I swept that wall-segment with frantic haste, lunged around and started another way. Across the room I saw Snap doing the same. A turmoil of electrical sound was reverberating around us, deafening, and the glare was blinding. A belt-shaft shot from the wreckage under my rod. It seared my left arm. My sleeve burned off; the arm hung limp and tingling at my side. I stopped to rub it; in a moment strength came back to its muscles.
Snap was raging like a great heavy bird gone amok. Through the green fumes of electrical gases which were filling the room I saw him lunging at the circular tables, overturning them. They cracked like thin polished stone as they struck the metal floor.
I finished with the wall. There was a twenty-foot square piece of metal apparatus, ramified and intricate; I heaved it over upon its side. A thousand little mirrors and prisms, dislodged from it, came out in a splintering deluge.
I was aware of Snap fighting with a brown-shelled figure. Then he was free of it. I saw it mashed and broken at his feet as I dove past, swimming in the smoke to lunge the length of a great fluorescent tube which was still dimly glowing. My pole pried it over; it crashed with a brief puff of light and the rush of an explosion as air went into its vacuum.
I found Snap panting beside me, clinging to me in mid-air. The glare was dying around us; the din was lessening. We were choking in the chemical fumes of the released, half-burned gases. Turgid darkness was coming to the wrecked room, with little hissing flares spitting through it.
"Enough, Gregg! Listen! Up overhead...."
A great siren from up there was screaming into the night.
Snap panted, "Got to get out of here. Can't breathe."
Together we lunged for the tunnel by which we had entered. I stood a moment, gazing back upon the strewn and scattered room.
The delicate nerve-center of Wandl. Heavy green-black gas fumes swirled in it; darkness and silence closed down.