There was a dizzying sense of almost instantaneous passage over an infinite distance--and also a sense that there had been no movement at all, but only a becoming aware of something right at hand. And then-- The darkness pulsed and throbbed with power, a power that it seemed must rack to pieces many-branched time and shake down the worlds like rotten fruit. The thought-choked void quivered with a terrifying creativity, as if this were the growing-point of all reality. Thorn became aware of seven minds crowded around the source of the pulsations and throbbing and quivering. Homely human minds like his own, but lacking even his own mind's tripled insight, narrower and more paternalistic than even the minds of World II's Servants of the People. Minds festooned with error, barnacled with bias, swollen with delusions of godhead. Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their ignorance--which their power protected. Then he became aware of vast pictures flaring up in the void in swift succession--visions shared by the seven minds and absorbing them to such a degree that they were unconscious of his presence. Like river-borne wreckage after an eon-long jam has broken, the torrent of visions flowed past. World II loomed up. First the drab Servants Hall, where eleven old men nodded in dour satisfaction as they assured themselves, by report and transtime televisor, that the invasion was proceeding on schedule. Then the picture broadened, to show great streams of subtronically mechanized soldiers and weapons moving in toward the transtime bridgehead of the Opal Cross. Individual faces flashed by--wry-lipped, uninterested, obedient, afraid. For a moment World I was glimpsed--the interior of the Opal Cross shown in section like an ant-hill, aswarm with black uniforms. Quickly, as if the seven masters hated to look at their pet world so misused, this gave way to a panoramic vision of World III, in which hundreds of miles were swept over without showing anything but fallen or fire-tortured skylons, seared and scrub-grown wasteland, and--cheek by jowl--glacier walls and smoke-belching volcanoes.