Discerning that their hideout has been discovered and may be subject to a police raid, the men move their operation to another safehouse, picking up a stray kitten that Hoyt begins to train telepathically.

Lefty tries to pull the rod loose and activates a mechanism that takes the platform and both men into a laboratory on an alternate Earth.

He returns to the weird vehicle in the laboratory and activates it just as one of the world's natives shoots him in the left shoulder with a heat ray.

The vehicle then takes Blake to a world in which Manhattan is a bleak landscape dotted with stone towers and patrolled by carnivorous hag-like creatures accompanied by giant robot centipedes.

The native takes him to Sarge, a benign dictator whose group has colonized Central Park and hopes to restore some measure of civilization on Manhattan after they have cleared out the "hiders", the criminal element that preys upon them.

Blake takes the injured man to the drug store to hole up for the night and wait for the rest of Sarge's men to return.

They return to Blake's original timeline to find Hoyt and Pranj locked in a psychic duel, a true battle of wills.