"Open the model shop," Devon demanded. "I must get in there at once!"
The watchman was a new one and slowly checked Devon's company identification, then turned and led the way with maddening, ponderous omnipotence over engineers who wanted access to the building in the hours when only watchmen reigned.
Sweat was bursting like ripe pods on Devon's face as he surged ahead when the model shop was in sight. It was dark. He pressed his face against the glass and shielded his eyes with his hands. There was no sound or light or sign of human presence.
Devon turned with a start as the sluglike watchman rattled the key. Then he was inside. His finger found the switch, commanded the light that flooded the broad room of the shop.
It was like the agony of waking from the grasping fingers of a dream reluctant to give up its clutch upon his mind. Reality slowly forced back grudging memory and he stood there with a slow sense of devastation swirling about him like a knee-deep flood.
The brake — Mac's six thousand dollar wonder — was there.
Intact.
The machine tools, the floor, the workbenches were just as they had been before the impossible dream out of the future had disturbed Devon's uneventful, handbook life.
It was all as before —
Out of his own disappointments a terrible, corrosive hate distilled through his veins and condensed in the cold chambers of his heart and his brain.