Another bomb fell, rocking the skylon. Beams clattered down from the towering superstructure, caving in sections of the aerie's roof. The guard, who had been circling for a safe shot at Aram, shrieked in agony as a metal section took him across the shoulders and snapped his back like a twig.
Suddenly Aram felt a wetness on his clothes and a bitterness on his tongue. The two wrestling men had rolled into the pool of liquid from the broken-vial.
Santane screamed with terror, and in a frantic burst of energy, broke away and stumbled out onto the landing stage and the air-sled.
Deve rushed to Aram, helping him to his feet. As she touched him, he recoiled.
"Don't, Deve! Don't touch me!"
But the girl's hands, too, were wet with the sticky stuff of the vial, and Aram knew with a sick certainty that they were both infected with the virus of bestiality.
"After him!" Hopeless now, sick with despair, Aram wanted only to kill Santane.
But Santane had not launched the air-sled. Instead he knelt on its deck, a medical kit in his hands. He was trying with trembling fingers to fill a syringe from a narrow capsule. Jerrold knocked the instrument from his hands and dragged him from the machine. The madman fought back with desperate strength, but Aram smashed him again and again against the stones of the landing. In a last spasmodic effort, Santane caught Aram by the throat and forced him toward the edge. Far below, the glowing, radioactive smoke of death roiled against the sides of the weakened skylon. Aram could see flames eating ravenously at the lower levels. Santane shrieked with triumph as Aram hung momentarily over the abyss. Aram twisted....
And then Santane was gone, vanishing in a long wailing fall, twisting and turning like a rag-doll until his scream of terror blended with the cry of another falling bomb.