Gnossos tore his hand out of the machine, rubbed it against his chest. It was red and raw and bleeding in a few spots.
“What the hell is in there?” Hurkos asked, leaning away from the open machine.
Sam stifled some low-keyed scream he felt twisting up toward his lips.
As if in answer to Hurkos’ question, a jelly-mass began dripping onto the table from the open access plate. It collected there, amber spotted with areas of bright orange. It trembled there, quivered. Piercing, low-scale hummings bathed its convulsing form. There was something like a skin forming over it, the amber and orange changing to a pinkish-tan hue that made it look amazingly like human skin — too much like human skin. The skin expanded, contracted, and there were pseudopods pulling the mass across the table toward the warmth of their bodies.
They had backed nearly to the door. “There were
“But it moved,” Sam argued. “It operated like a machine. How could it do that without moving parts?”
The jelly-mass burst in places as bubbles of something reached its surface, flopped open and left pocks. But the pocks were healed rapidly, and the skin was returned to normal.
“That — that thing was its insides, its working parts,” Gnossos said. “The jelly-mass operated the shell like a machine.”
The last of the mess dropped from the bowl of the main component. There was more than could have been contained in the main sphere; apparently all the sections had been filled and were now drained empty. The jelly- mass, shapeless, plunged over the end of the table, struck the floor with a sickening sloshing noise, and moved toward them, arms of simulated flesh lashing out for purchase on the cold floor.
“The armory!” Sam shouted, turning into the hall and flinging the door to the other room wide. Perhaps it had been the hypnotic training with the weapons that had made him think of guns so quickly. He knew how to kill; he could stop the amoeba, the super-cell. He stepped back into the hall with a rifle in his hands, brought it up, sighted. “Move away!”
Gnossos and Hurkos stepped behind him, moving toward the control cabin. Aiming for the center of the mass, Sam pulled the trigger. Blue lightning flashed outward, sparkling, and illuminated the passageway like a small sun going nova. Despite the light, there was no heat. In fact, the flame seemed to radiate coolness. It struck the jelly, sank into it. There was something like a scream from the writhing slop, though the sounds were most certainly not a voice. It was as if the very molecules of the mass had closed gaps and were rubbing one another. The jelly stopped.
Sam, trembling, released the trigger, started to let air out of his lungs.
And the jelly leaped!
He fired, caught it in mid-jump, sent it crashing backward, blue fire coursing through it like contained lightning flashing in a crystal paperweight. He aimed again, depressed the firing stud.
Nothing.
No blue, shimmering flame. No cool but deadly flame. Not even a lousy click! He raised the weapon to look at it, to see if some latch or bolt had not been thrown properly by the automatic mechanism. Then he saw the amber goo beginning to pulse out of the tip of the barrel. Suddenly his hand was burning furiously and there was amoeba slopping out of the powerpack casing inside the handle. He threw the gun down, wiped his hand on the wall, scraping his skin loose in the mad attempt to rid himself of every drop of the jelly.
“Explosives!” Gnossos shouted.
Sam turned, dashed into the armory once more. When he came out, he had three grenades. He ran to Gnossos and Hurkos, panting heavily, his eyes wide, his heart furious as a drum.
The jelly-mass was recovering and had slopped into the hall where it joined up with the smaller clump of stuff that had been the insides of the gun. The two touched each other, glowed purple where their surfaces met, then easily flowed together and became one.
“I think I see why the radio didn’t work,” Gnossos said. “It didn’t
“The entire ship is alive,” Sam agreed.
Hurkos rapped a hand on the wall, listened to the solid sound of it. “It’s steel. I’ll be damned if it is anything but steel!”
“Inside,” Sam said, keeping an eye on the pulsating jelly-mass at the end of the passageway. “Deep inside the plating, there’s more goo.”
“But the hyperdrive—”
“There mustn’t really be a hyperdrive mechanism,” Sam said. “The jelly can build up a hyperspace field somehow. There are no machines aboard, I’d wager. Only jelly-cored shells.”
“Your fear of machines—” Hurkos began.
“Was gained from whoever — or whatever — built this… this ship-thing.”
The lump had begun to move again, pseudopods slapping wetly against the deck. It was six feet high, a good three hundred pounds.
“You two get into the suits,” Gnossos said, taking the grenades. He still had his own suit on, and his helmet lay within easy reach. “We’ll have to go across to my ship. This one won’t let us live long now that we know part of its secret.”
Sam and Hurkos struggled into their suits, fitted their helmets to the shoulder threads, attached their air tanks. Every little act, though performed at top speed, seemed to take hours. When they were dressed, Gnossos pulled the hatch shut, sealing the main cabin from the hallway where the thing was advancing warily. “Let’s see it get through that!” the poet said, putting on his helmet. “Now let’s get out of here.”
“I’m afraid there isn’t much hope of that,” Sam said from his position next to the control console. “I’ve pressed all buttons to depressurize the cabin and open the exit chamber, but I can’t seem to get any response from the ship.”
Hurkos, eyes wide, jumped to the console, flipped the comline to the computer open. “Let us out!”
But the computer was not a computer. There was a deafening roar from the wire and plastic voice plate. There were screams, thunders, explosions. A thousand rats burning alive. A million sparrows madly attacking one another in a battle to the death.
“Shut it off!” Gnossos shouted.
Hurkos slammed the switch shut. The noises continued. At first, it swept out in irregular waves, shredded them and put them back together. Then there was not even a pattern of waves, merely a constant din of overwhelming magnitude. And there was jelly spewing out of the speaker grid…
Jelly spewing out of the jack-holes…
Abruptly, the speaker grid was gone, thrust away by the surging pressure of the thing behind it. Parts of the console began to sag as the supportive jelly that had filled it was drained away, spat out.
Still the noise. “It’s the same sound,” Sam shouted into his suit phone, “that I heard when I was obeying the hypnotic orders — only it isn’t ordering anything.”
“The grenades!” Hurkos called above the roar as the jelly began to collect on the floor, changing from amber to pink-tan, rising in a pulsating mass. The other glob pressed against the hatch from the hallway. There was the screeching sound of metal being strained to its limits. Soon the hatch would give, and they would be trapped between two shapeless monsters. The jelly would cover them and do… whatever it did to flesh and blood and bone.
Gnossos flipped the cap that dissolved the anti-shock packing in the outer shell of the grenade. He tossed it. Nothing.
“The grenades are jelly too!” Hurkos shouted.
Sam snatched one of the remaining bulbs from the poet. “No. They aren’t machines, so there is no reason for the jelly to replace them with part of itself. It’s just a natural chemical that explodes without mechanical prompting. It just needs a jar. Gnossos didn’t throw it hard enough.” He wailed the second grenade against the viewplate.
All the world was a sun. A lightbulb. Then the filament began to die and the light went out completely. The force of the explosion had gone, mostly, outward. What had pressed in their direction had been caught by the
