He stopped and peered at the panel searchingly. He noticed a glowing stud set in the casement, and after a moment's hesitation he pressed it. The panel slid back smoothly. Jackson looked up and down the hallway, then stepped cautiously through the door.
He found himself in a great high-domed room filled with ordered ranks of mighty but absolutely incomprehensible machinery, all humming enigmatic paens of power. Far down the serried ranks of gargantuan equipment he saw a light glinting on mighty crystal tubes.
With hypnotic fascination, Jackson advanced slowly through the maze of humming mechanisms. The closer he came to those enigmatic tubes, the wider his pale eyes opened, until, as he stood at the base of the rod-high crystal cylinders, he looked like a puppet registering amazement and consternation.
Doctor Gerard held neither Jerome Jackson's cowardly fear of danger, nor Randall's contempt for it. While there were important scientific facts to be learned, danger didn't count. It just didn't exist insofar as he was concerned.
Consequently it wasn't at all surprising that Gerard stepped right into a regular hornet's nest of trouble.
The little Doctor had been counting doors on his way down the corridor, more from scientific habit than anything else, and on the seventh door to his right, he noticed a very strange insignia. It was a weird diagrammatic inscription which immediately caught his interest.
Emblazoned in the central panel in glowing outline was a triangle enclosing a huge multi-faceted eye. As Gerard stared at the weird orb in its geometrical figure he suddenly recalled that a similar figure had been used by ancient necromancers and later by hypnotists, as a symbol of their questionable accomplishments.
Puzzledly he wondered whether its use here in this fantastic world of the past held any esoteric connection with its meaning in the far-distant future. Without stopping to consider potential consequences, he pushed the stud which opened the panel, and stepped inside.
When his eyes finally became accustomed to the even deeper gloom, he saw that the room was filled with a number of coffin-like glass cabinets and an equal number of switchboards crowded with dials and levers. Slowly he edged toward one of the crystal cabinets and peered down into its dimly illumined interior.