“Or else,” said Adikor, “maybe it’s just emerged into a completely dark room.”
“What—what do you suppose we should do?” asked Jasmel.
Dern shrugged his rounded shoulders slightly.
Adikor said, “Let’s haul it back in—see if anything can survive going … going
through
.” He walked out onto the computing floor and gently took hold of the cable, disappearing a few paces away into nothingness at waist height. He added his other hand and began to pull gently.
Jasmel came over to be behind him, and she began to pull gently as well.
The cable was hauling back easily enough, but it was obvious to Adikor, at least, that there was a weight hanging off the end, as if, somewhere on the other side of the hole, the robot was dangling over a precipice.
“How strong are the connectors on the robot’s end of the cable?” asked Adikor, shooting a glance at Dern, who, now that he no longer had to hold down his control box, had come out onto the computing floor as well.
“They’re just standard
bedonk
plugs.”
“Will they come free?”
“If you jerk them hard enough. There are little clips that snap onto the cable’s connector to help hold it in place.”
Adikor and Jasmel continued to pull gently. “And did you engage the clips?”
“I—I’m not sure,” said Dern. “I mean, maybe. I was plugging and unplugging the cable a fair bit as I set the robot up …”
Adikor and Jasmel had already hauled in perhaps three armspans’ worth of cable, and—
“Look!” said Jasmel.
The robot’s squat form was emerging through—well, through
what
they couldn’t say. But the machine’s base was now visible, as if somehow it were passing through a hole in midair that precisely matched the robot’s cross-section.
Dern hurried across the computing chamber, the closed ends of his pant making loud slapping sounds against the polished rock of the floor. He reached out and grabbed one of the robot’s spindly arms, now partially protruding from the air. He was just in time, too, for the cable connector did give way, and Adikor and Jasmel went tumbling backwards, him falling on her. They quickly got to their feet and saw Dern finish pulling the robot through from—the phrase came again into Adikor’s mind—from the other side.
Adikor and Jasmel ran over to join Dern, who was now sitting on the floor, the robot, toppled over, next to him. It seemed no more damaged than it had been before it had gone through. But Dern was staring at his own left hand, a dumbfounded look on his face.
“Are you all right?” asked Adikor.
“My hand …” said Dern.
“What about it? Is it broken?”
Dern looked up. “No, it’s fine; it’s fine. But—but when I first grabbed hold of the robot … when the cable came loose, and the robot fell backward, my hand passed
through
. I saw half of it disappear through … through whatever that was.”
Jasmel took Dern’s hand in hers and peered at it. “It looks all right. What did it feel like?”
“I didn’t feel anything. But it looked like it was cut off, right behind the fingers, and the edge was absolutely straight and smooth, but there was no bleeding, and the edge kept moving down my fingers as I pulled my hand back.”
Jasmel shuddered.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” asked Adikor.
Dern nodded.
Adikor took a half step forward, toward where the opening had been. He slowly stretched his right arm out and tentatively swept it back and forth. Whatever door had been open appeared to be closed now.
“Now what?” asked Jasmel.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Adikor. “Could we get a lamp to put on the robot?”
“Sure,” said Dern. “I could take one off a head protector. Bo you have extras?”
“On a shelf in the little eating room.”
Dern nodded, then held up his hand and rotated it from the wrist, now palm up, now palm down, as if he’d never seen it before. “It was incredible,” he said softly. Then, shaking his head slightly to break his own reverie, he headed off to get the lamp.
“You know what happened, of course,” said Jasmel, as they waited for Dern to return. “My father went through whatever that was. That’s why there’s no trace of his body.”
“But the other side isn’t at ground level,” said Adikor. “He must have fallen and—”
Jasmel raised her eyebrow. “And maybe broken his neck. Which … which means what we might see on the other side is …”
Adikor nodded. “Is his dead body. That thought had occurred to me, I’m sorry to say … but, actually, I’d expected to see him drowned in a tank of heavy water.” He reflected on this for a moment, then moved over to the robot, which was bone dry. “There was a reservoir of heavy water on the other side when Ponter went through, and—
gristle
!”
“What?”
“We must have connected to a
different
universe, not the one Ponter went to.”
Jasmel’s lower lip quivered.
Adikor hoisted the robot onto its treads. He checked out the cable connector, but, as far as he could tell, it was in fine shape. Jasmel, meanwhile, had gone off, walking slowly, head down, to get the loose end of the fiber-optic cable; she brought it to Adikor, who snapped it into place. He then brought down the two clamps that clicked into notches on the connector’s edge, helping to hold it in position.
At this point, Dern returned with two electric lamps and the spherical battery packs that powered them. He also had a coil of adhesive tape, and he used this to firmly attach the lamps on either side of the robot’s camera eye.
They repositioned the robot exactly as it had been before, right beside register 69, and then the three of them headed back into the control room. Adikor got some equipment boxes and stood on them so that he could simultaneously operate his console and look back over his shoulder onto the computing floor.
He called out the countdown once more: “Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”
This time, Adikor saw the whole thing. The portal opened like an expanding hoop of blue fire. He heard air rushing around again, and the robot, which seemed to be right on the lip of a precipice, tottered over and disappeared. The control cable went taut, and the blue hoop contracted around its perimeter, then disappeared.
The three of them turned as one to the square video monitor. At first it seemed again that there was no video signal at all, but then the light beams must have caught something—glass or plastic—and they briefly saw a reflection bouncing back at them. But that was all; whatever space the robot was dangling into must be huge.
The lights played across something else—intersecting metallic tubes?—as the robot swung back and forth like a pendulum.
And then, suddenly, there was illumination everywhere, as if—
“Someone must have turned on the lights,” said Jasmel.
It was now clear that the robot was actually twirling at the end of its tether. They caught glimpses of rocky walls, and more rocky walls, and—
“What’s that?” exclaimed Jasmel.
They’d only seen it for an instant: a ladder of some sort, leaning against the curving side of the vast chamber, and, scuttling down the ladder, a slight figure in some sort of blue clothing.
The robot continued to rotate, and they saw that a large geodesic latticework was sitting on the floor, with things like metal flowers at its intersections.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Dern.
“It’s beautiful,” said Jasmel.
Adikor sucked in his breath. The view was still swinging, and it showed the ladder again, two more figures coming down it, and then, maddeningly, the figures disappeared as the robot turned away.
Its rotation offered two more tantalizing glimpses of figures wearing loose-fitting blue body suits, and sporting bright yellow shells on top of their heads. They were way too narrow-shouldered to be men; Adikor thought perhaps they were women, although they were thin even for females. But their faces, glimpsed ever so briefly, seemed devoid of hair, and—
And the image jerked suddenly, then settled down, the robot no longer rotating. A hand had reached in from the side, briefly dominating the camera’s field of view, a strange, weak-looking hand with a short thumb and some sort of metal circle wrapped around one finger. The hand had clearly clamped onto the robot, steadying it. Dern was working frantically with his control box, tipping the camera down as fast as it would go, and they got their first good look at the face of the being now reaching up and clutching the hanging robot.
Dern gasped. Adikor felt his stomach knotting. The creature was
hideous
, deformed, with a lower jaw that protruded as if the bone within were encrusted by growths.
The repulsive being was still holding on to the robot, trying to pull it down, closer to the ground; the robot’s treads seemed to be about half a bodylength above the floor of the vast chamber.
As the robot’s camera tilted, Adikor could see that there was an opening in the bottom of the geodesic sphere, as if part of it had been disassembled. Lying on the chamber’s floor were giant, curved pieces of glass or transparent plastic piled up one atop another; they must have been what had originally caught the robot’s lamps. Those curved pieces of glass looked like they might have once formed a huge sphere.
They could now intermittently see three of the same beings, all equally deformed. Two of them were also devoid of facial hair. One was pointing directly at the robot; his arm looked like a twig.
Jasmel placed her hands on her hips and shook her head slowly back and forth. “What
are
they?”
Adikor shook his head in wonder.
“They’re primates of some sort,” said Jasmel.
“Not chimpanzees or bonobos,” said Dern.
“No,” said Adikor, “although they’re scrawny enough. But they’re mostly hairless. They look more like us than like apes.”
“It’s too bad they’re wearing those strange pieces of headgear,” said Dern. “I wonder what they’re for?”
“Protection?” suggested Adikor.
“Not very efficient, if so,” said Dern. “If something fell on their heads, their necks, not their shoulders, would take the weight.”
“There’s no sign of my father,” said Jasmel, sadly.
All three of them were quiet for a time. Then Jasmel spoke again. “You know what they look like? They look like primitive humans—like those fossils you see in
galdarab
halls.”
Adikor took a couple of steps backward, literally staggered by the notion. He found a chair, spun it around on its base, and lowered himself into it.
“Gliksin people,” he said, the term coming to him; Gliksin was the region in which such fossils—the only primates known without browridges and with those ridiculous protuberances from the lower jaw—had first been found.
Could their experiment have reached across
world lines
, accessing universes that had split from this one long before the creation of the quantum computer? No, no. Adikor shook his head. It was too much, too crazy. After all, the Gliksin people had gone extinct—well, the figure half a million months ago popped into his head, but he wasn’t sure if it was correct. Adikor rubbed the edge of his hand back and forth above his browridge. The only sound was the drone of the air-purification equipment; the only smells, their own sweat and pheromones.
“This is huge,” Dern said softly. “This is gigantic.”
Adikor nodded slowly. “Another version of Earth. Another version of humanity.”
“It’s talking!” exclaimed Jasmel, pointing at one of the figures visible on the screen. “Turn up the sound!”
Dern reached for a control. “Speech,” said Adikor, shaking his head in wonder. “I’d read that Gliksin people were incapable of speech, because their tongues were too short.”
They listened to the being talking, although the words made no sense.
“It sounds so strange,” said Jasmel. “Like nothing I’ve ever heard before.”
The Gliksin in the foreground had stopped pulling on the robot, evidently realizing that there was no more cable to be payed out. He moved away, and other Gliksins loomed in to have a look. It took Adikor a moment to realize that there were both males and females present; both kinds mostly had naked faces, although a few of the men did have beards. The females generally seemed smaller, but, on a few at least, the breasts were obvious beneath the clothes.
Jasmel looked out at the computing floor. “The gateway seems to be staying open just fine,” she said. “I wonder how long it can be maintained?”
Adikor was wondering that, too. The proof, the evidence that would save him, and his son Dab, and his sister Kelon, was right there: an alternative world! But Daklar Bolbay would doubtless claim the pictures, being recorded on video of course, were fake, sophisticated computer-generated imagery. After all, she’d say, Adikor had access to the most powerful computers on the planet.
But if the robot could bring back something—
anything
! A manufactured object, perhaps, or …
Different parts of the chamber were selectively revealed as people moved about, briefly opening up views of what was behind them. It was a barrel-shaped cavern, maybe fifteen times as tall as a person, and hewn directly out of the rock.
“They certainly are a varied lot, aren’t they?” Jasmel said. “There seem to be several different skin tones—and look at that female, there! She has
orange
hair—just like an orangutan!”
“One of them is running away,” said Dern, pointing.
“So he is,” said Adikor. “I wonder where he’s going?”
* * *
“Ponter!
Ponter
!”
Ponter Boddit looked up. He was sitting at a table in the dining hall at Laurentian, with two people from the university’s physics department, who were helping him over lunch to work out an itinerary for a tour of physical-science installations worldwide including CERN, the Vatican Observatory, Fermilab, and Japan’s Super-Kamiokande, the world’s other major neutrino detector, which had recently been damaged in an accident of it’s own. A hundred or so summer students were staring at the Neanderthal from a short distance away, in obvious fascination.