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.”
Cushing didn’t like any of it and he said so.
None of them liked Greenberg’s plan. What they wanted to do was quit wasting time and get on that speedboat of his and get out to the Sea of Mists and see what the compass showed them. The idea of letting Greenberg commit suicide for the sake of science was just unthinkable. Even the instinct to save their own asses wasn’t enough to make them jump at it, to leave this poor old man at the mercy of that … horror.
Even Elizabeth didn’t like it. “Please Mr. Greenberg … this is all ridiculous. You have to come with us.”
But Greenberg would not hear of it. “If there was a chance for me, dear, I would do just that. But … well I rather doubt this body has more than a few days left in it at most. I’m sick and you all know that. I’m terribly sick. Look at it this way,” he said sincerely. “I’m staying either way. If George can rig this bomb of his, then my death will be quick and painless, I won’t suffer anymore. Given that the alternative is the Fog-Devil turning my bones to liquid and my brain to soup, I’d say it’s my best chance. My death will be quick and maybe we can cancel that creature out of existence at the same time.”