Vic Arlen gasped.
"Protoplasm! Inanimate protoplasm!"
He forgot he had been nauseated by the slime a moment before and began to examine the stuff closely. Of course, it was protoplasm, it couldn't be anything else. Vic Arlen had studied it. He knew. Nothing could hold water granules in suspension in exactly the same way; nothing had the same baffling construction.
But there was a question: scientists admitted life could not exist without protoplasm, but could protoplasm exist without life?
In living protoplasm, death alters the structure. But other processes than life could, conceivably, preserve the stability of the substance. This would explain the existence of inanimate protoplasm on Venus.
And why didn't inanimate protoplasm exist on the earth? Arlen thought for a moment and had the answer for that too. Animal life lives on protoplasm, as well as being protoplasm itself. Animate protoplasm can reproduce its kind, but the inanimate kind can neither fight back nor replace its losses. The inanimate protoplasm on the earth had disappeared with the appearance of the first animal life. The coming of the first microbes had caused it to "decay."
If protoplasm existed on the face of Venus it meant there were no bacteria, no germs of any sort—no life!
How could Arlen explain Gheal without evolution from the simple to the complex? Was evolution working differently on Venus? Again Arlen had run up a blind alley.
The campfire cast a flickering red glow against the clouds. In spots above the skies were tinted with other glows from the craters of Venusian volcanoes. It was not absolutely dark, but it was far from being as light as a moonlit night on the earth.