It seemed solid—but still it wasn’t too solid to pass through the bulkheads.
That’s the way it looked, as near as I can tell you.
But the horror of it was the way it made you feel.”
“So that was how it looked?” Bob Star nodded bleakly.
“Now, tell me what it did.”
“It did enough to my precious geodynes, life knows,” the old soldier moaned. “It was alive, lad. It was never still. The pillar of mist kept spinning. The two stars beat like hearts of light, in the little moons of colored mist around them. Only the green ring shone with a steady glow. “It came across the floor, lad, to my precious generators.
The mist swirled out—an arm of it reaching through the solid metal of their cases.
And the song of them changed to a fearful, hurt sound.
It was their cry of death.
“The thing left them in a moment and came toward me.”
His fat bulk shook.
“I thought I was gone, lad.
The creature was hungry—• with a foul and noisome greed.
It yearned for the life of me, lad.
And it reached out with that green fire to kill me, the way it killed the geodynes.
“But then Mark Lardo screamed again.”
Giles Habibula sighed.
“That’s all that saved me, lad.
The evil creature saw me to be an old man, weak with many infirmities, and my flesh poisoned with the wine. It heard the madman scream—I saw it stop and listen.
And it left me, for the sweeter meat of a strong young man.
“It floated away through the metal of the ship, not bothering about the door.
And I sat listening to that screaming. It changed, lad.
The last scream was something to turn the blood to ice in your very heart, lad.
And that was all I heard.”
Bob Star stood speechless, thinking of the whimpering, shriveled thing it had left in Mark Lardo’s cell.
Giles Habibula took the bottle from his hand and turned it up.
His yellow throat pulsed convulsively until the last drop was gone.
The creature in the cell was not yet dead when Bob Star forced himself shakily back.
It was no longer able to move itself, however, because a dreadful disintegration had already set in.
Seeing that it would not long possess any kind of life at all, Bob Star called Jay Kalam.
They went voicelessly into the cell to gather it up, and nerved themselves to strip it of Mark Lardo’s garments, which now were far too large.
By the time they had laid it on the bunk in the cell, the shrunken fingers and toes were beginning to come away.
No attempt at medical aid was possible, yet the last sickening indications of life lasted for more than an hour.
There was no sign of intelligence, but the expression of that doll-sized head and the whimpering sounds it uttered made Bob Star believe the thing was still aware of agony.
At last the smoky yellow went out of the eyes.
They were left terribly white, obviously blind, and shimmering with the same iridescence that now covered the rest of the body.
The thing moved no more.
The glowing remains continued to crumble, until Bob Star and Jay Kalam rolled what was left into a blanket, and flung it out of the ship into space.
Jay Kalam spent two hours, afterwards, with a small specimen he had kept for analysis.
He came back from his tests, with an expression of baffled unease.
“That wasn’t human flesh,” he told Bob Star.
“Several of the elements found in the body were entirely lacking; others were present, but in the wrong proportions.
The chemical structure of the protoplasm had been queerly changed.
“Something fed upon Mark Lardo,” he concluded huskily.
“It consumed some ninety pounds of his weight.
The thing it left in the cell was neither human nor really alive.”
“Commander,” Bob Star whispered, “what—what do you think it was?”
Jay Kalam frowned thoughtfully.
“We expected to find no familiar sort of life on that object.
But I believe the thing Giles saw was, in its own way, alive.