last leaned toward him and
said in his ear, "Calvin, can you tell what--I mean whether it's male or
female?"

He studied it carefully. He couldn't even make a guess. He shook his
head.

Then it reached forward its stick and thrust it directly at Calvin's
face. He backed off, startled and somewhat frightened. At once the thing
touched Mrs. Full with the ivory ball, as if to separate her from the
knot of men.

She cried out in pain, and Calvin leaped forward; he had a flash of the
great paw coming at him with the prod aimed for his face again. It
touched his forehead, he felt an intense shock, and then he was
powerless to move.

His mind screamed, he could feel tiny muscles try sluggishly to crawl
deep under his skin, but he was paralyzed where he stood in an attitude
of charging; he knew his face must be twisted in horror and rage, but he
could feel nothing. Only his mind and eyesight seemed wholly clear.

He saw his wife taken off, stumbling unwillingly and looking back at him
over her shoulder. Watkins said, (Calvin could hear plainly, he found),
"Watch it, he's falling!" Then the paralysis left him and he slumped as
though all his bones had been extracted. Someone caught him under the
arms, holding him up. He tried to move, but aside from rolling his eyes
and lolling his tongue out, he was helpless.

Summersby, behind him, said, "Are his eyes open?"

"Yeah." Watkin's face appeared before him. "Poor guy looks half dead."

Calvin blinked and made a try at speech, but nothing came out but a
flop-tongued drooling sound.

The two creatures remaining near them squatted down and observed them,
making fragmentary noises to each other. Watkins started to walk after
the third, which had escorted Mrs. Full across the wide room and was on
the point of making her get onto a low platform on which were a number
of structures of purple tubing and crimson boxes and varicolored small
contrivances. One of the pair flicked its goad across his path.

Villa said, "Come back, you foolish, do you think you can take that
stick?" He sounded furious, probably because he was afraid of the beasts
becoming enraged.

Calvin made a wracking effort to say, "Let him go," for surely they
couldn't stand callously by and see his wife undergo the Lord knew what
tortures; but the sound he made was unintelligible.

Watkins said, "Blast it, Viva, we don't know what the thing might do to
her."

"Come on back," said Summersby. "Do you want to