ore violently, then stopped sparkling and turned dark,
then froze solid. The frozen surface, however, was neither thick enough
nor strong enough to form an effective wall.

Again and again the wave of golop built up high enough to crack and to
shatter that feeble wall; again and again golop and water met in
ultimately furious, if insensate, battle. Inch by inch the ocean's
shoreline was driven backward toward ocean's depths; but every inch the
ocean lost was to its tactical advantage, since the advancing front was
by now practically filled with hard, solid, dead blocks of its own
substance which it could neither assimilate nor remove from the scene of
conflict.

Hence the wall grew ever thicker and solider; the advance became slower
and slower.

Then, finally, ocean waves of ever-increasing height and violence rolled
in against the new-formed shore. What caused those tremendous
waves--earthquakes, perhaps, due to the shifting of the mountains'
masses?--no Tellurian ever surely knew. Whatever the cause, however,
those waves operated to pin the golop down. Whenever and wherever one of
those monstrous waves whitecapped in, hurling hundreds of thousands of
tons of water inland for hundreds of yards, the battle-front stabilized
then and there.

All over that world the story was the same. Wherever there was water
enough, the water won. And the total quantity of water in that world's
oceans remained practically unchanged.

"Good. A lot of people escaped," James said, expelling a long-held
breath. "Everybody who lives on or could be flown to all the islands
smaller than the biggest ones ... if they can find enough to eat and if
the air isn't poisoned."

"Air's okay--so's the water--and they'll get food," Garlock said. "The
Arpalones will handle things, including distribution. What I'm thinking
about is how they're going to rehabilitate it. That, as an engineering
project, is a feat to end all feats."

"_Brother!_ You can play _that_ in spades!" James agreed. "Except that
it'll take too many months before they can even start the job, I'd like
to stick around and see how they go about it. How does this kind of
stuff fit into that theory you're not admitting is a theory?"

"Not worth a damn. However, it's a datum--and, as I've said before and
may say again, if we can get _enough_ data we can build a theory out of
it."

Then it began to rain. For many minutes the clouds had been piling
up--black, far-flung, thick and hi