My sleeve burned off; the arm hung limp
and tingling at my side. I stopped to rub it; in a moment strength
came back to its muscles.

Snap was raging like a great heavy bird gone amok. Through the green
fumes of electrical gases which were filling the room I saw him
lunging at the circular tables, overturning them. They cracked like
thin polished stone as they struck the metal floor.

I finished with the wall. There was a twenty-foot square piece of
metal apparatus, ramified and intricate; I heaved it over upon its
side. A thousand little mirrors and prisms, dislodged from it, came
out in a splintering deluge.

I was aware of Snap fighting with a brown-shelled figure. Then he was
free of it. I saw it mashed and broken at his feet as I dove past,
swimming in the smoke to lunge the length of a great fluorescent tube
which was still dimly glowing. My pole pried it over; it crashed with
a brief puff of light and the rush of an explosion as air went into
its vacuum.

I found Snap panting beside me, clinging to me in mid-air. The glare
was dying around us; the din was lessening. We were choking in the
chemical fumes of the released, half-burned gases. Turgid darkness was
coming to the wrecked room, with little hissing flares spitting
through it.

"Enough, Gregg! Listen! Up overhead...."

A great siren from up there was screaming into the night.

Snap panted, "Got to get out of here. Can't breathe."

Together we lunged for the tunnel by which we had entered. I stood a
moment, gazing back upon the strewn and scattered room.

The delicate nerve-center of Wandl. Heavy green-black gas fumes
swirled in it; darkness and silence closed down.

16

Over us was turmoil, that screaming siren. Then suddenly it was
checked and we heard the thump and swish of what on Earth would have
been called running footsteps and shouts.

Snap shoved me. "Don't stay there, you fool!"

We lunged up the passage. Figures barred it but they scattered; a bolt
hissed at us, but missed. At the kiosk a group of workers and several
peering little brains leaped away in terror to let us pass.

We gained the open air. With the small gravity rays darting down with
repulsion upon the rocks we mounted like rockets out of the cauldron.
The upper plateau lay silent in the starlight, but the cauldron behind
us was ringing with alarm, and again the danger siren was blaring.

I changed my way of direction, swung it to the plateau rocks ahead.
Th