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 ...

And suddenly they were tumbling head over heels along the rocky ground of the little planetoid again.

"Johnny...."

"Helen...."

"At least we got them out of that," Pud puffed. "The sub-temporal field, Gop ... help me lift it ... hurry!"

"Master, all our experiments are activated! The tharn radiated enough to activate everything!"

"Help me lift the sub-temporal field!"

"Master, it's too late ... they're in it!"

A million miles above their heads was the vast sweep of All Time, like a rushing, glassy, upside-down river ... they tumbled through a chaos where Time, twice in each beat of their hearts, bounced back and forth between creation and entropy, and took them with it.... Time was a torrent beneath whose surface they were yanked back and forth from Beyond the End to Before the 

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