"Are you okay?" Richard asked David.
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine," he answered, waving Richard off. He walked up to the glass, this time without touching the glass. He didn't want to go into convulsions again. Everything inside the room, except for The Box, was melted. What kind of metal was this object made of that it wouldn't melt along with everything else? Maybe Richard was right. Maybe it was alien.
"Did the scanners pick up anything before they melted?" Richard asked Tim. "Tim?"
Tim still stared at The Box. Did he really see what he thought he saw? There couldn't be something alive in there, could there? It was impossible.
Richard grabbed Tim's arm, ripping his attention away from the object. "Huh?"
"The scanners. Did they pick up anything new?"
Tim hesitantly sat down in front of the computer monitor, as if he was just remembering where he was. He brought up the analysis screen. All the information was the same, except for the recorded temperature in the room, which was in excess of fifteen hundred degrees Celsius. It was impossible that they could still be alive. The glass separating them from the object would have melted too. It was almost as if the edge of the heated air stopped just before touching the glass. Again, that was impossible. Nothing could be that precise. Nothing on Earth, that was.
"It's alien," Richard said. He looked at Tim, expecting him to shoot down that theory again, but he didn't. "Tim? Are you accepting the alien theory now?"
Tim turned in his chair. "I'm not sure. I thought I saw ..."
David turned away from the glass. "Saw what?"
"Something. Inside the object."
David looked back at The Box. "There's something in there?"
"It might have been just my imagination, but I could have sworn I saw something moving inside the object, just before the light was gone. Like I was looking at an x-ray of it, or something," Tim explained.
"What did it look like?" David asked.
"I only saw it for a split second. But it was moving."
They all looked at The Box, through the pane of glass. This thing was already a big mystery to begin with, but now it seemed more like a paradox. Something that couldn't exist, but did.
