He turned and ran, almost crying in frustration.
Near the seared edge of last night's explosion, Ackerman turned to watch. An hour passed—Two—Three.
Whatever had happened before, it was not to happen again. Not this time, at least.
For when Les returned, Waters and Crowley were watching the brief half-lives die out on the counters and making histograms in an effort to predict the safety-time.
Mystified, tired of wondering, and utterly lonesome, Les Ackerman waited in the no-world life between two direct possibilities of man's existance.
It was meaningless to Ackerman; perhaps it was meaningless to Nature herself.
The complete incongruity of it all—and the conflicting evidences were beyond him. Trees and rock and ground were one; the building was there and so was that sere bowl of greenish glaze. At nightfall, his friends entered their cars by the laboratory and drove right through the still-crowding people of the other existance. Waters passed almost through his alter ego, and might have seen his friend Crowley twice—excepting that Waters, unlike Les Ackerman, could not see both coincident pathways of event.
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