"All right," said the old man, but there was a patronizing tone to his thoughts.
Gary gained a confused impression of horrific equations, of bracketed symbols that built themselves into a tangled and utterly confused structure of meaning — a meaning that seemed so vast and all-inclusive that his mind instinctively shuddered away from it.
Then the thoughts were gone and Gary's mind was spinning with them, with the vital forcefulness that he had guessed and glimpsed behind the symbolic structure that had been in the mathematics.
He looked at Caroline and saw that she was puzzled. But suddenly a look of awe spread over her face.
"Why," she said, and hesitated slightly, "…. why, the equations cancel, represent both everything and nothing, both zero and the ultimate in everything imaginable.”
Gary caught a sense of surprise and confusion that flashed through the mind of their host.
"You understand," said the faltering thought. "You grasp the meaning perfectly.”
"Didn't I tell you," said Gary. "Of course, she understands." ‘
Caroline was talking, almost as if she were talking to herself, talking her thoughts aloud. "That means the energy would be timeless. It would have no time factor, and since time is a factor in power, its power would be almost infinite. There'd be no stopping it, once it started.”
"You are right," said the old man. "It would be raw, created energy from a region where four-dimensional laws are no longer valid. It would be timeless and formless.”