Did he hear a sound through his oxygen helmet—a sound loud enough for the tenuous Ionian atmosphere to transmit? Or was it only the roaring of the unsteady pulses in his ears? He tried to look ahead, but his vision was very dim, now, and the light of Jupiter and his moons was so confusing. The shadows of the rocks and the ruined buildings were so very black.
But suddenly Harwich squinted. Something was moving toward him, skimming low over the ground, but not touching it. Something that glinted wickedly, and showed long, shadowy arms. It was no hallucination. Evan Harwich was sure of that! Fear came out of that numb fog into which his brain was settling. It gave him a last, feeble spurt of strength. He knew that here he must be facing a tiny part of Io's colossal riddle.
He tried to crawl away from nameless danger, dragging Paul Arnold with him. He got behind a mass of million-year-old masonry, tufted with prickly plants.
But the thing that pursued him, easily overcame his weak, instinctive effort to find concealment. Cold metal claws closed on him. He felt himself lifted upward, into the night. His mind toppled away into black nothingness.
Somehow, it wasn't the end of life. Harwich began to regain his senses, slowly. First he heard a distant, muffled clanging. For a long time before he paid any real attention to the fact, he was aware that strange warm rays were pouring down upon his body. They seemed to heal and soothe his aching muscles.
He opened his eyes at last. Startled, he sat up. Around him was the warm glitter of glass and metal. His space suit was gone. He was in a crystalline cage, filled with warm, humid air. Odd gadgets, like ray lamps used in therapy, were fitted to the ceiling. Strange, tropical vegetation grew in the cage, and water tinkled somewhere.
There was a kind of soothing quiet over the place, except for that distant clanging. There was a smoothness to everything; a mood of mechanical refinement and perfection. It was almost hypnotic, somehow. It dazed and quieted the senses.
Paul Arnold, clad in the slacks and shirt he'd worn under his space armor, was lying on the floor beside Harwich. He was still unconscious, but he was breathing evenly. His color was much better than before. The rays from the roof above were slowly healing his weakened body.
Evan Harwich shook the boy gently. "Wake up, Paul!" he urged. "This must be it! The center of Power! The place we wanted to find! Some kind of machine brought us!"