thing should have been able to destroy them. But it could not. It still writhed. It still shuddered. It twisted in monstrous, weary, lunatic gyrations. Ellen regarded it with eyes of loathing.

"It acts like it's gone mad," she said in revulsion.

"It may have," said Borden. "It's certainly exhausted. But we're getting pretty tired, too." He said into the microphone, "You probably don't understand this that I'm saying, any more then you understand any of the rest. But you had this coming to you."

He handed the microphone to Jerry, who had suddenly remembered an oration, Spartacus to the Gladiators. Jerry began to recite it.

But the writhings of the mountainous mass of jelly became more terribly weary, more quiveringly effortful. There came a time when it quivered only very, very faintly. Those quiverings ceased.

"I think it's dead, sir," said Jerry.

Borden snapped off the walkie-talkie. He snapped it on again. The horrible, half-cubic-mile of jelly did not flinch.

Borden said drily, "Abracadabra, hocus pocus, e pluribus unum."

There was no sign of life in the thing. He watched grimly for any sign of returning activity. By noon, though, it could be seen that the ghastly mass of once-living substance was changing. It was liquefying. There were rills of an unpleasant fluid forming on its glossy flanks, to run down and flow and flow away into the desert to be dried up.

"I don't think we'll want to be around for the next few weeks," Borden said heavily. "We'll go back and fix up the ship."

Then Ellen mentioned Sattell's name for the first time in days.

"How about Sattell?"

"We outran him on the way here," Borden said moodily. "But I think he'll come on. He'll want to find out if we're dead. Not knowing what the thing—the white spot—was, I think he'll figure that either we'll be sent back with help, or killed. If he gets to where he can see the white spot, and we haven't started back with friends, he'll be sure we're dead. Then he'll go back and start to fix up the ship himself. I think we'll meet him on the way."

And they did. The second day out from what was now an oasis instead of a white spot, they saw Sattell's car headed in their direction as a moving gleam of golden reflected sunlight.

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