"JON!"
"Well! The ITA hasn't lost much time! She looks a little bit white, doesn't she, Thurston? And seems to know our friend, here! Gentlemen, I think things are going to work out rather well...."
And that was the moment that Jon Kane returned to full consciousness, and full pain.
But he kept his eyes shut, his voice silent.
The banks of viewscreens in the New World's NIC room reflected a kaleidoscope of horror as no man had seen horror before, and as only a man of Kane's century could understand it. To the uninitiated observer of an earlier time whose entire life experience had been within the narrow confines of a single planet, the softly glowing spheres in the screens would have seemed remote things; untouchable, and of only speculative interest. The interest may have been heightened slightly by the sudden rifts that appeared in the surfaces of some, or by the peculiarly undulating ocean masses that seemed bent on erasing the land masses of others.
But to Jon, securely shackled to an ackseat as was Deanne beside him, the screens showed an impending wave of death and destruction on a scale that bordered on the unthinkable.
Procyon I and II were already torn near the point of total break-up; III, IV and V, because of their greater masses, were trembling with a slower rhythm, but the close-up screens showed their largest cities had already begun to crumble. Their streets were clogged with both dead and living, and the gaping mouths of panic stricken faces were eerily silent.
The six outer planets had not yet felt their first tremors, but they had begun to enter subtly-altered orbital paths, and whole continents were unnaturally bathed in the hellish light of twin suns that spewed great, flaming masses of their life-stuff with unchecked abandon into the infinite well of the void.
The largest screen showed a wide, wafer-thin disc floating with an inhuman serenity in the blackness, its flat plane tipped gently to the ecliptic, its surface crawling with tiny ant-like creatures that were men. Hovering above it was a glistening, pencil-shaped object from which more men came, their tiny forms followed by irregularly shaped masses, weightless on the invisible tow-lines.