"Take it, Mason," Underwood said. "I'm going down."
The impact of that moment hit them all, though they had been trying to anticipate it since they had first known that it would come. It was not their regard and friendship for Underwood, who might presently die before their eyes. It was not their own almost extinction before the fire of the invincible fleet rising to do battle.
It was that this moment would decide the course of man's history.
Everything depended upon a single strange weapon snatched from the hands of a forgotten people in a little eddy of civilization, whose sole purpose in existence might have been to carry this weapon through time to this moment.
And only one of them could wield that weapon, while the others stood by, neither knowing the progress of that conflict nor able to assist.
Underwood sat down in the deep chair that would hold his body restfully while his abasic senses swept Earthward to envelop and crush the anachronism that he had turned upon civilization.
It was more than just, more than ironic, he thought. It was his high privilege to wipe out some of the guilt that he knew he could never smother or rationalize out of his mind—the guilt of having been the one to bring Demarzule back to life.
Of them all in that control room, only Illia uttered a sound, and hers was a half audible cry choked back before it was fully spoken.
He lay apparently relaxed with eyes closed in the huge chair in the control room of the Lavoisier, but the essence, the force that was Delmar Underwood, was sixty thousand miles away, hovering over the force shell dome that hid the Carlson Museum.