I took a step back, as the entire roomful of men jumped up and turned to face me. My mind leaped about, like a fish flung alive onto a skillet, trying to make some sensible decision. Should I chance flinging myself over that red hot river outside, or rush back to the deadend of the cellar? Neither course seemed very profitable, somehow.
But my time was running out. After the first startled pause at seeing me there, the group came at me in a rapid scuttle, hands outstretched to take me.
So none of them ever saw what I saw, facing into the room. The sight they missed was one which sent me diving to my left, to fall prone on the corridor floor, hugging the raw stone there and clamping my eyes shut.
I heard that terrible throbbing buzz in that bar room, and then my skin prickled and stung as an eight-foot segment of the wall above me vanished into a cloud of white sparks.
When I at last lifted myself carefully for a look, the sugarfoot was gone. Gone with the collapser I'd seen it snatch up from that table when Jim's guard was down.
And the men were gone, too. Gone with most of the wall, half the bar, and a large quantity of chairs and tables.
A collapser is nothing to fool with.
The sugarfoot must have flicked it on and sent the blue-white beam in a sweeping curve that turned everything it touched into hot protons and electrical energy. He'd turned it off, however, as soon as the last man vanished from his ken.
I realized with a sick feeling of shock that a second's more energy would have dissolved the back wall, and I would have been buried beneath a flood of molten iron.