"Well," said Herb, "the fireworks can start any time now. The folks from the other universe have crossed safely and there's no reason for the other universe to exist. We can blast it any time we want to.”
"Gary," said Kingsley, "you and Herb better get over to those guns. We may want action fast.”
Gary nodded and walked to the controls of a disintegrator gun. He slid into the seat back of the controls and reached out a hand to grasp the swivel butt. He swung it back and forth, knew that outside the ship the grim muzzle of the weapon was swinging in a wide arc.
Through the tiny port in front of him he could see the blue intensity of the void in which they moved.
Out here time and space were thinning down and breaking up. Like a boat riding on the surface of a heaving sea, they were riding the very rim of the universe, their ship tossed about by the shifting, twisting co-ordinates of force.
Out there somewhere, very close, was the mysterious inter-space. Close, too, invisible in all its immensity, was another universe. An old and tottering universe from which its inhabitants had fled, a dying universe that had been sentenced to death so that a younger universe might live.
In just a few minutes now the space between the universes would begin to fill with a charge of that terrible timeless, formless energy. Slowly it would begin seeping into the two universes, slowly at first and then faster and faster, increasing their mass, dooming them to almost instant destruction.
But before that could happen, the disintegrator ray, the most terrible form of energy known to the Engineers, would blast out into that field of latent energy, would sweep outward toward that other approaching universe.
Instantly the field of energy would be turned into the terrific power of the disintegrator ray, but millions of times more powerful than the ray itself… a blinding sheet of energy that would stop at nothing, that would smash the very mold of time and space, would destroy matter and cancel other energy. And this sheet of energy would smash its way into the other universe.
And when that happened, the energy field, draining all its energy into the disintegrator blast, would be diverted from the younger universe, would turn in full force upon the one to be destroyed.