"Not yet, Kim," Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke informed him. "Just forming the vortex—microscopic yet. I haven't the faintest idea of what is going on in there; but man, dear man, am I glad that I'm here to help make it go on!"
"But when?" demanded the Lensman. "How soon will you know whether it's going to work or not? I want to do a flit."
"You can flit any time—now, if you like," the technician told him, brutally. "We don't need you any more—you've done your bit. It's working now. If it wasn't, do you think we could pack all that stuff into that little space? But we'll have it done long before you'll need it."
"But I want to see it work, you big lug!" Kinnison retorted, only half playfully.
"Come back in three-four days—maybe a week; but don't expect to see anything but a hole."
"That's exactly what I want to see, a hole in space," and that was precisely what, a few days later, the Lensman did see.
The spherical framework was unchanged, the machines were still carrying easily their incredible working load. Material—any and all kinds of stuff—was still disappearing; instantaneously, invisibly, quietly, with no flash or fury to mark its passing.
But at the center of that massive sphere there now hung poised a—a something. Or was it a nothing? Mathematically, it was a sphere, or rather a negasphere, about the size of a baseball; but the eye, while it could see something, could not perceive it analytically. Nor could the mind envision it in three dimensions, for it was not essentially three-dimensional in nature. Light sank into the thing, whatever it was, and vanished. The peering eye could see nothing whatever of shape or of texture; the mind behind the eye reeled away before infinite vistas of nothingness.
Kinnison hurled his extrasensory perception into it and jerked back, almost stunned. It was neither darkness nor blackness, he decided, after he recovered enough poise to think coherently. It was worse than that—worse than anything imaginable—an infinitely vast and yet non-existent realm of the total absence of everything whatever—absolute negation!
"That's it, I guess," the Lensman said then. "Might as well stop feeding it now."