Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward, toward the monster's head.
He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back, of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that had kept him doggedly plodding forward.
Again he lay half conscious, in a lethargy that unchecked must grow steadily deeper until death. Isolated thoughts floated through his head. It occurred to him that he was now ideally located to conduct the experiments necessary to prove his theory of how to destroy the monsters—if only someone had had the foresight to build a biological laboratory on the monster's back. Of course the rolling motion would create special problems of technique.... Idiocy.... Once more he seemed to glimpse Sutton's face, as the biologist calmly made that grisly report to the President's Committee on Extermination.... Sutton's prediction had been a hundred percent correct. The monsters' hunger knew no halt until they had absorbed into themselves all the organic material on the world which was their prey.... And men must starve, as he was starving now....
With a struggle Westover roused himself, first sitting up, then swaying to his feet, frowning with the effort to look sanely at the terrible inspiration that had come to him. The cloud blanket was breaking up, the sun already high, beating down on the naked moving plateau on which the man stood. The idea born in him seemed to stand that light, even to expand into hope.
Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide.
The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath. Clawing and hewing in the hole he had made, he tore out heavy slabs of the monster's flesh.
A ripple that did not belong to the crawling motion ran over the thing's surface round about. Westover laughed wildly with a sudden sense of power. He, the insignificant human mite, had made the miles-long beast twitch like a flea-bitten dog.
The analogy was pat; like a flea, he had lodged on a larger animal and was about to nourish himself from it. The slabs of flesh he had cut off were gray and unappetizing, but he knew from the studies he had helped Sutton make that the monsters, extraterrestrial though they were, were in the basic chemistry of proteins, fats and carbohydrates one with man or the amoeba, and therefore might be—food.
His matches were dry in their water-proof case; he made a smoldering fire from the loose fibrous scale of the monster's back, and half an hour later was replete. Either the long fast, or involuntary revulsion, or perhaps merely the motion of the creature brought on nausea, but he fought it sternly back and succeeded in keeping his strange meal down. Then he was tormented by thirst. It was some time, though, before he could bring himself to drink the colorless fluid that had collected in the wound he had inflicted on the monster.