"Now!" Bob prayed. "Now!"
He groaned inwardly. It wasn't going to happen! He'd been a fool to think—
Then a yell, completely uninhibited, escaped his lips. The asteroid was quivering, precisely like gelatine dessert. Pieces of iron ore, tungsten, quartz and cinnabar began to fall from its sides. Little rivulets of a silvery-white liquid gushed outward in streams.
The wedding guests leapt to their feet with startled cries, starting running back toward higher ground. The wedding march ended in a clatter of discords. And Bob reached the asteroid as it went to pieces completely. He found himself ankle-deep in rivulets of liquid metal. He was swept off his feet, came up hanging onto a jagged boulder of floating iron ore. He looked around on a mad scene. Screams, yells, tangled legs.
"Bob!"
Starre's voice. Bob plunged toward her, yelling above the general tumult. For a radius of several hundred feet, there was a sluggishly moving liquid. People were floating on it, or standing in it ankle-deep, dumbfounded. Bob reached Starre, swept her up in his arms, went slushing off to the edge of the pool. Starre was laughing uncontrollably.
"There's a helicopter on the other side of the house," she cried. "We can get away before they get organized."
They found Queazy in a room at the Somers Hotel. He opened the door, and the worry on his face dissipated as he saw them. Behind him on a table were stacks of five-thousand-dollar bills. Before he could say anything, Starre demanded of him, "I couldn't get married on an asteroid if the asteroid wasn't there any more, could I, Queazy? One minute the asteroid was there and the next minute I was wading in a metal lake."
"Quicksilver," Bob Parker agreed happily. "The asteroid was almost entirely frozen mercury, except for an outer solid layer of iron ore, tungsten, quartz, cinnabar."