She cried out in pain, and Calvin leaped forward; he had a flash of the great paw coming at him with the prod aimed for his face again. It touched his forehead, he felt an intense shock, and then he was powerless to move. His mind screamed, he could feel tiny muscles try sluggishly to crawl deep under his skin, but he was paralyzed where he stood in an attitude of charging; he knew his face must be twisted in horror and rage, but he could feel nothing. Only his mind and eyesight seemed wholly clear. He saw his wife taken off, stumbling unwillingly and looking back at him over her shoulder. Watkins said, (Calvin could hear plainly, he found), "Watch it, he's falling!" Then the paralysis left him and he slumped as though all his bones had been extracted. Someone caught him under the arms, holding him up. He tried to move, but aside from rolling his eyes and lolling his tongue out, he was helpless. Summersby, behind him, said, "Are his eyes open?" "Yeah." Watkin's face appeared before him. "Poor guy looks half dead." Calvin blinked and made a try at speech, but nothing came out but a flop-tongued drooling sound. The two creatures remaining near them squatted down and observed them, making fragmentary noises to each other. Watkins started to walk after the third, which had escorted Mrs. Full across the wide room and was on the point of making her get onto a low platform on which were a number of structures of purple tubing and crimson boxes and varicolored small contrivances. One of the pair flicked its goad across his path. Villa said, "Come back, you foolish, do you think you can take that stick?" He sounded furious, probably because he was afraid of the beasts becoming enraged. Calvin made a wracking effort to say, "Let him go," for surely they couldn't stand callously by and see his wife undergo the Lord knew what tortures; but the sound he made was unintelligible. Watkins said, "Blast it, Viva, we don't know what the thing might do to her." "Come on back," said Summersby. "Do you want to get this?" He hefted the limp Full. Calvin writhed and managed to move his hands up and down. "He's gaining," said Watkins, coming back. "Those rods pack a wallop," said Adam. "What sort of power can they have in 'em? Seems to me they're away beyond our science." "They're not hitched to batteries," said Watkins. "Say, look at all this machinery. If these animals built it, they're a pretty advanced race." * * * * * Mrs. Full was seated now on a large thing like a chrome-and-rubber chair, one of those modern abominations which she and Calvin so cordially detested. He could not see her face. The twelve-foot brute was moving its fingers before her, evidently telling her to do something. Calvin heard her say plaintively, "But what _is_ it?" Summersby hoisted him up and about then feeling began to come back to him with a sharp, unpleasant tingling of the skin. He said, "Help her!" quite distinctly.