The boy cried out and withdrew his hands and legs from the Net, staring at her with a round face full of betrayal… but a face that looked once more like that of an alert child rather than a bemused, petrified adult. Dura grabbed his hand. “Farr, you have to Wave as you’ve never Waved before. Hold my hand; we’ll stay together…”

With a thrust of her legs she pushed away. For the first moments she seemed to be dragging Farr behind her; but soon his body was Waving in synchronization with hers, wriggling against the cloying thickness of the Magfield, and the two of them hurried away from the doomed Net.

As she Waved, gasping, Dura looked back. The spin instability, recoiling, wafted through the Air like a deadly, blue-white wand. It scythed toward the Net with its cargo of wriggling humans. It was like some wonderful toy, Dura thought; it glowed intensely brightly, and the heat-noise it emitted was a roar, almost drowning out thought itself. The bleating of trapped Air-pigs was cold-thin, and Dura thought briefly of the old animal with whom she had shared that brief, odd moment of half-communication; she wondered how much that poor creature understood of what was to happen.

Maybe half the Human Beings had heeded Adda’s advice to get away. The rest, apparently paralyzed by fear and awe, still clung to the Net. The pregnant Dia was lumbering away into the Air with Mur; the woman Philas still picked frantically, uselessly, at the Net, despite the pleas of her husband Esk to come away. It was as if, Dura thought, Philas imagined that the work was a magic spell which would drive the instability away.

Dura knew that rotation instabilities lost energy rapidly. Soon, very soon, this fantastic demon would wither to nothing, leaving the Air calm and empty once more. And, glowing, roaring, stinking of sour photons, the instability was indeed visibly shrinking as it bore down on the Net.