CHAPTER 8
They're Back!

The overhead lights flickered out momentarily and then re-lit, as a loud powerline hum filled the room and slowly died back to a steady background sound. The screen said "Warm-up in progress..." and two large digits started counting down from 30.

At the end of thirty seconds, the digits vanished and the prompt changed to "Warm-up complete. Enter run duration in minutes:". Wilt said, "Let's start small," and hit `1'. The display responded with "1:00" in big digits and a smaller "Hit Enter to begin run." Wilt hit Enter.

The overhead lights went out completely, while the room was filled with furious squeals and whines that became a solid, ongoing roar, a wall of sound like someone holding down all the keys on a bizarre synthesizer that went up to impossible notes. It wasn't like the "white noise" roar of a jet engine; there were discrete tones, just an awful lot of them. They weren't musical, or even harmonically related, and created complex, changing beat patterns.

"The coils on the big mug are acting like giant electromagnets, singing from their oscillating magnetic fields!" shouted Wilt over the din. "They must be getting serious power at all those different frequencies."

In the now-darkened room a glow lit up the pant legs of Maud and Sparrow, who were standing near the mouth of the giant mug. They bent and stooped to look inside, almost cracking heads. "Same scene as the monitor," confirmed Sparrow. "Looks so real you can almost smell the grass... Hey! You can smell the grass! And feel the breeze!"

The guys crowded around to see for themselves. Although the drum was three feet long, the scene seemed to start only about two feet past the opening; the inside of the drum simply ended there, and beyond was the hillside meadow.

By the time everyone had a good look, the timer on the computer monitor had hit zero. The scene suddenly went dark and the noise stopped, reverberations slowly decaying away. The overhead lights flickered back on. Everyone was silent, stunned.

"Oh. My. God!" breathed Maud at last. "Anyone care to take a wild guess where the missing professors got off to?"

A few confused minutes passed before the group could even begin to speculate on what they had just witnessed. Nothing they could think of made much sense. They agreed this was some sort of portal, to a location with familiar-looking vegetation.

"That narrows it right down to `northern hemisphere' at least," remarked Wilt dryly. "On the other hand, since I've never been to the southern hemisphere, it may only narrow it down to `temperate zone'."

"Here's a thought," said Frax. "Up until a few minutes ago we were assuming there must be some kind of TV transmitter broadcasting the scene we saw on the monitor. And in fact I notice that scene is still there. If we had a hard time believing this alleged transmitter had been running for hundreds of years, what in hell are we to think now? That there's some kind of giant matching mug-portal-transmitter-receiver-thingy on a hillside overlooking the same field we see? I'm thinking this system must be single-ended; there's nothing on the other end, no transmitter, no nothing, nowhere. Little mug and big brother are all-in-one shows. Don't ask me how."

"Wait," said Sparrow. "If there's nothing on the other end, what determines the place the mug shows? For that matter, if we move the mug, does the scene change? That'd be a simple experiment to try, which would seem to pretty much rule out a matching transmitter anywhere else."

"Wait, wait, and more wait!" chimed in Maud. "Let's consider what this whole setup is about. Suppose the little mug, the old artifact, does all the `tuning in', or whatever, to determine the place. I have no clue what that involves, but there must be a little mini-portal inside. Dr. Stevens has tapped into that system with all the little colored wires stuck on the outside. All this equipment must then amplify things to drive the big portal mug. My point is that if we move the little mug, it won't be pointing the same as the big one. So we damn sure better not fire up the big one in that condition. Who knows, maybe it was just such a mismatch that fried the lab in Madison."

"Oooh, good point," said Wilt. Let's hold off on any experiments for a bit. We might be able to get things re-aligned afterward, but why take the chance?"

Just then there was a bright flare from the outside monitor screen, as Mrs. MacGruder's motion-sensing light blazed over the shared driveway. A low but vehement "shit!" signaled two approaching silhouettes.

The sound of the side storm door opening was followed by "Back again, you two?", though she wasn't in the camera view. In an instant one of the figures had whipped something from his bag. There was a "wssshtt" and a startled gasp, then a thud.

"That oughta hold the bitch for a few hours at least. C'mon, let's drag her around behind her house. Or maybe take her in and lay her down, and turn off the damn light while we're at it. Yeah, that's it, then when she comes to and she's real groggy, she may think she just passed out or something."