nier and Randall slowly followed, and despite himself a slight
shudder shook the latter's body as he stepped into the mechanism that
in moments would send him flashing out through the great void as
impalpable ether-vibrations. Milton and Lanier were standing silent
beside him, their eyes on Nelson, who stood watchfully now at the big
switchboard beside the chambers, his own gaze on the clock. They saw
him touch a stud, and another, and the hum of the great dynamos at the
room's end grew loud as the swarming of angry bees.

The clock's longer hand was crawling over the last space to cover the
smaller hand. Nelson turned a knob and the battery of great glass
tubes broke into brilliant white light, a crackling coming from them.
Randall saw the clock's pointer clicking over the last divisions, and
as he saw Nelson grip a great switch there came over him a wild
impulse to bolt from the transmitting chamber. But then as his
thoughts whirled maelstromlike there came a clang from the clock and
Nelson flung down the switch in his grasp. Blinding light seemed to
break from all the chamber onto the three; Randall felt himself hurled
into nothingness by forces titanic, inconceivable, and then knew no
more.

* * * * *

Randall came back to consciousness with a humming sound in his ears
and with a sharp pain piercing his lungs at every breath. He felt
himself lying on a smooth hard surface, and heard the humming stop and
be succeeded by a complete silence. He opened his eyes, drawing
himself to his feet as Milton and Lanier were doing, and stared about
him.

He was standing with his two friends inside a cubical metal chamber
almost exactly the same as the one they had occupied in Milton's
laboratory a few moments before. But it was not the same, as their
first astounded glance out through its open side told them.

For it was not the laboratory that lay around them, but a vast
conelike hall that seemed to Randall's dazed eyes of dimensions
illimitable. Its dull-gleaming metal walls slanted up for a thousand
feet over their heads, and through a round aperture at the tip far
above and through great doors in the walls came a thin sunlight. At
the center of the great hall's circular floor stood the two cubical
chambers in one of which the three were, while around the chambers
were grouped masses of unfamiliar-looking apparatus.

* * * * *

To Randall's untrained eyes i