Janu the Martian, away on the other side of the pit, made a shrill wailing cry. Loris and Pendleton flinched away like dogs afraid of the whip, looking upward.
MacVickers glimpsed a dark tentacled shape on the catwalk above, just before the shattering electricity coursed through him. He screamed, once. And then Birek moved.
He struck Loris and Pendleton and the blue-sheathed Earthman out of the way like children. His left leg took MacVickers behind the knees in the same instant that his right hand pushed MacVickers' face.
MacVickers fell heavily on his back, screaming at the contact of the metal floor. Then Birek sprawled over him, shielding his body with the bulk of his own.
The awful shocking pain was lessened. Lying there, looking up into Birek's pale eyes, MacVickers made his twitching lips say, "Why?"
Birek smiled. "The current doesn't hurt much any more. And I want you for myself—to break."
MacVickers drew a deep, shuddering breath and smiled back, the lines deep in his lean cheeks.
He had no clear memories of that shift. Heat and motion and strangling air, and Janu coughing with a terrible, steady rhythm, his own hands trying to guide the oil can. Toward the end of the time he fainted, and it was Birek who carried him up the ladder.
He had no way of knowing how long after that he came to. There was no time in that little hell. The first thing he noticed, with the hair-trigger senses of a man trained to ships, that the motion of the room was different.