More composed, he came to his feet as they burst through the back door of the Hall and stampeded towards the door to the cell.

He even smiled slightly. If they thought him a witch....

The key was in the lock. They had no difficulty getting in. He stood in the center of the room, the slight smile still on his lips.

He raised his forearm to a horizontal position, pointed his index finger in their direction.

"Who wants to die first?" he cried above the noise they made.

The onrush into the cell stopped abruptly, those in front pushing back against those behind them. They followed his finger with fascinated eyes as he fanned it across the group of them. He stopped, his finger pointing to a fat, applecheeked grovemaster. The man shrieked, turned about and began fighting his way back into the corridor.

One man was tripped up and fell. There was a wild shriek of terror. Men shouted that he was killing the leaders by magic. To Henry it seemed only an instant before the passageway was back in its usual silence. He stepped out of his cell. He could see a mass of people about the street door surrounding the panicked men. The passage in the other direction seemed empty.

He turned that way, passed onto the rear of the stage, felt his way across it in the darkness to the steps and down into the aisle. Calmly and without haste he passed through the front doors into the next street and walked, unrecognized in the half light and excitement, out of town.

It was dark when he arrived in the upper valley.

Theta was sitting at a table. She sprang up and rushed into his arms with a glad cry.

"It worked! They let you go?"

He looked about. "You turned the power back on?"

"No. The plant and these buildings have a separate power source of their own. I wasn't going to touch it until I knew you were safe."

He drew an apple from a bin and munched it. "We'd better turn things on again before the fruit spoils. Come on...."

The button, Henry knew, turned on as well as off. Henry pressed down the button, stepped back to watch the large battery of lights flash on, but nothing happened. Had Theta somehow wrecked—ah! The red buttons all began to glow again. Then, a minute later, a 

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