Belle had been studying, analyzing, probing the things that were coming down through that hellish tube.
She drove a thought. ‘Clee! Cut the monkey-business with those damn firecrackers of yours and look here – pure, solid force, like ball lightning or our Op field, but entirely different! See if you can analyze the stuff.’
‘Alive?’ Garlock asked, as he drove a probe into one of the things – they were furiously-radiating spheres some seven feet in diameter – and began to tune in with the thing, whatever it was, and still following it down.
This particular force-ball happened to hit the top of a six-
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story building. It was not going very fast – fifteen or twenty miles an hour – but when it struck the roof it did not even slow down. Without any effort at all, apparently, it continued downward through the concrete and steel and glass of the building – and everything in its path became monstrously, sickeningly, revoltingly changed.
‘I simply can’t stand any more of this,’ Lola gasped. ‘If you don’t mind, I’m going to go to my room, set all the Gunther blocks it has, and bury my head under a pillow.’
‘Go ahead, Brownie,’ James said. This is too tough for anybody to watch. I’d do the same, except I’ve got to run these cameras.’
Lola disappeared.
Garlock and Belle kept on studying. Neither had paid any attention at all to either Lola or James.
Instead of the structural material it had once been, the bore that the thing had traversed was now full of a sparkling, bubbling, • writhing, partly-fluid-partly-viscous obscenely repulsive mass of something unknown and unknowable on Earth – a something which, Garlock now recalled, had been thought of by the Arpalone Inspector as ‘golop’.
As that unstoppable globe descended through office after office, it neither sought out people nor avoided them. Walls, doors, windows, ceilings, floors and rugs, office furniture and office personnel – all alike were absorbed into and made a part of that indescribably horrid brew.
Not did the track of the globe remain a bore. Instead, it spread. That devil’s brew ate into and dissolved everything it touched like a steam of boiling water being poured into a loosely-heaped pile of granulated sugar. By the time the ravening sphere had reached the second floor, the entire roof of the building was gone and the writhing, racing flood of corruption had flowed down the outer walls and across the street, engulfing and transforming sidewalks, people, pavement, poles, wires, automobiles – anything and everything it touched.
The globe went on down, through-basement and sub-basement, until it reached solid, natural ground. Then, with its top a few inches below the level of natural ground, it came to a full stop and – apparently – did nothing at all. By this time, the ravening flood outside had eaten far into the lower floors of
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the buildings across the street, as well as along all four sides of the block, and tremendous masses of masonry and steel, their supporting structures devoured, were subsiding, crumbling, and crashing down into the noisome flood of golop – and were being transformed almost as fast as they could fall.
One tremendous mass, weighing hundreds or perhaps thousands of tons, toppled almost as a whole, splashing the stuff in all directions for hundreds of yards. Wherever each splash struck, however, a new center of attack came into being, and the peculiarly disgusting, abhorrent liquidation went on.
‘Can you do anything with it, Clee?’ Belle demanded.
‘Not too much – it’s a mess,” Garlock replied. ‘Besides, it wouldn’t get us far, I don’t think. It’ll be more productive to analyze the beams the Arpalones are using to break them up, don’t you think?’
Then, for twenty solid minutes, the two Prime Operators worked on those enigmatic beams.
‘We can’t assemble that kind of stuff with our minds,’ Belle decided then.
‘I’ll say we can’t,’ Garlock agreed. Ten megacycles, and cycling only twenty per second.’ He whistled through his teeth. ‘My guess is it’d take four months to design and build a generator to put out that kind of stuff. It’s worse than our Op field.’
I’m not sure I could ever design one,’ Belle said thoughtfully, ‘but of course I’m not the engineer you are…’ Then she could not helping adding,’… yet.’
‘No, and you never will be,’ he said, flatly.
‘No? That’s what you think!’ Even in such circumstances as these, Belle Bellamy was eager to carry on her warfare with her Project Chief.
That’s exactly what I think – and I’m so close to knowing it for a fact that the difference is indetectible.’
Belle managed to restrain an angry outburst; instead, she demanded, ‘Well, are you just going to sit there and do nothing at all except argue with me?’
‘Unless and until I can figure out something effective to do, I’m not going to try to do anything. If you, with your vaunted and flaunted belief in the inherent superiority of the female over the male, can dope out something useful before I do, I’ll
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eat crow and help you do it. As for arguing with you, I’m all done for the moment. Put up or shut up.’
Belle gritted her teeth, walked away, and plumped herself down into a chair. She shut her eyes and put every iota of her mind to work on the problem of finding something – anything – that could be done to help this doomed world and to show that overbearing jerk of a Garlock that she was a better Operator than he was. Which of the two objectives loomed more important, she herself could not have told.
And Garlock looked around. The air and the sky over the now-vanished city were both clear of Dilipic craft. The surviving Arpalone fighters and other small craft were making no attempt to land, anywhere on the world’s surface. Instead, they were flying upward toward, and were being drawn one by one into the bowels of, huge Arpalonian space-freighters. When each such vessel was filled to capacity, it flew upward and set itself into a more or less circular orbit around the planet.
Around and around and around the ruined world the Pleiades went … recording, observing, charting. Fifty-eight of those atrocious Dilipic vortices had been driven to ground. Every large land-mass surrounded by large bodies of water had been struck once, and only once; from the tremendous area of the largest continent down to the relatively tiny expanses of the largest islands. One land-mass, one vortex. One only.
‘What do you suppose that means?’ James asked. ‘Afraid of water?’
‘Damned if I know. Could be. Let’s check … mountains, too. Skip us back to where we started – oceans and mountains both fairly close there.’
The city had disappeared long since; for hundreds of almost-level square miles there extended a sparkling, seething, writing expanse of – of what? The edge of that devouring flood had almost reached the foothills, and over that gnawing, dissolving edge the Pleiades paused.
Small lakes and ordinary rivers bothered the golop very little if at all. There was perhaps a slightly increased sparkling, a slight stiffening, a little darkening, some freezing and breaking off of solid blocks, but the thing’s forward motion was not noticeably slowed down. It drank a fairly large river and a lake one mile wide by ten miles long while the two men watched.
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The golop made no attempt to climb either foothills or mountains. It leveled them. It ate into their bases at its own level; the undermined masses, small and large, collapsed into the foul, corrosive semi-liquid and were consumed. Nor was there much raising of the golop’s level, even when the highest mountains were reached and miles-high masses of solid rock broke off and toppled. There was some raising, of course, but the stuff was fluid enough so that its slope was not apparent to the eye.
Then the Pleiades went back, over the place where the city had been and on to what had once been an ocean beach. The original wave of degradation had reached that shore long since, had attacked its sands out into deep water, and there it had been stopped. The corrupt flood was now being reinforced, however, by an ever-rising tide of material that had once been mountains. And the slope, which had not been even noticeable at the mountains or over the plain, was here very evident.
As the rapidly-flowing golop struck water, the water shivered, came to a weirdly unforgettable cold boil, and exploded into drops and streamers and jagged-edged chunks of something that was neither water nor land – nor rock, soil, sand, or Satan’s unholy brew. Nevertheless, the water won. There was so much of it! Each barrel of water that was destroyed was replaced instantly and enthusiastically with no lowering of level or of pressure.
And when water struck the golop, the golop also shivered violently, then sparkled even more violently, then stopped sparkling, and turned dark, then froze solid. The frozen surface, however, was neither thick enough nor strong enough to form an effective wall.