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.