strong enough? It was too much like—like tickling it, arousing its appetite. Maybe if the beam were powerful enough it would be like paralysis."

Borden did not even answer. He hauled at the objects that had been found to be the covers to the power-leads of the vehicle. He and Jerry worked feverishly, without words. Then Borden stood up.

"This time we are really risking everything," he said grimly. "The full power of the car's power source goes into the beam. If a walkie-talkie beam was appetizing, this ought to curl its hair. Switch, Jerry! Microphone on!"

VIII

Some hundreds of kilowatts of power in modulated-wave form would go out now into the body of a creature whose normal sensory reception centers would be accustomed to handling minute fractions of one watt. The talkie could handle the power, of course. With cold-emission oscillators, there was no danger of burning out a wave-generating unit.

"'—the lamb was sure to go,'" said Borden.

The two-mile distant mass of horrid jelly began to quiver uncontrollably. But without any purpose at all. Borden said with a terrible satisfaction:

"'It followed her to school one day, which was against the rule. It made the children laugh and play to see the lamb at school.'"

The shapeless mass of living stuff made tortured upheavals. It flung up spires of glistening stuff. It writhed. It contorted. It flung itself crazily against the hillsides.

"''Twas brillig,'" said Borden, "'and the slithy toves, did gyre and gymbal in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe.'"

The jelly fled. It flowed back upon the carpet of its own substance on which it had been able to move with such ghastly speed. It flowed down from a mound to a flattened thickening of the pseudopod which had thrown itself at the car.

That pseudopod flowed away upon itself. It fled. It raced frantically to be gone from a beam of micro-waves whose pattern was not fixed, which varied unpredictably from instant to instant as sound waves changed it from something the white-spot being could disregard to something which did not promise food, and which could not be ignored.

The white-spot creature was tormented. Its instincts said that what was not patterned was life. Its intelligence said that this was 

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