The women didn't scream this time. It all happened too quickly. There wasn't even time for Randall to complete the step he had started.
Thunder with a thousand toneless voices echoed through his mind. Lightning with the hues of alien spectra shot blindingly into his eyes. He felt as though he had suddenly grasped the two poles of an electric circuit. His muscles contracted spasmodically and numbness clutched with deadly anesthesia at his groping mind.
When the stupor finally began to retreat from Randall's bewildered consciousness, the first sounds he identified were the delayed screams of the four school ma'ms and the bride.
He cautiously opened his smarting eyes and looked around. What he saw was far from reassuring, for it was vividly apparent that they were no longer in the Diamvator. In fact, there was no sign whatever to be seen of the Tube Car!
Randall blinked, looked again. He and his eleven companions were suspended like fallen acrobats in a huge net constructed of closely-woven metallic strands.
A dozen feet above his head was a coruscating sheet of stratified radiance that arched across like a miniature sky, forming a hemispherical dome of light over the great net.
Randall cleared his throat noisily. He had stalked desperate criminals into their hiding places.
He had daringly matched cunning with determined dope rings. He had stood face-to-face with armed murderers, but never as now had he felt so completely at a loss. Never had he been so neatly and easily trapped.
But what was behind it all? And how had it been done? What earthly—or other—agency could contrive to tear twelve people from the interior of a locked metal car traveling in excess of two thousand miles an hour?
Randall shrugged and turned to examine his eleven charges.