by Tim Curran
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…”
Saks pulled his hand away and the machine began to hum. Quietly at first, then louder.
“I don’t think we should fool with this,” Elizabeth said.
But it was too late. Saks touching it had activated something. The humming rose up to a whining and the air around them crackled again with building energy. There was that smell of burnt ozone again, electricity and melted wiring. That narrow beam of white light came out of the back of the scope, struck the rear mirror and made it glow. The glow was reflected and broken into prisms of light that struck the front mirror or lens, were amplified into that blue beam of illumination that hit the bulkhead like a spotlight. There seemed to be millions of tiny dots dancing in the beam like bubbles in beer. Right away, buzzing with that blue light, the bulkhead looked insubstantial.
George was just in awe.
That blue glow on the bulkhead looked like the static on a TV screen, but busy and thrumming and alive. Like a blizzard or something. Looked like you could get lost in there and he had a funny feeling that you probably could at that.
“Don’t touch that beam,” Cushing told them. “You don’t know what might happen.”
George said, “We could use this thing, you know? Greenberg said that if you could find the spot where you first came into… into Dimension X, that it might open back up for you sooner or later. Maybe this thing is the key that could open it whenever we wanted it to.”
“Or maybe it would suck you into an alien world,” Cushing said.
Saks put his hand in the beam. “Kind of cold,” he said. “Funny.. . feels like something’s crawling all over my hand.”
“Be careful,” George told him, maybe secretly hoping that idiot would get sucked through and spit out on the sterile plains of Altair-4.
Cushing watched the beam, the dancing flecks of matter or energy in it. “Probably some sort of ionized field. Electrified gas or something. I wouldn’t leave your hand in there too long. Not if you value it.”
“Yeah,” Fabrini said. “You lose a hand, Saks, there goes half your sex life.”
Cushing was studying the machine closely. “That disk underneath could be sort of a generator, I suppose. That scope could be an accelerator. It directs a stream of particles at that rear mirror where something happens to them. Then they’re reflected to the forward lens and that blue light must tear open time/space. Jesus, the minds that must have conceived of such a thing.”
Fabrini was over near the bulkhead now. Before Cushing could tell him not to, he pressed his hand into the blue glow there. His hand went right through it. There was no wall there, just empty space.
“Careful,” George told him. “You read what Greenberg said. If that’s a wormhole, it could come out just about anywhere.”
“Yeah, and maybe back on home sweet home.”
“C’mon,” George said. “You really think that alien opened up a portal into our world? Why would it… she do that?”
Fabrini didn’t seem to have an answer for that. He was not a scientific type by nature or inclination. A lot of what Cushing told him was pretty much indecipherable. Too much theory, not enough fact. All he knew was that the teleporter was maybe a way out and he told them all that.
“No fucking way,” George said. “You’re not going through there.. . you know what the chances are of coming out anywhere?”
“He’s right, Fabrini,” Cushing said. “That alien was working on this thing. Elizabeth says she saw that glow for the past few days. Maybe it was fine-tuning this or something. You just can’t step through there. You could end up just about anywhere… on some planet a million light years from earth or somewhere with a poisonous atmosphere. Shit, your atoms might get scattered like rice at a wedding. You really want to take that chance?”
He smiled. “Damn straight.”
Saks started laughing. “You got to hand it to Fabrini. He ain’t much in the smarts department, but he’s got some serious balls.”
That was about as close to a compliment as Fabrini had ever gotten from Saks and he practically beamed.
Menhaus kept shaking his head. “You can’t, Fabrini. Listen to what Cushing is saying, it’s death in there. Don’t do it, okay?” He went over to Fabrini, laid his hands on his arms. “C’mon, please don’t do this. I don’t want to lose you.”
Fabrini was touched. He patted Menhaus on the back. “Don’t worry, Olly. I’ll be okay. I’m fucking Italian here. We got a great sense of self-preservation, us Italians.”
“Yeah, tell that to Mussolini,” George said.
But that went over his head like a high-flying bird. “I’m going through,” he said defiantly. “If I don’t come back, it’s my own stupid fault. But I’m telling you right now, all of you right now, that I’ve had it right up to here with this bullshit. This sitting around. This waiting. This hoping something don’t chew up our asses so we can make it maybe one more shitty day and find a way out. I can’t handle any more of that. Way I see it, it’s time for action and that’s that. Time to take a chance.”
George didn’t bother arguing: his mind was made up. That much was obvious. But what he was thinking was, Fabrini, you stupid shit! Quit flexing your dick already, that testosterone is going to kill you. This isn’t about who’s got the biggest balls, it’s about using your fucking brain and staying alive.
And, yeah, that’s exactly what he was thinking.
But he didn’t say it and he wished later that he had.
“He wants to go,” Saks said. “Let him go. Guy’s got nuts on him. Can’t say that for the rest of you pussies.”
That was it, then.
Fabrini was going.
Cushing said, “All right, all right. But at least let us tie a rope to you or something. Shit hits the fan, we can yank you back out.” That was what he said and it seemed perfectly reasonable, but there was doubt in his eyes. Bad doubt.
“There’s rope upstairs,” Saks said. “I saw it on our way down.”
“Get it,” Fabrini said.
Saks and Menhaus grabbed a lantern and went topside. They came back two minutes later with two coils of rope. Each had a hundred feet of line on them. They knotted the two ends together, figuring two-hundred feet would be plenty for Fabrini to see what was on the other side. Then they looped another end around his waist. Saks tied the knots. Square-knots strong enough to tow a car with.
“I’ll ask you one more time,” Elizabeth said, “to reconsider. Please, please don’t do this.”
Fabrini was unmoved and she turned away and stood in the doorway, her back to what she was certain was calculated madness.
“Just go in gradually,” Cushing said. “An arm or leg first, then just a peek. And hold your breath when you look in there. You inhale a lungful of ammonia or methane, not much we can do for you. Just go in easy.”
They tied the other end of the rope off to an iron bench across the room that was bolted to the floor. It would have taken a couple bull elephants to yank it free. Fabrini stood near the glowing blue wall, looking pale and tense. Maybe he wanted then to turn back, maybe he wanted to do the sensible thing, but his manhood was at stake now. He couldn’t back down, not in front of Saks.
“Good luck, Fabrini,” Saks said.
And George raised an eyebrow. There was something he didn’t like there. Saks was too… what? Too anxious? Too eager? Definitely, too something. Like he knew what was about to happen, had been waiting for it, and was about to see it all come together. If George had to put a name to that smarmy little smile on his face he would have said, contented.
That sonofabitch is up to something, George found himself thinking. He’s up to no fucking good.
George looked over at Cushing and Cushing seemed to be thinkin
g something along those lines, too.
“Listen,” he said to Fabrini. “You back out, nobody’s gonna think less of you. This isn’t worth the risk. Just stay here. We’ll go up to that ship and-”
“Ah, don’t let em dick you around,” Saks said. “They don’t have any guts, Fabrini. Not like you. You’re the only real man here.”
“Take up that rope,” Fabrini said. “Play it out slow.”
He turned to that glowing blue field.
George heard something like cymbals crash in his head. His heart skipped a beat and the flesh at the back of his neck got very, very tight.
Fabrini stepped into the beam. He instantly looked liked he’d been dyed blue, those particles in there making him look like a man in a sandstorm. “Funny,” he said, his voice oddly muffled by the energy flow. “Yeah… like it’s crawling all over you.” He was running his fingers through it and those effervescing particles cycled around him in a sort of loose helix like bubbles in a glass of champagne. “Weird
… feels like I’m in a storm of tiny snowflakes or something. They kind of tickle.”
“Do you feel all right?” Cushing asked him. “Not dizzy or nauseous or anything?”
He shook his head in the flow and his movements were jerky like he was caught in a strobe light. Flickering, irregular, not a solid and smooth motion like a person in normal space.
Fabrini stepped forward, put his hand through and pulled back out. “Feels okay, I guess. Kind of chilly or thick or something.”
Saks was standing just outside the flow, a few feet away from him.
George and Menhaus had taken up the rope. Were gripping it very tightly like they were hanging on for dear life. Except it wasn’t their life that they were worried about.
Fabrini put both arms through the field and just stood there, maybe waiting for something to happen. But there was nothing. He turned his head to look at them with that same jerking, surreal animation like a TV cartoon with every other frame cut out. “Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
Cushing was standing there, breathing very hard. His hands bunching in and out of fists, the knuckles popping white as moons. Under his breath, he said, “That flow cuts out, it cuts out and he’ll be trapped in that bulkhead, he’ll become part of it…”
George heard him, some crazy picture in his mind of the teleporter clicking off like a light switch and Fabrini trapped there, his atoms mixed with those of the bulkhead, arms stuck in one side of the wall and out the other.
Fabrini stuck his face through and kept it there for a few moments. “It’s dark on the other side… real dark… but I think I see some lights in the distance.”
“Go easy with it,” Cushing said between clenched teeth.
Fabrini nodded, stepped through that blue and thrumming field. He created black, ghostly ripples as he broached it. Then he was gone and they waited for him to say something, but there was only silence. Yet, he was there, somewhere… both George and Menhaus could feel the tension on the rope.
“Why doesn’t he say something?” Menhaus said, sounding alarmed.
“Sound… sound might not carry through the field,” Cushing said.
Then, out of the field, Fabrini’s voice: “I’m… all right, all right.” But that voice was odd and wavering, tinny like it was coming through a distant transistor radio and not a very good one. His words were drawn out, then compressed, echoing with an unearthly and spectral sound. “… okay… I… it’s dark… I can see the dark… lights ahead, funny lights and… and… weird. .. weird shapes… blobs and bubbles… no they’re square or triangles… no they’re blobs… crystals, building crystals blowing and shining and what’s that? The rope is cut! The rope is cut! I can’t see it!”
“We have the rope!” George called out. “We can feel you on it!”
That voice again, echoing, splintering, bouncing around like a ball. “No… it’s okay okay… the rope it ends just a few feet from me like… like it’s broken… then it starts up again above me or below me… I can’t be sure,” he called back to them. His voice sounded fragile, like it was shattering and full of static. As if the sound waves were vibrating madly, flying apart. “I… my hands… they’re wrong… my thumbs are on the wrong side… I can’t see my feet… I don’t have any feet… my thumbs are coming out of my palms… where is my body… where.. “
“Pull him out,” Cushing said frantically. “Pull him the hell out of there!”
George and Menhaus yanked on the line, but it would not come. It felt like it was tied off to a slab of concrete. Saks took hold of it and so did Cushing, burned and bandaged hands or not. But the rope was stuck. They pulled and tugged until sweat ran down their faces.
“Fabrini!” Cushing cried out. “Fabrini? Can you hear me? Can you feel the rope in your hands? Follow the rope back through…”
“Rope… rope… rope… it’s stuck through me… I have too many legs, too many legs… what is that… that pale green face… no not a face… a cube… a living cube and a worm and a face of crystal… a million crawling bubbles… get me out of here! White faces without bodies… without eyes… don’t let them touch me… don’t let them touch me! GET ME OUT OF
HERE!”
Again, they yanked on the rope, everyone shouting and panicked and just utterly beside themselves. But the rope was not budging. It was hooked to something or around something and George doubted that even a bulldozer could have pulled it free.
“C’mon!” Menhaus shouted. “Pull! Pull! We gotta get him out of there!”
“It’s no good,” Saks said, panting.
George and Cushing gave the rope a final tug. It went limp in their hands, then taut, then limp again. It began to flop first this way, then that as if they had landed the mother of all trout. The field began to shimmer and then they could feel Fabrini’s weight on the other end again, he was screaming now, screaming something about “inside-out faces melting into hungry bubbles.” They gave the rope a good yank and Fabrini came through for just a moment, part of him did anyway.
But it wasn’t right, whatever was on the other side, whatever void or dimension or fractal between, had changed him, mixed-up his atoms maybe. They saw his back and his neck and the gold chain he always wore around his throat lit up like it was electrified. But there didn’t seem to be a head on top of his neck and his left arm was detached, floating above his head. His right arm was connected, but instead of the arm facing forward at the crook of his elbow, it was facing backward like it had been put back on wrong. And the rope…
The rope was not looped around him, it had passed right through his back and out the other side.
And he was screaming. God, yes, he was screaming with what sounded like a hundred spectral voices just out of sync with one another.
Elizabeth screamed and so did George.
Then Fabrini was pulled back into whereever he had been, but his left arm was still disembodied and it was alive, working, not bleeding or damaged in any way. Like when Menhaus had passed his hand into the mirror and his fingers came out of the other mirror. It was like that. Somehow, some way, through some obscene perversion of matter, that arm was still connected. Everyone watched it. It was gripping something and pulling itself along it.
“The rope,” George said. “The rope… it’s pulling itself along the rope…”
Then it, too, was gone.
Fabrini was just shrieking on the other side and there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it.
The rope came alive in their hands again. Something on the other side took it and with such force, it nearly pulled George and Menhaus right into the flow, too. The rope burned through their palms, whipping and snapping, jerking to the left, the right. Up, then down. Then it dropped slack in the flow, but did not fall, as if it was caught in some unbelievable stasis of antigravity. It just floated like a length of hose floating on the surface of a river.
George and the others just stood there.
Menhaus’ jaw was hanging op
en, his eyes wide and unblinking.
Saks just stepped back and away from the flow.
Then George found himself and reached in there, took hold of the rope and it was so very cold it burned his hands. He squealed like he had been scalded, but yanked the rope out. Cushing took hold of it where it wasn’t in the flow and Menhaus joined him. They pulled and the rope came out of the field easily.
And so did Fabrini.
He stumbled out of the flow… except he didn’t stumble, he drifted. Like a balloon he drifted out of the flow. He was seized up tight, arms at his sides, frozen stiff as meat in a freezer. His face was locked in some frightening, inanimate cataleptic sort of stupor like Bela Lugosi’s trademark catatonic stare.
That’s when George noticed – as they all did – that Fabrini was transparent. They could see right through him. It wasn’t Fabrini, not really, but more like a reflection of Fabrini. Like he had been replaced by this empyreal, extradimensional wraith.
Menhaus muttered something under his breath and reached out, touched Fabrini. He instantly cried out, his fingers frostbitten as if he’d touched dry ice. Where his fingertips had made contact, Fabrini’s image fluttered, trembled, then began to dissolve and was suddenly not there at all. The rope shuddered in midair, looped around nothing that anyone could see. Then it fell limply to the floor.
Menhaus made a choking, gagging sound, trying to catch his breath. “He was solid, but he was gas… he was solid… I could feel him… but cold, so very cold…”
And then, from the other side of the field, they could hear Fabrini crying out for help. No, he was not just crying, but screaming, begging, pleading to be pulled out of there. Just shrieking his mind away and it was almost too much for anyone standing there. Even Saks looked like he was about to faint.
Cushing, knowing full well the futility of it all, took up a gaff and waded right into the flow, Elizabeth shouting at him to get out of there. He reached through the buzzing blue field with it, reaching around in there for something, anything. But the gaff wasn’t long enough to grab anything if there was indeed anything to grab.
Menhaus took up the rope, cut the loop off it. Then he unscrewed the hook off the end of one of the gaffs and tied it firmly on there. He stepped into the flow with it and, whipping it around over his head like a cowboy about to rope a stray doggie, he tossed it through the field. Then pulled it back. Tossed it and pulled it back. Kept doing it.