The secondaries cut in and the beetle stopped again. Grim-ly, Helmuth opened the switch and sent the beetle creeping across the invisible danger line. Almost at once, the car tilted just perceptibly to the left, and the screaming of the winds between its edges and the deck shot up the scale, sirening in and out of the soundless-dogwhistle range with an eeriness that set Helmuth’s teeth on edge. The beetle itself fluttered and chattered like an alarm-clock hammer between the surface of the deck and ‘the flanges of the tracks.
Ahead there was still nothing to be seen but the horizontal driving of the clouds and the hail, roaring along the length of the Bridge, out of the blackness into the beetle’s fanlights, and onward into blackness again towards the horizon no eye would ever see.
Thirty miles below, the fusillade of hydrogen explosions continued. Evidently something really wild was going on on the surface. Helmuth could not remember having heard so much activity in years.
There was a flat, especially heavy crash, and a long line of fuming orange fire came pouring down the seething atmosphere into the depths, feathering horizontally like the mane of a Lipizzan horse, directly in front of Helmuth. Instinctively, he winced and drew back from the board, al-though that stream of flame actually was only a little less cold than the rest of the streaming gases, far too cold to injure the Bridge.
In the momentary glare, however, he saw something-an upward twisting of shadows, patterned but obviously un-finished, fluttering in silhouette against the hydrogen cata-ract’s lurid light.