The arm began contracting. Powell was helpless against the terrific
power of the slender, diamond-hard lance of crystal. He felt himself
irresistibly drawn toward the silver-faceted wall of the Devil
Crystal.
His senses reeled in the babel of alien sounds--the crashing,
glass-like music of the crystalline monsters and the snarling,
squealing, paean of jubilant triumph from the thousands of rat-men
now lining the rim of the pit above.
* * * * *
Then suddenly the pit, the Devil Crystals, and everything else in
the nightmare world of Arret was blotted out in a vast swirling
cloud of pulsing roseate flame that seemed to sweep him bodily up
into the air and whirl him dizzily around.
His dazed brain staggered from the shock of the cataclysmic force
that was disintegrating an entire world around him, but through the
utter chaos one thought rang clear and exultant in his consciousness.
Benjamin Marlowe had finally broadcast the recall wave!
For what seemed endless eons of time Powell hurried through a
limitless universe of swirling, tinted fires, while vibrations of a
mighty force tingled with poignant ecstasy in every atom of his
body.
Then the eddying clouds of flame began to coalesce and solidify with
startling suddenness. A moment later, like the abrupt lighting of a
room when an electric switch is snapped, the mists vanished and
Powell felt firm footing again under his feet. Around him were the
familiar objects of Benjamin Marlowe's laboratory.
He was standing upon the floor-plate in the center of the area
bounded by the banked green tubes, and beside him stood Joan,
sobbing with relief at their last-minute rescue from the Devil
Crystals of Arret. And over by the control panel of the recall
mechanism was the slight figure of old Benjamin Marlowe, with a
great joy now shining in his faded eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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