“Wake up, Sleeping fucking Beauty! Wake up!”
When George did he saw what Menhaus was seeing: a plane. Far overhead, its lights blinking on and off. George fumbled out the flare gun and popped a flare into it. Then he took aim on the plane like he wanted to shoot it down.
The flare lit up the sea and sky.
Then there was nothing to do but wait and hope.
2
It was the next morning when they caught sight of the Coast Guard cutter. She had a high, ice-breaker bow and, thankfully, no sails. She looked modern in every respect. In every possible detail. George even saw a helicopter waiting on the flight deck like a wasp sunning itself. The cutter caught sight of them, circled and dropped two rubber boats into the sea.
“This is it, George,” Menhaus said. “This is really fucking it.”
“Yes,” George said, overwhelmed by it all.
He felt a curious sense of disorientation, like he’d just woken from a dream. And that’s what it had been, right? A dream? All a crazy, insane dream? Sure, it had to be, he got to thinking. For chrissake, George decided he did not believe in magnetic vortices and other dimensions, did not believe in fog-shrouded anti-worlds and sea monsters and aliens and ship’s graveyards and Fog-Devils. No, he did not believe in any of that and he certainly didn’t believe in the Dead Sea and Dimension X.
Only a crazy man believed shit like that.
But when he closed his eyes, heard those boats getting closer, he could see it all and he could see Gosling and Marx and Cook and Fabrini and, yes, Saks. And Cushing. Good old Cushing with that wonderful mind of his. And Elizabeth who never escaped that place. Sure, in the bright daylight, places like that could not be… but when you closed your eyes? You knew they existed.
Menhaus said, “I can’t wait to see my bitchy, fat wife and my garage. Isn’t that funny? I been thinking about my garage.” He laughed, then stopped. “George… what the hell are we going to tell these people?”
George thought it over and the lie came easy. “We don’t really know what happened. Got lost in the fog, hit something and went down. You and me were on a lifeboat, then we found this boat drifting. We jumped on board.”
“They won’t believe that… will they?”
George put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “Sure they will. Trust me, buddy, that’s exactly what they want us to say. Nothing more, nothing that will look funny on their reports, just simple bullshit they can write down and will let them sleep at night.”
The lead boat came in closer and the sailor in the rear cut the engine.
“Ahoy there!” an officer in khaki dress said from the front of the boat. “You in trouble here?”
Menhaus laughed. “Brother, don’t you know it.”
He helped Menhaus aboard, but George hesitated. “What the hell year is it?”
The officer and sailors looked at one another and then the officer told him.
George and Menhaus were smiling.
They’d done it, they’d actually done it.
Before he climbed onto the rubber boat, George picked up the teleporter and tossed it overboard. It floated for a moment and then went underwater, down into the depths below where it belonged.
“What was that?” the officer asked.
“Oh, that?” George laughed as he came aboard. “That’s just my science project… but I don’t care much for science anymore.”
Then he was in the boat and Menhaus couldn’t seem to stop grinning.
