Doc Maxey had stopped on the graveled gyro court halfway between the lab and his house on the hill above but he wasn't waiting for us. He was staring back toward the lab with his scrubby beard fluttering in the night wind and his eyes shining like wet marbles.
I looked back to see smoke pouring out of the laboratory windows. Great sparks of light shot out through it but it wasn't until I understood Doc's yammering that I knew what they were.
"They've left the rift!" he was yelling. "They're free—we've let those monsters loose on the world!"
The fire-worms scattered systematically, taking off in every direction like snaky skyrockets. One minute the air was full of them—the next they were gone.
"This new Di-tube came through when our strain-bubble burst," I said, looking up at the shaft of vacancy dwindling away into the sky. Dora came out of her faint then but I didn't put her down—I liked holding her too well. "But how, Doc, and from where?"
"From superspace, the plane of existence immediately above ours," Doc said, wringing his hands. "The energy backlash from our generator must have weakened the spatial barrier between dimensions, enabling them to break through at the point of stress."
Even I could understand that. Dora got it too and hid her face against my chest. "We've got to stop them somehow," she said. "Jerry don't just stand here—do something!"
At another time it would have been funny—she was asking me to stop this catastrophe when the best brains in the Western Hemisphere were legging it up the hill with nothing on their minds but mileage.
"This is no time for jokes," I told her. "Let's get up to the house and call Washington, Doc."
There were two phones in the house but we couldn't get within yelling distance of either of them. Both generals were on the wire, countermanding each other's orders right and left and screaming for the Air Marines. The living-room t-v was blaring full blast at a circle of both Eastern and Western hemispheres and they were hitting us right where we lived.