captain, a brutal fellow by the name of Preen, used his slaves as sacrifices to the entity, the Fog-Devil.
“But eventually, much as on the Cyclops and the Korsund, this creature, this Fog-Devil as you call it, began taking lives and minds of its own accord despite Preen’s offerings. Its radioactive aftermath must have killed everyone eventually, even Preen.”
He said that all he knew was pieced together from Preen’s log and pure speculation. There was no way to acurately know the level of desperation, horror, and madness that had taken this ship and its attendant souls.
Greenberg seemed uncomfortable with the subject of the Fog-Devil, preferred physics.
He said the ONR had been fooling around with high-intensity magnetic fields for years, trying to create the sort of pulsating or vortexual field that occurred randomly and naturally in the Sargasso Sea/Devil’s Triangle area… with varying results. Sometimes comical and sometimes disastrous.
“What we were doing with Project Neptune and, yes, later privately with the Procyon Project of ours was pretty much based on Einstein’s Unified Field Theory which, as you may know, was the great man’s attempts to explain the underlying unity between electromagnetic, gravitational, and subatomic forces. Einstein never finished it, but many, many others of us have been working to that very end for years. Trying to garner practical, applied results from theoretical ends.”
Basically, he said, the idea he and the others in Procyon were fooling with was that the attraction between molecules could be altered by an ionized field, a force field in TV jargon. This field, essentially, would create a tear in the fabric of time/space and allow the introduction or extraction of matter from another dimension. Essentially, the transference of matter from one spatial universe to another.
“And you did?” Cushing said.
“Yes, we did,” Greenberg said, but did not seem happy about it. “We engineered a generator that did not actually create said vortex or field, but one that, if you knew the location where these sporadic vortices occurred, could more or less force them to open.”
“And it worked and you ended up here?”
“Yes. The generator worked… but the amount of juice it had to cycle to create the field, well, it blew the thing into about a hundred pieces. It went up like the Fourth of July. By the time myself and the others on the Ptolemy got that fire under control, we had been introduced into this place. If you read my letter as you say, you understand that what happens is that the vortex shuttles you into the fourth dimension, then out again into this place which I firmly believe is sort of a fractal.”
“The passage through the fourth,” George said. “It goes pretty quick.”
Greenberg nodded, snapped his fingers. “Mere seconds. Although you pass through a limitless amount of actual space, you do it essentially in hyperspace.”
Elizabeth listened, but was not moved by anything Greenberg said. She did not like the man and made no attempt to hide the fact. He recognized her, of course, and she offered him only the coolest of acknowledgments. And what it came down to with her was that she thought Greenberg was a fool. A fool that had cost her uncle his life and would, no doubt, cost the others their lives as well.
So she kept silent.
Menhaus just listened.
Once Greenberg had espoused his theories of time/space anomalies, whether natural or artificially-induced, and had thoroughly exhausted them, Cushing brought the alien machine aboard. Greenberg was ecstatic. He had to hear the story again and again. For here was an example of alien technology concieved by intellects light years beyond man’s. The machine, the teleporter, was the very thing the members of the Procyon Project had dreamed of. But unlike their version – which took up all available deck space on the Ptolemy, weighed in at over a ton, took three generators working in tandem to produce the energy it needed, and blew apart after five minutes of operation – this was a miracle of engineering. Like comparing a horse-driven carriage to a supersonic fighter, he said.
He lifted it off the deck, set it back down. “Amazing… it doesn’t even weigh five pounds. I’ll bet… yes, I’ll bet that disk is some sort of cold fusion generator. You could probably power a dozen factories with it, maybe a city.”
But the excitement was too much for him.
He sat on the deck, breathing hard and trembling, finally coughing out some blood.
He did not look too good. He had patches of hair missing from his scalp and open sores on his arms and neck. “Radiation sickness,” he explained to them. “I’ve been exposed to toxic levels.”
He told them that when the Fog-Devil had passed earlier, he had hid below in a lead-lined safe that Preen used for his booty once upon a time. For, judging by the mounted gun, Preen had been something of a pirate in- between running human beings.
“Are… are we all exposed then?” Menhaus said.
“No… no, I have a Geiger Counter,” Greenberg explained. “Brought it along to make sure our machine wasn’t spitting out radiation on the Ptolemy. You’re safe enough, friend. The… Fog-Devil, it just passed by, but even then, the radiation levels were ungodly. Had it directed itself… well, I wouldn’t be here.”
George figured it must’ve have passed here on its way to the Mystic. Maybe sniffed around for something to devour, then went on its way.
“You need medical care,” Cushing said.
Greenberg chuckled. “I’m far beyond that, I’m afraid.”
He refused to discuss it anymore. The alien machine had taken hold of his mind and his imagination. Cushing showed him how it worked. He put his hand on the scope and right away, there was that crackling energy in the air, that weird vibration, then that blue field thrown up against the bulkhead of the aft cabin. Greenberg was smart, though. He did not put his hand in the stream, he used the handle of a broom instead.
“Fascinating.” He stroked his bearded chin and mumbled under his breath for a time. “You know… this may be the way out. If you were to take this device to your point of origin here, which is the same as mine, I would guess this machine could open up the vortex and you could escape.”
Which is pretty much what everyone wanted to hear.
“But how would we find the vortex?” Cushing asked. “We could search for weeks in that mist and never see it.”
“Compass,” Greenberg said. “Just an ordinary liquid compass. There are no poles here, nothing for a magnetic compass needle to point to. What they will point to are vortex sites, areas of electromagnetic instability, variance. Trust me, I spent some time experimenting with this.”
“Then let’s get to it,” Menhaus said.
“Yes, you should do that,” Greenberg told them. “Now is a very bad time for your little visit. A very dangerous time. The entity, it’s getting active and will continue to do so until it’s food source is exhausted.”
“You’re coming with us,” George said.
“No, no. That’s out of the question, I’m afraid.” He had a brief coughing spell, then wiped his mouth. “I’m too sick, you see. I wouldn’t have the strength for a trip through hyperspace… no, I’ll stay here. But you young people, you need to get out before it comes back and this machine should do nicely.”
“You saw what that contraption did to Fabrini,” Elizabeth said, “and you still want to use it?”
“We have to try, don’t we?” George said.
She just shook her head, disgusted by the idea.
Cushing explained what had happened to Fabrini in all its gruesome details. Greenberg listened, nodding the whole while.
“Well… I would hazard a guess that whatever vortex the alien opened was not a good one. This machine, its purpose, is no doubt to project matter between dimensions and across the void of stars… but we’ll never know what the alien was attempting. Maybe he had it trained on the fifth dimension or the twentieth for that matter. I can hazard a guess that this awful place your friend stepped into was alien both physically and vitally. A place where matter and energy are not as we understand them.”
He explained that Fabrini’s basic atomic structure was probably particulated, that he underwent something of an interdimensional metamorphosis. His molecules underwent a matter-energy transformation and then back again. A phase in matter, like water going from ice to liquid to steam, back to ice again. Fabrini dematerialized and then re-materialized, matter to energy and then energy back to matter. And probably in the blink of an eye. Except that when teleported to that other dimension, his atoms were re-assembled according to the physical laws of that nightmare dimension… a place where your limbs could be disconnected by miles, yet be connected. A place where
