As we reached the table, I felt a sinuous trunk wrap about me. With a flip I was hurled to the tabletop. It was but a step to the dish containing the universe. I snatched it up, dish and all, and handed it down to Scott. I let myself over the table edge, hung by my hands for an instant, and dropped. I raced after the others toward the workshop.
As we gained the room, the walking-stick-man made an adjustment on his machine. The purple rod faded away. The Creator, a towering cone of light, tottered for a moment and then glided swiftly for the doorway.
Instantly a sheet of purple radiance filled the opening. The Creator struck against it and was hurled back.
The radiance was swiftly arching overhead and curving beneath us, cutting through the floor, walls, and ceiling.
'He's enclosing us in a globe of that stuff,' cried Scott. 'It must be an energy screen of some sort, but I can't imagine what. Can you?'
'I don't care what it is, just so it works,' I panted, anxiously.
Through the steady purple light I could see the Creator. Repeatedly he hurled himself against the screen and each time he was hurled back.
'We're moving,' announced Scott.
The great purple globe was ascending, carrying in its interior we five universe-men, our machines, and fragments of the room in which we but recently had stood. It was cutting through the building like the flame of a torch through soft steel. We burst free of the building into the brilliant blue sunlight of that weird world.
Beneath us lay the building, a marvel of outre architecture, but with a huge circular shaft cut through it — the path of the purple globe. All about the building lay a forest of red and yellow vegetation, shaped as no vegetation of Earth is shaped, bent into hundreds of strange and alien forms.