And all around the embattled structure, within the Patrol's now partially open wall of screen, spread holocaust supreme; holocaust spreading wider and wider during each fractional split second. In an instant, it seemed, nearby buildings burst into flame. The fact that they were fireproof meant nothing whatever. The air inside them, heated in moments to a point far above the ignition temperature of organic material, fed furiously upon furniture, rugs, drapes, and whatever else had been left in place. Even without such adventitious aids the air itself, expanding tremendously, irresistibly, drove outward before it the glass of windows and the solid brickwork of walls. And as they fell, glass and brick ceased to exist as such. Falling, they fused; coalescing and again splashing apart as they descended through the inferno of annihilatory vibrations in an appalling rain which might very well have been sprinkled from the hottest middle of the central core of hell itself. And in this fantastically potent, this incredibly corrosive flood the ground itself, the metaled pavement, the sturdily immovable foundations of skyscrapers, dissolved as do lumps of sugar in boiling coffee. Dissolved, slumped down, flowed away in blindingly turbulent streams. Super-structures toppled into disintegration, each discrete particle contributing as it fell to the utterly indescribable fervency of the whole. More and more panels of mobile screen went down. They were not designed to stand up under such heavy projectors as "Wemblesons" mounted, and the Boskonians blasted them down in order to get at the remote-control operators back of them. Swath after swath of flaming ruin was cut through the Bronsecan capital as the enemy gunners tried to follow the dodging caterpillar tractors. "Drop down, maulers!" the commander-in-chief ordered. "Low enough so that your screens touch ground. Never mind damage--they'll blast the whole city if we don't stop those beams. Surround him!" Down the maulers came, ringwise; mighty protective envelopes overlapping; down until the screens bit ground. Now the caterpillar and mobile-screen crews were safe; powerful as Prellin's weapons were, they could not break through those maulers' screens. Now holocaust waxed doubly infernal. The wall was tight, the only avenue of escape of all that fiercely radiant energy straight upward; and adding to the furor were the flaring under jets--themselves destructive agents by no means to be despised! Inside the screens, then, raged pure frenzy. At the line raved the maulers' prodigious lifting blasts. Out and away, down every avenue of escape, swept torrents of superheated air at whose touch anything and everything combustible burst into flame. But there could be no fire-fighting--yet. Outlying fires, along the lines of destruction previously cut, yes; but personal armor has never been designed to enable life to exist in such an environment as that near those screens then was.