Ross was staring thoughtfully into the fire. "It does seem wonderful the way you tell it. One species changing into another, going higher all the time-"
Gray stood up by the fire and stretched. "Well, you two can wonder over it, but this crass materialist is going to emulate his remote invertebrate ancestors and return to a prostrate position. In other words, I'm going to bed."
He looked at Ross, a doubtful grin on his young blond face, and said, "No hard feelings now, feller?"
"Forget it." The aviator grinned back. "The paddling was hard today and you fellows did look mighty skeptical. But you'll see! Tomorrow we'll be at the fork of the Little Whale and then I'll bet we won't scout an hour before we run across those jelly-creatures."
"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.