FOR THE FIRST time since the transmatter had started working, and the day Robert Benedict had had his first jolt of fright on the Other Side, it seemed that they had nailed down something solid. Something that meant something, that made sense. The point of a wedge driven into an impenetrable surface, a foot in the door, one simple fact that might be true on the far side of that vague, mysterious Threshold they were facing that could also be understood in its true meaning on this side.
And it was a fact they couldn’t use. A depressing, infuriating, frustrating fact that couldn’t be acted upon, tantalizing as it was. A fact that didn’t help, that even seemed to dash all hope of help.
They turned it over in every direction they could think of, sitting there in the Benedict living room with its ruined wall, its strange pile of dust and the two specimens on the table before them — a misshapen lump of black plastic that turned to cast steel on command and a wildly dangerous gray box with beveled edges, sealed seams and four studs along the bottom. Who could say what devastation would result from pressing the other three studs? None of them cared in the slightest to find out.
Robert lay on the couch, half-dozing part of the time, aching in every bone and so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open. Ed and Gail were talking urgently, trying to think through the implications of the idea, unable to hide their concern for Robert, worried at the price these trips through to the Other Side were already chalking up in terms of physical exhaustion, and frightened now at whatever nameless dangers he might face if he crossed through again (or was pulled through again; there was that also to consider now, all the more frightening because there was no way they could think of to prevent it or control it). Hank Merry paced the floor, McEvoy’s panic call still fresh in his mind, with the ever-present awareness that a machine, his machine, his own creation, was somehow not obeying the commands it was given any longer, and was drawing them all into some kind of vortex of fury that he didn’t even dare think of. They talked, and argued, and flared up in anger, and cooled down again, seeking somehow to find some answer that seemed to make some sense or offer some hope.
They came up with nothing whatever but a frustrating sense of failure, and the uneasy certainty that that failure was somehow, inexorably, leading to disaster beyond their imagination.
A busy, overpopulated planet, bursting its seams, hungry for the materials with which to build and grow, utterly unable to reach out for them because of the extortionate, bankrupting cost of reaching. A planet whose people violently needed, not just wanted, but needed those inaccessible materials if they were ultimately to survive. A people faced with the alternatives of war and waste, hatreds, pogroms, riots, bloodshed, violent depopulation, and reversion to conditions so primitive that no one alive could begin to remember what they were like; and along with that reversion, the loss of all that had been gained by those people over the centuries, the utter waste of their minds and capabilities, an end to the growth of knowledge and potential that had always been the legacy of human beings.
And so pointless, with the goal so near. For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe a horse was lost; for want of a horse a battle was lost; for want of a battle, a kingdom was lost.
Men searched for that elusive nail and found only a pile of iron filings with no means to fashion a nail from it. Not that it couldn’t be done; the laws of Nature declared that iron filings and an iron nail were part and parcel of the same substance. It was the how that baffled men. It was natural law that bound men and their space ships to the surface of their planet with the steel hoops of gravity, and natural law that made the transport of precious ores from Mars to Earth an economic disaster to contemplate. But other laws of Nature had hinted vaguely (as laws of Nature do) that other means of transport could be found, and the Transmatter Project was born — a way to bypass the barrier of gravity and the exhaustingly costly rocket launchings and the staggering problems of re-entry with worthwhile payloads. To men like Hank Merry, confident that the laws of Nature could be discovered and then used in the service of men, the transmatter had been a challenge, a problem to be solved, nothing more. Vastly important, that problem, but solvable.
And so it was, perhaps, until suddenly the transmatter had seemed to leap the barrier of natural law and behave as nothing could behave, uncontrolled and uncontrollable by the men who had devised it in flat contradiction of what ought to be so. In Hank’s search for a way to harness natural energies, his machine had inadvertently trespassed into a terra incognita, an area not even suspected, much less understood, where the laws of Nature seemed suspended, with what grim results nobody could guess.
And in a laboratory in New Jersey a machine, never actually completed, now half-dismantled, continued quietly to hum away, busily moving molecules of air from Point A to Point B in its own obscure fashion, and trespassing upon … what? … at the cost of … what? … and controllable … how? … and with something else … what? … on the receiving end not liking it a bit … and slashing back … how? and why? and to what end?
Above all, why? and to what end?
They had talked, and argued and speculated and come up with no answers. Merry told them of McEvoy’s frantic plea. “I’ve got to go back, and without delay,” Hank said. “I’ve got to try to find out why that wretched machine continues operating when it can’t be operating, and see what, if anything, I can do to stop it.” The others had to agree to that, and then there was the Joint Conference to think of, and McEvoy to think of, and the destruction of eighteen months of hard, painstaking work to think of. There was also physical danger to think of, if bits and pieces of the eastern seaboard were being chopped off and carried to perdition by some angry force across the Threshold. After much discussion it was finally decided that Robert and Gail should go back with Merry, if only in the hope that John McEvoy, on hearing what they had discovered, might think of some fresh lead for them to follow.
For Hank it was especially infuriating because something was in his mind, just out of reach of his consciousness; something that he had thought of before that was now eluding him, that might offer a route of exploration. He wasn’t sure if it was something he had just forgotten, or something he had rejected as ridiculous, back when many things had seemed ridiculous that didn’t seem so ridiculous now; but forgotten or blocked, it kept nudging his mind, and grope as he would, he couldn’t quite recapture it.
So ultimately they had flown back down to New Jersey, after considerable argument from both ends with Security to guarantee unobstructed passage, and at length were met by a gray-faced McEvoy who looked old and tired and didn’t seem to know whether to greet them with his usual half-angry bluster or to burst out crying. It was a baffled McEvoy, bad enough to Hank, who could not remember ever having seen McEvoy truly baffled before; and worse, a helpless McEvoy who somehow couldn’t seem to do the right thing no matter which way he turned. Consequently, perhaps for the first time in his life, he simply sat there immobilized, not so much because he couldn’t figure out what to do as because he couldn’t figure out what not to do.
In the laboratory office, with the transmatter making its ominous whirring sound in the vaulted lab outside the door, they told McEvoy what they had found, what had happened, what conclusions they had drawn from these things. Hank made a swift examination of his machine, already dismantled far more than he had imagined McEvoy would dismantle it, and still puffing away at the air like some kind of idiot steam engine. McEvoy, for once in his career, had listened with care, and not interrupted with his own burgeoning ideas, and nodded when he caught something and ticked down a note when there was something he thought he had missed.
McEvoy came to the same conclusion that they had come to earlier. “So our contact man is an idiot, to them,” he said glumly. “Or seems to be, at least.”
“Probably only seems to be,” Gail offered. “A newborn baby in this world behaves like an idiot, too, you know, to someone who doesn’t know any better. It has no symbols in its mind, nothing but instincts at first. The baby may have enormous potential, but until it learns about its surroundings from experience, and then learns to connect words up to things, he continues to respond like an idiot.”
“That I can understand,” John McEvoy said. “But Robert isn’t a newborn baby.”
“He may be the perfect equivalent on the Other Side,” Gail said. “Robert can cross the Threshold, something he learned how to do, and has been practicing for a long time. And he can observe that universe on the Other Side. But what he observes is limited by his human nervous system. The physical universe around him there is tolerable because one part of his brain is packed full of experience — information for survival — that applies to that side of the Threshold. But the way Robert’s brain is constructed, he simply can’t handle their symbols. He isn’t built right. It’s like trying to teach a dog to sing ‘Mother Machree.’ All you get are barks and howls, if you get anything at all. The dog simply hasn’t got the equipment to sing ‘Mother Machree,’ and if the ability to sing is your criterion of dog intelligence, then in that framework every dog on Earth is a canine idiot and always will be.”
McEvoy nodded, fiddling with the black modelling clay. He had looked at the gray box earlier, but didn’t touch it; he was nervous having a gadget around that could disintegrate walls at the touch of a button. “So if the Thresholders have symbols to express their thoughts, Robert can’t pick them up, so his reactions continue to seem imbecilic to them.”
“That’s right,” Gail said. “If the Thresholders really did try to contact him before, they got nowhere and dropped it. When their overtures fell flat, when they got what seemed like nothing but idiot responses, they quit bothering. After all, he wasn’t hurting anything, then. But now, suddenly, they have to establish contact with him, idiot or not. Because something this side of the Threshold is doing something that threatens them, something so terrible that they’re lashing back at us.”
McEvoy looked at Robert. “And you’ve come to a dead end? You can’t think of anything else you can do?”
Robert spread his hands. “Remember this no-contact thing works both ways, Dr. McEvoy. If I’m an idiot to them, they’re also idiots to me. If I only had something to stand on — one single thing to get hold of — but I can’t think what. I can’t even find out what they’re so terribly afraid of. Any more than Hank can figure out why his machine in there is working in spite of him. When you think of all the air that that thing has moved aimlessly from one side of that lab to the other — ”
Hank Merry looked up suddenly and snapped his fingers. “Yes,” he said softly. “Exactly. I knew there was something.”
They looked at him. “What do you mean?” Robert asked.
“Something inconsistent. All that air, moving from Point A to Point B. Or those testing blocks, moved from Point A to Point B. We can’t deny it happened, and it seems to be driving the Thresholders to distraction, for some reason.”
“But what’s inconsistent?” asked Robert.
“You are,” Hank said. “This machine moved a test block from one side of the lab to the other, and caused trouble. But you picked up a test block in your hands and moved it from one side of the lab to the other and didn’t cause trouble. Why not?”
“Why, because I — I — well, I’ve been doing the same thing for years!”
“So I understand,” Hank said. “Without any trouble. But this gadget tries it, and there’s more trouble than you can shake a stick at, then and there. Why?”
Robert saw his point then. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. It must mean that from their standpoint we aren’t doing the same thing. From our standpoint, the test block gets from Point A to Point B in either case. But when I carried it, I carried it the right way, and when the transmatter carries it, it carries it the wrong way — ”
“Like walking through a plate glass window to get outside,” Hank said.
John McEvoy looked up. “I don’t follow you,” he said.
“Well, suppose you wanted to move from Point A inside a room to Point B just outside a plate glass window in the yard. If you walk over to the door at the right, go outside, and then walk back to the window, the way is clear. Of course, you could go directly from Point A to Point B, too, but you’d have to go through the window to do it. You’d get where you wanted to go, but at the expense of a mess of broken glass.”
“But nobody in his right mind would do that!” McEvoy said.
“Not if he knew the difference,” Robert said. “But I think Hank’s right. Suppose you didn’t know the difference between the right way and the wrong way! Suppose you couldn’t see either the door or the plate glass window at all. You might do a whale of a lot of damage without knowing it, and then wonder why the landlord was suing you.”
“Exactly,” Hank said. “Apparently you have been going through to the Other Side the right way, and the transmatter has been shoving things through the wrong way. And as a consequence, we’re in trouble and getting into much worse trouble very fast.” He looked up at Robert.
“I wonder what would happen if you were to go through the wrong way, once. Through the plate glass window.”
In the silence that followed, Robert turned and looked at the transmatter, witlessly humming away and shoving volumes of air from Point A to Point B.