"Gosh," Dead-Eye said, gaping open-mouthed into the visaplate. "Cap, looky here, the whole city is blue."
It was blue—this White City which in the long ago had been New York. A blue visible with an inner light of its own that absorbed the white moon beams and made even black shadows turn blue.
The city was like some huge blue flower, sunset blue for stamen and pistil, its hue lightening to aquamarine, cerulean, and pastel as its petals stretched farther out over the city. It was pulsing and each pulsation swelled its circumference.
Then the visaplate was flickering and the tiny red bulb centered in its plastic base began to blink, signaling power trouble. Then the screen went blank.
"What is it?" Packer exclaimed. His voice was loud and harsh in the plotting room now. The incessant signal six-two ... signal six-two ... had ceased. The instrument panel lights went dark, the rockets cut off abruptly, the only sound was the scrabbling fingers of the outside....
"Force field," Curt Wing said. "Something we've never been able to develop. But there it is. That's the catastrophe. It's swallowing White City, and if there's an intelligence behind it or not, mankind is done if we can't stop it."
"Force field?" Packer asked. "But didn't you...?"
"Yes," Wing said. "I created one once. A little thing less than an inch square. Balanced one magnetic field against another by firing four atomic guns at a coincident point. But a funny thing, the longer the field held the more power I had to shove into it.
"Then I didn't have any more power to give, and Dead-Eye says, 'Gee, what's happening to all those atoms?' So I grabbed him and ran like hell for the nearest sub-basement. When those compressed atoms let go it tore everything loose from the experimental station.