Gritting his teeth on the bit of his pipe, Russ cursed soundlessly. He yanked savagely at the wrench. It slipped from his hand, hung for a minute on the nut and then plunged downward, falling straight into the heart of the new force field they had developed.
Russ froze and watched, his heart in his throat, mad thoughts in his brain. In a flash, as the wrench fell, he remembered that they knew nothing about this field. All they knew was that any matter introduced in it suddenly acquired an acceleration in the dimension known as time, with its normal constant of duration reduced to zero.
When that wrench struck the field, it would cease to exist! But something else might happen, too, something entirely unguessable.
The wrench fell only a few feet, but it seemed to take long seconds as Russ watched, frozen in fascination.
He saw it strike the hazy glow that defined the limits of the field, saw it floating down, as if its speed had been slowed by some dense medium.
In the instant that hazy glow intensified a thousand times—became a blinding sun-burst! Russ ducked his head, shielded his eyes from the terrible blast of light. A rending, shuddering thud seemed to echo ... in space rather than in air ... and both field and wrench were gone!
A moment passed, then another, and there was the heavy, solid clanging thud of something striking metal. This time the thud was not in space, but a commonplace noise, as if someone had dropped a tool on the floor above.
Russ turned around and stared at Wilson. Wilson stared back, his mouth hanging open, the smoldering, cigarette dangling from his mouth.
"Greg!" Russ shouted, his cry shattering the silence in the laboratory.
A door burst open and Manning stepped into the main laboratory room, a calculation pad in one hand, a pencil in the other.