The tiny earphone clicked and she heard McEvoy’s voice. “Gail? How are you doing?”
“Fine,” she said. “Cold. Waiting for my eyes to adjust.” Her own voice sounded scratchy in her ears.
“Good. Can you see it?”
“Oh, yes. I can see it, all right.” Through the earphone she could hear the faint swish-swish of a tape recorder and the whirr of the refrigerating pumps below the vault. “It’s like you said…kind of a cold blue, almost phosphorescent. It wavers…I can’t really focus on it.”
“You’ll have to go closer,” McEvoy said. “Try to describe it, the best you can.” He paused. “And Gail, don’t be a heroine. Anything funny, let out a yell.”
“I know. If it would just hold still a minute.” She moved toward the center of the room, her eyes fixed on the luminescent spot in the center. It was clearer now as her eyes adjusted to it. Or at least brighter; the outlines were still indistinct and shimmering. As she moved closer the coldness seemed to increase. She rubbed her hands together, pushed back her hair, and peered into the gloom.
A ghostly thing, she thought suddenly. Shaped like a cube, six inches square, except that the angles weren’t quite right. Before the pumps began, it was a block of tungsten on a tripod. Now, just this wavering something, hanging in mid-air…
She moved closer, stared at the shimmering outlines, glowing a frosty blue. Like a box, she thought, but not quite. Like a doorway, with a long corridor leading…somewhere…far, far beyond…It was holding her eyes now, a strange, fascinating thing, half-hypnotizing her.
She tried to look away, but the glowing cube held her gaze.
At her ear, McEvoy’s voice: “Gail? What do you see?”
“I don’t know.” She groped for the right words. “This is very odd…it’s…I can’t describe it.
But I think…wait a minute!”
As she stared, the shimmering cube seemed to grow larger, enveloping her as she tried to see inside. There were outlines, shapes in there…vague and indistinct, wavering just beyond her perception. A step closer, a turn of her head…if only her eyes would focus, hold it still for a moment! Somewhere, again, she thought she heard McEvoy’s voice calling her name as she was drawn toward this strange, glowing thing…but it seemed far away, unimportant. She didn’t even try to answer. Again his voice, urgent this time, calling her name, and then: “Frank, throw the switch! We’re losing her!” and the distant rattle of the vault door being thrown open.
The last thing she heard was McEvoy’s voice shouting her name, and then, suddenly, she was inside.
—6—
There was dead silence in the place, a silence she had never even imagined before. Like a blanket that had fallen when she crossed through. No sound. No possibility of sound.
Silence, and darkness.
At first she thought she would suffocate. She could scarcely breathe; a scream rose in her throat but no sound came. As if she had suddenly crossed a threshold into another universe, the vault was gone. The glowing cube was gone. She was somewhere else. In a foreign place, if it was a place at all—utterly alien.
Incomprehensible.
Odd, there was no light here, yet she could see, in a way. At first it seemed that she was standing on a perfectly flat polished floor that stretched out endlessly on all sides. It was like nothing her mind had ever encountered, vast and alien. Then it wasn’t a flat surface at all, but a dark, endless tunnel stretching before her with spiraling lines leading down and down, and she was whirling around and around, down toward the vortex of the spiral. She reached out involuntarily to grasp something and stop herself, but there was nothing to grasp. There was substance here, matter, solidity, but somehow she herself was different. Her body wasn’t right; part of it seemed to be gone; part was twisted and distorted, several feet away from her, and her muscles were not working right…
She felt panic; the initial sense of dread she had felt was melting now into blind terror.
Somehow she had moved through into an alien universe, a place where everything was wrong. A dreadful place that offered her no anchor, no starting place. Nothing to hold onto.
Her terror rose as she tried to block the place out of her mind, draw back from it, find a way out fast.
Then she felt her heart thumping in her chest, felt perspiration, sensed the air moving in and out of her lungs, and she fought down her panic. Of course there was something to grasp: she was alive. Everything was wrong here, even her body seemed wrong, but her mind was still working, her heart was still beating, what more did she need? She was here, and alive, obviously.
That was her anchor, then. Her mind narrowed on that single thought. She was here, and this unbelievable place was here, too. There was nothing she could comprehend, but at least she was surviving. All about her she was aware of lines, angles, circles, but none of them were right, the way they should be. Three perfectly parallel lines which met each other at ninety-degree angles to form a perfect square with seven triangular sides…
It couldn’t be!
But it was. Right here, all around her. And she was here. It has to be so, she told herself.
Adjust to it! She sensed that in crossing the threshold into this universe she had turned a corner, an odd corner, not like any corner she had ever seen before, but her own universe was just inches away, back around that same corner. And, even more strange, she realized that she could get back through to her own universe again any time she wanted to just by turning back through the same strange angle, now that she knew it was there.
Like a desk with a secret drawer, she thought suddenly. Hidden, concealed from view, nobody could get in without knowing where the release spring was. Once you knew that, you could open and close it at will. Of course, you might discover the secret drawer by accident if you were sawing a corner off the desk, but even so, you wouldn’t be able to work it without knowing about the hidden release.
What was it McEvoy had said? “We think it may be a three-dimensional slice through a fourth dimension.” And he was right. They had found the secret drawer by sawing the corner off the desk. Quite by accident the stresses they had been using on that tungsten block had inadvertently twisted a segment of three-dimensional space and torn a hole through into this place. Accidentally, they had thrown open a door, and nothing they had found inside had been comprehensible to anyone who had crossed through. A door into Nowhere…no wonder they had died of fright! With no training, no experience to fall back on. It was only her own individual experience, her own incredibly high ability to adapt that was shielding her now, and for all her skill her own mind was now reeling to maintain control.
She knew that she could do nothing here. There was nothing that she could tell McEvoy that would make any sense, except that this place meant disaster to anyone who ventured here. No one but a high-adaptive would have the faintest chance of withstanding the mental shock she had encountered. Even she could never correlate anything inside this mad universe with anything outside. To do that, everything would have to be discarded; all the knowledge and data stored up through the years would have to be thrown out entirely, and there was no way that she could do that. No way anyone could do it…unless…
Yes. There was a way; she saw it suddenly, with blinding clarity. Find a human being with a perfect, keen, intelligent mind with no conscious information in it at all. But how? The answer was obvious: the only possible way to study this incredible place was through the only human being who would even have a chance.