The bipeds looked on as Borden and Ellen carried the stubby, golden-metal weapons.
The bipeds looked on as Borden and Ellen carried the stubby, golden-metal weapons.
The bipeds looked on as Borden and Ellen carried the stubby, golden-metal weapons.
He reached inside the vehicle, passed out objects midway between rifles and blasters in size. They were surprisingly light. They could have been aluminum, except that they were the color of gold or copper. There were three armsful of them.
Ellen took them inside and came back.
"Now I'll look at those skeletons," said Borden.
He took Jerry's hand flash and climbed inside. Jerry said apologetically to Ellen:
"I got so excited about what I found that I forgot all about eating. Do you think I could fix something?"
"I'll do it for you, Jerry," said Ellen.
V
She took him inside. Sattell had carried away about most of the food in the current-use freezer, and the storage lockers were nearly empty, but she prepared an ample meal for him. She couldn't even guess at the significance of what he'd found, but she knew there was meaning to it if only it could be found.
Jerry was eating contentedly and telling Ellen about his journey with the furry bipeds when Borden came in. He went to a tool locker, got out a small torch, and went out again.
Considerably later the outer lock door clanked. Then Borden came back into the cabin where Jerry was still talking with his mouth full.
"I'm beginning to get an idea of what's happened on this planet," Borden said grimly. "Jerry, was there any sign of a highway where you found this bunch of wagons?"
Jerry considered: "The front part of this one," he offered finally, "was buried deeper than the back. It went into a sort of hill. And under the wheels there was flat stone. It could have been a highway, buried under the mud that partly covered up what you call the wagons, sir."
Borden nodded. "I've brazed the steering tiller of that wagon so it can't be steered," he observed. "And I've replaced the lock fastener so Sattell can't break into the ship. We can sleep tonight. Tomorrow we'll go over to those wagons and disable them all. And then, in this wagon you brought, we'll hunt Sattell down. I have an idea he'd better not have a wagon of his own. It might not be good for us."
Jerry asked rather breathlessly, "What did you think of the skeletons, sir? I left them exactly as they were." He hesitated. "I thought they were a lot like human skeletons. Is that right?"
"Quite right," agreed Borden. "There is an extra rib on each side, and three fewer vertebrae, and their joints were a little different, but they were people, as I interpret the word. Were there skeletons in all the wagons you entered?"
"Yes, sir."
Ellen said impatiently, "What did you find out, Dee?"
"I guessed," Borden told her. "But I'd bet on my guesses. For one thing, the group in this vehicle was a family. One was taller and stockier than the others. I could be wrong, but I think it was the male—the father. There is a slightly smaller, slightly slenderer skeleton there, too. It has jewelry on it. And there are two smaller skeletons." He took a deep breath. "The small skeletons were laid out neatly, comfortably. The next to largest skeleton was with them. The stocky skeleton.... He'd killed himself, Jerry?"
"The weapons make holes like that, sir," said Jerry. "I tried one on the ground. Even in the ground cars where there were no weapons, one skeleton was always like that, with a hole in the skull."
"Yes," said Borden. "They must have loaned the weapons to each other for that purpose."
Ellen protested: "But Dee! Whatwasit?"
"I've a very complete guess," Borden said evenly. "It includes Jerry's furry friends. They act like domestic animals, like pets with an inbred, passionate desire to be approved of by—people. Dogs are like that. You agree, Jerry?"
"Oh, yes, sir!"
"If a party of human beings, in flight from something dreadful, had come to some place in the arctic, on Earth, where they couldn't go any farther, where the wives and families they had with them had no chance of survival because of the thing from which they fled, what would they do?"
Jerry said awkwardly, "If I may say so, sir, it does look just like that!"
Borden went on without apparent emotion, "The men of those families would know there was no escape. The odds are that they'd put their family dogs out of the ground cars, because they might live. But if the situation was absolutely hopeless they might not want their families to suffer—what they'd first tried to escape. So the children would die painlessly. So would the women and then the men would kill themselves. Possibly, anyhow. Or they might go back and fight. Here, it seems, they killed themselves."
Ellen protested, "But what could be so hopeless? If the pets survived—"
"My guess doesn't run to what they fled from, Ellen. But I think it's the white spot that flung that heat-ray at us. And I think that after all the people in the ground cars were dead, winter came, and covered up the vehicles with snow. Spring came, and floods washed mud along the highway and partly covered up the cars with mud. That went on for years and years and years. The pets that had been put out of the cars did survive. They were probably arctic animals to begin with, judging by their fur. And they have a language of sorts. They yearned for their masters. That was instinct. But they told their children—pups, what have you—about the masters they had lost. And one day a space-ship came bumbling down out of the sky and landed with a crash—and Jerry got out of it. And he was like their masters. So they have adopted us as their masters. And so—that's my guess. All of it."
"Dee!" cried Ellen softly. "How terrible!"
"You think, sir," asked Jerry, "that they were running away from something on the white spot?"
"Wedid," said Borden. "We had to. Maybe they had to, too."
"But what do you think it is?"
"That," Borden told him, "is something I hope we don't have to find out. Right now I suggest that we get some sleep."
And presently there was silence inside theDanaë, while the night grew deeper and darker outside.
There was no moon on this planet, but there were many stars in the sky. In the starlight the furry bipeds waited patiently about the hull for dawn when the humans would come out again. Some of them slept. Some sat erect, blinking meditatively. One or two walked about from time to time.
Occasionally one or more seemed to think there was a sound somewhere. They would look intently in the suspected direction until assured there was nothing amiss. They were much like dogs back on Earth, waiting hopefully for their masters to get up and be ready to pay attention to them again.
Hours later, the sky to the east paled. There was a chill mist to the northward, toward the polar cap. The ground in that direction glistened with the wet of condensation when the sky grew brighter. But here, so near the desert which save for the white spot covered the planet from pole to pole, there was no such excess of moisture. The ground here was damp because of seepage.
In a little while an eerie half-light spread over this curious world. The furry creatures sat up and scratched themselves luxuriously, and stretched in human fashion. Some of them scuffled amiably, tumbling over and over each other as if to warm themselves by exercise.
A little longer, and the sun rose. And shortly after that there were clankings when Borden unfastened the air-lock and came out. Immediately he was the center of a throng of the bipeds, lying flat on their backs with their stubby trunks waving urgently in the air, waiting to be scratched.
He scratched them gravely, one by one. Then Jerry came out and the process had to be repeated. The sun was low, and Jerry's shadow was thirty feet long on the sparsely covered ground.
Relieved of the bipeds' attentions, Borden moved off to one side. He had one of the stubby, golden-colored light metal weapons in his hand. He examined it carefully, again. There was a sort of stock, and a barrel three inches in diameter with an extremely tiny opening at its end. There was a round knob on one side. Borden unscrewed the knob a little, pointed the weapon carefully away from theDanaëand the furry creatures, and shifted the knob.
There was no noise. But what seemed to be a rod of flame shot out of the tiny muzzle. Where it touched the ground there was a burst of steam and flame and smoke from the scorched vegetation.
Borden turned it off quickly and aimed at a greater distance. He could not discover any limit to its range, in which respect it was a better weapon than the blaster of human manufacture he wore at his hip. It would be decidedly undesirable for Sattell to get hold of a weapon like this!
He went into the ship and when he came out again Ellen was with him. They put the golden-metal weapons in the ground car. They brought out food. Ellen looked uneasily in the back, where she had heard there were skeletons, but they were gone. A mound of loosened soil nearby told where. Borden had buried them, together.
"All set, Jerry?" asked Borden. "I've locked the ship so Sattell can't get in. As I told you, we're going to disable those other wagons and track down Sattell. If we can capture him reasonably intact, we'll put a cardiograph on him and ask him loaded questions about the ship's log and star maps. His pulse should change enough to enable us to track it down. But first we wreck those wagons!"
Jerry made gestures to his furry friends. They gesticulated back extravagantly. He climbed in the vehicle. Borden freed its tiller and Jerry drove.
For people effectively shipwrecked on an inimical planet and with no real hope of ever returning to their home, it was hardly appropriate that they got absorbed in the operation of a local vehicle. But this vehicle, large and roomy, was not a ground car so much as it was a land cruiser. It ran with astonishing smoothness, considering that it lacked pneumatic tires. And though from the outside it seemed to lurch and sway as it covered the rough ground, inside the lurchings were not felt at all.
The bipeds ran and skipped and loped beside it. Jerry picked up a little speed. They strained themselves to keep up.
Jerry had said ten miles. Actually, the distance was nearer twelve. There was snow in patches here and there. The air grew misty. Through the mist the edge of the ice-cap could be seen, a wall of opaque white some sixty or seventy feet high at its rounded melting edge, and rising to greater thickness beyond. And they came to a small running stream some four or five feet wide, the first running water they had seen on this planet.
And there were the clustered vehicles, about forty of them lined up as if on a highway which had come to an end in an ice barrier now melted away.
The vehicles were partly or wholly covered with water-borne clay which had been laid upon them by just such meltings of the ice-cap. They ran on into a small hillock which had formed since they had come to a stop at this place. Some were merely hummocks of clay-covered metal, barely showing above the ground. Some were what could be called only hub-deep in the clay. But it was being buried in the clay which had preserved them.
"You see, sir," Jerry explained, "I got the creatures to help me dig down to the doors, so I got into all that show. For weapons."
But Borden did not compliment him, though a compliment was due. Instead, Borden said in a toneless voice:
"I also see that Sattell has been here. He must have trailed you. He saw where you had driven one vehicle away. So he dug out the tracks of another one—there!—and tried it. And it worked. Sattell is gone."
It was true. Jerry, stricken, drove over to the new deep gouges in the earth which showed plainly where a way had been dug to take out another gold-metal vehicle on its wheel-like treads, and that it had been backed from where it had been almost buried.
Bones on the ground showed where Sattell had savagely flung the pitiful relics of the original owners of the car. The prints of his boots were plain in the loosened dirt.
"We've got to chase him?" Ellen asked apprehensively.
"He has the star maps and the log," Borden said tonelessly. "Or else he knows where he hid them."
"But where would he go?" persisted Ellen.
"He knows we're after him," said Borden. "He knows we're armed, and I doubt that he is, except for his bow and arrow. Where would he go for help, except to the place where we have enemies?"
The track of the other vehicle was clear. There had been no feet heavier than those of Jerry's biped friends on any of this ground for many, many years. There was a deep furrow where the other ground car, the one Sattell had taken, had rolled away.
Jerry put on speed.
Borden said, "I'll watch how you drive this thing, Jerry, and relieve you presently. Sattell can't drive night and day. We can. And there's a long way to go. We'll catch him!"
But Sattell had a head start. Five miles from the beginning of the chase, the track they followed swung to the right and down a rolling hillside. They followed. And a seamless highway built of stone, patently artificial, came out of the hillside and stretched away across country.
It was forty feet wide. And here, in some dust that had drifted across it at some spots, they saw the trail of Sattell's car. At other places, even for most of the way, the winds had kept the roadway clear.
Jerry increased his speed. Borden thought to look at the road behind them.
Ellen, understanding, said, "No, the poor creatures couldn't keep up. They were running after us as if their hearts were breaking, but they couldn't make it."
Ten miles farther on, the highway was overwhelmed by wind-drifted sand. The trail of Sattell's fleeing car went up over the sand dune. They went after it. Half a mile farther, the highway was clear again. It swung south, headed out across the desert.
They did not catch sight of Sattell or his car.
For a stretch of twenty-five miles the arrow-straight road was raised above the average level of the sands, and it was wind-swept. Then it went into a low range of rust-colored hills. Here they saw signs again of Sattell's passing. The streaked, rounded furrow of his vehicle's peculiar tread in wind-blown sand across the road.
On the far side of the hills they thought they had overtaken him when they saw the glint of golden metal a little off the highway.
They stopped. Borden and Jerry approached the spot, weapons ready. It was a ground car, past question, one like their own, but it had not been newly wrecked. That disaster had happened generations ago. The car had literally been pulled in half. It had been gripped by something unthinkably powerful and wrenched in two. The metal, strained and stretched before it broke, showed what had happened.
There were bones nearby. Not skeletons. Bones. Individual bones. Not gnawed. Not broken. Simply separated by feet and yards of space.
VI
Some ten miles farther on they came to the first of the forts, a great, towering structure of rocks piled together across the road. It was a parapet sixty feet high, enclosing a square of space. In sheltered places among the rocks there was a vast amount of soot as if flames had burned here fiercely. But there was no charcoal. Here, too, were innumerable bones. There would have been thousands of skeletons in this walled area if they had been put together. But they were separate. Every bone, no matter how small, had been completely separated from every other bone.
They could be identified, however. These were the bones of people like those who once had owned this golden-metal vehicle. They had died here by thousands. Weapons, bent and ruined, proved that they had died fighting. After death, each body had been exhaustively disjoined and the separate bones scattered utterly without system. And the victors had apparently done nothing else.
Borden knitted his brows as the ground car went on, having perilously skirted around the walls. Jerry seemed to feel that he had wasted time looking. He tried a higher rate of speed. The car yielded it without effort. There seemed to be no limit to the speed at which these remarkable vehicles could travel without vibration or swaying or jolting.
That first fort was perhaps fifty miles behind when Borden's expression changed from harried bewilderment to shock. He stared ahead as the vehicle sped along the geometrically linear highway, wind-swept and free of dust as it was.
He said slowly, "That's right, Jerry. Make as much speed as you can. When you're tired, I'll drive. We've got to catch Sattell before he reaches that white spot. It's possible that more than our lives depend on it...."
They did not catch Sattell, though they drove night and day. Their speed varied from fifteen miles an hour when they crawled over occasionally drifted sand dunes which swallowed the highway, to two hundred miles an hour or better. Borden estimated grimly that they averaged more than a thousand miles per twenty-hour day.
Sattell couldn't have kept that up, so they must have passed him, probably as he slept in some hiding place off a rocky spot in the highway where there would be no trail to guide them to him. But of course the wind might have erased his trail anywhere.
Ellen tried to rest or doze in the back while Jerry or Borden drove on, one resting while the other drove. But after the first day the actual overtaking of Sattell plainly was not Borden's purpose. It was clear that he meant to get ahead of Sattell, to reach the white spot first.
On the second day of their journeying they found a second fort. This also was a structure across the highway, defended from attack in the direction for which they were headed. It had been more carefully built than the other one. This had been more constructed of squared stones, lifted into position by construction engines whose sand-eroded carcasses were still in place.
There also were larger instruments of warfare here, worn away by centuries of exposure to blowing sand. The fort itself had many times been filled with sand and emptied again by the wind. Only under archways were there any signs of soot, as if flames had burned terribly here. Some land cruisers such as the one in which they rode had been destroyed like the one they had seen at the first fort—pulled apart.
Like the other fort this one had not been demolished after its capture. Not even the cranes and weapons had been seized. But the defenders had been completely dismembered. No two bones were ever attached to each other. Rarely had one been broken. None had been gnawed. Some were sand-worn, but each was complete and entirely separate.
And tens of thousands—not merely thousands—had died here. Their bones proved it.
Ellen watched Borden's face as they drove through this fortress.
"Do you know what happened, Dee?" she asked.
"I think so," he said coldly.
"The white spot? It looks as if they had been fighting something that came from there."
"They were," said Borden. "And I don't want Sattell to encounter the thing they were fighting. He knows too much."
She studied his expression. She knew that they were making the top possible speed toward that same white spot from which a heat-ray had been thrown at them. He hadn't explained. Jerry was too diffident to ask. Ellen was not, but something occurred to her suddenly.
"You said, the 'thing'!" she said, startled. "Not creatures or people or anything like that! You said the thing!"
He grimaced, but did not answer her. Instead, he said. "I'll take the tiller, Jerry. We've still got the talkie that Sattell sabotaged, haven't we?"
Jerry nodded and shifted the tiller to him. They'd discovered that the steering gear could be shifted from side to side of the front of the vehicle, so that it could be driven from either the right or left side. On a planet without cities but with highways running thousands of miles to the polar ice-caps, long-distance driving would be the norm. Conveniences for that purpose would be logical. Drivers could relieve each other without difficulty.
"Look it over," commanded Borden. "The logical way to sabotage a talkie would be to throw its capacitances out of balance. No visible sign of damage, but I couldn't find a band it wasn't tuned to. See if that was the trick."
Jerry busied himself as Borden drove on. Here the highway wound through great hills, the color of iron rust and carved by wind and sand into incredibly grotesque shapes. A long trail of swirling dust arose behind the racing cruiser.
Borden said abruptly, "I've been thinking. Check me, will you two? First, I think the people who made this vehicle were much like us. The skeletons proved that. They had families and pets and they made cars like this to travel long distances on highways they'd built from pole to pole. This car uses normal electric power, and its power source is good! So they should have had radio frequency apparatus as well as power. But no radio frequency is being used on this planet. The race that built this car, then, has either changed its culture entirely, or been wiped out."
Jerry said blankly, "You mean, the people in the white spot—"
"Are not, and were not the race that built the roads and made this machine," said Borden. "In fact, we've passed two forts where people like us died by tens of thousands, fighting against something from the white spot. They had long-range weapons, but at the end they were fighting with fire. You saw the soot! It was as if they burned oil by thousands of gallons to hold back something their long-range weapons couldn't stop. Fire is a short-range weapon, though a sun-mirror need not be. But nothing stopped this enemy. Vehicles like this were pulled right in half. That doesn't suggest people. It suggests a thing—something so gigantic and horribly strong that needle beams of flame couldn't stop it, and against which flame seemed a logical weapon to use. It must have been gigantic, because it could pull a land car apart endwise."
Ellen waited. Jerry knitted his brows.
"I'm afraid," Jerry said, "I can't think of anything that would be big and ... I just can't think what they could have been fighting."
"Think of what it wanted," Borden said drily. "It killed the population, wiped them out. Back on Earth, a long, long time ago, Ghenghis Khan led the Mongols to destroy Kharesmia. His soldiers looted the cities. They carried away all the wealth. They murdered the people. Plains were white with the skeletons of the folk they murdered. Do you notice a difference here?"
Jerry said irrelevantly, "You were right about the talkie, sir. Somebody's thrown it all out of tuning. I'll have to match it with the other to make use of it." Then he said painstakingly, "The difference between what you mentioned and the conquerors of the forts is that the loot was left in the forts. Engines and weapons and so on weren't bothered." Then he said in sudden surprise, "But the people weren't left as skeletons! They were all scattered!"
Jerry raised startled eyes from the talkie on which he was working. And suddenly he froze. Borden braked, stopped the car. They had come to a place where shattered ground cars were on the highway, on the sides of the road, everywhere. Here the road ran between monstrous steep-sided hills.
Borden started the car again and drove carefully around half of a vehicle which lay on the highway. Weapons had been mounted in it for shooting through the blister that was like the blister through which he looked in their car.
"There was a battle here, too," he said. "They fought with cars here. Maybe a delaying action to gain time to build the fort we just left. There are bones in these cars, too."
"But what were they fighting, Dee?" Ellen demanded again, uneasily.
Borden drove carefully past the scene of ancient battle—and defeat. He did not answer.
After a time Ellen said, more uneasily still, "Do you mean that whatever they fought against was—going to eat them? It wanted their—bodies?"
"So far as we can tell," said Borden, "it took nothing else. Didn't even want their bones."
He drove on and on. He didn't elaborate. There was no need. A creature which consumed its victims without crushing them or biting them or destroying the structure of their bones! It must simply envelop them. Like an amoeba. A creature which discarded the inedible parts of its prey in separate fragments, without order of position, without selection. That also must be like an amoeba which simply extrudes inedibles through its skin. Ellen swallowed suddenly and her eyes looked haunted.
"Something like a living jelly, Dee," she said slowly. "It would flow along a highway. If you shot it with a needle-ray, it wouldn't stop because it would use the burned parts of its own body as food. You'd think of burning oil as a way to fight it. You'd try to make forts it couldn't climb over. Where would such a thing come from, Dee?"
Borden said drily, "From space. Maybe as a spore of its own deadly race. Or it might be intelligent enough for space-travel. It should be! It knew enough to make a sun-mirror of itself to destroy us! It also knew enough to make itself into straining cables to pull ground cars like this apart to get at the people inside."
Ellen shuddered. "But that must be wrong, Dee! A creature like that would cover a whole planet! It would consume every living thing and become itself the planet's surface or its skin."
"But this planet is mostly desert," Borden reminded her. "It may be that there was just one oasis on which a civilization started. Sun-power was all it had. It would make use of that. It would find the ice-caps at its poles, and build highways to them to haul water to extend itself. Its people would delight in such strangeness as running streams, like the one we saw. If something hellish came out of space, landed, and attacked that oasis, the thing would follow the survivors of its first attacks along the highways by which they retreated. When they built forts, they would congregate in numbers it could not resist attacking. And—"
Jerry glanced up. His face was white, and he looked sick.
"I recall, sir," he murmured, "that you said Sattell knew too much. I believe you guess the 'thing' you are talking about absorbed the knowledge of the people it consumed. Is that right? And if it should absorb more from Sattell, and through him know about us—"
"My guess," said Borden, "is that it knew we were in a space-ship. In one there are always relays working, machines running, things happening—as is always the case where there are humans. Where there are living beings. Such happenings can be detected. I also believe this 'thing' can tell when it can reach the living, and when it can't. When it can reach them, it undoubtedly moves to devour them. When it can't, it tries to destroy them—as it tried with us. That may be because of its own intelligence, or it may be because of the knowledge gained through what it has consumed.
"That's why I don't intend to let Sattell be consumed by it! He knows how theDanaë'sdrive works and how it should be repaired. He knows how to read the log and the maps he stole. Just as a precaution, I'm not going to let that 'thing' in the white spot gain the knowledge that there is a planet called Earth with life all over it, on every continent, and in the deeps of the seas.Ifthe 'thing' in the white spot were to find out that there is such a place, andifit is intelligent enough to wipe out a civilized race on this planet, it might be tempted to take to space again. Or at least to send, say, part of itself!"
VII
Abruptly the wind-carved, rust-colored hills came to an end. The highway curved slightly and reached out toward the horizon. But the horizon was not, now, a mere unending expanse of dunes and desert.
A bare few miles distant, the desert was white. There were no dunes. A vast, vast flat mass of nothing-in-particular, not even raising the level of the ground, reached away and away to this world's edge. It looked remarkably like a space on which a light snowfall had descended, shining in the sunlight until melting should come. The towers of the city in the midst of it also were shimmering white.
But it all was not a completely quiescent whiteness. There were ripplings in it. A pinnacle rose abruptly, and Borden backed the vehicle fiercely as the pinnacle formed a cuplike end of gigantic size, and the interior of that cup turned silvery.
The rust-colored hills blotted out just as a beam of purest flame licked from it to the spot where the ground car had been the moment before. Rocks split and crackled in the heat.
The beam faded. The light vanished.
"So," said Borden matter-of-factly, continuing what he had been saying, as if there had been no interruption, "as long as Sattell is at large, why, we have to kill that 'thing.' I think I know how to do it. With a little overload, I believe that walkie-talkie will do the trick. You see, the 'thing' is terrifically vulnerable, now. It has conquered this planet. It was irresistible. Nothing could stand against it. So it will be easy to kill."
But in that opinion, Borden was mistaken. Living creatures moving toward the white spot should have had no reason to be suspicious. Traveling at high speed along the highway, they should have continued at high speed to the very border of the white spot, at least. More probably they should have entered the white-covered area filled with a mild curiosity as to what made it so white. And of course the white spot—the horror, the protaean protoplasm of which it was composed—would have engulfed them. But the car stopped. And the white spotwasintelligent.
Twenty minutes after the first crackling impact of a heat-beam in the valley, Borden was out of the ground car and moving carefully to peer around a rocky column at the white spot.
Its appearance had changed. There was a rise in the ground level at the edge of the white spot now. The stuff which was the creature itself—which Ellen had aptly called a living jelly—had flowed from other places to form a hillock there. Borden regarded it with suspicion. Obviously, it could send out pseudopods. Amoebae can do that, and he had just seen this thing form a sun-ray projector of itself.
But Borden was not aware of the possibilities of a really protaean substance to take any form it desires.
He saw the pseudopod start out. He was astounded. It did not thrust out. The hillock, the raised-up ground level, suddenly sped out along the highway with an incredible swiftness. He regarded it with a shock that was almost paralyzing.
But not quite. He fled to the car, leaped into it, and sent it racing down the highway at the topmost speed he could coax from it. His face was gray and sweating. His hands shook.
Ellen gasped, "What, Dee? What's happened?"
"The beast," said Borden in an icy voice. "It's after us."
Ellen stared back. And she saw the tip-end of the white-spot's pseudopod as it came racing into the end of the valley through which the highway ran. It was a fifty-foot, shapeless blob of glistening, translucent horror. And it did not thrust out from the parent body. It laid down a carpet of its own substance over which its fifty-foot mass slid swiftly.
An exact, if unimpressive, analogy would be a cake of wet soap, or a mass of grease, sliding over a space it lubricated with its own substance as it flowed, leaving a contact with its starting point as a thin film behind. Or it could be likened to a roll of carpet, speeding forward as it unrolled.
A hillock of glistening jelly, the height of a five-story building, plunged into the valley at forty miles an hour or better. By sheer momentum it flowed up the mountainside, curved, and came sliding back to the highway and on again after the ground car.
But the car was in retreat at over a hundred miles an hour. It reached a hundred and fifty miles an hour. Two hundred.
Borden stopped it five miles down the highway and wiped his forehead.
"Now," he said grimly, "I see why ordinary weapons didn't work against it. The thing is protean, not amoeboid. It isn't only senseless jelly. It has brains!"
He considered, frowning darkly. Then he turned the ground car off the road. He drove it around a dune, and another. It became suddenly possible to see across the desert toward the white mass at the horizon.
There was a ribbon, a road, a highway of whiteness leading toward the city. The five-story-high mass of stuff that had come sweeping toward the car had traveled along the highway, carpeting the rocky surface with its own substance. Now there were new masses of loathesome whiteness surging along the living road. There were billows, surgings, undulations. It was building up for a fresh and irresistible surge.
Across the desert a new pseudopod, a new extension of the white organism, moved with purposeful swiftness. It was somehow like a narrow line of whitecaps moving impossibly over aridness.
"It knows we stopped," Borden said. "It won't attack. It'll act as if baffled—until there's a fresh mass of it behind us. Then it will drive together and catch us in between. Jerry, are you set to try the talkie stuff?"
"Pretty well," sighed Jerry.
The car crawled back to the highway. The waiting mass of jellylike monster was larger. It grew larger every instant, as fresh waves of its protaean substance arrived through the throbbing of the pseudopod back to the oasis.
"Turn on the walkie-talkie," commanded Borden.
Jerry, white and shaken, threw the switch. An invisible beam of micro-waves sped down the valley behind the halted car. It reached the blob of jelly which now was as large as when it had started from the parent mass. The jelly quivered violently. Then it was still.
"Turn it off," ordered Borden. "Why didn't that work?"
Jerry turned off the micro-wave beam. The jelly quivered once more. Borden, watching with keen eyes, said:
"On again."
The pile of jelly quivered a third time, but less violently. The first impact of the micro-wave beam had bothered it, but it had been able to adjust almost instantly. It perceived the micro-waves. That much was certain. But it could adjust to them.
Borden said furiously, "The damned thing can learn! It can think. It is smart as the devil! But if I am right, what it wants more than anything else is not to do anything. It has to be awake when we are near. It can't help itself, but it wants to sleep. We and our micro-waves are like mosquitos buzzing around a man's head. I thought they—"
He stopped short, but after a moment laughed unpleasantly.
"I get it. When it learns a pattern it can disregard it. Living things always act without pattern. So it can't disregard them. But it could disregard an unmodulated beam. Let's see what a modulated one will do. Jerry, the microphone."
When the talkie went on and its beam of micro-waves hit the monstrous, featureless thing, it did not even quiver. Then Borden said into the microphone:
"'Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went—'."
The monstrous mass of ghastly jelly plunged toward him.
Ellen shot the ground car away. Borden's throat contracted. When his voice stopped, the frenzied movement of the horror ceased. It stood trembling in a gigantic, glistening heap. It seemed to wait. Borden considered grimly.
"It could make a sun-mirror now," he decided, "but not a very big one. We'd run away. It doesn't want to chase us away until that other arm of stuff gets behind us. If we run, it will follow. It could follow the original inhabitants of this planet for thousands of miles. Doubtless it would follow us as far.
"And there's always Sattell. We've got to kill it. How? I thought a walkie-talkie beam would irritate it. It can adjust to it. Then I thought, a modulated wave—voice-modulated—would exhaust it. But no. We need something new, right now!"
There was silence. Then Ellen said uneasily:
"Maybe this idea isn't sensible, but could it be that the walkie-talkie beam just wasn't strong enough? It was too much like—like tickling it, arousing its appetite. Maybe if the beam were powerful enough it would be like paralysis."
Borden did not even answer. He hauled at the objects that had been found to be the covers to the power-leads of the vehicle. He and Jerry worked feverishly, without words. Then Borden stood up.
"This time we are really risking everything," he said grimly. "The full power of the car's power source goes into the beam. If a walkie-talkie beam was appetizing, this ought to curl its hair. Switch, Jerry! Microphone on!"
VIII
Some hundreds of kilowatts of power in modulated-wave form would go out now into the body of a creature whose normal sensory reception centers would be accustomed to handling minute fractions of one watt. The talkie could handle the power, of course. With cold-emission oscillators, there was no danger of burning out a wave-generating unit.
"'—the lamb was sure to go,'" said Borden.
The two-mile distant mass of horrid jelly began to quiver uncontrollably. But without any purpose at all. Borden said with a terrible satisfaction:
"'It followed her to school one day, which was against the rule. It made the children laugh and play to see the lamb at school.'"
The shapeless mass of living stuff made tortured upheavals. It flung up spires of glistening stuff. It writhed. It contorted. It flung itself crazily against the hillsides.
"''Twas brillig,'" said Borden, "'and the slithy toves, did gyre and gymbal in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe.'"
The jelly fled. It flowed back upon the carpet of its own substance on which it had been able to move with such ghastly speed. It flowed down from a mound to a flattened thickening of the pseudopod which had thrown itself at the car.
That pseudopod flowed away upon itself. It fled. It raced frantically to be gone from a beam of micro-waves whose pattern was not fixed, which varied unpredictably from instant to instant as sound waves changed it from something the white-spot being could disregard to something which did not promise food, and which could not be ignored.
The white-spot creature was tormented. Its instincts said that what was not patterned was life. Its intelligence said that this was not life—not life in quantity proportional to the stimulus, it yielded, anyhow. The modulated micro-waves impressed its consciousness as a steam whistle at his ear impresses a man. The sensation was intolerable. It was maddening.
In less than an hour, Borden had returned to the end of the valley and was beaming micro-waves at the white spot across the few miles of desert in between. He was beginning to be weary now, and his memory for recitative verse was running thin.
"Take over and keep talking, Ellen," he said into the microphone. He handed it to her.
Ellen said steadily. "I don't know how this is doing what it does, but—'My name is John Wellington Wells, I'm a dealer in magic and spells, in hexes and curses and ever-filled purses and witches and crickets and elves.' I've got this wrong somehow, Dee, but tell me what it is and I'll try to keep on."
Borden said, "I'd rather not tell you. It would overhear. I think, though, that it's moving away. The white stuff is drawing back!"
And it was true. The whiteness which had been beyond the desert was withdrawing. The pseudopod—a misnomer, because in this case the word should have been something else—the extension which had come to destroy the humans had long since withdrawn. The formless ground-covering was gathering itself into a mass, and that mass was moving away.
There was a dark space visible. It was ground—humus, oasis soil—which had been covered by the unspeakable organism which centuries since had conquered this planet.
"I'd chase it," Borden said somberly, "only I'm not sure it couldn't get itself together and make a sun-mirror. We'll wait till nightfall."
"But what are we doing to it?" demanded Ellen.
Jerry was at the microphone now, going through theSonnets From the Portuguese, while the living jelly at the edge of the world quivered and fled in shaking revulsion.
"The thing's alive," said Borden. "And it can't help receiving all sorts of impressions. Like any other organism, it learns to disregard any impression it receives that it can anticipate or classify. We don't hear a clock ticking. If we live near a noisy street, we don't hear traffic. But we wake if a door squeaks. That—white spot can disregard the electric waves of lightning. It can disregard sunshine. But it can't disregard things it can't fit into a pattern. It has to pay attention. And I'm giving it the kind of unpatterned signals that normally mean living things. Continuous, nonrepeat patterns of stimulation. And—they're too strong for the devilish thing."
Ellen said doubtfully, "Too strong?"
"You touch people to call their attention. If you touch them too hard, it isn't a touch but a blow, and you can knock them down. That's what I'm giving this thing. It has the quality of a signal the spot can't ignore, and the force of a blow. It should have the psychological effect of thousands of bells of intolerable volume—only worse. But we've got to keep on with the stimulus. And we mustn't repeat, or it might be able to get used to the pattern."
"I'll talk to it in French," said Ellen. "But it doesn't seem to me that a walkie-talkie could be too strong for—"
"It's hooked to the car's power system," Borden told her. "Jerry set it up and connected it just before he began to recite poetry. There are several kilowatts of radiation going to the thing now, and all of it is attention-holding radiation."
When night fell and the use of a sun-mirror was patently impossible, Borden moved on the highway toward what had been the white spot. The walkie-talkie sent on its waves ahead.
Ellen recited, "La fourmi et la cigale" from second-year French. Borden was more or less ready to take on from there with what he remembered of Shakespeare.
They reached the end of the desert and all about them there was the moist ground of the oasis which once had been the center of a civilization. Presently they moved into the deserted, emptied buildings of a city.
Borden said, "This civilization will be worth studying!"
They went on and on and on, talking endlessly, and driving the entity which had conquered a planet by painstakingly recalled sections of Mother Goose, and by haphazard recollections of ancient history, the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, and the care and feeding of domestic cats.
When dawn came, Borden was speaking rather hoarsely into the microphone, and the creature was plainly in sight before them. It writhed and struggled spasmodically. It flung masses of itself insanely about. It knitted itself into intricate spires and pinnacles, with far-flung bridges, which shuddered and dissolved.
The sun rose, and the thing should have been able to destroy them. But it could not. It still writhed. It still shuddered. It twisted in monstrous, weary, lunatic gyrations. Ellen regarded it with eyes of loathing.
"It acts like it's gone mad," she said in revulsion.
"It may have," said Borden. "It's certainly exhausted. But we're getting pretty tired, too." He said into the microphone, "You probably don't understand this that I'm saying, any more then you understand any of the rest. But you had this coming to you."
He handed the microphone to Jerry, who had suddenly remembered an oration,Spartacus to the Gladiators. Jerry began to recite it.
But the writhings of the mountainous mass of jelly became more terribly weary, more quiveringly effortful. There came a time when it quivered only very, very faintly. Those quiverings ceased.
"I think it's dead, sir," said Jerry.
Borden snapped off the walkie-talkie. He snapped it on again. The horrible, half-cubic-mile of jelly did not flinch.
Borden said drily, "Abracadabra, hocus pocus, e pluribus unum."
There was no sign of life in the thing. He watched grimly for any sign of returning activity. By noon, though, it could be seen that the ghastly mass of once-living substance was changing. It was liquefying. There were rills of an unpleasant fluid forming on its glossy flanks, to run down and flow and flow away into the desert to be dried up.
"I don't think we'll want to be around for the next few weeks," Borden said heavily. "We'll go back and fix up the ship."
Then Ellen mentioned Sattell's name for the first time in days.
"How about Sattell?"
"We outran him on the way here," Borden said moodily. "But I think he'll come on. He'll want to find out if we're dead. Not knowing what the thing—the white spot—was, I think he'll figure that either we'll be sent back with help, or killed. If he gets to where he can see the white spot, and we haven't started back with friends, he'll be sure we're dead. Then he'll go back and start to fix up the ship himself. I think we'll meet him on the way."
And they did. The second day out from what was now an oasis instead of a white spot, they saw Sattell's car headed in their direction as a moving gleam of golden reflected sunlight.
Jerry ran their car off the road to a hiding place behind a dune. He and Borden took posts behind the sand dune's tip. Sattell came racing at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, raising a long plume of sand dust behind him.
Borden and Jerry fired together—two thin pencil rods of flame from the golden-metal weapons. Sattell's ground car ran past them, crossing the highway just a foot from the rock. The treads of the car disintegrated. The car sped on, slid, and rolled clumsily, three separate times. Then it stopped.
The oval side window turned and Sattell came crawling out. He had a golden-metal weapon now. He must have searched feverishly in the shambles of one of the two forts to find a weapon that still would operate. He swung it frenziedly in their direction. He ran toward them, screaming hate. He stumbled.
His weapon was firing, but the fire was short. He fell on it. Into its flame.
And the ship's log and the star maps were in the ground car Borden and Jerry had disabled.
It was more than a month later when theDanaë, completely overhauled and refueled, and with the product of Ellen's agriculture stored carefully away, hovered cautiously over what had been the white spot. At last they descended into the central square of the city that once had been the center of a civilization.
The three of them spent a day examining that city. They found things they could not understand, and things at which they smiled, and things that were quite marvelous. Every civilization makes some discoveries that others miss, and misses some that others take for granted. There would be useful items in this civilization, when humans landed here and examined the remains.
"I think," Ellen said, to Borden, "that you mean to come back."
Borden nodded, frowning a little.
"No rational natives," he said, "and eighteen thousand square miles of oasis. It would make a rather wonderful place in which to live—with that city and that civilization to study. Will you mind?"
Ellen laughed. She held out her hand. There were capsules in it.
"I've been planting more seeds," she said, "so there'll be Earth-type vegetation here when we get back."
"And Jerry?"
Jerry said bashfully, "There's a girl.... If I can organize a group to make a settlement here, I think I'll be back."
"Then we'll be back," said Borden. "And next time we'll bring some of our furry friends down from the ice-cap and really find out what it means to settle down and live here."
And then theDanaëclimbed for the stars and started back home.