Ellen stared back. And she saw the tip-end of the white-spot's pseudopod as it came racing into the end of the valley through which the highway ran. It was a fifty-foot, shapeless blob of glistening, translucent horror. And it did not thrust out from the parent body. It laid down a carpet of its own substance over which its fifty-foot mass slid swiftly.
An exact, if unimpressive, analogy would be a cake of wet soap, or a mass of grease, sliding over a space it lubricated with its own substance as it flowed, leaving a contact with its starting point as a thin film behind. Or it could be likened to a roll of carpet, speeding forward as it unrolled.
A hillock of glistening jelly, the height of a five-story building, plunged into the valley at forty miles an hour or better. By sheer momentum it flowed up the mountainside, curved, and came sliding back to the highway and on again after the ground car.
But the car was in retreat at over a hundred miles an hour. It reached a hundred and fifty miles an hour. Two hundred.
Borden stopped it five miles down the highway and wiped his forehead.
"Now," he said grimly, "I see why ordinary weapons didn't work against it. The thing is protean, not amoeboid. It isn't only senseless jelly. It has brains!"
He considered, frowning darkly. Then he turned the ground car off the road. He drove it around a dune, and another. It became suddenly possible to see across the desert toward the white mass at the horizon.
There was a ribbon, a road, a highway of whiteness leading toward the city. The five-story-high mass of stuff that had come sweeping toward the car had traveled along the highway, carpeting the rocky surface with its own substance. Now there were new masses of loathesome whiteness surging along the living road. There were billows, surgings, undulations. It was building up for a fresh and irresistible surge.
Across the desert a new pseudopod, a new extension of the white organism, moved with purposeful swiftness. It was somehow like a narrow line of whitecaps moving impossibly over aridness.