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deck, the ball-bearings on which it rode frozen magnetically to the rails.
Grimly, Helmuth cut the power to the magnet windings and urged the flat craft
inch by inch across the 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 which
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
fanllghts, and onward into darkness again toward the horizon which, like the
Bridge itself, no eye would ever see.
Thirty miles below, the fusillade of hydrogen explosions continued. Evidently
something really wild was going on down on the surface. Helmuth could not
remember having heard so much vulcan sm in years.
There was a fiat, especially heavy crash, and a long line of fuming orange
fire came pouring down the seething air into the depths, feathering
horizontally like the mane of a Lipizzan stallion, directly in front of
Helmuth. Instinctively, he winced and drew back from the board, although that
stream of flame actually was only a little less cold than the rest of the
storming, streaming gases, and far too cold to injure the Bridge.
In the momentary glare, however, he saw something:
an upward twisting of shadows, patterned but obviously unfinished, fluttering
in silhouette against the lurid light of the hydrogen cataract.
The end of the Bridge.
Wrecked. -
Helmuth grunted involuntarily and backed the beetle away. The flare dimmed;
the light poured down the sky and fell away into the raging sea of liquid
hydrogen thirty miles - below. The scanner clucked with satisfaction as the
beetle recrossed the danger line into Sector 113.
Helmuth turned the body of the vehicle 180 degrees on its chassis, presenting
its back to the dying orange torrent. There was nothing further that he could
do at the moment for the Bridge. He searched his control -board-a - ghost
image of which ~was cast on the screen across the scene on the Bridge-for the
blue button marked Garage, punched it savagely, and tore off his fireman's
helmet,
Obediently, the Bridge vanished. -
CHAPTER THREE: New York
Does it not appear as if one who lived habitually on one side of the pain
threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually
lives on the other?
-WILLIAM JAMF.S
Tun GIRL-Whose full name, Paige found, was Anne Ab- -bott-looked moderately
acceptable -in her summer suit, on the left lapel of - -which she wore a model
of the tetracycline molecule with the atoms picked out in tiny synthetic gems.
But she was even less inclined to taIk~ -when he picked her up than she had
been in Pfitzner!s- -reception room. Paige himself had never been expert at
making small talk, and in the face of her obvious, continuing resentment, his
parched spring of- social invention went underground completely.
Five minutes later, all talk became impossible anyhow. The route to the
restaurant Paige had chosen lay across Foley Square, where there turned out to
be a Believer Mission going. The Caddy that Paige had hi-red-at nearly a
quarter of his leave-pay, for commercial kerosene-fueled taxis were strictly a
rich man's occasional luxury-was bogged down almost at once in the groaning,
swaying crowd. - -
The main noise came from the big plastic proscenium, where one of the lay
preachers was exhorting the -crowd in a voice so heavily amplified as to be
nearly unintelligible. Believers with portable tape recorders, bags of tracts
and magazines, sandwich-boards lettered with fluorescent inks, confessions for
sinners to sign, and green baize pokes for collections- were well scattered
among the pedestrians, and the streets were crossed about every fifteen feet
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