of light, a glassite
pane in a house wall nearby. The commotion was louder, and under it
now we heard a vague humming: something electrical. It was an
indescribably weird sound, like nothing I had ever heard before.

Snap clutched at me. "In here, but where is the accursed door?"

There was a glassite pane, but we could find no door. In our hands we
held small electronic bolt-cylinders, short-range weapons.

The hum and hissing was louder. It seemed to throb within us, as
though vibration were communicating to every fiber of our bodies.

Light was streaming through the glassite pane, and we glimpsed the
interior of the room. The light now came from a strange mechanism set
in the center of the metal cubby. I caught only an instant's glimpse
of it, a round thing of coils and wires. The metal floor of the room
was cut away, exposing the gray rock of Manhattan Island. And against
the rock, in a ten-foot circle, a series of discs were contacted, with
wires leading from them to the central coils.

The whole was glowing with opalescent light. It was dazzling,
blinding. Within in it the goggled figure of Molo was moving,
adjusting the contacts. He stooped. He straightened, drew back from
the light.

Only an instant's glimpse, but we saw the girls, crouching with black
bandages on their eyes. Meka, goggled like her brother, was holding
them. A tall shape carrying a round black box darted through the light
and ran. Molo leaped for the girls; the hum had mounted to a wild
electrical scream. Molo flung his sister back out of the light.

They all vanished. There was nothing but the light, and the mounting
dynamic scream.

Beside me, Snap was pounding on the glassite panel. I joined him.
Everything was dreamlike, blurring as though unconsciousness was upon
me.

Where was Snap? Gone? Then I saw him nearby. He had found a door, but
it wouldn't yield. I saw his arm go up in a gesture to me.

He ran; I found myself running after him, but I stumbled and fell.
Then over me the scream burst into a great roar of sound. It seemed so
intense, so gigantic a sound that it must ring around the world.

And the light burst with an exploding puff. The black metal cubby
walls seemed to melt like phantoms in a dream. A titan's blowtorch,
the opalescent light shot upward, a circular ten-foot beam, eating its
way through all the city levels as though they were paper, up through
the city roof.

Molo's cubby was gone. His mechanism was eat