Here Sandra stepped in with a word to Larry.
"It's all nonsense, Larry. Don't believe a word he says. He's done nothing but lie since we've met him. He told me the most impossible tale about a 'dome' and a 'dome control chamber.' Of course such things are absurd!"
"So!" Harg's thought had the crackle of audible sound. "Know, then, my two young innocents, that you choose to mock genius. Genius never lies. Behold!" He turned abruptly from the course they were traveling, led them down a side corridor, fingered open a door and showed them, glistening across a wide expanse of metal flooring, a turret-like structure from which emanated, like the sprawling arms of an octopus, vast cables. From the hemispherical roof of this turret emanated a wide, unwavering cone of light, blinding in its brilliance.
"Behold," mocked Harg, "the dome control chamber in which you presumed to disbelieve. From this heart emanates the life of our city-state—and I am its sole supervisor. Even so, it is a tiny thing compared with the greater invention which was, and is, my own. The Time-warp machine. You still doubt? Let me show you, that you may marvel at the brain of Harg—About, guards! We return to the laboratory!"
One of the guards blinked the thick soft lids of his bulging eyes, said nervously, "But, Master of Masters—"
"We return, I said!" Harg was icy cold, even more nettled because a guard had dared question his decision, determined to exact admiration from his audience.
They turned about, began to retrace their steps. Larry marked carefully the corridor which led to the control turret. He would not forget it, nor how to reach it. And as they walked he caught Sandra's eye for a brief moment. Harg did not see the swift wink that passed between them, nor the way Sandra's hands clenched before her in a delighted gesture of approbation....
But he did see, and gloried in, the amazement mirrored in the eyes of Sandra and Larry when at last they stepped into the chamber which housed the Time-warping machine. It was a huge structure, its inner chamber alone being large enough to house a battalion of men. But its core was small, being an oddly shaped, angular object spinning endlessly on a bar of crystalline material.
Displaying all the vanity Larry had hoped for, the little scientist pointed to the twirling object first, then at a great, banked keyboard like that of some gigantic organ.
"The end product of man's genius," he boasted vaingloriously, "for a thousand millenia! The machine which can span Time. You do not comprehend the object which spins upon the bar, no? I fear it is beyond your puny concept, friends from an unenlightened age. It is a tesseract; the infinite cube of four dimensions. Your eyes see but a cross section of its fullness, which is beyond seeing. Yet I, Harg-Ofortu, conceived and built it!