"I used some very sensitive instruments to measure the banked up lava flow and the intensity of the central fires with a minimal margin of error," I said. "I knew almost precisely to the hour when the eruption would occur. It's a fairly severe eruption, but not a major one." "You knew--" "It's been building up for days. It should be over in an hour." She started to reply, then swayed toward me in blind panic. It wasn't a stampede exactly. The lizards didn't emerge from the shadows in a single onrushing column, but in threes and fours. Maddened with terror they darted to and fro between the cowering, screaming women and children, their distended eyes and metallic body sheen mirroring the fiery sky glow. They lunged and parried, striking out with their claws as they circled about as any savage animal will when it feels itself to be hopelessly trapped. There was a blind purposelessness in their movements, a frantic swaying and thumping that churned up the ground beneath them and sent clumps of uprooted vegetation spinning in all directions. The sky glow became more fiery, spilling over in crimson splotches, turning the village thatch poles into redly glowing fingers pointing mountainward as if in remorseless accusation. The rumblings grew louder, the quakes more frequent. A woman ran into the open with a child in her arms. She set the child down with a look of calm, tender solicitude on her face, picked up a rock and hurled it at a lizard. Other women joined her, clustering about her as if to draw strength from that straight unbending figure. The lizards veered away from her, and she stood with the infant in her arms again, a picture of quiet heroism. Kallatah's eyes were shining. She seemed to have lost her fear, and suddenly she too was joining in the attack on the lizards. She picked up a stone and hurled it, and her laughter rang out defiantly above the screams of the natives. More lizards appeared, creating such panic that a few of the women ran shrieking back into their huts again. The sky had become a solid sheet of flame, and every hut in the village was writhing in fiery radiance. There was a continuous loud scrambling and flapping noise as the lizards tried in vain to take flight. Something had crippled and imprisoned them in the flame-streaked region between the huts and they were powerless to escape from it. I didn't know exactly what was going to happen. I wasn't sure just how the first destructive assault would be made on the lizards, whether the mental tensions would increase first, or the physical ones shatter the beasts with a sudden, explosive violence. With poltergeists you can never be sure. The powerful waves of their thoughts and emotions sweep through their minds in erratic currents, and when a post-hypnotic command enters the picture--