Woodenly, Jim nodded. 'Yes. Sal told me.'
'Don't do anything tonight'
'We're in the grip of fate,' Jim said. 'We can't do anything; we've started something bigger than all of us put together. We may be seeing the end of the human race.'
'Humanum est errare,' Cravelli said, assuming he was joking. But was he ? 'You don't mean that,'
Cravelli said, stricken. 'I hate that kind of talk; it's morbid and defeatist and ten other things, all of them bad. That acceptance speech you gave at the nominating convention; it was cut out of the same lousy cloth. Sal ought to give you a good swift kick.'
'I believe what I believe,' Jim said.
At four a.m. the augmented power supply had been coupled to the Jiffi-scuttler; supervising the work, Don Stanley gave the go-ahead signal to start the 'scuttler back up. It had been off now for six and a half hours. His fingers crossed, Stanley tensely smoked his cigarette and waited as the entrance hoop gradually flared into unusual, pale-yellow brilliance, at least four times as bright as before.
Beside him, Bascolm Howard, who had strolled in to watch, said, 'It certainly caught right away.
No hesitation there.'
'It really shines,' Stanley murmured. God, suppose we're overloading it he thought. Suppose it heats up too much and burns out. But the engineers who had done the work had assured him that the load was within the safe tolerance. And he had to go by what they said.
'Tired ?' Howard asked him.
'Darn right.' Stanley felt irritable. 'I ought to be home in bed.' We all should be, he said to himself. I'll be glad when they've run the final tests on this and it's ready to go back into operation.
A senior engineer hopped into the tube of the 'scuttler and disappeared from sight. Stanley dropped his cigarette to the lab floor and savagely ground it out. Now we learn the truth, he realized. We get the poop, whether we've failed or been successful.
Minutes passed.
Reappearing, the engineer called to him. 'Mr. Stanley, would you come here, please ?'
Stanley, on rubber legs, made his way to the tube. 'How is it inside there ?'
The rent's big, now. Three and a half, maybe four times greater.'
Feeling limp as tension throughout his body lessened, Stanley said, 'Fine. Now we can go home where we belong.'
'I want you to look through the rent,' the engineer said.
'Why ?' He did not see the point.
The engineer said, 'Just look, okay ? For chrissake, will you please look, Mr. Stanley ?'
He looked.
Through the rent in the tube wall he saw, not a grassy meadow and ultramarine sky, no white flowers with buzzing, lazy bees tackling them. And he saw no sign of people. None of the tons of equipment which had been passed through the rent. No tents. No temporary septic tanks. No improvised food kitchens or overhead lighting. Instead he saw - and could not at first accept that he saw - a marshlike expanse, gray with mist and the hollow croakings of some distant birds. He saw reeds poking through the gummy, yellow water which lay in pools. A snake moved suddenly, twisting its path through the stagnant debris. And over to the right, some small living creature with a naked tail dropped to safety in the dense shadows beneath a cracked, hairy mass of roots.
The air smelled of decay and silent, utter death.
Pulling back into the 'scuttler tube, Stanley said hoarsely, 'It's not the same place.'
His chief engineer nodded mutely.
'It's a swamp,' Stanley said. 'My god, what kind of catastrophe is this ? Can you make any sense out of it ? We better get the original power supply right back on; you evidently can't increase the load and get the same results only more so, instead you get this, whatever it is.' He took one more look. All his determination was required merely to see it, let alone venture through the rent and actually into it. 'I think I understand,' he said, muttering to himself. 'There's not just one alter-
Earth, parallel universe or whatever you call it; there's several, and why we didn't deal that factor into our planning I'll never know. We'll never make that mistake again.'
'I agree,' his engineer said, beside him, also looking.
'You think we can restore the original power supply and make contact again with where we dumped those people ?'
'We can try.'
'We've got to,' Stanley said. 'You know who'll get the rap; it'll be us. Start work immediately; we'll work the rest of the night.' God, he thought. What'll I tell old man Turpin ? Nothing. If we can get this patched up again we'll see it's forgotten forever. Like it never happened.
I'm not thinking about us getting the blame,' the senior engineer said to him. 'I'm thinking about those people, especially those women, stranded there.'
'They'll be okay! They've got supplies; they went there to colonize, so let them colonize. It was their idea to go across, they knew they were taking a risk. It was their responsibility. So tough tubes.' He drew himself back into the 'scuttler, shaking. 'Wow, what a hell of a sight. I can't see colonizing there. You think you'd like to live there, Hal ?'
'No, Mr. Stanley,' the engineer said. He rose to his feet stiffly, waved to the team standing before the entrance hoop. 'Shut it off!'
The power died. Stanley walked back out of the tubs and over to Howard. 'Now we have to take apart the whole damn thing again and fix it back up the way it was,' he said bitterly. 'What lousy luck. And it's going to take twenty years to get those millions of bibs through; President
Schwarz'll never buy that. That's the end of that contract. That voids it automatically.' And to think we worked six and a half hours for this, he said to himself.
Something appeared at the mouth of the tube.
Stanley saw it, but, even as he saw it, the shadow-like substance vanished.
'Who has a laser pistol ?' he said.
'Get a laser pistol,' Howard said. Evidently he had seen it, too. 'It must have followed you. Come over from the other side. Before the power was turned off.'
'It's just an insect,' Stanley said. 'Some miserable thing that flew up out of that swamp.' I know that's all it is, he said to himself. It's got to be. 'For chrissakes, somebody kill it!' he said, looking around. Where had it gone ? Not back into the tube, but out into the room.
From within the tube, the senior engineer said loudly, 'Mr. Stanley, the rent never shut down.'
'That's absolutely impossible,' Stanley said. 'The power's off.' He ran back into the tube, found the engineer crouched down by the rent. Once more Stanley saw across, into the world of the swamp, the decaying landscape of doomed, collapsing ruin. His senior engineer was right; it was still there.
'I can think of only one explanation,' the engineer said to Stanley. 'It must be that it's maintained by a power source on the other side, because you know no power's coming to it from here; that's for sure.'
Stanley said, 'Did you see something that slipped through just now ? Something alive ?'
'Only for a second. But I thought it went back.'
'It didn't go back,' Stanley said. 'It's out somewhere in the lab, in the TD building, on our side, and now more are going to come across because we can't shut down this damn rent. Maybe we can block it somehow. Can you put a barrier right up ? I don't care what it's made out of, just as long as it's good and solid.'
'We'll get on it right away,' the engineer said and scrambled to his feet.
What kind of power source could exist there on the other side ? Stanley asked himself. There in that brackish, desolate swamp ... it's as if it were waiting. But how could it know we'd show up ?
How could it possibly have been expecting us ?
When he made his way out of the tube once more, Howard said to him, 'It's still somewhere in the room. I can feel it, but I'll be darned if I can see it. It's like it just merged with everything on this side, just sort of - you know, whatever it saw here.'
Don Stanley tried to remember when he had felt such fear. Not for a long time. Had he ever reacted this way to anything in his life before ?