"Yes. No, wait!" I thought I heard distant sounds.
"Voices, Snap. Listen."
More than voices. A thud: footsteps running. A commotion, back in this warren, within a hundred feet of us.
"This way," I murmured.
We plunged into a black gash. There was a glow of light, a glassite pane in a house wall nearby. The commotion was louder, and under it now we heard a vague humming: something electrical. It was an indescribably weird sound, like nothing I had ever heard before.
Snap clutched at me. "In here, but where is the accursed door?"
There was a glassite pane, but we could find no door. In our hands we held small electronic bolt-cylinders, short-range weapons.
The hum and hissing was louder. It seemed to throb within us, as though vibration were communicating to every fiber of our bodies.
Light was streaming through the glassite pane, and we glimpsed the interior of the room. The light now came from a strange mechanism set in the center of the metal cubby. I caught only an instant's glimpse of it, a round thing of coils and wires. The metal floor of the room was cut away, exposing the gray rock of Manhattan Island. And against the rock, in a ten-foot circle, a series of discs were contacted, with wires leading from them to the central coils.
The whole was glowing with opalescent light. It was dazzling, blinding. Within in it the goggled figure of Molo was moving, adjusting the contacts. He stooped. He straightened, drew back from the light.