As with so many things, the gulf between theory and practice was enormous. A hundred laboratories had been searching for a practical engineering solution to the Transmatter Project on a crash program for over ten years. Billions had been spent on research; some laboratory prototypes had even been built, but there were problems. Enormous quantities of power had been needed for their operation. Decomposition of the target load wasn’t too hard, but reconstitution of the load to its original form was something else again. One laboratory transmitted a gram of solid gold to a receiver ten centimeters away, but ended up with a chamberful of gold vapor so finely atomized that it still hadn’t settled out three months later. Other devices got peculiar things out of the receiver end but not what had been transmitted. All programs were cloaked in secrecy; what the Russians were doing nobody knew for sure, except that it was on a characteristically massive scale. Something had blacked out the whole city of Moscow for a week, but in the absence of earth-shaking announcements, it was assumed that whatever it was had been a failure.
It was then that Hank Merry, a young mathematician at Telcom Laboratories—one of the great electronics and communications organizations that had grown up since the end of the Cold War—had come up with a whole new approach. With John McEvoy he had been working for eighteen months to build a prototype transmatter, and now it was working before it was finished. It was no wonder that they both sat staring at the machine now as if they were holding a stick of dynamite with the fuse burning down.
—4—
Now, together, the two men worked, checking the wiring diagrams and circuits. McEvoy ordered somebody on standby in the generator room to report on power drainage. A crew from Chemical Analysis took a scraping from the aluminum block, and sent down a fast report: normal reagent grade aluminum, with the expected coating of aluminum oxide on the outside.
“No changes in X-ray refraction?” Hank asked sharply.
“None we could see,” the chemistry man said.
Hank exchanged glances with McEvoy, and placed the block under the dome in the transmitter plate. Delicate scales recorded its weight to a thousandth of a microgram.
Surface temperature was recorded, and it was scanned for radioactivity. Then Hank threw the switch, and the block vanished again, to reappear on the receiver plate. No change in weight. No evidence of radioactivity. No drain on the generators. A fraction of a degree of temperature change…downward. The block was slightly colder.
They tried it again and again. Each time, the same results. Then McEvoy said, “Let’s try something else.” He handed Hank a lead pencil from his pocket, an ordinary pencil with the red, yellow and green spiral design of the Telcom Laboratories painted on the outside. “Try that.”
The pencil disappeared from the transmitter and reappeared on the receiver plate just as the block had. But this time, when Hank picked it up, he whistled. “Now, there’s a switch.”
An ordinary lead pencil except that now it was wrong. The right shape, size and weight, but the pencil now had a solid core of wood surrounded by a thin coating of graphite on the outside.
McEvoy looked at it, frowning. “Try that again,” he said.
They did. The second time, the pencil had wood and graphite intermixed throughout its length. The third time, the rubber eraser turned up in the middle of the pencil’s shaft. Each time, the engineer reported only a flicker of power used, no more than if they had turned on a small electric light.
While McEvoy continued to blink at the funny pencil, Hank picked up a small ammeter sitting on the supply bench, one of the instruments he had been using to test his circuits.
“Let’s see about function,” he said. The ammeter went onto the transmitter plate, and the switch was thrown. Reappearing on the receiver plate, it looked fine but when Hank wired it into a test circuit the needle swung crazily for a moment and then fell dead as a curl of blue smoke rose from the instrument.
“Burnt out!” he muttered. He pried it open, stared at the mass of scorched wires inside.
“And how. It’s all backwards, completely shorted out in two places, with a cross-short.” He tossed the ammeter on the bench in disgust and searched for other bric-a-brac from the workbench. A screwdriver went through completely unchanged. Hank’s wristwatch appeared on the receiver plate, still ticking but with the second hand running backward. A machine bolt came through with a left-hand thread.
Hank scratched his head. “I just don’t get it, John. Some things move just fine; others get all twisted around.”
“So I see,” McEvoy muttered, still staring at the funny pencil. “I wonder what would happen to a tennis ball.”
“Why?”
“Oh, nothing. I saw a lead pencil like this once before, years ago, that’s all. But there couldn’t be any connection.”
“A pencil that was all backward?” Hank said. “When?”
“Before your time.” McEvoy shrugged. “It was an old project, must have been twenty years ago. We never did get an answer. We were trying for ultra-low temperatures, and somehow we cut into the corner of a four-dimensional space continuum, a sort of doorway or threshold into a four-dimensional universe. Nobody ever figured out how or why…something to do with our application of power, I guess, or interference with molecular motion, or something. We couldn’t even investigate it; whatever was across that threshold was so wrong, or alien, or incomprehensible that nobody could tolerate even looking at it.
Except for one…”
McEvoy’s jaw tightened, and he slammed his fist into his palm. “Well, it doesn’t matter.
We lost five good men just trying to find out what it was we’d tripped over, and when we finally found someone who could look, she wouldn’t tell us what she saw. She was a high-adaptive, one of the Hoffman Center’s guinea pigs. Married one of the psych-docs there, later, a man named Benedict. But that’s neither here nor there. It’s just that when we passed a lead pencil through that four-dimensional corner, it came out like this one.”
Hank Merry stared at the older man. “Well, what happened? You didn’t just drop it, did you?”
“We had to. The girl was unharmed, but she clammed up. When we tried to crowd her, she used something she learned inside that doorway—to escape. She vanished out of a locked room right under our noses. And when I tried to contact her later, she invoked the Right of Privacy laws. I couldn’t even mail her a first-class letter without permission from the court.”
McEvoy paced back and forth as if he were suddenly unbearably restless. “So that was that. We had to close down, too much risk of dead men in the laboratory. The directors dropped the whole thing into the hands of the math boys, and they’ve been trying to figure out the theory ever since. Fun for them, but it’s like the medieval monks trying to decide how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Lots of theories, but nothing much they could prove without finding some way to get hold of an angel or two.” McEvoy tossed the pencil down in disgust. “As I say, no connection, except that when we dropped objects into this four-dimensional threshold they came out funny. Backwards, inside-out, reversed.”