Dead Sea

“It was intelligent, you know,” Cushing said five minutes later. “That creature… it was smart. It was intelligent and we killed it, killed its young.”

“We were defending ourselves,” Menhaus said, still shaken by the sight of those squirming alien fetuses. “What else could we do?”

“Nothing.” Cushing shook his head. “Nothing at all.”

Saks said, “You wanna feel sorry for it, Cushing, then take a look at Pollard there. Take a good look.”

Menhaus clenched his teeth.

“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…”