"There's something wrong!" she cried.
There was a world, but it was not the planet of the Engineers. No great city grew upon it from horizon to horizon. Instead of three blue suns, there was one and it was very large and red, a dull brick red, and its rays were so feeble that one could stare straight into it and at the edges it seemed that one could see straight through the fringe of gases.
There was no Hellhounds fleet, no flashing ships of the defender… no war.
There was peace upon this world… a quiet and deadly peace. The peace, thought Gary, of the never-was, the peace of all-is-over.
It was a flat splotched world with a leprous look about it, not gray, but colored as a child with water paints might color a paint book page when he was tired and all the need of accuracy and art were things to be forgotten.
Something happened, Gary told himself. And he felt the chill of fear in his veins.
Something happened and here we are — in what strange corner of the universe?
"Something went wrong," Caroline said again. "Some inherent weakness in the co-ordinates, some streak of instability in the mathematics themselves, perhaps.”
"More likely," Gary told her, "the fault lies in the human brain — or in the brain of the Engineer. No man, no being, can see far enough ahead, think so clearly that be will foresee each eventuality. And even if he did, he might be inclined to let some small factor slip by with no other thought than that it was so small it could do no harm.”
Caroline nodded at him. "The mistakes creep in so easy," she admitted.