A newborn baby. Start him from birth, first on one side of the threshold, then on the other. Let him grow up, first inside, then outside. Two sets of knowledge growing up in his mind about two mutually incomprehensible worlds. Sooner or later that child could go on either side with equal ease. And perhaps the time would come when he could learn how to relate one side to the other.
Gail collected herself and looked for an entrance back to the outside, groping for the secret release spring. McEvoy was determined to bludgeon bis way in here, but a frontal attack would never work. Even she could never explore this universe. Others would die, or lose their minds, and nothing would be gained if McEvoy were not blocked. And there was nothing she could tell McEvoy that he would comprehend. The one thing that she could do to stop the mayhem would be to block him. Make him drop this investigation, force his hand, until the right way could be prepared.
She smiled to herself, more in sadness than malice. McEvoy wouldn’t like it. He might even try to force her, but it wouldn’t matter. If he got too rough, she could always escape, come back inside to elude him. She didn’t need an artificial entrance any more, any place could provide entrance if you knew where to look. And he didn’t know there was a secret spring.
She chose a spot near the place she had come through. As she turned that odd corner, leaving the dark alien universe behind her, she heard the vault door bursting open, and McEvoy’s hoarse voice shouting, “Gail! Hold on! We’re coming!”
—7—
She stood in the corner of the vault, closing her mind to McEvoy and all the rest, staring straight ahead of her and very carefully, deliberately blocking them out of her mind. The medical team lifted her up, carried her out into the control room and placed her on a stretcher. She held herself rigid. When somebody flashed a bright light in her eyes she winched involuntarily, but gave no other sign of recognition. Even Ed Benedict, leaning over her, begging her to speak, could not draw a response though she wanted to reach out and cling to him for dear life. She knew that she must not, dare not respond until she was far away from here, and McEvoy was thwarted, and the investigation stopped.
They wheeled her down to the first-aid cubicle, and she heard voices all around her—confused, angry, frustrated. McEvoy was beating his fist on his palm in helpless fury as the Hoffman Center doctor worked and strained and finally got her knees bent so he could sit her up on a chair. He lifted her arm and released it; she held it suspended in mid-air as she gazed ahead without expression.
The doctor scratched his head. “I don’t get it,” he said. “It looks like paranoid withdrawal, but I don’t think it is.”
“You mean she’s going to go like the others?” McEvoy cried.
“No, no. The others who lived were wild. She’s alive, and she flinches at the light, she’s just keeping tight control. That’s what I don’t get. I’d swear she’s putting it on deliberately.”
McEvoy stared at her, unbelieving. “You mean you think she has the solution?”
“I think so,” the doctor said. “I think she’s seen something and just decided not to tell you about it.”
“Why, you cheat.” McEvoy whirled on the girl. “You sneaky little cheat!” He slapped her across the face with a heavy hand, started to drag her out of the chair by her blouse.
She felt anger rising swiftly, almost beyond endurance. Just to let him have it, just to sink her teeth into that arm of his, just once…she knew it was showing on her face as the fingers of her suspended hand clenched into a fist. But then…carefully, carefully…control returned and she was gazing steadily ahead again.
McEvoy released her roughly. “She’s got to tell,” he said to the doctor.
“Maybe. Drugs may help jar it loose from her, once she’s recovered a little. Or electroshock, if the drugs won’t do it. But Ed Benedict isn’t going to like that, I warn you.”
“Hang Benedict! Get him out of here. Don’t let him near her. And keep her under guard around the clock. She’s going to talk, or I’m going to know why not.”
Gail stared fixedly at the wall as they turned to leave. Poor McEvoy, she thought. He means it, too. And he couldn’t possibly understand a single thing I could tell him. She smiled.
There was a way, eventually…but not McEvoy’s way. And she knew now that she couldn’t stay here and let them probe. A stubborn problem McEvoy could cope with. A stubborn human being was something else. As the men stopped in the corridor and turned to lock her into the cubicle, Gail took a deep breath and turned the strange, invisible corner that she had learned about.
The last thing she saw was John McEvoy’s unbelieving face as he stared slack-jawed into a suddenly empty room.
Part Two
The Universe Between
—1—
It was going to be a bad day. Hank Merry knew that, before his feet hit the floor that morning.
Hank was too practical a man to believe in psychic emanations, but he knew the crawly feeling of Trouble Coming Up when it met him at dawn, and this day felt like Trouble. He just didn’t know how much trouble, was all.
First, he’d overslept—an old failing of his that even modern twenty-first century technology couldn’t seem to beat. His alarm blew a tube during the night and failed to ring.
The fancy multiple-mirror contraption rigged outside his fourteenth-story window also failed (the sun didn’t come out that day); and his call-signal went blinking on the lab switchboard over in Jersey for thirty-five minutes before an answering servo got a circuit free to key in his emergency wake-up call. So when the metallic taped voice from the lab finally blared out cheerfully from the telephone speaker: GOOD MORNING DOCTOR MERRY IT IS SEVEN
O’CLOCK AND PLEASE THROW YOUR CUTOFF SWITCH AT ONCE OR I WILL BE
LOCKED ON THIS MESSAGE FOR THE REST OF THE DAY it was really 7:45, and his regular 7:30 TV session on the mathematics of wavicle conversions was already three blackboards deep in symbols, and he was so lost it would take him two hours over library tapes that night to catch up. And at that, he would still get an absentee mark for failing to flash his check-in signal to the prof before the session began.
With one eye on the wall screen Hank tossed a breakfast pak into the crisper to heat, and pulled the day’s fresh shirt and trousers from the shelf of disposables in the corner. He was usually quite skilled at shaving, watching the TV brain session and cooking breakfast all at the same time; but today he lost the professor’s line of reasoning, then jammed his shaver halfway through his shave. He swore at it and fiddled for ten minutes to get it running again, forgetting his breakfast until the toast was scorched, the eggs hard-boiled and the cereal very crisp indeed. He ate them sourly as the TV session progressed, doodling circuit diagrams on a handy scratch pad at the same time.
He remembered now what was waiting for him at the lab that day. Aside from the maze of wires, tubes, transistors, transmogrifiers and activated Hunyadi plates that were always part of his day, there would be a crew of frantic technicians waiting to tell him that the circuits he’d set up yesterday hadn’t worked. He already knew this, because at eleven o’clock the night before, as he dozed off to sleep, it had dawned on him that he had totally ignored the effects of feedback in one of the critical loops. This meant that when the boys ran a test charge through it after he left the lab, the whole circuit probably went up in a cloud of smoke.