His shoulder crashed against the heavy, buttressed base. His hands closed on a corroded telonium bar. Tearing it from the litter, he surged up, heedless to the light-beams that stung at his back and sides.
The bar had weight to it. Dane swung it with all his might, straight at the seemingly empty space between socket and needle-tip.
If only he could upset the delicate balance of forces that held the shaft upright, and bring it crashing down, almost anything might happen!
The blow hit square and true. But to Dane, it was as if he'd struck the bar against a daggad column. Pain shot up his arms, clear to the shoulders. The telonium strip tore from his hands and sailed through the air nearly fifty feet.
Before the bar even hit the ground, a bolt of energy struck Dane. Helpless, hopeless, sobbing with fury at his own inadequacy, he found himself slammed back bodily against the metal rim that girded the shaft's base. His hands clamped to the alloy.
It was a moment completely incredible; a moment beyond all possibility of belief. For as Dane's hands touched the rim, sparks leaped from flesh to metal. His whole body convulsed. Blue flame crackled in a tight sheath round him. Power pulsed through every bone and muscle in a surging tide.
Then sound came—a high, thin skirl, louder and louder, till Dane thought his eardrums must surely burst.
But the sound still welled and swelled and echoed; and now numbly, it dawned on Dane that something was happening to the Kalquoi. Even blurred as his eyes were, and in spite of the spasms of his body, he could see that, one and all, the aliens had reverted to crystal form. No light gleamed in them. They moved jerkily, as if having trouble even rising from the ground.
The sound in Dane's ears reached a new high note—a note so clear and pure it ceased to be sound at all, to human ears. In its place came silence—a taut, thin-strung, nerve-fraying silence that somehow was almost more than flesh and blood could bear.
Now, while Dane watched in the eerie silence, a Kalquoi crystal suddenly cracked wide open in mid-air.