Chapter VI

Some ten miles farther on they came to the first of the forts, a great, towering structure of rocks piled together across the road. It was a parapet sixty feet high, enclosing a square of space. In sheltered places among the rocks there was a vast amount of soot as if flames had burned here fiercely. But there was no charcoal. Here, too, were innumerable bones. There would have been thousands of skeletons in this walled area if they had been put together. But they were separate. Every bone, no matter how small, had been completely separated from every other bone.

They could be identified, however. These were the bones of people like those who once had owned this golden-metal vehicle. They had died here by thousands. Weapons, bent and ruined, proved that they had died fighting. After death, each body had been exhaustively disjoined and the separate bones scattered utterly without system. And the victors had apparently done nothing else.

Borden knitted his brows as the ground car went on, having perilously skirted around the walls. Jerry seemed to feel that he had wasted time looking. He tried a higher rate of speed. The car yielded it without effort. There seemed to be no limit to the speed at which these remarkable vehicles could travel without vibration or swaying or jolting.

That first fort was perhaps fifty miles behind when Borden's expression changed from harried bewilderment to shock. He stared ahead as the vehicle sped along the geometrically linear highway, wind-swept and free of dust as it was.

He said slowly, "That's right, Jerry. Make as much speed as you can. When you're tired, I'll drive. We've got to catch Sattell before he reaches that white spot. It's possible that more than our lives depend on it...."

They did not catch Sattell, though they drove night and day. Their speed varied from fifteen miles an hour when they crawled over occasionally drifted sand dunes which swallowed the highway, to two hundred miles an hour or better. Borden estimated grimly that they averaged more than a thousand miles per twenty-hour day.

Sattell couldn't have kept that up, so they must have passed him, probably as he slept in some hiding place off a rocky spot in the highway where there would be no trail to guide them to him. But of course the wind might have erased his trail anywhere.

Ellen tried to rest or doze in the back while Jerry or Borden drove on, one resting while the other drove. But after the first day the actual overtaking of Sattell plainly was not Borden's purpose. It was clear that he meant to get ahead of Sattell, to reach the white spot first.

On the second day of their journeying they found a second fort. This also was a structure across the highway, defended from attack in the direction for which they were headed. It had been more carefully built than the other one. This had been more constructed of squared stones, lifted into position by construction engines whose sand-eroded carcasses were still in place.

There also were larger instruments of warfare here, worn away by centuries of exposure to blowing sand. The fort itself had many times been filled with sand and emptied again by the wind. Only under archways were there any signs of soot, as if flames had burned terribly here. Some land cruisers such as the one in which they rode had been destroyed like the one they had seen at the first fort--pulled apart.

Like the other fort this one had not been demolished after its capture. Not even the cranes and weapons had been seized. But the defenders had been completely dismembered. No two bones were ever attached to each other. Rarely had one been broken. None had been gnawed. Some were sand-worn, but each was complete and entirely separate.

And tens of thousands--not merely thousands--had died here. Their bones proved it.

* * * * *

Ellen watched Borden's face as they drove through this fortress.

"Do you know what happened, Dee?" she asked.

"I think so," he said coldly.

"The white spot? It looks as if they had been fighting something that came from there."

"They were," said Borden. "And I don't want Sattell to encounter the thing they were fighting. He knows too much."

She studied his expression. She knew that they were making the top possible speed toward that same white spot from which a heat-ray had been thrown at them. He hadn't explained. Jerry was too diffident to ask. Ellen was not, but something occurred to her suddenly.

"You said, the 'thing'!" she said, startled. "Not creatures or people or anything like that! You said the thing!"

He grimaced, but did not answer her. Instead, he said. "I'll take the tiller, Jerry. We've still got the talkie that Sattell sabotaged, haven't we?"

Jerry nodded and shifted the tiller to him. They'd discovered that the steering gear could be shifted from side to side of the front of the vehicle, so that it could be driven from either the right or left side. On a planet without cities but with highways running thousands of miles to the polar ice-caps, long-distance driving would be the norm. Conveniences for that purpose would be logical. Drivers could relieve each other without difficulty.

"Look it over," commanded Borden. "The logical way to sabotage a talkie would be to throw its capacitances out of balance. No visible sign of damage, but I couldn't find a band it wasn't tuned to. See if that was the trick."

Jerry busied himself as Borden drove on. Here the highway wound through great hills, the color of iron rust and carved by wind and sand into incredibly grotesque shapes. A long trail of swirling dust arose behind the racing cruiser.

Borden said abruptly, "I've been thinking. Check me, will you two? First, I think the people who made this vehicle were much like us. The skeletons proved that. They had families and pets and they made cars like this to travel long distances on highways they'd built from pole to pole. This car uses normal electric power, and its power source is good! So they should have had radio frequency apparatus as well as power. But no radio frequency is being used on this planet. The race that built this car, then, has either changed its culture entirely, or been wiped out."

Jerry said blankly, "You mean, the people in the white spot--"

"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!"