have been fighting."

"Think of what it wanted," Borden said drily. "It killed the population, wiped them out. Back on Earth, a long, long time ago, Ghenghis Khan led the Mongols to destroy Kharesmia. His soldiers looted the cities. They carried away all the wealth. They murdered the people. Plains were white with the skeletons of the folk they murdered. Do you notice a difference here?"

Jerry said irrelevantly, "You were right about the talkie, sir. Somebody's thrown it all out of tuning. I'll have to match it with the other to make use of it." Then he said painstakingly, "The difference between what you mentioned and the conquerors of the forts is that the loot was left in the forts. Engines and weapons and so on weren't bothered." Then he said in sudden surprise, "But the people weren't left as skeletons! They were all scattered!"

Jerry raised startled eyes from the talkie on which he was working. And suddenly he froze. Borden braked, stopped the car. They had come to a place where shattered ground cars were on the highway, on the sides of the road, everywhere. Here the road ran between monstrous steep-sided hills.

Borden started the car again and drove carefully around half of a vehicle which lay on the highway. Weapons had been mounted in it for shooting through the blister that was like the blister through which he looked in their car.

"There was a battle here, too," he said. "They fought with cars here. Maybe a delaying action to gain time to build the fort we just left. There are bones in these cars, too."

"But what were they fighting, Dee?" Ellen demanded again, uneasily.

Borden drove carefully past the scene of ancient battle—and defeat. He did not answer.

After a time Ellen said, more uneasily still, "Do you mean that whatever they fought against was—going to eat them? It wanted their—bodies?"

"So far as we can tell," said Borden, "it took nothing else. Didn't even want their bones."

He drove on and on. He didn't elaborate. There was no need. A creature which consumed its victims without crushing them or biting them or destroying the structure of their bones! It must simply envelop them. Like an amoeba. A creature which discarded the inedible parts of its prey in separate fragments, without order of position, without selection. That also must be like an amoeba which 

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