The whining continued to rise. It was almost a thin scream now.
Still Haral waited, wordless.
Xaymar twisted dials again. The warrior saw that her knuckles showed white through the skin. Her voice took on new intensity, new vibrance:
"You dream of power, blue man—but never can you have imagined power such as this!" She laughed, a little wildly. "I cannot pretend to explain these things so you can understand them. But a thousand years ago I learned how to create what I choose to call an ionic vacuum—an electrolytic vortex that sucks in electrons from the atmosphere's neutral atoms. The very process sets up a storm condition. Wind, rain, turbulence—they all come with it."
Like an echo to her words, a shadow fell across the inverted crystal bowl in which they stood.
Incredulously, Haral shot a fast glance skyward. An icy knot took form deep in his midriff.
Where mere seconds before he had gazed up into the bright, clear yellow of the Ulnese day, now clouds were swirling! Before his very eyes, they grew and darkened.
Through his haze of shock, Xaymar's words came dimly:
"A storm is a dynamo, blue one—a dynamo greater than it lies within man's power even to conceive! It generates the lightning. Mighty bolts crash from it down to earth—spent, wasted. But these projectors,"—she gestured to the massed banks that lined the tracks overhead—"these projectors can direct its fury! They focus its shafts, throw out magnetic targets for it...."