I swung our gyro toward the fading Di-shaft, gave it full throttle and prayed. Dora was gripping my arm and crying something in my ear but I didn't understand a word of it.
I looked back once, just before we hit the crumbling column. The shower of sparks had died out, and in its place stood a familiar shaft of vacancy, boring outward into the upside-down sky. Something squeezed through the break while I watched, beating back the Blazers who fought to stop it.
I got only a glimpse but I'll never be the same again.
It was a Twister but it didn't look like the ones we had seen through our Di-tube. What we had seen then were only reversed projections, Doc Maxey said later, transposed cross-sections altered to something we could partially visualize with our limited senses.
But this Twister wasn't transposed and it didn't look like an inside-out octopus. It writhed and swelled and radiated a dark devouring coldness that snuffed out Blazers like sparks against an ice cake.
Other Twisters may have followed it—I wouldn't know. We hit the Di-tube then and at the same moment the Blazers' generator blew up with an appalling blast....
The next instant we were sailing over a parched and blazing desert, a glaring waste of jagged lava that stretched away on every side through a shimmering haze of heat. Black basalt cliffs jutted up here and there, warped and eroded by scorching winds.
Dora and I looked at each other dumbly.
"We got away," Dora said. "But what sort of dimension is this? Where are we, Jerry?"