
“What about you and Sharnan?”
“Personally?” Robert shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s odd. She’s looked into the deepest corners of my mind, and I into hers, and even so we are two people from two different places and I don’t know how close we can really come. Now or ever.” He looked up at Hank. “She’s an exciting girl, when she’s on this side. On the other side she doesn’t exactly send me. And I’m not quite sure how it seems to her, on this side, to be courted by a jigsaw puzzle. Probably not everything she could hope for. Of course, it isn’t always like that.
Sometimes I think I do see her world her way, and she sees mine my way.”
Robert walked over to stare out the window. “It’s very strange, Hank. Sometimes I think their universe as they perceive it is an ordinary, pedestrian three-dimensional universe just like ours. Very similar to ours, in fact, just somehow turned around at an off angle so that we can only perceive each other through another spatial dimension. But sometimes I think that they see themselves very much the same as we see ourselves, with their people, their cities, their social problems—”
“But not the same ones,” Hank said, alarmed.
“Not quite the same, but off the same stalk. A variation of ours.” Robert rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I’ve learned a little of their history, and it’s amazing. They had roughly the same emergence of science as we did, in the long run, but along slightly different lines. Their great theoretical mathematician had a different name, for instance, and came to slightly different conclusions, ultimately just as wrong as ours. In our universe the United States never did break away from the mother country; in their universe, it did. Our Civil War fell apart after six months because of the great freeze and famine in the south in 1883; theirs came sooner, and lasted four years without solving anything. They faced the same Cold War between freedom and slavery in the twentieth century that we did, except our Joint Conference finally made peace, while they are still limping along with a ‘United Nations,’ or some such thing.