Then, with the equipment's secrets available for him to study, Bronson abandoned such study in order to think and plan more thoroughly.
The lock upon his door was certainly not the kind that any man in his right sense would use to imprison any but a schoolchild. That did not ring true, even though Kingston and Maddox held him in contempt and knew that Bronson could never return to Earth One.
There was more to it than that. He turned back to the equipment and set the depth-dial to zero-zero. Then, with an amused shock, Bronson was looking at a view of himself who was looking at the viewscreen upon which was the same picture. Lack of definition in the picture elements prevented the scene from being repeated to the infinitely small.
But there was no time for fooling. So Ed Bronson lifted the plane of view and passed the plane entirely through the top floor of the building. He brought it back once it had reached the back and repassed it again, setting it aside by nine-tenths of its span. On the fourth pass Bronson saw something, plucked at the switches and rotated the plane of view.
Here was a small room. Two cots were there with a sleeping man in each. They were in uniform. A third man lounged in an easy chair—asleep.
Bronson breathed more easily. For, on a small portable viewer, was the bedroom that Bronson had recently vacated. Guards, obviously, and one of them luckily eligible for court-martial for sleeping on his watch!
Bronson spun the distance dial wildly, and saw a kaleidoscope of color, land, rock, and stream. He cared not where it was that he came upon the supercritical mass of space resonant elements—all he cared was that it was a goodly distance away.
He did smile when he saw the name of the store on the window—not that he could read it for, to Ed Bronson, lettering in Russian might as well be read from either inside or outside or upside-down or backwards—because he had a hunch that uniformed guards trying to explain their undesirable presence in a Russian store would be at a loss to explain how they had got there.
His hand found the key marked TRANSMISSION and he saw all three guards land on the hard cold floor, awake, and start to ask themselves what had happened.