I threw open the door with a laugh. The laugh faded into a shout of terror.
I threw out my hands, revolver and packets of loot falling through the door, and I only barely saving myself with one foot over the threshold.
The horror that gripped me then is such a horror as comes to a man but once in a lifetime. My brain sickened and chilled, my heart all but stopped its beating, and my limbs grew rigid.
In the black of the fearsome night—not the atmospheric blue-black I had been accustomed to, but the ebony dark of Erebus—I saw a wild greenish star below, a huge disk whose gleaming nimbus danced on my sight in quivering lines.
Half crazed, I flung back into the room and fell groveling to the floor, my ears echoing with the professor's merriment and the startled exclamations of the four men I had robbed—all to no purpose.
Presently I sat up, rubbing forehead and eyes.
The professor stood in the open door, gloating over the vista below.
"Come!" he called, beckoning to the huddled quartet at the other side of the room. "Come, Gilhooly, Meigs, Popham, and Markham—come, look down upon the scene of your feverish activities. You were plutocrats there, more powerful than kings! Here you are no more than shoulder high with me, and yon muddled thief on the floor! You have been snatched from the scene of your pernicious labors—exiled into planetary space where you will be powerless to work further evil. I have not lived in vain; for this, this is the triumph of my career."
Slowly Meigs disentangled himself from the mute group by the opposite wall and crept on all fours to the threshold that overlooked the void and the greenish star.
He recoiled with a yell; then, maddened by what he had seen, he leaped erect and tried to hurl himself out into space.