IT

By HAYDEN HOWARD

Slowly, inexorably, the struggling Earthman was metamorphosed into a Siamese twin—a twin whose partner was jellied death.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Before the Captain's feet fled ghosts of dust. Crackling with static electricity they fled before his body-charge. Ringing out through pools of heat mirage they mushroomed up the toppled walls. In his ears their crackling was laughter. In his brain he screamed at them.

Crazy dust ghosts, you are more self-willed than I.

His runaway feet splatted on and on over Hogan's deep-toed, running bootprints in a race of death he could not stop. Crazy dust ghosts. They at least could settle and die. He had the thing on his back. He had it driving him endlessly on, his body burning with exertion, his uncontrollable hands clutching the auto-electric rifle. He had already killed one of his men.

Fool, Joe Hogan, at least stop and try to kill me. This way you are only leading me to the spheroid. Then it will be able to kill you all.

Stop, stumble, anything damn you; now he was thinking at his feet. But they never faltered.

Suddenly the thing shifted its soft weight and drove his feet hard, hurling him face down behind a fallen girder an instant before Hogan's manmade lightning clanged along the girder and flushed sparrows of dust into the sky. Behind the dust the Captain's body leaped to a new location and bobbing from its cover fired, not blindly as if dust-veiled eyes had aimed but deliberately, with the slow-squeezing aim of its organic radar. But its batsense was too late, for it quivered angrily on his neck.

As his body burst through the dust, the Captain's good eye caught the faroff glint of sun on moving steel where Hogan fled into a jungle of girders. The Captain's long legs drove hard in pursuit, but after a few hundred yards they began to stagger.

Bloodsucker, his thoughts rang, you are as stupid as a man. Keep driving me this fast and you'll have a dead horse. And what will you be without me? Black gunk frying in the sun!

Perhaps I'll die soon, he hoped as his 

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