The warp bounced silently on the rocky ground, caromed like a fire-ball from boulder to boulder, encountered stray radiation from the tharn-field that still glowed invisibly on the other side of the ridge, and became activated; it emitted concentric spheres of nameless-colored energy, and a vast snapping and crackling.
"There," Gop thought triumphantly at Pud. "That's just what I did with the tharn-field.... I guess nobody is above accidents, eh?"
Pud thought pure vitamins at his Junior Scientist. "You idiot, I didn't accidentally turn on the warp! You left the tharn on, and it triggered the warp! Why didn't you deactivate the tharn?"
"Why didn't you?" Gop shot back. "You were there too!"
Pud lashed a tentacle over the outcropping, and the tharn-field became inactive. Then he looked around, and every eye in his prime head popped. "Look out, the dimensional-warp is spreading ... it's lost its cohesion ... oh, digestion, they're in that now!"
Johnny and Helen Gorman were in a universe of blazing stars and nebulae that whirled like cosmic carousels; of gas clouds that seethed in giant turbulence ... it was the universe of creation, or a universe in its death-throes....
"Johnny...."
"Helen...."
The boiling universe exploded away from them in soundless radiation, in all directions ... in five directions, their subconscious minds told them ... it vanished into nothingness, a nothingness that surrounded them like white blindness, and then suddenly it was restored again, roiling, churning, flashing with the bright eyes of novae, shot with the sinuous streamers of rushing gas clouds, pulsing with the heartbeats of winking variables ...