"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!"