“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 that 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 icecaps 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 the Danaë’s drive 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. If the ‘thing’ in the white spot were to find out that there is such a place, and if it 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!”
CHAPTER 7
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 w
ith a mild curiosity as to what made it so white. And of course the white spot—the horror, the protean protoplasm of which it was composed—would have engulfed them. But the car stopped. And the white spot was intelligent.
* * * *
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 protean 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 loathsome 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 microwaves 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 microwave 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 microwave beam had bothered it, but it had been able to adjust almost instantly. It perceived the microwaves. That much was certain. But it could adjust to them.
Borden said furiously, “The 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 microwaves 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 microwaves 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 it 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. “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!”
CHAPTER 8
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 gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogoves, 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 microwaves 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 microwaves 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 microwaves 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.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 115
