Heidkamp, hands shaking as he realized that the miraculous experiment had succeeded, turned the great black handle of the Time Trap and flung wide the door. Within the cell the girl huddled against the far wall, hardly knowing what had befallen her, conscious only of the dizzying sickening shock she had sustained from her transportation into the future.
An inarticulate cry of joy burst from the lips of the Master. Now his passion for the girl became an avalanche of madness, sweeping away all his fears and cautions. He hurled himself forward into the cage of the Time Trap, reached blindly for the girl, twisted one hand in her golden hair and pulled her toward him. Blanched and shaking, she held up her hands with a pathetic gesture of pleading horror. "Beauty from past ages!" cried the Master hoarsely, and bore down her resistance.
He had forgotten Heidkamp.
Quietly, almost reverently, Heidkamp stepped forward, laid his hand upon the door, and closed it. He fingered the master switch, and as he did so, remembered the forces of the New Day, ready to take over power and build at last a true democracy, including all the mechanical glories of the civilization which the Master had erected, with the added crown of peace and freedom and happiness for every man on earth. This he remembered, and he closed the switch.
The light died back within the cage, and in the circle on the time screen appeared the Master, so forgetful of all else in his struggles to win the lips of the girl that he was not even aware that he was trapped by Time. In his arms the girl struggled desperately, her feet scattering the wondrous gems upon the grass. A roadster stopped before the house with an abrupt jerk, and the girl's giant lover hurled himself from the driver's seat and laid a violent hand upon the shoulder of the Master.
For one long, ecstatic instant Heidkamp could see in the time visor the eyes of the Master, stark with his abrupt, dreadful realization.
Slowly Heidkamp picked up a long bar of heavy iron, and methodically destroyed the time traveler—first the long spirals of glowing tubes, then the frail and lifeless structure of the empty cage and last the idling generators, their whispers crashing into silence.
He ignored the robots, waiting in vigilance for the commands of the Master, commands that now would never come, their frantic urgency lost in Time.