Tim Curran - Dead Sea

“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 your consciousness, through some freakish set of variables, could become disassociated from your body.

“But he was still alive,” Menhaus said, swallowing. “We could hear him… his mind was still alive.”

“Yes, yes, terrible. Again, we can only speculate. Unlike his body which was disorganized atomically… his mind must have remained intact. The energy of his thoughts, his consciousness, were somehow divorced from his physical self and will probably exist forever in one form or another.”

That just about took George’s breath away. Menhaus looked like he wanted to be sick. The idea of Fabrini existing until the end of time or beyond it as a conscious, aware, screaming cloud of atoms… it was unthinkable.

Greenberg said that time, as well as matter, must be horribly distorted in that place. While only moments passed here, thousands of years must have passed there. The best Greenberg could come up with for that ghostly image of Fabrini that drifted back out of the field was that it must have been some sort of reflection… one caught somewhere between the ethereal and the corporeal, but with a highly unstable molecular structure. Like a shadow, he said, the way shadows must be in that place of deranged physics.

“The Fog-Devil,” George said, plugging a cigarette in his mouth and giving it flame, “I’m guessing that it’s not native to this place, right? That maybe it slipped out of some other dimension, something like that.”

Greenberg nodded. “I suspect it to be of extradimensional origin. I can’t… no, I can’t even concieve of the sort of place where such a creature could be natural. Maybe that place your friend went. Regardless, it is a living and sentient being, I think. A sort of biological firmament of anti-matter that exists by ingesting or assimiliating fields of electrical energy. If you can imagine a nebulous, radioactive mass of cellular anti-matter that feeds on the raw, untapped electrical energy of thinking minds… actually sucks them dry, then you’d be close. Anti-matter with force, intellect, and direction… dear God, what an abomination.”