“It’s done. We lost almost everybody. But we caused a very
nice riot.” A ghost of animation stirred in the voice for a moment. “You should have been there.”
“I’m—almost there now. Good . . . wo~rk, Mark. Get . some rest.”
“Sure. But—”
Something very heavy described a searing hyperbola in Amalfi’s mind, and then the whole city was a scramble of magnesium-white and ink. As the light faded, there was a formless spreading and crawling, utterly beyond any detection but Amalfi’s.
“Gas alarm, Mark,” he heard himself saying. “Hawkesite barium suits for everybody.”
“Yes. Right. Boss, you’ll kill yourself running things this way.”
Amalfi found that he could not answer. He had found the town where the women had been dropped. Nothing clear came through, but there was certainly a riot there, and it was not entirely within the town itself. Tendrils of movement were being turned back from the Okie city, and were weaving out from places where there had been no sign of activity before.
At the base of the mine fountain, something else new was happening. A mass rose slowly, and there was a thick flowing around it. Then it stopped, and there was a sense of doors opening, heavy potentials moving out into tangled desolation. The tramps were leaving their city. The unmistakable, slightly nauseating sensation of a spindizzy field under medium drive domed the boiling of the lake of mud.
Dawn coming now. The riot in the town where the women were still would not come clear, but it was getting worse rather than better. Abruptly there was no town there at all, but a boiling, mushrooming pillar of radioactive gas—the place had been bombed. The struggle moved back toward the area of tension that marked the location of the bindlestiff.