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.
"Burn out the ground under them!" came the order. "Tip them over—slag them down!"
Sharply downward angled twoscore of the beams which had been expending their energies upon Boskone's radiant defenses. Downward into the lake of lava which had once been pavement. That lake had already been seething and bubbling; emitting momently bursts of lambent flame. Now it leaped into a frenzy of its own; a transcendent fury of volatilization. High-explosive shells by the hundred dropped also into the incandescent mess, hurling the fiery stuff afar; deepening and broadening the sulphurous moat.
"Deep enough," Haynes spoke into his microphone. "Tractors and pressors as assigned—tip him over."
The intensity of the bombardment did not slacken, but from the maulers to the north there reached out pressors, from those upon the south came tractors; each a beam of terrific power, each backed by all the mass and all the driving force of a veritable flying fortress.
Slowly that which had been a building leaned from the perpendicular, its inner defensive screen still intact.
"Chief?" From his post as observer, Kinnison flashed a thought to Haynes. "Are you beginning to think any funny thoughts about that ape down there?"
"No. Are you? What?" asked the port admiral, surprised.