I looked back once, just before we hit the crumbling column. The shower of sparks had died out, and in its place stood a familiar shaft of vacancy, boring outward into the upside-down sky. Something squeezed through the break while I watched, beating back the Blazers who fought to stop it. I got only a glimpse but I'll never be the same again. It was a Twister but it didn't look like the ones we had seen through our Di-tube. What we had seen then were only reversed projections, Doc Maxey said later, transposed cross-sections altered to something we could partially visualize with our limited senses. But this Twister wasn't transposed and it didn't look like an inside-out octopus. It writhed and swelled and radiated a dark devouring _coldness_ that snuffed out Blazers like sparks against an ice cake. Other Twisters may have followed it--I wouldn't know. We hit the Di-tube then and at the same moment the Blazers' generator blew up with an appalling blast.... * * * * * The next instant we were sailing over a parched and blazing desert, a glaring waste of jagged lava that stretched away on every side through a shimmering haze of heat. Black basalt cliffs jutted up here and there, warped and eroded by scorching winds. Dora and I looked at each other dumbly. "We got away," Dora said. "But what sort of dimension is _this_? Where are we, Jerry?" It was a good question. Judging from the landscape the collapsing Di-tube could have shunted us straight into the ash-bin of hell. There wasn't a twinkle of water anywhere, not a wisp of cloud nor a flutter of bird in the sky. Just a vast wind-swept desolation, parching to a sandy crisp under a flaming sun. I was fumbling for an answer when Dora caught my arm. "Look, Jerry--there, over the horizon. Isn't that smoke?" I looked and it was--a thin white streamer of smoke rising across the badlands, wavering at the top like the crooking of an enigmatic finger. "We may as well investigate," I said, heeling the gyro toward it. "If it means another danger we might as well face it now as later." But it wasn't another alien menace. It was a sheep camp at the edge of the lava beds not far from San Rafael, New Mexico. The Mexican herder ran like a jackrabbit when we swooped down, never having seen a gyro before, but at Acomita--over on the Pueblo Indian reservation--we found a government agent who gave us our bearings and brought us up to date. After what we had been through, it was only a minor shock to learn that it wasn't 1982 any longer. It was 1985 and the Blazers had been gone for so long that they were practically forgotten. Doc Maxey explained later, when we showed up with a small army of telepaper reporters at his Connecticut home, that our being caught in the collapsing Di-field had somehow distorted the time values involved and had shunted us three years into the future. We took his word for it.