Overhead the sky was empty, roofless, blinding white. It sucked the sweat before it could form and made their eyeballs stick. It shimmered on the prostrate girders and made them scorching hot. That the girders were silicon instead of steel did not excite them anymore. Nor did they exclaim over the generators of malleable glass with inner windings clearly visible like demonstration models or the strange doorways, all of them exactly three feet in diameter, all of them exactly thirty feet above the cracked mud streets as though the intervening space had been filled with water. It was too damn hot.
As they wormed toward the core of the city, Hogan, who followed Spencer, began to hum softly about a red-haired baby with two great big hums. He kicked up the dust and chattered to himself. He blinked at the white sky and tripped. Touching a girder involuntarily, he staggered back cursing, leaving the skin of his hand and wrist smoking on the silicon.
"Damn that Templar," he shrilled, "drinking beer in the cool of the spheroid!"
"In the cool of the spheroid," cried the echoes.
"The spheroid," replied echoes of the echoes.
Hogan dropped his rifle with a clatter and sucked his wrist.
"Shake it up," shouted the Captain from the head of the worm.
"Hogan's hurt," Spencer called from the tail. But Hogan lurched forward hissing: "Tend your own jet hole."
The Captain was back there, tall and concerned, grabbing Hogan's arm, making him show the burn. Deftly he bandaged it. "You can go back to the ship if you want to."
"Hell no and let you guys find something worth something," Hogan retorted and spat near Spencer's foot.