Margaret.... He touched her picture, still safe in his pocket.
There were other worlds—an infinity of them. Somewhere, sometime, he'd find the one world he sought.
Again, he turned the transdimensional registration unit's dials.
Light flashed on the scanning scope's screen. Stiff-fingered, Horning focussed.
Here the scene was one of bleak desolations, painted in a hundred drab shades of grey. A murky sky pressed down on sullen hills, thick underfoot with powdery, ash-dry dust. Seared shafts that might once have been trees thrust up here and there like skeletal fingers. In the foreground rose the crumbling corner of a ruined building, base buried deep in rubble.
A man crouched there—ragged, bone-gaunt, grey as the shattered walls at his back. He clutched a club in one claw-like hand, and the strain of utter panic, despair, stood out in every taut, harsh-drawn line.
Before the man, hemming him in, ranged a dozen great, six-legged, wolfish beasts of a fearsome genus Horning had never seen before. Snarling, slavering, they crowded in closer and closer, huge fangs bared.
With a chill of horror, Horning flipped the magnifier across the scanning scope's screen.
The beleagured man's face leaped up at him, sharp and clear.
"No—!" Horning choked. "No!"