HANK HAD known it was going to happen, sooner or later. He’d been afraid that this was it, and it was. There had been a routine report from the Threshold Station at Los Angeles that a massive shipment of steel pipe was coming through, just the day before, but no pipe had turned up in Ironstone. He had assumed that there had been some delay on the Earthside end until a suspicious report, a thoroughly mystifying report, had come in from the pilot of one of the scout satellites making regular runs circumnavigating Mars every day, about something extraordinary that had appeared out of nowhere in a remote valley some 850 miles from Ironstone on the Martian equator. Something which had proven, upon closer examination to be an immense puddle of molten iron which half-filled the valley and sat there, slowly congealing. Hank had tried to flag down Robert, hating to do it because it seemed that he had to flag Robert down so often these days, except that this time Robert was somewhere out in the Rigellian system patting monkeys on the head, or some such thing, and couldn’t be reached. The call was still in, but there had been no response as yet.
And now, Hank knew, there was no question. The puddle of molten iron had originally been four hundred miles of ten-inch steel pipe shipped from Earth via the heavy-transport Threshold chambers in Los Angeles, under a doubtfully moral but unassailably legal license from the International Joint Conference to Interplanetary Oil, Incorporated.
Hank had to explain why to an angry Jonathan Tarbox, doubly indignant because he had been shadowed across country by a shadow Hank Merry had certainly not assigned, for reasons that Hank couldn’t begin to fathom.
Hank walked to the window and stared out at the spindly buildings and ramps and archways of the Martian city, Ironstone architecture was strangely anachronistic on this ancient and moldering planet; bright sharp crystalline lines and pointed spires in a place where all the sharp edges had been worn down by eons of sandstorms and the howling, unremitting winds. From the forlorn, primitive outpost of five years ago Ironstone had grown. Grown! Hank almost laughed at the understatement. Like discovering one of the original ice-bound Antarctic outposts transformed into a modern sky-scraping metropolis overnight and saying that it had “grown.” Ironstone had burgeoned, blossomed, exploded, once Threshold contact had been established.
Some of the builders lived here permanently, fond of the alien desert surroundings; most of them commuted daily, thanks to the Benedict Threshold. But all of them had thrived as the iron ore began pouring back to Earth, and the marble, and the beautifully streaked red sandstone, and the radioactive ores. People had poured into Ironstone, bringing clever architects to plan the buildings suitable to the low-gravity conditions. “The grace of willows, the strength of steel,” was the slogan, and it was true. Ironstone had become a beautiful, graceful city, a thriving place, working to support a once-again-thriving Earth.
The Threshold stations had made it possible, of course. Whenever Hank thought of the old, silly, desperate idea of building ships to carry men and materials back and forth, he had to laugh. It could never have been done, that way. There would have been no Ironstone. A few stinking underground hovels and nothing more. They could never have brought the cement and steel and crystal. They could never have built the dome to cover the city. They could never have brought the hydroponics to supply food and oxygen here; or even if they could have, slowly, at economy-shattering expense, they could never have shouldered the expense of sending things back to Earth. And the Benedict Threshold made it so easy. No problem, no work, no power required, no technology. Just walk into a chamber and press a button and you were there!
But things had happened along the way, things neither Hank nor Robert Benedict himself could either explain or cope with. A puddle of iron on the Martian desert, for example. A slowly growing list of odds and ends of things that had never gotten through, or had gotten through wrong, of time delays, of altered personalities. Hank knew about them. So did Robert, and Robert had tried to straighten them out, time and again, and thought he had succeeded time and again, but they continued to happen. Jonathan Tarbox, facing Hank now in arrogant fury, knew only about a lost load of pipe, not about a puddle in the desert. And nobody but Hank and Robert and a few high government officials knew, for instance, that the exploratory party to the surface of Saturn had gone there by way of the Treshold and not by the scout ship reported in the news, and had never gotten to the surface of Saturn at all, as far as anybody knew.
Now Hank Merry turned to the Interplanetary Oil man. “Do you have any idea how a Benedict Threshold station works?”
Tarbox shrugged with tremendous indifference. “A vague idea. Who cares? Something about a fourth-dimensional warp, and little monsters or something trotting people back and forth. A very haphazard arrangement, it seems to me. But the government endorses it.”
“Not so haphazard. And no ‘little monsters’ that we know of. Things are propelled through a fourth-dimensional warp, that’s true. And as a means of interplanetary commerce it’s without equal in speed, efficiency and reliability. The time-slip is annoying sometimes, but it’s a 1000 per cent improvement over any propelled rocket craft you ever dreamed of.” Hank threw up his hands in disgust. “The Threshold is no magician’s wonder. There’s no hocus-pocus about it. It’s a universe, a complete, organized, populated universe, co-existent with ours, contiguous with ours, probably using the same atoms and molecules as ours at the same time, but a universe with four spacial dimensions.
“It’s an incomprehensible place; it drove men crazy until Robert Benedict made contact with the people there and showed them that we needed the planets and that our effort to get to them with a transmatter was causing all the chaos they were suffering. So they bargained. We would stop using disrupting force-fields, and they would provide transport. For them, this amounts to turning things through an angle, maybe only a few millimeters across, but popping them out again on Mars. Or Venus. Or any place else in the universe we want to go. Robert Benedict worked out the system with the Thresholders, and he continues to work with them, setting up stations, trying to settle on load limits, helping with routings and policing the system as well as anybody can police it.”
Jonathan Tarbox pulled the cigar out of his mouth. His eyes narrowed at Hank Merry. “Policing,” he said. “Now that is an interesting choice of word.”
“Well, it doesn’t mean what you think. Keeping the strings straight, maybe. Trouble-shooting, or finding solutions when problems turn up.”
“But it also implies keeping track of people,” Tarbox said. “Policemen shadow people they’ve interested in — right? Only they don’t usually use a teen-ager with white-blond hair for a shadow. Too easy to spot. And in my case, altogether too hard to shake; wherever I was, he seemed to be there too, even when he couldn’t have known where I was going.” The little man looked at his cigar speculatively. “You know this Robert Benedict, I gather? Just out of curiosity, what color is his hair?”
Hank stared at the little man for a minute. Then he said, “His hair is blond. You might even say white-blond.”