The air still reeked acridly. White smoke and fumes came from a dozen areas where earth and vegetation had been blasted by subtronic weapons. And there were those who did not stand up, whose bodies lay charred or had vanished in disintegration. The ground between them and the Opal Cross was still freshly scored by the tracks of great vehicles. There were still wide swathes of crushed vegetation. At one point a group of low buildings had been mashed flat. And it seemed that the air above still shook with the aftermath of the passage of mighty warcraft. But of the great mechanized army that had been fanning out toward and above them, not one black-uniformed soldier remained. They continued to stare. * * * * * In the Sky Room of the Opal Cross, the members of the World Executive Committee looked around at a similar emptiness. Only the tatters of Clawly's body remained as concrete evidence of what had happened. It was blown almost in two, but the face was untouched. This no longer showed the triumphant smile which had been apparent a moment before death. Instead, there was a look of horrified surprise. Clawly's duplicate had vanished with the other black-uniformed figures. The first to recover a little from the frozenness of shock was Shielding. He turned toward Conjerly and Tempelmar. But the expression on the faces of those two was no longer that of conquerors, even thwarted and trapped conquerors. Instead there was a dawning, dazed amazement, and a long-missed familiarity that told Shielding that the masquerading minds were gone and the old Conjerly and Tempelmar returned. Firemoor began to laugh hysterically. Shielding sat down. * * * * * At the World II end of the broken transtime bridgehead, where moments before the Opal Cross had risen, now yawned a vast smoking pit, half-filled with an indescribable wreckage of war machines and men, into which others were still falling from the vanished skylon--like some vision of Hell. To one side, huge even in comparison with that pit, loomed the fantastically twisted metal of the transtime machine. Ear-splitting sounds still echoed. Hurricane gusts still blew. Above it all, like an escaping black hawk above an erupting volcano, Clawly flew. Not even the titanic confusion around him, nor the shock of the time-streams' split, nor his horror at his own predicament, could restrain his ironic mirth at the thought of how that other Clawly, in trying to kill him, had insured the change of minds and his own death. Now he was forever marooned on World II, in Clawly II's body. But the memory chambers of Clawly II's brain were open to him, since Clawly II's mind no longer existed to keep them closed, and so at one bound he had become a half-inhabitant of World II. He knew where he stood. He knew what he must do. He had no time for regrets.