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."