But the resting week was sacred.
“I really wouldn’t bother you for anything small,” Conners said apologetically. “But that damned rock melted two inches off my spade.”
Micheals opened both eyes and sat up. Conners held out the spade. The rounded end was sheared cleanly off. Micheals swung himself off the couch and slipped his feet into battered moccasins.
“Let’s see this wonder,” he said.
* * * *
The object was lying in the ditch at the end of the front lawn, three feet from the main road. It was round, about the size of a truck tire, and solid throughout. It was about an inch thick, as far as he could tell, grayish black and intricately veined.
“Don’t touch it,” Conners warned.
“I’m not going to. Let me have your spade.” Micheals took the spade and prodded the object experimentally. It was completely unyielding. He held the spade to the surface for a moment, then withdrew it. Another inch was gone.
Micheals frowned, and pushed his glasses tighter against his nose. He held the spade against the rock with one hand, the other held close to the surface. More of the spade disappeared.
“Doesn’t seem to be generating heat,” he said to Conners. “Did you notice any the first time?”
Conners shook his head.
Micheals picked up a clod of dirt and tossed it on the object. The dirt dissolved quickly, leaving no trace on the gray-black surface. A large stone followed the dirt, and disappeared in the same way.
“Isn’t that just about the damnedest thing you ever saw, Professor?” Conners asked.
“Yes,” Micheals agreed, standing up again. “It just about is.”
He hefted the spade and brought it down smartly on the object. When it hit, he almost dropped the spade. He had been gripping the handle rigidly, braced for a recoil. But the spade struck that unyielding surface and stayed. There was no perceptible give, but absolutely no recoil.
“Whatcha think it is?” Conners asked.
“It’s no stone,” Micheals said. He stepped back. “A leech drinks blood. This thing seems to be drinking dirt. And spades.” He struck it a few more times, experimentally. The two men looked at each other. On the road, half a dozen Army trucks rolled past.
“I’m going to phone the college and ask a physics man about it,” Micheals said. “Or a biologist. I’d like to get rid of that thing before it spoils my lawn.”
They walked back to the house.
* * * *
Everything fed the leech. The wind added its modicum of kinetic energy, ruffling across the gray-black surface. Rain fell, and the force of each individual drop added to its store. The water was sucked in by the all-absorbing surface.
The sunlight above it was absorbed, and converted into mass for its body. Beneath it, the soil was consumed, dirt, stones and branches broken down by the leech’s complex cells and changed into energy. Energy was converted back into mass, and the leech grew.
Slowly, the first flickers of consciousness began to return. Its first realization was of the impossible smallness of its body.
It grew.
* * * *
WHEN Micheals looked the next day, the leech was eight feet across, sticking out into the road and up the side of the lawn. The following day it was almost eighteen feet in diameter, shaped to fit the contour of the ditch, and covering most of the road. That day the sheriff drove up in his model A, followed by half the town.
“Is that your leech thing, Professor Micheals?” Sheriff Flynn asked.
“That’s it,” Micheals said. He had spent the past days looking unsuccessfully for an acid that would dissolve the leech.
“We gotta get it out of the road,” Flynn said, walking truculently up to the leech. “Something like this, you can’t let it block the road, Professor. The Army’s gotta use this road.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” Micheals said with a straight face. “Go right ahead, Sheriff. But be careful. It’s hot.” The leech wasn’t hot, but it seemed the simplest explanation under the circumstances.
Micheals watched with interest as the sheriff tried to shove a crowbar under it. He smiled to himself when it was removed with half a foot of its length gone.
The sheriff wasn’t so easily discouraged. He had come prepared for a stubborn piece of rock. He went to the rumble seat of his car and took out a blowtorch and a sledgehammer, ignited the torch and focused it on one edge of the leech.
After five minutes, there was no change. The gray didn’t turn red or even seem to heat up. Sheriff Flynn continued to bake it for fifteen minutes, then called to one of the men.
“Hit that spot with the sledge, Jerry.”
Jerry picked up the sledgehammer, motioned the sheriff back, and swung it over his head. He let out a howl as the hammer struck unyieldingly. There wasn’t a fraction of recoil.
In the distance they heard the roar of an Army convoy.
“Now we’ll get some action,” Flynn said.
* * * *
Micheals wasn’t so sure. He walked around the periphery of the leech, asking himself what kind of substance would react that way. The answer was easy—no substance. No known substance.
The driver in the lead jeep held up his hand, and the long convoy ground to a halt. A hard, efficient-looking officer stepped out of the jeep. From the star on either shoulder, Micheals knew he was a brigadier general.
“You can’t block this road,” the general said. He was a tall, spare man in suntans, with a sunburned face and cold eyes. “Please clear that thing away.”
“We can’t move it,” Micheals said. He told the general what had happened in the past few days.
“It must be moved,” the general said. “This convoy must go through.” He walked closer and looked at the leech. “You say it can’t be jacked up by a crowbar? A torch won’t burn it?”
“That’s right,” Micheals said, smiling faintly.
“Driver,” the general said over his shoulder. “Ride over it.”
Micheals started to protest, but stopped himself. The military mind would have to find out in its own way.
The driver put his jeep in gear and shot forward, jumping the leech’s four-inch edge. The jeep got to the center of the leech and stopped.
“I didn’t tell you to stop!” the general bellowed.
“I didn’t, sir!” the driver protested.
The jeep had been yanked to a stop and had stalled. The driver started it again, shifted to four-wheel drive, and tried to ram forward. The jeep was fixed immovably, as though set in concrete.
“Pardon me,” Micheals said. “If you look, you can see that the tires are melting down.”
The general stared, his hand creeping automatically toward his pistol belt. Then he shouted, “Jump, driver! Don’t touch that gray stuff.”
White-faced, the driver climbed to the hood of his jeep, looked around him, and jumped clear.
There was complete silence as everyone watched the jeep. First its tires melted down, and then the rims. The body, resting on the gray surface, melted, too.
The aerial was the last to go.
The general began to swear softly under his breath. He turned to the driver. “Go back and have some men bring up hand grenades and dynamite.”
The driver ran back to the convoy.
“I don’t know what you’ve got here,” the general said. “But it’s not going to stop a U.S. Army convoy.”
Micheals wasn’t so sure.
* * * *
The leech was nearly awake now, and its body was calling for more and more food. It dissolved the soil under it at a furious rate, filling it in with its own body, flowing outward.
A large object landed on it, and that became food also. Then suddenly—
A burst of energy against its surface, and then another, and another. It consumed them gratefully, converting them into mass. Little metal pellets struck it, and their kinetic energy was absorbed, their mass converted. More explosions took place, helping to fill the starving cells.