"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 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!"