The blow hit square and true. But to Dane, it was as if he'd struck the bar against a daggad column. Pain shot up his arms, clear to the shoulders. The telonium strip tore from his hands and sailed through the air nearly fifty feet. Before the bar even hit the ground, a bolt of energy struck Dane. Helpless, hopeless, sobbing with fury at his own inadequacy, he found himself slammed back bodily against the metal rim that girded the shaft's base. His hands clamped to the alloy. It was a moment completely incredible; a moment beyond all possibility of belief. For as Dane's hands touched the rim, sparks leaped from flesh to metal. His whole body convulsed. Blue flame crackled in a tight sheath round him. Power pulsed through every bone and muscle in a surging tide. Then sound came--a high, thin skirl, louder and louder, till Dane thought his eardrums must surely burst. But the sound still welled and swelled and echoed; and now numbly, it dawned on Dane that something was happening to the Kalquoi. Even blurred as his eyes were, and in spite of the spasms of his body, he could see that, one and all, the aliens had reverted to crystal form. No light gleamed in them. They moved jerkily, as if having trouble even rising from the ground. The sound in Dane's ears reached a new high note--a note so clear and pure it ceased to be sound at all, to human ears. In its place came silence--a taut, thin-strung, nerve-fraying silence that somehow was almost more than flesh and blood could bear. Now, while Dane watched in the eerie silence, a Kalquoi crystal suddenly cracked wide open in mid-air. Its shards cracked, too; and its shards' shards. It was dust before it hit the ground. On all sides, it was the same. Everywhere in the amphitheatre the aliens were shattering to atoms. In seconds, not one of them remained. Convulsively, Dane twisted; managed to throw one anguished glance upward to the silver needle that was the Sandoz Shaft. But so fast was the shaft vibrating that it now looked less like a needle than a flash of silver light. Dane sagged back. Dully, he wondered how long it would take a man to die this way. Certainly there must be a limit to the amount of such maltreatment the human form could stand. Yet he knew strength was not in him to break loose, tear away. Was this, then, his destiny? Must he die here, a living conduit for the power now activating the Sandoz Shaft? What a goal for a compulsion! What an end to a dream! He couldn't even see the spot where Nelva Guthrie lay.... Time blurred, after that. There were moments when he was conscious; more when he was not. When he first heard the drone of the carrier's landing beam, he thought he was delirious. Then he opened his eyes, and the craft hung there before him, less than fifty feet away. While he watched, it ramped down. The hatch opened. It was then he _knew_ he was delirious, for sure.