Price's mind was a mad turmoil. What had happened?
He had blundered right over the bomb test-area, right over the bomb-tower. And the jets guarding the area had tried to stop him. Probably, if his radio hadn't been off, he would have heard them screaming frantic warnings to him.
But had the bomb really gone off? If it had, he would surely have been instantly annihilated.
He hadn't been. He was alive. The plane was ticking along through the night. The instruments functioned.
But something terrific had happened. That ghastly, wrenching shock that had seemed to outrage the very atoms of his body—his flesh still crawled with the memory of it. Something had happened. But what?
Price couldn't think. The mind just could not grapple with a thing like this. He sat, mechanically touching the controls, and the Beechcraft roared on and on.
Gradually, his mind came alive. He shakily swung the plane around. He was going back to Las Vegas. Right now, arrest and prison looked good to him compared to what had happened, or nearly happened.
If he hadn't been so tensely trying to escape, he thought, he would have remembered about the bomb-tests coming up. There had been newspaper stories. Guarded stories about a radical physical effect detected during explosions of the new-type H-bombs, and mention of elaborate preparations being made to study these unusual effects.
Price's thoughts leaped suddenly. He recalled a scientist's statement that the center of explosion of the new-type bomb might be like the eye of a hurricane, a focus of inconceivable forces but affected in a radically different way by those forces.
Had the bomb gone off under him, then? Had his plane and himself, at the "eye" of the tremendous explosion, been hurled somehow through spatial barriers into safety before the light and sound and destruction could even reach him?