Four tridents shot out, and in a monstrously obscure fashion reached _past_ clothing, skin, and ribs; seizing upon and holding firmly, but painlessly and gently, the vital nervous centers of the human bodies. Seaton tried to leap to the attack, but even his quickness was of no avail--even before he moved, a wave of intolerable agony surged throughout his being, ceasing only and completely when he relaxed, relinquishing his pugnacious attempt. Shiro, leaping from the galley with cleaver upraised, was similarly impaled and similarly subdued. Then a hoisting platform appeared, and Seaton and Margaret were forced to board it. They had no choice; the first tensing of the muscles to resist the will of the hyperman was quelled instantly by a blast of such intolerable torture that no human body could possibly defy it for even the slightest perceptible instant of time. "Take it easy, Dot--Mart," Seaton spoke rapidly as the hoist started upward. "Do whatever they say--no use taking much of that stuff--until Peg and I get back. We'll get back, too, believe me! They'll _have_ to take these meat hooks out of us sometime, and when they do they'll think a cyclone has broken loose." XI. Raging but impotent, Seaton stood motionless beside his friend's wife upon the slowly rising lift; while Crane, Dorothy, and Shiro remained in the control room of the _Skylark_. All were helpless, incapable alike of making a single movement not authorized by their grotesque captors. Feeble the hypermen were, as has been said; but at the first tensing of a human muscle in revolt there shot from the insulated teeth of the grappling hypertrident such a terrific surge of unbearably poignant torture that any thought of resistance was out of the question. Even Seaton--fighter by instinct though he was, and reckless as he was and desperate at the thought of being separated from his beloved Dorothy--had been able to endure only three such shocks. The unimaginable anguish of the third rebuke, a particularly vicious and long-continued wrenching and wringing of the most delicate nerve centers of his being, had left him limp and quivering. He was still furious, still bitterly humiliated. His spirit was willing, but he was physically unable to drive his fiendishly tortured body to further acts of rebellion. Thus it was that the improvised elevator of the hypermen carried two docile captives as it went _past_--not _through_--the spherical arenak shell of _Skylark Two_ and up the mighty well which the vessel had driven in its downward plunge. The walls of that pit were glassily smooth; or, more accurately, were like slag: as though the peculiarly unsubstantial rock of the hyperplanet had been actually melted by the force of the cruiser's descent, easy and gradual as the fall had seemed to the senses of the Terrestrials.