“I’m just saying that it was intelligent. That’s all,” Cushing pointed out.
George said, “I didn’t like the idea of killing it either. I don’t think any of us did, but it wasn’t exactly friendly. You saw that face
… Jesus, I’ve never seen such absolute hatred before. Those eyes could burn holes through concrete.”
“We should get back,” Elizabeth said.
Saks ignored her. “We saw its ship. Part of it sticking up out of the weed… looked like a flying saucer. Course, Menhaus thought it was a hovercraft.”
Fabrini chuckled under his breath. But it was not a happy sound.
“Bullshit,” Menhaus said. “I said it looked like a hovercraft. That’s all I said.”
But Elizabeth didn’t seem to care. “Please, let’s just go… I’m sick of looking at it.”
“But something that intelligent… just imagine the things it knew,” Cushing said.
Saks laughed. “There you go again. If it was so fucking smart, how did it get trapped here like us? You wanna tell me that, Einstein?”
Cushing shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it was just an accident. Maybe something happened to its ship. That thing… a ship like you say, probably had the power to jump from star to star. Maybe it opened a wormhole into this place and something went wrong.”
Fabrini was crouched down, elbows on knees, studying the machine the creature had built. “What about this?”
Cushing stood up. He studied it carefully. “I think… I think it might be a teleporter. A teleportation device. A sort of machine that might be quite common where that thing came from, but is thousands of years beyond us.”
“You lost me,” Menhaus said. “What does it do?”
Cushing gave him his best guess. The alien was trapped here, in Dimension X, and its ship was damaged, so it decided to tunnel its way back out. It made the teleporter – if that’s what it was at all, he freely admitted – to punch a hole back through time/space to its own dimension, its own world.
“It might have had this on the ship,” he said. “Sort of like we carry liferafts, they carry something a little more sophisticated. But, Christ, this is a really wild guess on my part. It could be just about anything. Maybe some kind of communications device. Who really knows?”
Again, more randy speculation on his part. He told them it might have chosen this freighter because of the radioactive waste in the barrels. Maybe it was tapping that, charging its machine with atomic power.
“Hell, this contraption might run on cold fusion… the mechanics of the stars themselves. If it is a teleporter, though, then the mathematics and physics behind this thing are probably ten-thousand years beyond us. It boggles the imagination.”
George said, “I read Greenberg’s letter… he seemed to think there were wormholes everywhere. Maybe this thing just opens them?”
Menhaus was kneeling next to it. “Christ, there’s no buttons or levers or readouts. Nothing. How the hell do you turn it on?”
“Good question,” Cushing said.
Menhaus was checking out those mirrors at either end. They didn’t look much like mirrors really. There didn’t seem to be any glass in them or anything else for that matter. But there was something there. .. some see-through type of material like a shiny veil. He touched the front mirror with his hand, felt a tingling sensation. Shrugging, he thrust his hand in and… it disappeared. Well, not really. His hand was stuck in that mirror up to the knuckles, only his fingers didn’t come out the other side, they came out of the other mirror, from the back end.
Menhaus gasped, pulled his hand out. It was fine.
“Do it again,” Saks told him.
Licking his lips, he put his hand up to the knuckles again. His fingers wiggled from the rear of the other mirror. Separated by nearly six feet of space, yet whole, connected, alive.
“I think you’re sticking your hand into the fourth dimension,” Cushing told him, very excited now. “The usual rules of space and distance don’t apply.”
“That’s freaking me out,” Fabrini said. “You stick your hand in the front… it comes out the back? That’s some weird shit.”
“Does it hurt?” Elizabeth asked Menhaus.
Menhaus shook his head. “It feels kind of cold in there, tingly, but nothing beyond that.”
“Pull your hand out,” Cushing warned him. “If that thing cuts out
… well, your fingers might fall off on the other end.”
Menhaus yanked his hand back out.
Saks was kneeling next to him. He touched the scope-like projection on top and his fingers sparked. “Static electricity,” he said. He placed his hand on it. “Yeah… the whole goddamn thing is crawling with static electricity…”
Saks pulled his hand away and the machine began to hum. Quietly at first, then louder.
“I don’t think we should fool with this,” Elizabeth said.
But it was too late. Saks touching it had activated something. The humming rose up to a whining and the air around them crackled again with building energy. There was that smell of burnt ozone again, electricity and melted wiring. That narrow beam of white light came out of the back of the scope, struck the rear mirror and made it glow. The glow was reflected and broken into prisms of light that struck the front mirror or lens, were amplified into that blue beam of illumination that hit the bulkhead like a spotlight. There seemed to be millions of tiny dots dancing in the beam like bubbles in beer. Right away, buzzing with that blue light, the bulkhead looked insubstantial.
George was just in awe.
That blue glow on the bulkhead looked like the static on a TV screen, but busy and thrumming and alive. Like a blizzard or something. Looked like you could get lost in there and he had a funny feeling that you probably could at that.
“Don’t touch that beam,” Cushing told them. “You don’t know what might happen.”
George said, “We could use this thing, you know? Greenberg said that if you could find the spot where you first came into… into Dimension X, that it might open back up for you sooner or later. Maybe this thing is the key that could open it whenever we wanted it to.”
“Or maybe it would suck you into an alien world,” Cushing said.
Saks put his hand in the beam. “Kind of cold,” he said. “Funny.. . feels like something’s crawling all over my hand.”
“Be careful,” George told him, maybe secretly hoping that idiot would get sucked through and spit out on the sterile plains of Altair-4.
Cushing watched the beam, the dancing flecks of matter or energy in it. “Probably some sort of ionized field. Electrified gas or something. I wouldn’t leave your hand in there too long. Not if you value it.”
“Yeah,” Fabrini said. “You lose a hand, Saks, there goes half your sex life.”
Cushing was studying the machine closely. “That disk underneath could be sort of a generator, I suppose. That scope could be an accelerator. It directs a stream of particles at that rear mirror where something happens to them. Then they’re reflected to the forward lens and that blue light must tear open time/space. Jesus, the minds that must have conceived of such a thing.”
Fabrini was over near the bulkhead now. Before Cushing could tell him not to, he pressed his hand into the blue glow there. His hand went right through it. There was no wall there, just empty space.
“Careful,” George told him. “You read what Greenberg said. If that’s a wormhole, it could come out just about anywhere.”
“Yeah, and maybe back on home sweet home.”
“C’mon,” George said. “You really think that alien opened up a portal into our world? Why would it… she do that?”
Fabrini didn’t seem to have an answer for that. He was not a scientific type by nature or inclination. A lot of what Cushing told him was pretty much indecipherable. Too much theory, not enough fact. All he knew was that the teleporter was maybe a way out and he told them all that.
“No fucking way,” George said. “You’re not going through there.. . you know what the chances are of coming out anywhere?”
