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  THE UNIVERSE BETWEEN IS “… ENGROSSING SCIENCE FICTION THAT WILL BE WELCOMED BY ALL SCIENCE FICTION FANS.”

  (Dallas Public Library)

  To save Earth, Bob Benedict must venture once more into the invisible, dangerous world of The Thresholders. If he fails to return — sane — Earth, and all those who inhabit the planet, will be hurled into oblivion.

  “… fascinating science fiction … the action moves rapidly and there is a great deal of suspense and excitement…. Recommended.” (Spokane Public Schools)

  “Highly imaginative …” (ALA Booklist)

  THE UNIVERSE BETWEEN

  ALAN E. NOURSE

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Part One: THE DOOR INTO NOWHERE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part Two: THE UNIVERSE BETWEEN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Part Three: THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Part One

  THE DOOR INTO NOWHERE

  1

  THEY CUT the current the instant the trouble began, switched off the main pumps and broke into the vault. Half-dragging the man from the chamber, they tried to slap him into silence as he screamed, cowering and shrieking and covering his face with both hands. Finally a sedative shot quelled the original attack; the man just sat blubbering in a chair, staring at nothing, his whole body shaking violently. Then, like the others, he took a sudden breath and sagged forward. The doctor from the Hoffman Center caught him and eased him down to the floor. They had the resuscitator and heart-stimulator at hand, of course, but it was no good. Five minutes later the man’s pulse and blood pressure were gone. He was dead.

  Dr. John McEvoy twisted the small round object from his clenched fist and examined it under the arc light: an eight-centimeter ball of rubber, slick and smooth on the outside. With a pocket knife McEvoy sliced through the outer covering of the ball to reveal the fuzzy down that lined the hollow interior. Angrily, he tossed the ball to the technician. “There’s your tennis ball,” he said.

  The doctor was examining the man’s body as the rest of the lab crew clustered about. He looked up at McEvoy and spread his hands. “The same as the other two,” he said hopelessly. “No marks, no nothing. And the post-mortem won’t tell us anything more. Total cardiovascular collapse, with cardiac arrest. Maybe adrenal exhaustion, though I don’t see how a psychic trauma could get to the endocrine function so fast.”

  “Oh, come on, Doc,” McEvoy snapped. “Translate it.”

  “The man died of fear. Or shock. Or both.”

  McEvoy clenched a heavy fist. “Same wretched thing again, then.” He turned away, slamming the fist into his other hand. As director of this whole branch of research in the sprawling Telcom Laboratories, John McEvoy had been trapped in the middle from the beginning. It was his responsibility, even though some of the bright-eyed boys on his staff had actually started the thing. He turned to his assistant. “Well, what about it? Where do we go next?”

  The technician tossed the peculiar tennis ball into the air a time or two, staring at the body on the floor. “Well, one thing is certain. We can’t go on like this.”

  “Obviously not,” McEvoy said. “But we’ve got to go on somehow. We can’t let this thing slide by. It’s right in front of us — right at our fingertips! And we can’t seem to touch it. Can’t even get near it. But we can’t quit now, just because …”

  “Just because everybody dies?” The man met McEvoy’s eyes. “That’s what you’re really saying, you know. And you’re the one who talked that poor guy into it. ‘Nothing to worry about, we’ve got the bugs out of it this time,’ you said. Good old McEvoy, always the persuader. So now he’s dead. How would you like to go in there next time?”

  “Not I,” said McEvoy, glancing quickly away from the body on the floor. “Not after that, not I.”

  2

  “THE FACT remains, Dr. McEvoy, that you’re going to have to close it down.” The little man with the red face tamped his pipe and applied a match to it. Across the small office room pale afternoon sunlight was filtering in the window. McEvoy felt as bleak as the South Jersey barrens he could see outside. The little man with the pipe stared at him and the Hoffman Center doctor from behind the wide desk. He didn’t look like much, this little man, but he was power — the final word at Telcom Laboratories, the co-ordinator of all the research projects under way in this whole great communications-equipment organization. What this little man decided was what was going to happen; McEvoy knew that.

  “We just can’t have any more accidents of this sort on that project,” the little man went on quietly. “Telcom has given you free sanction in your work here so far; we don’t believe in hiring good men and then handcuffing them. But if you don’t clamp down on this now, we will. Already we have a committee of the International Joint Conference on our necks. Did you know that I’ve spent all day on the Washington line beating off bureaucrats who want to know what on earth you’re doing up here that’s taken three lives already and put two other good men into a Hoffman Center lock-ward for the mentally deranged? Next thing, we’ll be facing a full-fledged government inquiry, with an injunction slapped on everything we’re doing here, and Telcom Laboratories doesn’t care to have that happen.” The red-faced co-ordinator paused. “To say nothing of the moral questions involved.”

  McEvoy was silent for a moment. The three of them had been hashing it out for over an hour; now McEvoy was tired, more tired than he could ever remember. Finally he spread his hands. “Sir, I’ve considered all these points very carefully, and I’ve come to some definite conclusions. I’d like at least to present them.”

  “Conclusions! Dr. McEvoy, the record shows that since you started this thing back on — ” he glanced at a note sheet — “on November 3, 1978, that’s just two months ago, you’ve killed or incapacitated five of the best investigators Telcom had on the payroll, and you have nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way of a solution to offer. Those men would better be alive and working. The only definite conclusion I can reach is that you’re fooling with something you can’t manage, and I think the time has come to stop you.”

  McEvoy squirmed. “I can’t deny the record. And I wouldn’t care to be the next man, either. But we do have a solution to offer.” He motioned to the man from the Hoffman Medical Center. “Tell him what we talked about this morning, Doc.”

  The doctor shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. “We’ve been in close contact with Dr. McEvoy ever since he got involved in this … this business,” he said carefully. “Particularly when abnormal behavior patterns began to develop among the investigators. As you know, the Hoffman Center is acutely interested in problems of human behavior, adaptability, adjustment … normal or abnormal. In fact, we have a very promising young psychologist named Benedict who is working right now with a team of high-adaptive youngsters, trying to learn more about mental adaptation to physical and emotional
stress — ”

  “Yes, yes,” the co-ordinator broke in impatiently. “Telcom has worked with your people on any number of projects, I know that. After all, communication involves people as well as electrons.”

  “Yes, sir. Well, we think we may have a lead to Dr. McEvoy’s problem. At least a way to go about investigating it without any more tragedies. There’s a pattern to what has happened, and it makes sense. In each case a man has gone into the vault after the … the cube, or whatever it is … has materialized. In each case the man was alone, and instructed as well as possible in techniques of observation. Since we aren’t entirely sure just what we’re dealing with, it’s been hard to tell a man exactly what to look for, your understand. Each one was instructed to observe the phenomenon any way he could.” The doctor shrugged. “You know the results.”

  “Yes,” the co-ordinator said. “Deranged minds and dead men.”

  “The question is why,” the doctor went on. “Each of these men was a perfectly ordinary lab person picked at random, trained in physics or electronics but not much else. We think now we’re dealing mainly with a problem of adjustment — mental adjustment. These men apparently have been faced with something they have never encountered before, something so completely foreign to their experience that their nervous systems couldn’t cope with it. They ran into something so frightening, or startling, or stupendous that their minds saw no escape but total and immediate breakdown. And in three cases the shock brought on physical collapse as well. It was a matter of adjust or crumble. They couldn’t adjust, so they crumbled.”

  The co-ordinator blinked at the doctor. “The theory sounds reasonable enough. I’m no physician, I have to take your word. But what do you suggest, gentlemen? That we just keep feeding good men to this thing?”

  Dr. John McEvoy stirred. “Not quite,” he said. “Believe me, I don’t want any more bodies in the laboratory. But as the doctor says, it may be a matter of adjustment. He claims this man Benedict has proven that people differ greatly in what they can adjust to mentally. He has taken some natural high-adaptives, tested them stage by stage to find the most adaptable ones, and has been training them to adapt even better … right, Doc? What we need is a man with a high adjustment threshold. A very high threshold. Somebody with a cast-iron nervous system who can adapt to anything, regardless of how strange or shocking it may be. And if I could find a man like that, I’d agree to one more stab at it.”

  The co-ordinator knocked out his pipe and looked from McEvoy to the Hoffman Center man and back. “In other words, what you’re saying is that somebody who is specially skilled and gifted at adapting to strange situations might — just might be able to investigate where the others have failed.”

  “Exactly,” John McEvoy said.

  “But there are no guarantees of that.”

  “None,” McEvoy said flatly.

  For a long time the co-ordinator stared out the window at the gloomy countryside. He filled his pipe again, lit it, put it down, picked it up and puffed on it. “John,” he said finally, “I’ve known you and your work for a long time. You’re a big man and a tough one; when you get onto something you don’t like to let it go. But I’ve always counted on your judgment. Do you really think that this thing is so important?”

  “It’s something no scientist in history has ever encountered before,” McEvoy said. “It’s important.”

  “And if this new approach of yours fails, you’d drop it?”

  The big man hesitated just an instant. “I’d drop it, yes. Until I could find some better way to define it, or something. Yes, I’d close it down.”

  There was another moment of silence. Then the co-ordinator nodded. “Very well, John. If you can find the kind of investigator you’ve described, I’ll accept your word that you’ll stop if he fails. Even though I don’t believe you for a moment.”

  3

  JOHN MCEVOY took the ball from his briefcase and laid it on the desk before the young man with the tired eyes and the horn-rimmed glasses. “What does that look like to you, Dr. Benedict?”

  The young man shook his head impatiently. “Not ‘Doctor,’ please. Around here that means either an M.D. or a psychiatrist. I’m neither; just a research phychologist.” Ed Benedict picked up the ball, examined it closely. Young, thin, obviously intent, he gave McEvoy none of the impression of eager, inexperienced blundering he so often felt with the young mathematicians and physicists coming into his laboratory from their training. So often they thought they had the world by the tail, knew all there was to know and had only to convince everyone else of that simple fact. By contrast, Ed Benedict had a curious manner of reserve about him that McEvoy couldn’t quite pin down. Not exactly caution; certainly not hesitation, not fear — maybe wisdom was the right word. A young man, but with a wisdom beyond his years — a wisdom born of experience.

  Benedict studied the ball, put a finger into the notch that McEvoy had cut, and looked up, frowning. “It looks to me like a tennis ball somebody turned inside out.”

  McEvoy nodded. “Right. And how would you go about turning a tennis ball inside out?”

  “I don’t think I could, without cutting a hole in it to turn it inside out through.” The psychologist tossed the ball back onto the desk. “Which, I gather, you did not do. What can I do for you, Dr. McEvoy?”

  “You’ve talked to the Center man who was in my lab yesterday?”

  “Yes. But I’m afraid he was pretty vague about the details. He couldn’t even say just what this project is that you’re working on.”

  “Neither can I, for sure,” McEvoy said. “About two months ago we ran into a peculiar snag in the work we were doing. You know the background: the Mars and Asteroid landings a few years ago, and all the stir about the iron lode they found on Mars, what with the pinch on steel we’ve been feeling lately. And you’ve read about the Joint Conference contracts for various kinds of spacecraft, and the trouble with the guidance components on longrange ships because of prolonged low temperature conditions.”

  Ed Benedict smiled faintly. “I know there’s been enough government-supported research in communications equipment to quadruple the value of Telcom stocks in the last five years. Go on.”

  “Okay, we’ve had more work than we knew what to do with,” McEvoy said. “My lab has been involved with temperature stresses on spacecraft components, especially the effects of extreme cold on guidance systems. We’ve been working in extremely low temperatures, approaching absolute zero, where molecular motion ceases altogether. A theoretical point, of course, because you’re never supposed to be quite able to get there. You get into problems of entropy and energy exchange … actual physical stress … that gets worse the closer you get to the theoretical point. Mass-energy conversion, a lot of otherwise-stable constants that don’t seem to obtain under these conditions … the very meat of the project, the reason we’re doing it.”

  Ed Benedict nodded. “I don’t understand you, but I think I know what you’re talking about.”

  “Fine. Things were going along very well until one of my men devised a radically new refrigerating pump that worked far better than anybody dreamed it could. We got our test material — a block of tungsten supported on an insulated tripod in the refrigerating vault — down closer to absolute zero than we’d ever hoped for. Maybe we hit absolute and dropped below it … I don’t even know that for sure.”

  The phychologist blinked. “I don’t follow. From absolute zero, just where can the temperature drop to?”

  “A good question,” McEvoy said. “I can’t answer it. Below absolute zero you might speculate on some kind of negative molecular motion. Maybe that’s what we did get. Certainly something changed. The test block simply evaporated. Vanished. The tripod vanished, and so did the temperature-recording device. All we could see in the vault was a small, glowing hole in the center of the room where the block had been. Nothing in it, nothing. Just a pale, blue, glowing area about six inches across that looked to some of us very strangely lik
e a hypercube.”

  “A hypercube?”

  “A three-dimensional picture of a four-dimensional object; just as you can draw a picture of a cube in perspective on a flat two-dimensional surface like a piece of paper. It looks like a cube when you look at it, but it doesn’t actually have any depth. This glowing area was in three dimensions — cubical — but the lines were distorted as if there were more than one cube in the same space. In fact, it looked very suspiciously like a four-dimensional hole in our three-dimensional space, as if the energy we had been applying had inadvertently cut through a corner or an edge of some … some other universe constructed in four spacial dimensions instead of three.”

  Ed Benedict was silent for a moment, staring at the tennis ball. “So you investigated,” he said finally.

  “We investigated … and you know from the doctor what happened.”

  “What about this?” Benedict pointed to the ball.

  “That’s one of the characteristics of this thing we are able to investigate. That was an ordinary, normal tennis ball until we dropped it into the area of this hypercube. It came out the other side looking like this. I stuck a pencil into the area and it came out with a thin layer of graphite around a solid wooden core. A light bulb we pushed in just exploded and vaporized.”

  Benedict toyed with the tennis ball. “And your investigators haven’t even been able to look into this little area of space?”

  “No. When they’ve tried it, it’s frightened them, or shocked them, or done something to them. As if they had taken on some kind of terrible overload, beyond their ability to adjust.”

  “It sounds as if you need a tough nervous system,” Ed Benedict said. “Somebody tough enough to look in there and investigate and at least come out alive.” He smiled. “Have you heard the old story about the South American farmers who tried to carry, their goats over the Andes by muleback? The mules crossed the high passes and the narrow mountain trails along dreadful drop-offs just fine. But the goats all died of fright. It was old stuff for the mules, or else they were too stupid to be worried, but the goats couldn’t take it. Until they were blindfolded. Then everything went fine.”