Alex stared into his goggles. As far as he could tell, the entire cloud was a mass of indistinguishable lumps. Then he realized that a whole area of the base—a couple dozen lumps, a cloudy sprawl the size of four, maybe five football fields—was beginning a slow waltz. The lumps were being tugged down—powerfully wrenched and heaved down—into a broad bulging round ridge, well below the natural level of the cloud base. The lumps were black and ugly and sullen and looked very unhappy about being forced to move. They kept struggling hard to rise into the parent cloud again, and to maintain their shape, but they were failing, and falling apart. Some pitiless unseen force was stretching them into long circular striations, like gaseous taffy.