The gray-green haze parted in a flare of light. Ackerman saw both the deuterium-ice target and the temperon clearly; it was the latter that gave him pause.
For out from the temperon sample was growing a shimmering, uncertain sphere of energy. It expanded and then hurled itself outward with lightning rapidity. Out it went, to the ends of the infinite universe.
Then destruction, sheer and complete, broke loose. The "time-ship" was hurled away, but not before they saw solid matter burst into a coruscation of incandescent gas, and flame up out of its wraithlike self into a pillar of boiling clouds that headed for the stratosphere. Below them, the ground seared upwards and sintered downwards and fused into an ugly gray-green glaze.
"So," said Ackerman, shaking with reaction. "So Lester Ackerman himself is the cause of the fission in 'time'. You may stop fighting, gentlemen. Tansie, you can stop pointing that cannon at them, too."
Calvin Blaine came forward and took it from her shaking hands. She turned blindly, like an automaton; then she looked up at Les and reality came once more across her face. "Les!" she cried and hurled herself forward into his arms.
Calvin turned to his other, "time-separated" self. "Please leave," he said. "This is most disconcerting."
One Laurie Blaine shrugged at the other. "I don't even like myself as competition," she said.
One pair of Blaines left the ship; the other Calvin Blaine looked out of the window and chuckled. "They left," he said, "just in time to get into that fight!"
"Then this," replied his daughter, "is the ship they came in."