Something snapped.

A violet spark stung and convulsed his arm and the thing was still.

When he attempted next day to replace these Tannhauser cylinders by another pair, he found the apparatus broken....
He struck out a path oblique to the room and paced to and fro, struggling with intolerable vast impressions.

The things he had derived from the cylinders and the things he had seen, conflicted, confused him.

It seemed to him the most amazing thing of all that in his thirty years of life he had never tried to shape a picture of these coming times.