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You instruct CAIN to turn on the Variac Drive to shift you into null-space and to re-engage the Drive as soon as you have finished inputting the navigational co-ordinates for the Timehole on Dyskra, 1985 AD. Your scalp tingles slightly as the Time Machine moves out of phase, and everything around you seems grey and insubstantial. You know that should you turn on the outside camera the screen would remain blank, not even blackness exists in null-space. You cast your thoughts into the void and, using your Psychic Awareness, locate the Timehole on Dyskra. When you have translated this location into co- ordinates for CAIN, the Variac Drive engages once more. The process of re-emerging in real time is immediate, but seems to take about an hour for you. You may spend this time in the Autodoc, if you wish and gain up to 12 Endurance points.

The outside camera scans the terrain. It appears as a featureless red expanse of desert apparently devoid of life, but with the occasional unusually-shaped outcropping of rock against which dunes of reddish sand are piled. CAIN chimes in with a brief report on the world of Dyskra. The dominant life forms are the Repnids, intelligent beings, a strange fusion of lizard-like skin, tongue and body with a wolf-spider's legs, compound eyes and poisonous fangs, weighing about half a ton each. They burrow through the soft red rock, inhabiting cities and tunnels' underground, heated by the winds of Dyskra, a warm world with few seas. CAIN warns that the predatory Repnids are uncivilised in this era and that he believes there is a high density of life forms nearby. You estimate that it will take five minutes to check the nearby rock outcroppings with your holo-detector to see if any of them are Speke's disguised Time Machine. Do you: