They slipped from the doorway and nearly fell, avoiding a mass of jelly the size of a two-story house which flopped against the entrance. They edged by its pulsing, transparent sides. The lamp light pierced into it a yard, and once a skull swirled toward the surface and then sank again.
Suddenly it sucked away from the entrance and shivered ponderously toward them. Something was happening at the front. Figures, three or four of them, were detaching themselves from the mother mass and preceding it.
They turned and ran along the road, plunging suddenly into an extended darkened section. A moment later there was a glow in front of them and suddenly Urson yelled, “Watch it!”
Abruptly the road sheered off in front of them; they halted, and then approached the edge slowly. The surface of the road tore away and the girders descended, webbing toward the ruined stump of a building from which the orange-white glow rose. The glow came from the heart of the edifice. “What do you think it is?” asked Geo.
“I don’t know,” said Iimmi.
They looked, and in the shadow, numberless figures were marching after them. Suddenly the figures fell to the ground, and flesh rolled forward from bone, congealed, and rose quiveringly into the edge of the light.
Iimmi started out first on the skeletal, twisted structure that descended to the glowing pit. “You’re crazy,” Geo said. The thing flopped forward another yard with a sick sound. “Hurry up,” Geo added. With Urson in the middle, they started out along the twenty-inch wide girder. Lit from beneath, their bodies were in the shadow of the girder. Only their outstretched arms burned in the pale orange light as they balanced themselves.
Before them, faintly legible on the broken building into which they were descending was the sign:
Atomic Energy for the Betterment of Man
It was flanked by two purple trefoils. The beam twisted sideways, and then dropped. Iimmi made the turn, dropped to his knees and hands, and then started to let himself down the four feet to the next small section of concrete. Once he saw something, let out a low whistle, but continued to lower himself to the straightened girder. Urson made the turn next, while Geo knelt in front of him. When Urson saw what Iimmi had seen, his hand shot to Geo’s chest and grabbed the jewel. Geo took his wrist. “That won’t help us now,” he said.
Urson expelled a breath, and then continued down, slowly. Quickly Geo turned to drop now.
The entire beam structure over which they had just come was coated with a trembling thickness of the stuff. Globs dripped from the steel shafts, glowing in the light from below, quivering, smoking, splashing off into the darkness. Here and there something half human would rise either to look around or to pull the collective mass further on, but then it would fall back and dissolve. It bulged forward, smoking now, bits of it shriveling off and falling away. Geo was about to descend, but suddenly he called, “Wait a minute.” The others stayed still.
It wasn’t making progress. It rolled to a certain point in the pale, sherbert-colored light, globbed up, smoked, and fell away. And smoked. And dripped.
“Can’t it get any farther?” Urson asked.
“It doesn’t look it,” said Geo.
A skeleton stood up, flesh-covered in the orange light. It tottered, its surface steaming, and then fell with a sucking noise, down into the hundreds of feet of shadow. Geo was holding tight onto the girder in front of him.
The pale light fell cleanly over his hand, wrist, and midway up his forearm.
What happened now made him squeeze until sweat came: the entire Gargantuan mass, which had only extended tentacles till now, pulsed to the edge of the jagged road, draped itself over the web of girders, and flung itself forward on the spindly metal threads. It careened toward them, and the three jerked themselves back.
Then it stopped, quivering. It boiled, it burned, it writhed, sinking, smoking through the spaces in the naked girder work. It tried to crawl backwards. Human figures leaped from its mass toward the edge of the road, missed, and plummeted like smoking bullets. It hurled a great pseudopod back toward the safety of the road; it fell short, flopped downward, and the whole mass shook beneath the smoke that rose from it. It pulled free of the support, tentacles sliding across steel, whipping into the air. Then it dropped into the shadows, breaking into a half dozen pieces before they lost sight of it below.
Geo released his hand. “My arm hurts,” he said, shaking it.
They climbed up to the road again, carefully. “Any ideas what happened?” asked Iimmi.
“What ever it was, I’m glad it did,” said Urson.
Something clattered before them in the darkness.
“What was that?” asked Urson, stopping.
“My foot hit something,” Geo said.
“What was it?” asked Urson.
“Never mind,” said Geo. “Come on.”
Fifteen minutes brought them to the stairway that went to the lower highway. Iimmi’s memory proved good, and for an hour they went quickly, Iimmi making no hesitation at turnings.
“God,” Geo said, rubbing his forearm with his other hand. “I must have pulled hell out of it back there. It hurts like the devil.”
Urson looked at his hand and rubbed them together.
“My hands feel sort of funny too,” Iimmi said. “Like they’ve been windburned.”
“Windburned nothing,” said Geo. “This hurts.”
Twenty minutes later, Iimmi said, “Well, this should be about it.”
“Hey,” said Urson. “There’s Snake.” As they ran forward, now, the boy jumped off the rail, grabbed their shoulders, and grinned. Then he began to tug them forward.
“You lucky little so-and-so,” said Urson. “I wish you’d been with us.”
“He probably was, in spirit, if not in body,” Geo laughed.
Snake nodded.
“What are you pulling for?” Urson asked. “Say, if you’re going to get headaches like that, you’d better teach us what to do with them beads there.” He pointed to the jewel at Iimmi’s and Geo’s necks.
Snake nodded and tugged forward again.
“He wants us to hurry,” Geo said. “We better get going.”
The road finally
