Earth was below our angle of vision, but the beam from Greater New York, sweeping the sky with the Earth's rotation, was passing now comparatively close to Wandl.
There was an expectant moment. Then into the sky leaped another ray, narrow, luridly green. It swung up from Wandl and darted into space. The hissing, agonized electrical scream from it as it burst through the Wandl atmosphere was deafening. I saw it strike the Earth-beam, grip it with a blinding burst of radiance up there in the sky, clinging, pulling against the rotation of the Earth with a lever sixty million miles long.
A moment of screaming sound in the atmosphere around us, and that conflict of light in the sky. Then the screaming suddenly stilled. The Wandl beam vanished.
The Earth-beam still swept the heavens like a stiff, upstanding sword. But in that moment when Wandl gripped it, the axis of the Earth had been changed a little. The rotation was slowed. By a few minutes, the day and the night on Earth were lengthened.
It was the beginning of Earth's desolation.
11
"But when do we eat?" Snap demanded.
"Soon," said Molo.
"I hope so."