'Caroline!' he shouted. 'The ship! The ship!”
'Hurry,' said the voice to them. 'Hurry, before I change my mind. Hurry, before I go insane again.”
Gary reached down a hand and pulled Caroline to her feet.
'Come on,' he shouted.
'Think of me as kindly as you can,' said the voice. 'Think of me as an old man, an old, old man, who is not quite the man he was… not quite the man he was.”
They ran, stumbling in the darkness, toward the ship. 'Hurry, hurry,' the voice shouted at them. 'I cannot trust myself.”
'Look!' cried Caroline. 'Look, in the sky!”
The wheel of light was there, the slow, lazy wheel of light they first had seen on Pluto… the entrance to the space-time tunnel.
'I gave you back the ship,' said the voice. 'I gave you back the strand of hair. Think kindly of me please… think kindly…”
They clambered up the ladder to the open port and slammed the lock behind them.
At the controls, Gary reached out for the warming knob, found that it was already turned on. The tubes, the indicator said, were warm.
He gunned the ship into the sky, centering the cross hairs on the wheel that shimmered above them.
They hit it head-on and the black closed in around them and then there was light again and the city of the Engineers was below them… a blasted city, its proud towers gone, great heaps of rubble in its streets, a cloud of stone-dust, ground in the mills of atomic bombing, hanging over it.
Gary glanced over his shoulder, triumphant at their return, and saw the tears that welled in Caroline's eyes and trickled down her cheeks.
'The poor thing,' she said. 'That poor old man back there.”
Chapter Sixteen
The city of the Engineers lay in ruins, but above it, fighting desperately, battling valiantly to hold off the hordes of Hellhounds, the tiny remnant of the Engineer battle fleet still stood between it and complete destruction.
The proud towers were blasted into dust and the roadways and parks were sifted with the white cloud of destruction, the powdered masonry smashed and pulverized to drifting fragments by the disintegrator rays and the atomic bombs. Twisted bits of wreckage littered the chaotic wastes of shattered stone — wreckage of Engineer and Hellhound ships that had met in the shock of battle and plunged in flaming ruin.
Gary glanced skyward anxiously. 'I hope they can hold them off,' he said, 'long enough for the energy to build up.”
Caroline straightened from the bank of instruments mounted upon the roof outside the laboratory.
'It's building up fast,' she said. 'I'm almost afraid. It might get out of control, you know. But we have to have enough energy to start with. If the first stroke doesn't utterly destroy the Hellhounds, we won't have a second chance.”
Gary's mind ran over the hectic days of work, the mad scramble against time. He remembered once again how Kingsley and Tommy had gone out to the edge of the universe to create a huge bubble of space-time, warping the rim of space into a hump, curving the time-space continuum into a hypersphere that finally closed and divorced itself from the parent body, pinching off like a yeast bud to become an independent universe in the inter-space.
It had taken power to do that, a surging channel of energy that poured out of the magnetic power transmitter, crossing space in a tight beam to be at hand for the making of a new universe. But it had taken even more power to 'skin' a hypersphere, to turn it through a theoretical fifth dimension until it was of the stuff that the inter-space was made of — a place where time did not exist, a place whose laws were not the laws of the universe, a mystery region that was astonishingly easy to maneuver through space once it was created. It wasn't a sphere or a hypersphere — it was a strange dimension that apparently did not lend itself to measurement, or to definition, or to identification by any of the normal senses of perception.
But whatever it was, it hung there above the city, although there was no clue to its existence. It couldn't be seen or sensed — just something that had been created from equations supplied by the last man living out his final days on a dying planet, equations that Caroline had scribbled on the back of a crumpled envelope. An envelope, Gary remembered, that had carried an irate letter from a creditor back on Earth who felt that he should have long since been paid. 'Too long overdue,' the letter had said. Gary grinned, Back on Earth the creditor undoubtedly still was sending him letters pointing out that the account was becoming longer overdue with the passing of each month.
Outside the universe that tiny, created hypersphere was bumping along, creating frictional stress, creating a condition for the creation of the mysterious energy of eternity — an energy that even now was pouring into the universe and being absorbed by the fifth-dimensional frame that poised above the city.
A new, raw energy from a region that had no time, an energy that was at once timeless and formless, but an energy that was capable of being crystallized into any form.
Kingsley was standing beside Gary, his great head bent, staring upward. 'An energy field,' he said, 'and what energy! Like a battery, storing up that energy from interspace. I hope it does what Caroline thinks it will.”
'Don't worry,' said Gary. 'You saw the mathematics that she brought back.”
'Sure, I saw the mathematics,' Kingsley said, 'but I couldn't understand them.”
He shook his head inside the helmet.
'What's the universe coming to?' he asked.
Caroline spoke quietly to the Engineer.
'There's plenty of energy now,' she said. 'You may call them down.”
The Engineer, headphones clamped upon his skull, apparently was giving orders to the Engineer fleet, but the Earthlings couldn't catch his thoughts.
'Watch now,' chirped Herb. 'This is going to be a sight worth seeing.”
High above the city a ship dropped, flashing downward, like a silver bullet. Another dropped and still another, until the entire Engineer fleet, blackened and ripped and decimated, was in full retreat, flashing back toward the ruined city. And in their wake came the triumphant Hellhounds, a victorious pack in full cry, determined to wipe out the last trace of a hated civilization.
The Engineer had snatched the headphones off, was racing to the set of controls. Gary, glancing from the battle scene above, saw his metal fingers reach out and manipulate controls, saw Caroline pick up an ordinary flashlight.
He knew that the Engineer was shifting the fifth-dimensional mass into a position between them and the screaming fleet of death above them, shifting that field of terrible energy into the Hellhounds' path.
The last of the Engineer fleet had reached the city, was shrieking down between the shattered towers, as if fleeing for its very life.
And only a few miles above them, in what amounted to a mass formation, the Hellhound fleet was plunging down, guns silent now, protective screens still up, grim and ghastly ships running their quarry to the ground.
Gary's body tensed as he saw Caroline's arm swing up, clutching the tiny flashlight, pointing it at the on- driving fleet.
He saw the flash of light burn upward, pale in the light of the sinking suns — a tiny, feeble, ineffective beam of light stabbing at the oncoming ships. Like taking a swipe at a grizzly bear with a pancake turner.
And then the heavens seemed to blaze with light and a streamer of blue-white intensity whipped out toward the ships. Protective screens flared briefly and then exploded into a million flashing sparks. For the space of one split second, before he could get his hand up to shield his eyes against the inferno in the sky, Gary saw the gaunt black skeletons of the Hellhound ships, writhing and disappearing in the surging blast of energy that tore at them and twisted them and finally, in the snapping of one's finger, utterly destroyed them.
The sky was empty, as empty as if there had never been a Hellhound ship.
There was no sign of the fifth-dimensional mass, no hint of ship or gun — just the blue of the sky, ashing into
