“I hope so,” said Woodin yawningly. “Then we’ll see just how good your eyesight is from a mile up, and whether you’ve yanked two respectable scientists up here for nothing.”
Later as he lay in his blankets in the little tent, listening to Gray and Ross snore and looking sleepily out at the glowing fire embers, Woodin wondered again about that. What had Ross actually seen in that fleeting glimpse from his speeding plane? Something queer, Woodin was sure of that, so sure that he’d come on this hard trip to find it. But what exactly?
Not protoplasmic things such as he described. That couldn’t be, of course. Or could it? If things like that had existed once, why couldn’t they—couldn’t they—?
Woodin didn’t know he’d been sleeping until he was awakened by Gray’s cry. It wasn’t a nice cry, it was the hoarse yell of someone suddenly assaulted by bone-freezing terror.
He opened his eyes at that cry to see the Incredible looming against the stars in the open door of the tent. A dark, amorphous mass humped there in the opening, glistening all over in the starlight, and gliding into the tent. Behind it were others like it.
Things happened very quickly then. They seemed to Woodin to happen not consecutively but in a succession of swift, clicking scenes like the successive pictures of a motion picture film.
Gray’s pistol roared red flame at the first viscous monster entering the tent, and the momentary flash showed the looming, glistening bulk of the thing, and Gray’s panic-frozen face, and Ross clawing in his blankets for his pistol.
THEN THAT SCENE was over and instantly there was another one, Gray and Ross both stiffening suddenly as though petrified, both falling heavily over. Woodin knew they were both dead now, but didn’t know how he knew it. The glistening monsters were coming on into the tent.
He ripped up the wall of the tent and plunged out into the cold starlight of the clearing. He ran three steps, he didn’t know in what direction, and then he stopped. He didn’t know why he stopped dead, but he did.
He stood there, his brain desperately urging his limbs to fly, but his limbs would not obey. He couldn’t even turn, could not move a muscle of his body. He stood, his face toward the starlit gleam of the river, stricken by a strange and utter paralysis.
Woodin heard rustling, gliding movements in the tent behind him. Now from behind, there came into the line of his vision several of the glistening things. They were gathering around him, a dozen of them it seemed, and he now could see them quite clearly.
They weren’t nightmares, no. They were real as real, poised here around him, humped, amorphous masses of viscous, translucent jelly. Each was about four feet tall and three in diameter, though their shapes kept constantly changing slightly, making dimensions hard to guess.
At the center of each translucent mass was a dark, disk-like blob or nucleus. There was nothing else to the creatures, no limbs or sense-organs. He saw that they could protrude pseudopods, though, for two, who held the bodies of Gray and Ross in such tentacles, were now bringing them out and laying them down beside Woodin.
Woodin, still quite unable to move a muscle, could see the frozen, twisted faces of the two men, and could see the pistols still gripped in their dead hands. And then as he looked on Ross’s face he remembered.
The things the aviator had seen from his plane, the jelly-creatures the three had come north to search for, they were the monsters around him! But how had they killed Ross and Gray, how were they holding him petrified like this, who were they?
“We will permit you to move, but you must not try to escape.”
Woodin’s dazed brain numbed further with wonder. Who had said those words to him? He had heard nothing, yet he had thought he heard.
“We will let you move but you must not attempt to escape or harm us.”
He did hear those words in his mind, even though his ears heard no sound. And now his brain heard more.
“We are speaking to you by transference of thought impulses. Have you sufficient mentality to understand us?”
Minds? Minds in these things? Woodin was shaken by the thought as he stared at the glistening monsters.
His thought apparently had reached them. “Of course we have minds,” came the thought answer into his brain. “We are going to let you move now, but do not try to flee.”
“I—I won’t try,” Woodin told himself mentally.
At once the paralysis that held him abruptly lifted. He stood there in the circle of the glistening monsters, his hands and body trembling violently.
There were ten of them, he saw now. Ten monstrous, humped masses of shining, translucent jelly, gathered around him like cowled and faceless genii come from some haunt of the unknown. One stood closer to him than the others, apparently spokesman and leader.
Woodin looked slowly around their circle, then down at his two dead companions. In the midst of the unfamiliar terrors that froze his soul, he felt a sudden aching pity as he looked down at them.
Came another strong thought into Woodin’s mind from the creature closest him. “We did not wish to kill them, we came here simply to capture and communicate with the three of you.
“But when we sensed that they were trying to kill us, we slew quickly. You, who did not try to kill us but fled, we harmed not.”
“What—what do you want with us, with me?” Woodin asked. He whispered it through dry lips, as well as thinking it.
There was no mental answer this time. The things stood unmoving, a silent ring of brooding, unearthly figures. Woodin felt his mind snapping under the strain of silence and he asked the question again, screamed it.
This time the mental answer came. “I did not answer, because I was probing your mentality to ascertain whether you are of sufficient intelligence to comprehend our ideas.
“While your mind seems of an exceptionally low order, it seems possible that it can appreciate enough of what we wish to convey to understand us.
“Before beginning, however, I warn you again that it is quite impossible for you to escape or to harm any of us and that attempts to do so will result disastrously for you. It is apparent you know nothing of mental energy, so I will inform you that your two fellow-creatures were killed by the sheer power of our wills, and that your muscles were held unresponsive to your brain’s commands by the same power. By our mental energy we could completely annihilate your body, if we chose.”
THERE WAS A pause, and in that little space of silence, Woodin’s dazed brain clutched desperately for sanity, for steadiness.
Then came again that mental voice that seemed so like a real voice speaking in his brain.
“We are children of a galaxy whose name, as nearly as it can be approximated in your tongue, is Arctar. The galaxy of Arctar lies so many million light-years from this galaxy that it is far around the curve of the sphere of the three-dimensional cosmos.
“We came to dominance in that galaxy long ages ago. For we were creatures who could utilize our mental energy for transport, for physical power, for producing almost any effect we required. Because of this we rapidly conquered and colonized that galaxy, traveling from sun to sun without need of any vehicle.
“Having brought all the matter of the galaxy Arctar under our control, we looked out upon the realms beyond. There are approximately a thousand million galaxies in the three-dimensional cosmos, and it seemed fitting to us that we should colonize them all so that all the matter in the cosmos should in time be brought under our control.