Part 4

"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!"

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 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 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 the _Sonnets 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 the _Danaë_, 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 the _Danaë_ climbed for the stars and started back home.