The entire beam structure over which they had just come was coated with a trembling thickness of the stuff. Globs dripped from the steel shafts, glowing in the light from below, quivering, smoking, splashing off into the darkness. Here and there something half human would rise either to look around or to pull the collective mass further on, but then it would fall back and dissolve. It bulged forward, smoking now, bits of it shriveling off and falling away. Geo was about to descend, but suddenly he called, "Wait a minute." The others stayed still.
It wasn't making progress. It rolled to a certain point in the pale, sherbert-colored light, globbed up, smoked, and fell away. And smoked. And dripped.
"Can't it get any farther?" Urson asked.
"It doesn't look it," said Geo.
A skeleton stood up, flesh-covered in the orange light. It tottered, its surface steaming, and then fell with a sucking noise, down into the hundreds of feet of shadow. Geo was holding tight onto the girder in front of him.
The pale light fell cleanly over his hand, wrist, and midway up his forearm.
What happened now made him squeeze until sweat came: the entire Gargantuan mass, which had only extended tentacles till now, pulsed to the edge of the jagged road, draped itself over the web of girders, and flung itself forward on the spindly metal threads. It careened toward them, and the three jerked themselves back.
Then it stopped, quivering. It boiled, it burned, it writhed, sinking, smoking through the spaces in the naked girder work. It tried to crawl backwards. Human figures leaped from its mass toward the edge of the road, missed, and plummetted like smoking bullets. It hurled a great pseudopod back toward the safety of the road; it fell short, flopped downward, and the whole mass shook beneath the smoke that rose from it. It pulled free of the support, tentacles sliding across steel, whipping into the air. Then it dropped into the shadows, breaking into a half dozen pieces before they lost sight of it below.
Geo released his hand. "My arm hurts," he said, shaking it.
They climbed up to the road again, carefully. "Any ideas what happened?" asked Iimmi.