Experiments in automatic travel

In 1945, the greatest war the world had seen up to that point in history had ended. The Americans brought scientists from the Third Reichs nuclear, medical and occult research factions to the great shore of America. Under the name of Operation Paperclip, they were given new identities and their prior affiliation to one of the most brutal regimes was scrubbed from their record. Among these ideological refugees were many who still held the beliefs of their Fuhrer, yet they dared not say anything and make new, powerful enemies among the Americans.
The Russians had their own version of Operation Paperclip, who's operational title was lost after the first Xhoan Emission. Where the Americans had the American Way, where you work hard and do good deeds and succeed, the Russians knew no similar motto. 'Do What is Best For Your Motherland!', and 'From Each According His Ability, To Each According His Need!' plastered the walls and working spaces of the former Nazi scientists.

Among the many findings that they brought with them to their respective new homes, a new chemical. First synthesized by a Swiss chemist in 1936, it fueled the Adolf HItlers fascination in the occult, space, and time. It spread among the more liberal minded scientists, to great avail. In 1944, they had discovered the first rudimentary form of instantaneous travel to monumental failure. Every test subject that was sent through the portal was returned between 30 and 54 minutes later. Often with tumorous growths that featured teeth, eyes, orifices or fully formed extremities. No matter what medical treatment was afforded to the test subjects, they would invariably expire within a weeks time. This afforded them little time to study the mutations. That was of small importance, because they had no shortage of test subjects. Of the 6 million Jews, mentally disturbed or homosexual test subjects that were killed in concentration camps or by death squads, approximately half of those were as a consequence of studying the effects of the portal on human flesh.
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They arrived in great trains that chugged and billowed thick black smoke over a bleak landscape. Some cried. Some begged for food. Others were silent and shambling with sunken eyes and shallow cheeks. Men, women and children; some marching, some crawling, others being pulled by their shackles by the ones ahead of them. All of them died.

The portal was shaped like the inside of a great, cavernous throat. The walls were fleshy and slick and undulated as if it was hungering for things to be thrown into it. The entrance rose out of the ground at an angle, and a steel walkway and ramp ran down into the fleshy opening. The walkway, for the guards and scientists, and the ramp for the metal gurney like contraptions that transported the unfortunate test subjects to the antechamber that housed the portal entrance.

Inside of the antechamber were two openings. There was a rule to the portal. If a subject was placed in one hole, it would be rapidly 'swallowed', and then they would be returned by the other. To expedite the extraction of fresh bodies to medically experiment on, one hole was the designated 'entrance', and the other would be the designated 'exit'. For the most part, the return would coincide linearly in the order that subjects were placed in the 'entrance' hole. At this point, the gurneys would be wheeled back to the surface and into the medical wing of the camp. The subjects returned would scream, twitch and jerk violently, each one a little moreso than the previous. Where the first subject had relatively minor tumourous growths, the hundredth was horribly disfigured, with extraneous appendages and orifices that seemed to end just below the surface of the skin.

Upon dissection, these growths oozed a stinking black pus when excised, and pulsed and shuddered when removed from the main trunk. When the pus was cleared away, what appeared to be a misshapen fetus laid in the centre of the mire. We had to keep the animals away from the wing since the