He opened his mouth, gaping at the image, lost, studying the faces. There were subtle differences between the people he knew in his dimension and these in the alternate world. Their noses were long and thin. Their lips were thicker. Their hands only had three fingers and a thumb.
Something exploded in one of the wave machines. There was a shower of sparks and the smell of ozone. A small fire erupted from the machine and the image wavered again, then it flickered, and was gone.
"No!" Shaw called, running to where the portal had been. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck and arms rise as if there were still a charge in the air, but there was nothing there.
He was close. So close. If he could figure out how to stabilize and amplify things, he might be able to step into the portal. Perhaps he could cross over into that alternate world.
How would he get back?
He had to start making the devices smaller. Shaw set about trying to make the wave machines pocket-sized. If he could find a way to trigger them while in the alternate world, he could come back. He then set about trying to determine the resonant frequency of the dimension in which he lived.
The days flew by. His work on the food technology was also coming along and, before long, he had turned over his work to Gemini so that they could patent the damn thing and turn it into something from which they could make money. That was OK with Shaw as he wanted to spend his time below ground.
His skin was so pale now. He was spending so much time underground that nearly any bright light sent spears of pain rocketing through his brain. His hair was falling out and Shaw could swear that when he looked at himself in the mirror he could see his veins more clearly. None of that mattered. If he was becoming some kind of underground dweller, that was fine.
Once he determined the resonant frequency of his current dimension, Shaw went back to trying to see more dimensions. He added more machines. He brought more and more into the room and the once-too-large room was now crowded and it was hard to move around.
He saw one dimension that overlooked a green field that smelled like lilacs, but the flowers were bright red. He saw another dimension populated by more humanoids that had an insectoid faces and spoke in strange clicks. In another window he saw a world that looked like it had been completely frozen and another that was almost entirely fire. In another dimension there were horrendous creatures with green skin covered with scales and faces covered with tentacles or feelers. In another, green slime flowed everywhere and there were pus-like slug-creatures with mouths full of teeth swimming within it.
Shaw was repulsed and fascinated. He was terrified and enraptured. In each case, the image would hold for a while and then the energy required to maintain the portal proved too great on the machines and they would give out. In a few cases the portal was unstable from the beginning, always on the verge of disappearing.
After a full year of this, Shaw was exhausted. He had been living in his lab for so long that he was no longer even sure he had a house. He had not made a mortgage payment in a while. However, he felt so close. He was turning into a kind of zombie, shying away from anyone else, determined to keep his discoveries a secret. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw the image of one of those weird, frightened scientists that he noticed when he first moved into the lab.
But Gemini left him alone. He had not heard from Frank for months. Shaw had routinely asked for more power and generators and, in each case, his needs had been granted.
He tested his pocket-sized wave generator and it appeared to work, but since the thing was supposed to take him back to his current dimension it was hard to know for sure. Was he ready to step into another dimension only then to find out that his device would not work over there? He thought that he was. There was always risk in discovery and he had to be willing to risk his very existence to further things.
Ezekiel, Whitten and Mr. Void all seemed like very distant things and he wondered at times if he had dreamed them all.
The nights and days blended together. Shaw's clothes began to fall apart since had only brought one suitcase full of them and just washed them over and over again in a sink and hung them to dry in the lab. He often stood at the lab tables wearing his white lab coat and nothing else, surrounded by clothes lines full of drying garments.
One night, a year and a half into the experiments, he came very close to producing a stable portal. He was looking at the circle in the middle of the room and studying the people. This dimension looked very much like the one Shaw called home, only the fashions and styles reminded him more of the mid-70s. He wondered if maybe this was a relatively close dimension, perhaps a slightly newer one, a new layer to the onion, and they were just a few decades behind. There were a few changes, such as the cell phone-like devices that many people had up to their ears and at least one person sitting at a park bench that looked like he was on a laptop, but the clothing was very much like something out of the 70s.
Shaw stood back and watched and watched and watched. When he again studied the clock he realized the portal had been open for more than half an hour. He did a quick check of the machinery and it was all humming along nicely. Now his heart was beating, his entire body shivering with excitement. This was the longest and most stable any portal had been. Yes, Shaw concluded, this must be a very close, very new dimension since it was taking slightly less power to hold this portal.
Shaw grabbed his remote devices and a clipboard and ventured close to the vibrating disc in the middle of the room. He could hear people talking through the scrim of the dimensional barrier. It sounded like English, although heavily accented. He leaned his face close to the portal and could smell the exhaust from the cars, freshly cut grass, food being prepared and served by street vendors. It was all he could do not to giggle.
Did he dare?
No.
Not completely through. That would have been crazy. He might only get halfway through and the dimensional portal would close and he could end up half in the lab and the other half of his materializing on a street in some alternate dimensions, bloody, screaming in pain, bleeding out there in front of families.
His arm, however...
Shaw looked around the lab. He checked the machines again. All was running right. He wondered, for an instant, if he should call someone. Maybe he should call Whitten and tell him to get in touch with Mr. Void. Perhaps they should be here to see this. Perhaps he should call Frank and tell him and get someone else in here in case his arm was sliced off.
No.
No, this was his. He had been working for it for so long.
Shaw cleared his throat, wiped the sweat from his brow, walked up to the shimmering portal, and stuck out his hand. His fingers shook from sheer nerves as they approached the portal. He could feel energy from the disc as his fingertips got very close. It was like a mild electrical charge, and all of the hair on his body suddenly stood on end.
Slowly, so slowly, Shaw would swear that he could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall, each movement of the second hand as loud as a bass drum. His fingers approached, and then sank into the image of the other world before him.
He gasped. There was a feeling like his entire arm had fallen asleep. Shaw remembered the one time he had to go in for surgery and the anesthesiologist had told him to get ready to go to sleep and then started the medicine into his left arm. There had been an intense tingling that ran up his arm from his wrist and eventually enveloped his head and he was out. This sensation was very close. At the time of the surgery the feeling was so intense and it happened so fast, Shaw had only been able to get out one tiny word. He now repeated that word as his hand sank through the portal.
"Whoa," he whispered.
There was that intense tingling, followed by an intense coldness. For an instant it looked like his arm had been severed at mid-forearm. Then he saw his fingers appear within the other dimension. He could feel the breeze from the other side.
"I'm feeling weather in another dimension," he whispered,
now wishing he had thought to turn on a voice recorder or something to document this.
Shaw wiggled his fingers. It was a street scene he was looking at, but not the main street that he had been watching before. By adjusting the machines slightly, he had discovered he could move the portal and he had chosen a slightly more isolated area when he had decided to try entering this new world.
Shaw wiggled his fingers. There was a tiny delay before he saw his hand wiggle in that other dimension. The tingling sensation in his arm was growing in intensity and the coldness was now localized, focused on his elbow, which must have still been lingering in that between-world limbo.
"Amazing," Shaw whispered.
Another breeze blew in the alternate world. The air was humid over there, as if it were the middle of summer and very hot. Perhaps the land he was looking at was tropical in nature. Then there was the feeling of water on his palm.
Shaw jumped, at first, surprised at the sensation, and then realized it had started to rain over there. He laughed, then opened and closed his fist, feeling the water between his fingers, running over his arm. He wondered if he could palm enough of the rainwater to bring it back into this dimension and study it. What kinds of things would be in the air and water over there? Would they be more polluted or less? Did they even breathe oxygen like we did?
There was a loud, piercing noise. It was a high pitched sound and he looked around the lab, wondering if someone, or something –such as an animal - had sneaked into the room and thought the foolish scientist had severed his own limb. The machines were all still humming like they should have been, and there were no wild animals to be seen or excess humans in the room.
Shaw slowly turned his attention back to the dimensional portal. The noise was coming from there.
There was someone in the street now, staring at his hand. It was a woman, blond-haired, blue-eyed, pretty. She had her hands to her face, the rain streaming down her hair and shoulders, soaking her. She stared in horror at Shaw's hand, which must have looked like a severed hand floating in mid-air waving at her.
She was screaming.
"No, no, no!" Shaw said, and then realized that if she could hear him at all it would just be a disembodied voice coming from a severed hand. "Wait! No!"
The screaming got louder. Now there were more people rushing through the puddles and coming around a corner and filling the street. Shaw panicked and yanked his arm back. There was a more intense feeling of cold and electricity and then he staggered back from the portal.
He looked at his hand. The skin still glistened with rain. The end of his lab coat sleeve was soaked. Shaw looked on in wonder for several seconds and then remembered that there were still people in another world freaking out thanks to him.
The people on the street were yelling and talking over each other. The rain still pounded down on them. The woman who had been screaming in horror was surrounded by men looked at the spot where it had been. The woman had her hands up, looking ready to faint. Shaw felt his heart squeezed, he felt horrible. What had he done?
Then, suddenly, the image began to fade, just as the rain took on a strange coloring. Shaw got closer, begging his machines to keep the portal open a bit more. The people in the other dimension stared up into the rain and Shaw could see that the rain was now black, as if it were raining oil. Where the black rain hit them in the face it left large red welts and the people began to scream and tried to cover their heads. Then, beneath the spots where the red welts formed Shaw could see their skulls, then just air. In fact the blackness was now puddling up and filling the portal, consuming everything. Shaw saw the streets, the houses, the people, all being consumed by the black substance and when it was done eating, there was nothing left, just more blackness.
"No," Shaw whispered. "Oh no. No. NO!"
He reached his hand out towards the shimmering circle. Within the other dimension the sound of thousands upon thousands of people screaming could be heard. Just as Shaw reached his hands toward the portal there was that familiar smell of ozone, followed by a flash and sparks. A moment later the dimensional portal was gone. There was just the lab and the smell of something burning somewhere.
Shaw collapsed to the floor, his entire shaking. What had happened? What was that that was consuming everyone and everything in that world?
"Do you see now?"
The voice startled him, but he did not get up from the floor. He knew whose voice it was and was not entirely surprised to hear it.
"I thought you couldn't get in here, Ezekiel," Shaw said.
"Whitten is an idiot. It's difficult, yes, but not impossible," Ezekiel replied. "Do you see what happens? Do you see what happens when you deal with Void and his minions? Do you see what happens when you open a rift like that? It doesn’t matter if the dimension is next door to the Void dimension or not, he has grown powerful enough to beam himself, as it were, into any dimension into which there is an opening. He can use the spaces between dimensions to travel just like we can, except that he does it faster and does it better. Only the technology and protection we have in place prevents him from entering our own world. You just opened a hole into an unprotected dimension and allowed the Void to march right in and consume it. Now the Void is bigger, more powerful, more deadly than before."
Shaw got to his feet very slowly. The world was doing that thing that it had done to him before where it felt like it was trying to throw him off of the planet. He reached out to steady himself by putting a hand on one of the lab tables. He turned to see Ezekiel standing in the far corner, wearing his shadow outfit.
"So, I have to ask," Shaw said, "was that one guy I hit that had an insect face from another dimension?"
"Indeed," Ezekiel replied. "A dimension that was ultimately destroyed by Void. From what we just saw through that portal, he's gotten much faster and more powerful since he's destroyed a world. He must be building his powers, growing somehow. Perhaps Whitten has found a way to feed him energy. He can almost appear anywhere. There are limits. The machines we have in place in our world still limit his abilities, but he tries and tries and with each turn, with each dimension that falls, he learns something new and comes back stronger.”
"I just wanted to see other dimensions," Shaw said, feeling as if he might start crying at any moment. "I just wanted to see other worlds."
"I know that, Dr. Shaw, but there are ways that can happen without causing the damage you just did," Ezekiel said and then he looked down at his body and the long coat and outfit that he wore. "There are methods that I can show you."
"I don't even know if I believe you yet, Ezekiel," Shaw said. "What's the proof that what I saw there was Void? How do I know you aren't lying to me, too? And what about Whitten? What happens if he finds out that I'm not doing what they want me to do anymore?"
Ezekiel nodded as he stepped forward. "There are a lot of questions. And I don't expect you to trust me or anyone with IDEA. We have to prove ourselves. I think, however, that Void and Whitten have proven themselves with what you just saw. I can show you things that I have collected over the years. I can show you other worlds that Void has wiped out. I can show you what he looks like. He is evil, Dr. Shaw. There is true evil in the world and he is the very personification of it. You will have to trust me for now. We can try to protect you."
"What about my lab? My work?"
Ezekiel sighed. "You are going to have to leave it here. I'm sorry, but the experiments have to end now."
Yes, that was what he thought Ezekiel was going to say. It sort of made sense.
"How did you survive?" Shaw asked. "I saw Whitten fling you across the room and into a wall. How did you survive?"
"I'm tougher than I look," Ezekiel said. "Plus, this outfit offers some protection. So, enough of the questions for now. Are you coming?"
"Yes, but I need to stop by my apartment," he said. "I need more clothes."
"Your clothing and furniture were tossed out of your apartment months ago," Ezekiel said, turning around, hi
s back to Shaw. "We can stop somewhere and get you clothes."
Shaw nodded again, unable to muster the strength to speak, feeling defeated, feeling exhausted. Feeling as if his entire purpose had now been taken away from him.
"What time is it?" Shaw asked.
"Ten at night," Ezekiel said.
"Great," Shaw said. "I've always wanted to go clothes shopping in the middle of the night. So many things crossed off my bucket list in so short a time."
***
The night was intensely dark and there was no moon. To Shaw it felt as if the Void were already here, in this dimension. He wondered why Void had not yet taken over the world that he knew. Perhaps there was something special about this place. He was going to ask Ezekiel, but then decided that he didn't care.
Ezekiel's vehicle was actually a pretty beat up white van. Shaw was not surprised, but he was also a tad disappointed. He was maybe hoping for the DeLorean car from Back to the Future or something like that. Instead, the van was loaded with equipment that looked cobbled together from parts rummaged at garage sales and junkyards.
Shaw got into the passenger side and lay his head back. He felt sick.
What have I gotten myself into? He thought.
***
Soon they were pulling up in front of a storefront that Shaw did not recognize. Somehow he had dozed a bit and he couldn't even tell where he was. It had a small town feel to it, so it was probably one of the suburbs. The store was small, most likely independently owned, and it looked very closed.
"This place looks closed," Shaw said.
"One thing you should know by now is that looks are deceiving," Ezekiel replied, stepping out of the van. "Come on, let's get this over with. We have so much more to do and I have much to show you and we are running out of time."
For the first time since he had spoken to the man, Shaw saw that Ezekiel was worried and a bit frightened. The feeling was contagious and Shaw felt himself moving faster, wanting to get this done more rapidly. There was nothing going on around them. The streets were empty and there were no people looking at them from windows. It was eerily quiet.
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