Then it stopped, quivering. It boiled, it burned, it writhed, sinking, smoking through the spaces in the naked girder work. It tried to crawl backwards. Human figures leaped from its mass toward the edge of the road, missed, and plummetted like smoking bullets. It hurled a great pseudopod back toward the safety of the road; it fell short, flopped downward, and the whole mass shook beneath the smoke that rose from it. It pulled free of the support, tentacles sliding across steel, whipping into the air. Then it dropped into the shadows, breaking into a half dozen pieces before they lost sight of it below. Geo released his hand. "My arm hurts," he said, shaking it. They climbed up to the road again, carefully. "Any ideas what happened?" asked Iimmi. "What ever it was, I'm glad it did," said Urson. Something clattered before them in the darkness. "What was that?" asked Urson, stopping. "My foot hit something," Geo said. "What was it?" asked Urson. "Never mind," said Geo. "Come on." Fifteen minutes brought them to the stairway that went to the lower highway. Iimmi's memory proved good, and for an hour they went quickly, Iimmi making no hesitation it turnings. "God," Geo said, rubbing his forearm with his other hand. "I must have pulled hell out of it back there. It hurts like the devil." Urson looked at his hand and rubbed them together. "My hands feel sort of funny too," Iimmi said. "Like they've been wind-burned." "Wind-burned nothing," said Geo. "This hurts." Twenty minutes later, Iimmi said, "Well, this should be about it." "Hey," said Urson. "There's Snake." As they ran forward, now, the boy jumped off the rail, grabbed their shoulders, and grinned. Then he began to tug them forward. "You lucky little so and so," said Urson. "I wish you'd been with us." "He probably was, in spirit, if not in body," Geo laughed. Snake nodded. "What are you pulling for?" Urson asked. "Say, if you're going to get headaches like that, you'd better teach us what to do with them beads there." He pointed to the jewel at Iimmi's and Geo's necks. Snake nodded and tugged forward again. "He wants us to hurry," Geo said. "We better get going." The road finally tore completely away, and four feet below them, over the twisted rail, was the mouth of a street that led into the waterfront. Snake, Iimmi and then Urson vaulted over. Urson shook his hands painfully when he landed. "Give me a hand, will you?" Geo asked. "My arm is really shot." Urson helped his friend over. Almost as though it had been in wait, thick liquid gurgling sounded behind them. Like a wounded thing it emerged from behind the broken highway, bulging up into the light which shone on the ripples in its shriveled membrane. "Run it!" bawled Urson, and they took off down the street. In the moonlight, the ruined piers spread along the waterfront to either side of them, some even slanting into the silvered water.