"Let's dance," Julian said suddenly with an emotion he would not
analyze. He rose and caught her roughly up to him. He saw her eyes go
expressionless with surprise, she was stunned a little. And before she
could recover, the irresistible power of Julian's arms had borne her
to the greater anonymity of the dance floor in seconds. One moment
the lyric quality of the atmosphere was part of them, and then the
illusion was shattered as the frost-trellised bower vanished almost
simultaneously with their leaving it. Lurid pencils of unleashed power
impinged on the crysto-plast table charring it, while the fragile walls
disappeared under the barrage. Julian saw a burly Mutant searching for
him, atom-blast in hand, while beside him another Dynast, his face
stamped with the excesses of Vanadol slipped into the pandemonium the
dance-floor had become.
With cold ruthlessness Julian aimed his electro-beam and saw the upper
part of the Mutant's torso disappear. He saw the other one near the
conveyor and the "electro" flashed again. The beam went through the
creature and struck the great conveyor releasing the imprisoned waters.
An icy geyser of liquid shot upward, and pandemonium broke loose.
All the lights went out and madness stalked the swirling humanity
that desperately sought to escape. He was in a maelstrom of fighting,
shrieking beings and a chaos of noise as tables and chairs crashed.
"Let me lead ... my eyes are conditioned to darkness!" Julian felt a
tiny hand grasp his arm.
"So are mine ... but who...." He could see dimly a tiny, slender
figure, scarcely five feet in height, completely masked. Then he
remembered the slurred accents of the artist who had achieved his
disguise. The Ganymedean already was scurrying toward the same
direction in which Julian wanted to go, to the right of where the
conveyor had been. Icy water already swirled around his ankles, and the
babel of sounds had risen to a crescendo of unleashed fear, when Julian
reached the plastic wall. The Ganymedean was ahead of him, and Julian
saw him press a spot in the smooth barrier. A draft of icy air struck
his face as an aperture appeared. He dived in.
* * * * *
They must have traveled miles before Julian's Ganymedean guide began
to falter, then stopped. The being had silently ignored every question
thus far, and twice had asked for silence. Now he turned on a tiny
pencil beam and surveyed their surroundings. It was a cavern, musty and
icy in temperature; great festoons of dust held together by age-old
cobwebs hung from the curved ceiling.
The Ganymedean went directly to a section of the rocky wall on the
left, and searched the crumbling surface minutely with the pencil-beam
until he found what he sought; he made an odd twisting motion with
fingers pressed to the wall, and a circular section slid inward; beyond
was another tunnel ending in a seemingly blank wall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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