The awful arm came in like a hairy python, groping blindly with the rod.
Summersby, standing near the opening, was the first to be touched. It tapped him lightly, and he walked out of the room, really very bravely, she thought. The rod discovered Adam. The boy backed up, too frightened to put on a show of boldness. The rod slapped him impatiently, and he yelled and darted forward into the other room. He and Summersby stood together, staring up at something that could not be seen from inside the prison box.
"It's electrical," said Calvin. "Like a bull prod."
"Yes, dear," she said automatically.
"We may as well go out. I don't want you shocked."
"All right, Calvin." She took his arm. Watkins had been caught and herded out. As they stepped forward after him, she glanced sideways at her husband. She would have liked to tell him she loved him, but it would have been too melodramatic. She pressed his arm tightly, affectionately. They walked out into the great hall.
Villa's cursory description had not prepared Calvin Full for the reality of the huge beings.
There were three of them. They stood absolutely motionless, grotesquely humanoid figures with smallish, sunken eyes fixed rigidly on the people some yards away. Then, as Calvin watched, two of them thrust out their hands holding the ball-tipped rods. The gestures were almost too swift to follow.
He stared at the central figure, and it gazed back with its withdrawn, pupilless, rust-red eyes. Its head was, as Villa had told them, the shape of a watermelon, with the eyes wide-set on either side of a gently agitating orifice that was probably a nostril. The mouth, very human in shape, with full lips the color of the eyeballs, was quite low in the face. There was a rough growth of gray-black hair on the crown of the big head and a fuzz of it, less dark, on the face itself. There seemed to be no ears.