The gnarled hands were amazingly steady and sure in their movements. In a few minutes Blade was sitting festooned with electrodes, and the multicolored wires leading from them like some abandoned building overgrown with vines and fantastic fungi. He found that his breathing had increased and that his stomach felt tight and cold. He forced himself to breathe more slowly and flexed as many of his muscles as he could to relieve the tension. Save the adrenaline for Dimension X, where you may really need it, you idiot! Then he turned his head to where Lord Leighton stood at the master panel and nodded. The gnarled right hand lifted in salutation, then came down, pulling the red master switch with it.

This time it happened with explosive suddenness. Lord Leighton whipped out of sight between one heartbeat and the next. The computer consoles charged in on him from all sides with a single gigantic lurch. For a second he felt like a man standing at a four-way rail crossing and watching runaway locomotives thunder toward him down all four tracks.

Then the hurtling gray bulks struck, and he dissolved into a fine mist that still retained sensation as the impact of the computers hurled it upward into the black sky. The mist coiled and dissipated as it rose but never lost sensation. He felt a deadly cold seep down from the sky and attack each separate microscopic particle that he had become, felt all sensations heightened by this new and terrible dispersal, which was spreading him across cosmic distances.

He rose farther, farther; the cold continued to envelop and chill him, and soon; he began to lose sensation in some of the more remote particles, as though they had fallen into ice water and been engulfed altogether in its numbing chill. His brain was it functioning more slowly now that it was dispersed along with the rest of him? — tried to send out pulses to those remote particles. But they were dispersed and chilled beyond his ability to reach them. And he continued to spread across space with more and more of his particles being enveloped by the chill..