It caught him, then. Bent and flung him back. Staring, he saw Nuala
half out of the crystal block, rigid and writhing, twisted and
distorted by some queer force. Her red mouth drew back in agony,
screams gurgling in her throat.
And bent and twisted in her likeness, straining until their molecules
whined, were the dynamos and cones and globes.
"Magnetic ... flux ... by Grock! Grock!" she screamed. "I can't hang
on. It's got me. Grock ... good Grock...."
Travis dove to yank her free--and ran into it. He felt it in his
fingers, first. It was a maddening wrench that bent them as if they
had been boneless. He leaped sideways and the thing caught him in the
middle. On hands and knees he crawled away, crawled toward the only
spot that offered safety.
He slid into the nacre coldness, dropped onto the stone floor of the
captured tower. Sobbing, he lay there, listening to Nuala scream.
_This is the end of it. There is no way out_--
No way out. Only death from torture. Or--maybe not death. Just torture
for Nuala. He remembered the pink and menacing girdle that secured the
crypt from the _arklings_. The unseen voices, recorded somehow by the
first humanoid race, had told of tortures--_Nuala, stop screaming! God,
I can't stand it!_
Nuala, screaming. And Rudra--gloating!
Rudra!
Travis lifted his tanned face. His eyes burned savagely, staring across
the tower toward the dials and levers that controlled those forces
that only Rudra and Nuala understood. Travis moved his hands, getting
to his feet. He looked at his hands, balled them into hard fists.
He whispered, "I wanted something to come to grips with. I needed
something to put my hands on, to hit, to batter!"
Travis snarled, "Rudra!" and slammed his hands on the levers. He had
watched Nuala move them. He knew how to move the tower through the
dimensional paths Nuala had guided it.
Under his feet the tower swayed, reeled sickeningly.