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.”
They went back to the transmatter. Shifting the receiver to a far corner of the room, they set the rheostats for the proper distance, then placed a shiny steel ball-bearing in the transmitter. It appeared in the receiver, unchanged. McEvoy insisted on trying the funny pencil again. This time it disappeared altogether; McEvoy bellowed in outrage, but the receiver plate was empty. For two hours more they worked, transmitting a dozen small objects — pins, neckties, cigarettes — with varying degrees of success. Finally McEvoy threw up his hands. “Hank, is there any reason you can see why this thing should be working so erratically?”
“I can’t see why it works at all,” Hank said. “But it does. Even if it fouls things up. The cigarettes went through unchanged. The key was reversed, and the light bulb exploded the instant it appeared in the receiver. Something isn’t working right in the scanner plates, the ones that are hooked in, or in the receiver, or somewhere. I don’t know. Maybe if I tear it down and re-analyze — ”
“Tear it down?” McEvoy roared. “Never! Build another one, following the pattern of this one but don’t even touch this one until we know why it’s doing what it does.”
“But I can always rebuild it.”
“Maybe. And maybe not.” McEvoy turned to him. “Look, Hank, think for a minute. Whatever makes it go, we’ve got a working transmatter on our hands! That by itself will hold up any government action until we can get the bugs ironed out.”
McEvoy pulled on his hat and coat. “I’ve got to get on the line to Washington now and get some planning started. You order up any work crew that you need, spend whatever you need, but keep this thing working and make it work right. And we’ll clamp down a security blackout with full government sanctions. If word of this thing leaks out, you’ll have every TV and newspaper reporter in the hemisphere sitting on your doorstep tomorrow morning. We’ve got half an answer here; now we’ve got to get the rest of it. But we can’t afford a news break until we have something to say.”
Hank Merry went back to the transmatter, while McEvoy went up to begin dragging sundry company and government officials out of bed and onto scrambled telephone circuits. Hank was glad McEvoy could handle that; for him it was enough for one day to be facing an enigma he couldn’t explain, the designer of a machine that couldn’t possibly be working, but was, all the same. It would be a sleepless night, and somehow he had a sneaky hunch that the news would leak out, and that Telcom Labs would be neck-deep in newsmen by morning, no matter what security measures were taken. He was glad to let McEvoy worry about that, too.
After a quick cup of coffee he sent out a call for an overtime crew of technicians and engineers. A few minutes later he was back at work again. He was right about the sleepless night, but many hours later, as dawn was lightening the eastern sky, he learned that he was wrong about the reporters. They had a bigger story to cover, far more amazing than the vague rumors that had filtered out from Telcom Laboratories. During a coffee break, Hank switched on an early morning newscast, and learned that during the night the lower end of Manhattan Island had swiftly and silently vanished into the sea.