GAIL BENEDICT protested the idea with a tenacity and stubbornness which surprised even McEvoy, first indignantly, then angrily, then bitterly, at last almost tearfully.
“It’s bad enough that the boy is the only contact we have at all, and it’s bad enough that he can’t even go through now without getting tormented and frightened and trounced. But now you’re talking about using him where you know there’s danger. You’re asking him to try something he may not be able to control at all, and to take chances that you can’t even guess at, much less begin to measure, and I’m not going to stand here and let you get away with it.”
“It’s the same universe over there, regardless of how he gets there,” Hank Merry argued. “And he’s the same person, with the same brain and the same knowledge.”
“Maybe it’s the same universe and maybe it’s not. How do you know? The things you push through that machine are stirring up trouble. Robert never did. There’s a reason, there has to be. You have a volcano that may be about to explode and you want somebody to crawl down in the crater to find out why!”
“There’s no other way to find out, as far as we know. And Robert is the only one who has a chance.”
“But how do you know that even Robert has a chance?” Gail stormed. They argued on while Robert listened, looking thoughtfully at the transmatter. Even McEvoy stewed and fumed and wondered whether some other approach — he didn’t know just what — shouldn’t be tried first.
But ultimately, of course, it was Robert who decided. “There isn’t much choice,” he pointed out to Gail. “I’m scared to go through even the usual way, and I’m not getting anywhere doing that. Apparently they can reach out and grab me any time they want to, or at least they could up in Massachusetts. Maybe they had a fix on me up there so they could grab me easily, and now that I’ve gone somewhere else they’ve lost their co-ordinates. Maybe they’re taking bites out of our living room right now, trying to grab me. I don’t know.
“It certainly looks like they’re trying to center in on this laboratory in a grand style, hit or miss, a grab here and a grab there at random. If you check the map, their aim is getting closer. That’s a guess — maybe they don’t even know there is a transmatter. And I can’t tell them anything, either. But maybe if I let the transmatter push me through, I can get some idea why it’s taboo and the usual way isn’t. If I can’t tell them that we want to help, maybe I can at least show them. If they can recognize me right at the center of the source of trouble, right down in the volcano’s crater, then maybe they’ll recognize that we at least know we’re causing some trouble and are trying to do something about it.”
Gail shook her head. “You don’t know what distortion there might be, going through that way. You don’t know what might happen to you, or what shape you might be in when you got back out. You don’t even know there’d be any way out again. Maybe the transmatter really is tearing things down and putting them back together again.”
“Well, what about it?” Robert challenged Hank. “Do you think that’s so?”
“No,” Hank said. “I don’t think it’s doing anything at all to the molecular structure of things. I can’t see any way it could be. It’s half dismantled. I don’t think now that it ever actually did what it was supposed to do. I think it’s been taking things and shoving them bodily through someone else’s backyard, that’s what I think, and somehow tearing up the neighbor’s garden in the process. I don’t think we’re dealing with subatomic forces here. I think we’re talking about spacial dimension and direction. We may be talking about the whole energy-structure of a universe. I’m not sure what we’re talking about, but I think we have to find out and very soon.”
“Then let’s find out,” Robert said shortly. He cut off Gail’s protest. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but once I’ve gone through there I think I can get back out again.” He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. “Hank, let’s get going. How do I go about it?”
“Probably just climb up on the transmitter plate,” Hank said. “That’s where the draft is moving like smoke down a chimney. If that doesn’t do it, we’ll try — ”
Robert shook his head impatiently and climbed up on the transmitter plate. What happened then was too fast for any of them to comprehend. Gail stared and burst out sobbing. Hank gripped the lab bench until his knuckles were white, totally immobilized. They all stood frozen as they watched, and only later tried to piece together exactly what they saw, or thought they saw, in that brief instant.
Robert disappeared like magic from the metal transmitter plate and reappeared in the precise same instant on the receiver plate. Followed in the same instant by a second Robert, and a third, and a fourth….
Multiple Roberts, moving jerkily back to the transmitter plate, like the images thrown by an old, shaky motion picture camera run far too slowly, like shadow images on a TV screen when the aerial is out of phase, flick, flick, flick, Robert-1, Robert-2, Robert-3, moving back and vanishing again, one by one but all together on the transmitter plate, and in the same instant another Robert reappearing on the receiver plate, but a different Robert; an oddly twisted, distorted, crooked-shaped sort of Robert, the same Robert, not so much different, not in the least horrible, but out of phase, wrong … but even if a crooked Robert, an unhurt Robert who moved back to the transmitter plate again.
And did not reappear at all.