THEY HAD a quiet dinner, while Robert told Hank more about his experiences on the Other Side. Ed Benedict had little to say; he was upset about the brush with Security and worried about switching the aircar to manual to escape the dragnet. “Those people aren’t stopped by the Privacy laws if they don’t want to be,” he said. “Which means they’ll be fixing on you here in short order if we can’t block them. And Robert can’t drag the whole crew of us through to the Other Side to avoid them.” He looked at his son and shook his head. “You and your bright ideas! I’d better get the Medical Director on the line and brief him; maybe he can help discourage the Security people for a while. But if you have an idea of what can be done to untangle this mess, you’d better put it to work before we’re all in detention.”
“I wish I really had a good idea,” Robert said. “All I can think is that somehow we have to make some kind of contact with the … the people … on the Other Side, to find out how the transmatter has been disturbing them.”
“Have you ever had any contact with them before?” Hank asked.
“Not really, that I can remember.”
“Are you sure there are people there?”
“Some sort of people, or beings, yes. And I’m sure they’ve been aware of me crossing back and forth.”
Hank shook his head, perplexed. “It seems to me they must have made some kind of effort to communicate with you, at some time, if that were true.”
“I think they have,” Gail interrupted. “A long time ago.” She looked at Robert. “Don’t you remember back when you were six or seven, those funny things you kept coming back with? Bits of metal, wood, paper? We never understood what they were supposed to be, but you used to tell us that you thought they were trying to make friends with you, and you didn’t know what to do about it.”
Robert nodded. “Yes, I remember. They did seem to be interested, then, but nothing ever got through. And then they seemed to give up, and there hasn’t been any hint of it for a long time, for years.”
“But now apparently there is, again,” Hank said.
“Apparently.”
“I wonder what would happen if you deliberately tried to contact them, in some way that might connect you up with the transmatter business.”
“My idea, exactly,” Robert said. “But how?”
“Well, it seems to me one form of contact would be an exchange of artifacts. It sounds as if they handed you that pencil for a purpose. Suppose you took it back to them, along with something else, say a flashlight battery. That might demonstrate that we have knowledge of electricity and magnetism, something we would practically have to be sharing with any physical universe.”
Robert considered. “It might work,” he said finally. “Certainly it’s worth a try, and if we could exchange things that have any meaning to the Other Side, we’d have a chance of moving on from there — ” He looked at Gail. “Can we find a flashlight battery around here? And that pencil? I think I’d better go back on through right now.”