“If you feed it enough broken glass it makes a washing machine,” Darby reports.

“A glass washing machine?”

“Steel drum, plastic housing. Which–to reiterate–is completely impossible without…” Darby shrugs. “Transmutation? Alchemy?”

“Unless it’s just exchanging it somewhere,” says Vance. “White hole, wormhole…”

They look through the viewport at the battered black box, covered in that weird fake Cyrillic. One of the techs is pouring in a bottle of ’09 Riesling.

“If it comes out as water, I say we blow the thing up,” says Darby.

“There’s an idea,” murmurs Vance. “What do you think it makes out of explosions?”