“It was, of course, what the ONR had us doing with Project Neptune,” Greenberg told them. “We were studying electromagnetic gravitation. Trying to duplicate, under laboratory conditions, aberrant electromagnetic storms. Creating magnetic, cyclonic storms which would in turn, we thought, open a magnetic vortex that was self-augmenting for the purposes of interdimensionl transition. Do you see? That’s what the Navy had us doing. Creating a sort of electromagnetic tornado which is about as close to a black hole as you can get under controlled conditions.”
Greenberg had been talking non-stop.
God knew how long it had been since he talked to anyone and he was certainly making up for it now. The first thing he told them about was the Lancet, which was an illegal slave ship bound from the Gold Coast of Africa to Virginia… except somewhere in the Sargasso Sea, fate intervened and the ship ended up here in Dimension X. Its 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 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.”
“It came today,” Menhaus said. “It got one of our friends and Elizabeth’s aunt… but it’ll come again, won’t it? I mean, you said in your letter that it cycles, that it builds up.”
“Yes, it’s cyclical in nature, I think. It’s pretty pointless to apply third-dimensional reason or rationale to something that technically cannot exist in the first place… but, yes, it seems to be cyclical.” Greenberg had to rest a moment. All the excitement and talking were taxing him. “If you know the stories of the Cyclops and the Korsund, then you understand the destructive, deadly power of this creature. I believe it shows irregularly, maybe not for ten years or fifty, but that when it does, it leaves nothing alive with a rational brain. It hones in on the electrical fields of these thinking minds and chews them down to the marrow, if you will.”
“You couldn’t hide from something like that,” Cushing said. “It could find you anywhere, anytime.”
Greenberg sighed. “Yes, exactly.”
“Something that eats minds,” George said. “Incredible.”
“That’s why you need to get out of here,” Greenberg warned them. “I don’t think it’ll come back until tonight… but when it does, well, it won’t leave any of us. If you understand my meaning.”
George exhaled a stream of smoke. “And you want us to just leave you behind?”
“Yes. I’m too sick to make the journey. There’s nothing that could be done for me even if I did make it back home… so I’ll stay here. I’ll stay here and get a good look at this Fog-Devil of ours before it kills me. Satisfy some scientific curiosity, you might say.”
George just shook his head. Selfless acts were to be applauded, but suicidal acts were just plain stupid and waiting for this monstrosity to pick your mind clean like a skull was just suicide. Plain and simple.
Cushing said, “How can this thing exist? An anti-matter entity in a matter world like this? I mean, this has to be a matter world like the one we left or we would have ceased to exist the moment we stepped into it… right?”
“Yes, yes exactly. I believe the entity must have some sort of membrane that protects it, a sort of field of energy that contains and protects it much like skin protects us. Is that matter or anti-matter or some sort of subatomic material unknown to us… who can say? If I could hazard a wild, irrational leap of logic here,” Greenberg said to them, “I would say that this creature not only emits radiation, but is radioactive by nature. That maybe where it comes from, life is based on radioactive isotopes just as life as we know it is based on the carbon atom. But the radiation of this thing… it’s probably a completely alien sort of radiation that we can only guess it.”
“It kills all the same,” George said.
There was no arguing with that. Nor was there any arguing with the fact that if they didn’t either get their asses out of Dimension X in a real hurry or find a way to destroy that thing, then they were going to learn all about it first hand.
Cushing said, “If there was some way to shoot it full of matter. That would probably destroy it or knock it back where it came from.”
Greenberg said, “Interesting idea. Exactly how do you put out a fire?”
“With water,” George said.
“Or sometimes you build another fire and let them burn into each other and cancel each other out,” Greenberg explained. “I think if we had, say, an atomic bomb we could do it. A bomb like that would deliver the sort of explosive punch to disrupt the thing’s membrane and at the same time flood it with matter. And not just any matter, but radioactive matter. Hence, my analogy… fire burning out fire.”
“Why not just a conventional explosive?” George said.
But Greenberg shook his head. “By itself, I don’t honestly believe it would be enough. Such a force might momentarily disrupt that field or membrane, but it wouldn’t deliver the knock-out punch… irradiated material. I think we need to saturate its guts, if you will, with a burst of radioactive material, fissionable material. That would… burn it out, I think. Dissipate it, kill it. Not that it could know death as we understand it.”
Pulling off his cigarette, George said, “How about a dirty bomb?”
Greenberg looked confused and Elizabeth, being from a different time, was just totally lost. The world Greenberg had left behind back in the 1980s didn’t have any worries about terrorists acquiring nuclear waste and weaponizing it. But Cushing and Menhaus were getting it just fine.
“Sure,” George said. “A dirty bomb. A conventional explosive hooked up to barrels of radioactive waste. We could do it, too. There’s a ship back in the weeds, a freighter loaded with barrels of radioactive waste. We wire some explosives to that… a lot of explosives… you got the mother of all dirty bombs.”
George explained to Greenberg about the C-130 and all those crates of pre-packaged satchel charges. How he had been an engineer in the army and he knew how to use them. Both he and Menhaus had done some blasting at construction sites. They could make this happen.
Greenberg was silent for a time. “Yes, yes, I think that would do it… just understand the implications of such a weapon. It would spread a deadly cloud of fallout… you would need to be far away when it went.”
“I could set a time fuse on it,” George said. “That would give us the time we need.”
But Greenberg shook his head. “No, that wouldn’t work. The only way we could know the entity was coming would be by the Geiger Counter. It picks up the creature’s radioactive emanations. And we would want the bomb to go off when the entity was right on top of it. .. that’s the best chance we have for success. So, there’s only one possible solution. You rig your bombs and I wait with the Geiger Counter, when it comes, I blow it.”
Again, they tried arguing with Greenberg, but he refused to see reason. He honestly wanted to get a look at the thing. It was more than curiosity, it was an obsession with him.
“Just understand one thing,” he told them. “Matter and anti-matter do not mix. When a particle meets its anti-particle, well, they tend to annihilate each other completely, knocking each other out of existence. And as they do so, immense amounts of pure energy are released.”
“An anti-matter bomb,” Cushing said.
“Exactly. If our explosion rips this membrane, then matter and anti-matter will collide in an explosion that will be devastating beyond comprehension.”
He laid it out for them, how a colleague of his once said that an anti-matter bomb would make a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb – about ten-thousand times as powerful as what was dropped on Hiroshima – look like a firecracker. A nuclear bomb, Greenberg said, only converts a small fraction of warhead mass to energy, but matter/anti-matter annihilation converts almost total mass-to-energy.
“Something like that… well, it could boil this sea to steam.” He shook his head. “You would need to pass through the vortex before I fired it.”
“It’ll be dark in about six hours,” Elizabeth announced.
“There’s no way we could arm that ship and then get ourselves to the vortex in time,” George said.
Greenberg smiled. “Not unless you had a speedboat.”