One Step From Earth

"Neither. No temperature rise. If anything a brief lowering of the temperature. No metallic particles emitted. It just went in — and never came out. And before you ask, it didn't come out the other side because, and I find this utterly fascinating, the silvery surface has no other side. Can you imagine a substance with only a single surface? It's like trying to think of the sound of one hand clapping."

The next morning Adam Ward arrived at the lab promptly at nine and quickly found himself immersed in the work. In another life — under another name that he never permitted himself to think about — he had done related research. Not on this scale, not with this sort of funding, but work that had been closely related to the control circuitry he was helping to design now. He had done this until his Country had Called — or rather the heavy-set men, the dark coats, who had shown him why he had no choice but to help. All this was forgotten as he worked with the others to discover the secret of that silvery entity.

When his alarm watch pinged he at first could not remember why it had been set. The letters on the face of the watch simply read message. Message? From whom? No, not from anyone but to someone; his spirits sank with the memory. He was now Adam Ward. But he was someone else as well — and the message was a grim reminder of that. It was time to report to those across the Atlantic who had sent him here. He was not at his best for the remainder of the day and left early, blaming a headache. In the security of his room he took out his programmable calculator and shook out the handful of magnetized strips that were various programs and formulae that he used; he found the one with the encoding program. He slowly typed his report into the calculator's memory, ran it through the encoding program then recorded it on another magnetic strip. Without the code it was just electronic hash. He went to bed troubled, but slept well, as he always did.

After work the next day he followed the routine that he had established on the previous three Fridays. He drove first to the car wash, paid, then watched until he saw the government Plymouth dragged into the watery tunnel. Then he crossed the road to Mom's Bar and Grill for a glass of beer. The bar was not what might be called exclusive; at least the beer was cold. He finished the glass quickly, as he always did, then went to the grimy toilet and locked the door behind him. It took only a few seconds to fix the tiny magnetic strip to one end of the bandaid, to reach up and stick it behind the cistern with the other adhesive end. He flushed, unlocked the door and went out. He showed no curiosity about the others in the bar, made no attempt to imagine which of them would retrieve the strip. He crossed back over the road just as they were finished wiping his car dry. It had certainly been easy enough to do. His watch was already set for the date of the next drop. This made it easy for him to put all memory of this from his mind, to think instead about the Epsilon field.

During the next week they worked hard and managed to increase the duration of the field's existence by a factor of ten. Prof. Bhattacharya dropped his bombshell at the weekly report meeting.

"You gentlemen, and lady of course, will I am sure be most interested in a theory about the Epsilon field that Dr. Levy has developed. We have had discussions of an exhaustive and continuous nature and the time has arrived to present you with some of our tentative conclusions. Dr. Levy."

For a change — and a relief — Levy's pipe was not working but lay instead reeking at his elbow. He shook a cautionary finger at Bhattacharya. "In all fairness, I must speak the truth about this discovery. Yes, I did the hack work on the computer to see if the math supported the supposition. But, no, I did not originate the idea. Our illustrious chairman did and all credit where credit is due. Now as to the theory. ."He took a deep breath and reached for his pipe — pulling his hand back when de Oliveira coughed politely. By mutual consent he had been requested, ordered rather, not to ignite the foul object at these meetings. His fingers twitched and he sighed.

"Now nobody laugh. To put it as simply as I can — the silvery surface that we have been observing is. . the interface between our plane of existence and another. Or between our dimensions and a space of different dimensions. Or between here and there — only we don't know yet where there is. But we do have an idea how we can find out." There was an expectant silence and he went on.

"We have to construct a second field. In the relationship between the two fields we will find our explanation of this phenomenon."