There was a flashing glimpse of a grotto, of crystalline, polychromatic light and tingling warmth—the Chamber. Then that and the pain too was gone and he fell interminably through blackness.
Seconds ... hours ... eons. And he struck with unexpected mildness on a hard, flat surface.
He opened one eye—and the other. He placed the palms of his hands—both hands—against the floor and pushed himself to a sitting posture.
The fluorescent lights of his own laboratory cast shadowless brilliance upon him. The charge collectors still whined, their pitch lowering slowly as he listened, and the air was still pungent with ozone. It couldn't be—or could it?—that only a few moments of Earth time had elapsed?
A woman lay on the floor a few feet away, and he knew that he and she had both been near enough the neutral focus of the forces he had unleashed to escape destruction. And his arm, his eye—even the hand Margaret had so cruelly slashed—these parts of him had somehow in the transit between Varda and Earth his body had been made whole again.
He stared hard at the woman, for it was a different Margaret Matson, hardly recognizable. There were deep lines and wrinkles in her face and her revealing Vardan costume showed only too clearly how her once sleek body had become flabby and misshapen. In that last effort Sasso had fed ruthlessly upon its own worshippers, and his blast rod discharge had prevented their rejuvenation by lives stolen in the Vat.
While his mind was still adjusting itself he noticed the copper bar lying across the contacts of his experimental mechanism, and with Thin World knowledge he knew exactly what effect it had had upon the resonance of the bound charges. After a while he stopped merely looking and went to work.
He picked up a rod of nonconductive plastic and flipped the copper bar aside. Methodically he replaced blown fuses and threw in the circuit breakers controlling the bound charge concentrators. The hum rose rapidly. The machine was not seriously damaged.
A voice startled him.