"Do we sleep on the floor or what?" asked Bright.

It was full night. The lights of the basement didn't work, but various components of the Furnace glowed with a harsh, actinic light and more light was coming from the window into the other world. The alien landscape was lit from the same angle, as if the sun hadn't moved in the sky and Duffy wondered if the other world was gravity locked to its sun.

They were all tired, but there was so much work to do. Duffy had scanned quickly through the notes Bergman had left on his computer and was now going through it in more detail. There seemed to be gaps in it, though. Areas where Bergman had apparently arrived at a conclusion with no indication of how he'd done it. Duffy assumed the missing work was in another file on the hard drive, in a folder he hadn't found yet, or maybe on another computer elsewhere in the building. When he'd asked Bergman, the other physicist had only said that it wasn't important and that only the final result mattered. Duffy didn't share that opinion, but didn't press the matter. There was more than enough as it was to keep him busy for a long time yet.

"Do they understand that we have to sleep?" asked Costanzo.

"All higher forms of life need sleep," Bhatt answered. "I can't believe our friends here are any different."

None of the Visitors were showing any sign of fatigue, though. The same twelve were standing around the room, watching the humans, apparently willing to do so until the end of time. Now and again other Visitors entered. They went to stand next to one of the guards and some of the fish eggs that comprised their bodies had swapped with those of the new arrival. Fresh eggs, full of water and food, Duffy assumed, replacing depleted ones full of bodily wastes. The Visitor would then go off to eat and poop, sparing the guard from having to do so. Did this swapping of body parts spare the guards the need to sleep as well?

"If we just lie down on the ground, what will they think?" asked Costanzo. "Can you explain it to them, Miss Bright?"

"For the tenth time, call me Sarah please," said the linguist with a smile.

"Wouldn't be proper, miss," said Costanzo, though. "You're a specialist. I'm just a grunt."

"Until we find our way back to civilisation we're all equal," said Bright. "Formalities are pointless." She looked back at the screen of her laptop. "As to your question, no, I can't really explain it. So far, we've been finding words for things that we can both perceive in the environment. It's easy to find their word for table when you can just point to a table and listen to the sound they make, but when it's a physiological function that they know nothing about..." She shrugged her shoulders helplessly, but then brightened as a thought came to her. "Lie down and pretend to sleep," she told the soldier. "Over there."

Costanzo nodded and went over to an empty part of the basement. He took off his robes, rolled it up into a ball, then lay down and rested his head on it. He closed his eyes and lay still while the creatures watched him curiously.

Bright tapped her fingers on the table to get their attention and typed on her desktop. 'Costanzo is doing sleep,' she wrote. 'Without sleep, Costanzo will die.' The laptop made the corresponding sounds in the Visitor's language, with one of the sounds standing for 'unknown word'. They used it when they didn't know the Visitors' word for something.

Her student Visitor made a series of sounds that the laptop translated. "Assigning new word. Sleep. What is sleep?"

Bright thought for a while before typing again. 'No movement. No sight. No hearing. Alike to death, but later alike to alive again. Necessary to prevent true death'.

The creatures made their chalk-on-a-blackboard noises to each other, presumably discussing the idea with each other. Trying to make sense of it. Bright waited until they fell silent again before typing some more words. 'Visitors need to do sleep query'.

"No," her student replied. "When do humans do sleep query".

'Every day,' Bright typed. 'One third of life, humans do sleep.'

More chalk-on-a-blackboard sounds resulted. "Humans do sleep now," her student told her. "Learn more when do sleep ends."

"I can't wait until we're able to talk to them in more natural language," said Duffy, telling the computer to start shutting itself down.

"It's nothing less than a miracle that we're able to talk to them at all," the linguist replied. "And we've made such astonishing progress in just a few hours. They have the vocabulary of a four year old already, and they're the ones doing all the hard work. Whatever it is that's controlling them is brilliant."

"Do we sleep down here," asked Bhatt, "or will they let us go up to the dorms?"

"I don't think we should press our luck," said Bright. "They're probably suspicious of us already with this sleep business. If we ask to go to another part of the building they'll probably think we're up to something."

"Yeah, but sleeping on a hard floor with only rolled-up robes for a pillow..."

"I've slept on worse," said Costanzo without looking up. "I've slept on hard ground plenty of times."

"Arizona gets cold at night, for those of you not familiar with this part of the world," pointed out Bergman. "And the heating isn't working."

"If it gets too cold we'll have to share body heat," said the linguist. "Feel free to cuddle up to me so long as you keep your hands to yourselves."

"It wouldn't be so cold if we shut those doors," said Bhatt. "I'm betting the Furnace generates quite a bit of heat, if we kept it in."

"I'd rather have a quick way out of here if the roof shows signs of falling in," said Duffy, though. Costanzo had told them about the collapsing buildings elsewhere in the city. "Not having to shove those heavy doors open might save our lives."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Good point," said Bright. "The doors stay open. Now settle down and get some sleep. We'll need clear heads in the morning. Our work here is only just begun."

They all chose a spot and lay down on the ground, all apart from each other for the time being, and closed their eyes. Duffy tried not to think of the strange, alien creatures that would be staring at him, watching, as he slept.

☆☆☆

Duffy didn't expect to get much sleep that night, and he didn't. Neither, he suspected, did many of the others. When sunlight began to shine in from the car park, though, he heard someone moving around and opened his eyes to see Bergman heating up some soup in the microwave. He got up to join him.

"Beef and vegetable or chicken and mushroom?" Bergman asked as he watched the microwave counting down. "Not that there's much meat in either of them so far as I can tell."

One of the cans had a dent in the side so Duffy chose it. Chicken and homestyle noodles, whatever they were. He opened it, and when Bergman took his can out, he put his in. A couple of minutes later they were both eating their breakfasts straight out of the can.

"I normally like to dip some buttered bread into my soup," the Canadian said. "Gives me something to eat while I wait for the soup to cool down."

"Before all this started, I liked to eat pancakes for breakfast," the American replied. "Maple syrup, the lot. I'm probably lucky I haven't had a heart attack yet."

Duffy smiled. "So all the myths about the unhealthy American diet are true?"

"I'm afraid so. And what about the myths about the bland, tasteless British food?"

"Only half true, I'm afraid. There are two kinds of Englishmen. Those who like their food bland and tasteless and those who like it so hot and spicy that it virtually glows in the dark."

"Spices destroy the taste buds," said Bergman, nodding. "So once you start spicing up your food, you have to keep adding more and more to get the same kick. When I lived in China, a family I knew liked to put Red Sichuan Peppercorns in their food. They invited me to dinner one day and I could barely eat it. It brought tears to my eyes but they were wolfing it down like there was no tomorrow. They couldn't understand why I didn't like it."

Duffy smiled again. "I didn't know you'd been to China," he said.

"Yes. That was where I..." Bergman suddenly fell silent, his eyes flicking to Duffy's before darting away again. "I met a woman I nearly fell in love with, but she loved someone else. You don't want to hear about that, though."

That hadn't been what the other man had been going to say, though. Duffy was suddenly certain of it. What had it been, and why had he suddenly changed his mind? "You studied under Chen Wenzhong, didn't you? Did you meet him in China?"

"I went there to study under him. The man was brilliant. A world leader in the field of... Well, I don't need to tell you. You know his reputation as well as anyone."

Duffy nodded. "His death was a tragedy. And very mysterious. The Chinese are so secretive. Do you have any idea what happened to him?"

"As you say, the Chinese are very secretive. He probably said something indiscrete about an important politician." He scraped out the last of his soup and put the can aside. "And now I've got to go take a leak, and a dump. You think they'll let me go outside?"

"We sure as hell don't want you doing it in here. Go try your luck. If you make it, I'll be next."

Bergman nodded and moved towards the doors of the service entrance. Two of the Visitors moved to block his way producing claw-tipped tentacles, but then they moved aside and followed him as he made his way up to the car park. "Are you going to watch me doing it?" Bergman asked the nearest one. "I suffer from bashful bladder, you know."

The others were awake and moving by then. Duffy went back to the main workbench, making room in front of the microwave as they yawned and picked out something to eat. Bergman's computer was on, he saw. The other physicist must have turned it on while Duffy was still asleep. Duffy put the mouse pointer over the icon for the folder containing the furnace blueprints, but then, on an impulse, he went to a different folder. The one containing copies of Bergman's published papers.

The most recent of them cited him as the principle author, with other scientists and interns as co-authors, but in earlier papers Bergman was a co-author with an older, more experienced physicist as the main author, and in many of them it was Chen Wenzhong. He selected the last paper to name Wenzhong as having been involved in writing it and noted the date it had been published. September thirteenth, 2014. Just under ten years ago. Most of the other co--authors had Chinese names, so Duffy guessed Bergman had been in China at the time. He knew that Bergman had taken his current post at Kensington Labs at around that time, so he must have left China very shortly after this paper had been published.

He scrolled down to the bottom of the paper, where there were brief biographies of the authors and co-authors. Bergman must have downloaded this copy of the paper some years after it had been published because it gave Wenzhong's date of death as well as his date of birth. October the second 2014. Less than three weeks after the paper, which named Bergman as a co-author, had been published.

Duffy felt a chill running up his spine. The paper detailed a theoretical way in which undoing the knots of elementary particles could provide a source of free, clean energy. The first time he'd read it, ten years before, he'd dismissed it as purest fantasy and forgotten about it almost immediately, but as he scanned his eyes across it now he saw how similar the device it described was to the Furnace currently humming and thrumming behind him. Wenzhong must have been right on the brink of building a Furnace of his own, he thought. In fact, he'd be amazed if the Chinese physicist hadn't created a small, proof-of-concept device whose only purpose was to provide evidence that they were on the right track...

He saw Bergman returning out of the corner of his eye and deliberately left the biographies on the computer screen. "Wenzhong must have died very shortly after you last saw him," he said, watching the other physicist for his reaction.

"Yes," Bergman replied. Cautiously, Duffy thought. It was almost as if he was choosing his words carefully. "But I didn't find out until some months later and, as I said, I still don't know how he died."

"How close were you to building a working Furnace?"

"Wenzhong built a couple of small devices, but neither of them worked. I thought I knew why but he wouldn't listen to me. He was convinced that a double plasma vortex was the way to go. My device uses a triple plasma vortex and it worked the very first time we fired it up. Of course it required a lot of fine tuning. It was a long time before we were able to get any useful power out of it, but it worked right from the start. The very first time I flipped the switch."

"Is it possible that Wenzhong built a third device after you left him? Maybe he tried your triple vortex after all."

Bergman stared at him. "You think that had something to do with his death?"

"What if his third device worked and it created an anomaly, like your device? But it was a smaller device. It didn't generate a strong enough magnetic field to protect him from the anomaly effects."

"It would have killed all his assistants and interns as well, wouldn't it?" said Bergman. "I know for a fact that Tu Ji is still alive, or was as of last february. I correspond with her quite regularly."

Duffy nodded. Now that he thought about it, he'd seen several of Wenzhong's former assistants named on papers on plasma physics. "It was just a thought," he said. "It would explain how the controlling alien intelligence was able to design those..." He waved a hand at the Visitors which, he suddenly noticed, were watching him closely. "How it was able to design them so quickly. Just days after the anomaly opened. It would explain a lot if the Intelligence had had a human body to study ten years ago."

"It would indeed, but as I said I don't know what happened over there after I left. If you're right, I know nothing about it."

"Yes, of course. Well, enough gossip. We've got work to do. Tell me more about this triple plasma vortex."

Bergman closed the text window on his computer and clicked the icon for the files containing the blueprints of the Furnace.