Ellen recited, "La fourmi et la cigale" from second-year French. Borden was more or less ready to take on from there with what he remembered of Shakespeare.
They reached the end of the desert and all about them there was the moist ground of the oasis which once had been the center of a civilization. Presently they moved into the deserted, emptied buildings of a city.
Borden said, "This civilization will be worth studying!"
They went on and on and on, talking endlessly, and driving the entity which had conquered a planet by painstakingly recalled sections of Mother Goose, and by haphazard recollections of ancient history, the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, and the care and feeding of domestic cats.
When dawn came, Borden was speaking rather hoarsely into the microphone, and the creature was plainly in sight before them. It writhed and struggled spasmodically. It flung masses of itself insanely about. It knitted itself into intricate spires and pinnacles, with far-flung bridges, which shuddered and dissolved.
The sun rose, and the thing should have been able to destroy them. But it could not. It still writhed. It still shuddered. It twisted in monstrous, weary, lunatic gyrations. Ellen regarded it with eyes of loathing.
"It acts like it's gone mad," she said in revulsion.
"It may have," said Borden. "It's certainly exhausted. But we're getting pretty tired, too." He said into the microphone, "You probably don't understand this that I'm saying, any more then you understand any of the rest. But you had this coming to you."
He handed the microphone to Jerry, who had suddenly remembered an oration, Spartacus to the Gladiators. Jerry began to recite it.