The thing was a great blob of gelatinous substance that quivered and shook as it approached the land. Val Kenton fired twice more, gaped in incredulous surprise when the atomic fire did absolutely nothing in the way of stopping it.
He backed slowly from the water's edge, the other men moving backward as though by common consent; and they stopped only when their shoulders touched the ship.
The sea-thing was almost at the beach now. It halted its forward movement momentarily; and a pseudopod flicked from its glowing surface and settled over the shattered body of a great crab. One second the pseudopod settled there, and then was withdrawn with incredible speed.
And where the crab had been was nothing.
"Protoplasm!" Johnson gasped, "it's living protoplasm!"
Val Kenton felt a dull horror clutching at his heart. He had seen experiments with tiny bits of living protoplasm, and he knew the insatiable appetite of the mindless thing. But never in even his most horrible of dreams had he visioned a blob of sentient life that was fully a hundred yards in diameter and which must have weighed hundreds of tons.
The protoplasm touched the beach, seemed to flow out of the water. Living ropes of itself flipped out of itself, settled over the living and dead crabs; and an instant later the pseudopods flipped back and the ground was bare and sterile.
Val Kenton fired again and again, then stopped in sheer futility. For although his shots had blown bits of the creature away—each of the bits moved with insatiable greed the moment it lit, always flowing toward the nearest source of food.
And then the crabs were gone, and the protoplasm was flowing like warm, whitely-glowing tar toward the four Earth people and their ship.