Regardless of what happened now—regardless of himself or of anybody—he had won this battle. He laughed and in the tortured continuum of the place his laugh sounded like a mad cackle.
Fear was painfully slow in coming to the faces of Kingallis and his cohorts. Then it came—fear and the realization of danger. King gave an angry, wordless cry and tried to cross the laboratory floor. He could not quite make it.
Carroll turned his back on them and watched the viewplate on the far wall. It was wavering and distorted but it showed the sky and the sphere of negative mass.
Out in the parabolic reflector, the tiny compressed sphere of energy disappeared into a hole of blackness, from which expanded an exploding shell of sheer light-energy. Against the reflector it poured in a howling torrent and into the sky it went—and disappeared.
Faster than the light it created it went, on and out into space. Gone—unseen—undetectable—save for the black circle on the wall of Carroll's laboratory.
There it was evident as a column, a cylinder that blazed like the fury it was. How long it lasted is beyond guesswork. Its duration was several seconds in the making, its velocity the speed of light multiplied by an unknown quantity that registered in the thousands.
It was—the Lawson Radiation—the Lawson Radiation multiplied and increased as the light from the sun is greater than the pale ineffective illumination coming from a Will O' the Wisp.
It only took seconds, while the continuum heaved and strained to regain its equilibrium and the sensitive nervous systems of those in the laboratory tingled and screamed to the dictates of flowing energy. Seconds only it took for that flying column of energy to reach the black circle that was the negative mass that menaced Terra.