Hope dawned in the blue eyes. Hope stilled the shudder rippling down her back. She cried, "Yes, yes. That's our chance, our one big weapon--the calyx!" Nuala moved her hands in that queer, flowing motion. Her eyes were wide and staring. She whispered, "It is easier to move the warping controls--this way. The distances in the dimensional flows are shorter." There was a faint dizziness as the tower reeled. Travis had an odd instant of vision, where he saw whirling clouds of elfin dust, heard the discordant music of distorted space. In mind's eye, he glimpsed the tower as it swung through a blackness striped with red traceries. There was a jar, a sudden shock-- * * * * * A wall of the tower shone with iridescent nacre. Through the pale pearl glitter, Travis saw the chamber of the calyx, the cones and globes circling endlessly and shedding their soft light, the great sculped-out hollow of the crystal. "Step quickly," whispered Nuala. "Step through...." She was a blur of movement, leaping for the nacre. Travis clutched for her hand and found it warm and soft as he hit the shimmer with her. A moment of cold, then they were inside the crystal crypt. Nuala went to the crystal, lay down within it, attached wires to grips, rested her golden head against the oddly wrought headpiece that was wired to the dynamos. Travis watched her hands lift and blur as a faint, nauseous color came seeping up through the very stones of the floor. Travis knew that some light-colors could affect people physically, but this was sickening, overpowering. Much of that color, and he would go mad. His brain reeled. His stomach writhed-- The light went away, but Nuala's hands were still invisible, as she worked the forces hidden within the captured tower. Travis knew she was hitting back at Rudra, reading his mind, searching for and finding the counter-agent, the necessary checkmate. Her eyes opened a second, looked into his. She whispered, "Watch the screen, Travis. The screen...." He could see now what she was doing. The west wall of the tower that appeared through the nacre light was a giant visiscreen. In it the tower of Rudra in his city of Kovokod stood like a blackened giant above the ruins of the leveled city. Stone buildings were tossed and flattened. Smoke eddied upward in huge billows from charred and stark stumps of buildings. A woman fled with clothes ablaze along the upended stones of what had been a broad street. From the black and sullen sky red and fiery balls rolled and thundered, broke and splashed, devouring, on the city. The balls toppled walls, exploding; ate up wooden buildings with flaming tongues, caught and engulfed human beings, burning. Sickened, Travis turned away-- It caught him, then. Bent and flung him back. Staring, he saw Nuala half out of the crystal block, rigid and writhing, twisted and distorted by some queer force. Her red mouth drew back in agony, screams gurgling in her throat.