Caroline straightened from the bank of instruments mounted upon the roof outside the laboratory.
"It's building up fast," she said. "I'm almost afraid. It might get out of control, you know. But we have to have enough energy to start with. If the first stroke doesn't utterly destroy the Hellhounds, we won't have a second chance.”
Gary's mind ran over the hectic days of work, the mad scramble against time. He remembered once again how Kingsley and Tommy had gone out to the edge of the universe to create a huge bubble of space-time, warping the rim of space into a hump, curving the time-space continuum into a hypersphere that finally closed and divorced itself from the parent body, pinching off like a yeast bud to become an independent universe in the inter-space.
It had taken power to do that, a surging channel of energy that poured out of the magnetic power transmitter, crossing space in a tight beam to be at hand for the making of a new universe. But it had taken even more power to "skin" a hypersphere, to turn it through a theoretical fifth dimension until it was of the stuff that the inter-space was made of — a place where time did not exist, a place whose laws were not the laws of the universe, a mystery region that was astonishingly easy to maneuver through space once it was created. It wasn't a sphere or a hypersphere — it was a strange dimension that apparently did not lend itself to measurement, or to definition, or to identification by any of the normal senses of perception.
But whatever it was, it hung there above the city, although there was no clue to its existence. It couldn't be seen or sensed — just something that had been created from equations supplied by the last man living out his final days on a dying planet, equations that Caroline had scribbled on the back of a crumpled envelope. An envelope, Gary remembered, that had carried an irate letter from a creditor back on Earth who felt that he should have long since been paid. "Too long overdue," the letter had said. Gary grinned, Back on Earth the creditor undoubtedly still was sending him letters pointing out that the account was becoming longer overdue with the passing of each month.
Outside the universe that tiny, created hypersphere was bumping along, creating frictional stress, creating a condition for the creation of the mysterious energy of eternity — an energy that even now was pouring into the universe and being absorbed by the fifth-dimensional frame that poised above the city.
A new, raw energy from a region that had no time, an energy that was at once timeless and formless, but an energy that was capable of being crystallized into any form.
Kingsley was standing beside Gary, his great head bent, staring upward. "An energy field," he said, "and what energy! Like a battery, storing up that energy from interspace. I hope it does what Caroline thinks it will.”
"Don't worry," said Gary. "You saw the mathematics that she brought back.”
"Sure, I saw the mathematics," Kingsley said, "but I couldn't understand them.”