They passed on, drifting quietly between broken crags that two hours before had been office buildings, hearing the echo of their light foot-falls tossed back by windowless walls and heaps of brick and stone. One passage was clogged breast-high with corpses. They went around it, climbing over powdery granite piles that had been a theater's facade.
Then there was the broad plain of ruin, a gargantuan bowl, smoothed down from its rim to the center, which was some twenty feet below the original level of the ground. Everything had been smashed here, buildings and trees and everything that stood upright; in the middle of the frightful desolated bowl rested one of the great silver disks, tilted like a gyroscope and balanced on its extreme edge, as though it leaned at its forty-five-degree angle against an invisible wall.
"That settles it," said Don. "Our ships can't do that stunt. Look, it balances like that and the bubble opened up makes an incline to the ground; fit steps inside the bubble and you have a perfect way of getting in and out. Our system is much clumsier. How the devil do they make it balance, though?"
"They've set up effective force screens around our armies," said Jim. "If they can do that, certainly they can utilize small editions of the screen mechanisms to hold up their saucers."
"Or maybe it's a principle of gyroscopics," added Bill.
"Well," said Brave, "we're going down there. At least I am. Anybody wants to stay here, Lord knows I won't blame him."
"We're all going."
"Okay. First Alan and Bill and I will walk out. If we aren't shot by the time we've gone twenty yards, you four come on. We can't plan anything till we get a look at the brutes in the disk; but as soon as we do, I'll shout out our next move. Is that all right with everyone? Or does one of you want to take charge?"
"You're the chief, Brave," said Rob. "Maybe we outrank you on Project Star, but in action I'd back you against all of us. I've heard about you in Argentina."