The _arklings_ cried out just as the pink light swept up all around Travis. The menace was unbearable as he fell back and into the pale barrier. It bathed him and whispered to him and threatened him with queer and maddening ways to die. It caught him in its tenuous folds and held him there, cradled, as the voices told him of a water-death that took eleven years, each year more painful than the last; they gloated over a spit and a fire of red coals that cooked a man over a space of months; they whimpered, themselves scarcely daring to think of the barbaric tortures of Rudra the eternal.... A cool something touched his forehead. Travis tried to focus his eyes through the subtle distortions of the pink mists. He saw the twin blue pools at first, and then the yellow shower of hair graced with the triangular headgear blazing with jewels. The blue pool were her eyes, and they were wide and open, and filled with a wisdom that made Travis shudder deep in his guts. And yet, there was a _fear_ in those blue eyes, too. She wore a transparent film with a slender golden thong looped at her middle. She murmured, "You are Clark Travis, an Earth-thing. You came to kidnap me. Yes. And the _arklings_ have harmed you." The woman turned and stared toward the tunnel. A white hand fumbled at her girdle, drew out a pencil-thin rod of metal. She went away from Travis and stepped into the tunnel. Travis tried to watch her, but the pain of his wounds, and the ringing in his temples bothered his eyes. There was a terrific green flare that tinted the pale pink light-- And silence. Travis knew the _arklings_ were just so much powder drifting from tunnel ceiling and wall. The woman came back, seeming to float through the light. She brooded at him with her wise eyes. Travis could read the fear in them more distinctly, now. * * * * * She put out a hand and closed her warm fingers on his. She led him through the beams of pink light and into white brilliance, into a room that he had beheld briefly through the pink mists from the tunnel. The cone-towers were there, grouped by threes around the room. And the globes that rotated lazily overhead in orbits were fiery with golden luminescence. They warmed Travis as they floated. In the middle of the room lay a huge crystal, scooped hollow by some long-dead artisan. It had indentations and mounds in it. Travis realized it was carved with exact care to fit a reclining body. From the walls of the crystal calyx stemmed thin golden wires, reaching across to the cones. And against the wall, humming and throbbing, were the dynamos and engines that fed the cones. "I am Nuala," the girl said in her silvery voice. "I am of the Nekkalad, the first humanoid race in our universe. I have been encased in the calyx for eons. Unrememberable eons. I have seen the rise and fall of your planet, and the fall of others. I have seen--" She broke off, shuddering.