The impulses of evil poured on through the electrodes into his mind. He sensed the immensity and purpose of the thing that had generated them. He sensed that out of some far reach of space, where time and dimension were not the same, the thing had acquired an eternal nature of a kind that knew no birth and could experience no death in the dimensions of man.
He sensed that its nature and its purpose were pure destruction. Destruction of life in any form. It was a thing of death, and life and it could not exist in the same universe.
He sensed how it had come and why it had come, and the partial defeat that had sent it into dormancy because there was no life of the kind it knew in the universe through which it hurtled.
Now—it was once again aware of life.
The three of them went back to the tracking station laboratory together. Jim managed to obtain a clearance for Tom to see what they were doing. "I want to move the Prospector a long distance and try one more hole," he told Sam.
"What do you mean by a long distance?"