"''Twas brillig,'" said Borden, "'and the slithy toves, did gyre and gymbal in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe.'"
The jelly fled. It flowed back upon the carpet of its own substance on which it had been able to move with such ghastly speed. It flowed down from a mound to a flattened thickening of the pseudopod which had thrown itself at the car.
That pseudopod flowed away upon itself. It fled. It raced frantically to be gone from a beam of micro-waves whose pattern was not fixed, which varied unpredictably from instant to instant as sound waves changed it from something the white-spot being could disregard to something which did not promise food, and which could not be ignored.
The white-spot creature was tormented. Its instincts said that what was not patterned was life. Its intelligence said that this was not life—not life in quantity proportional to the stimulus, it yielded, anyhow. The modulated micro-waves impressed its consciousness as a steam whistle at his ear impresses a man. The sensation was intolerable. It was maddening.
In less than an hour, Borden had returned to the end of the valley and was beaming micro-waves at the white spot across the few miles of desert in between. He was beginning to be weary now, and his memory for recitative verse was running thin.
"Take over and keep talking, Ellen," he said into the microphone. He handed it to her.
Ellen said steadily. "I don't know how this is doing what it does, but—'My name is John Wellington Wells, I'm a dealer in magic and spells, in hexes and curses and ever-filled purses and witches and crickets and elves.' I've got this wrong somehow, Dee, but tell me what it is and I'll try to keep on."
Borden said, "I'd rather not tell you. It would overhear. I think, though, that it's moving away. The white stuff is drawing back!"
And it was true. The whiteness which had been beyond the desert was withdrawing. The pseudopod—a misnomer, because in this case the word should have been something else—the extension which had come to destroy the humans had long since withdrawn. The formless ground-covering was gathering itself into a mass, and that mass was moving away.
There was a dark space visible. It was ground—humus, oasis soil—which had been covered by the unspeakable organism which centuries since had conquered this planet.