The Leech

The driver in the lead jeep held up his hand, and the long convoy ground to a halt. A hard, efficient-looking officer stepped out of the jeep. From the star on either shoulder, Micheals knew he was a brigadier general.

'You can't block this road,' the general said. He was a tall, spare man in suntans, with a sunburned face and cold eyes. 'Please clear that thing away.'

'We can't move it,' Micheals said. He told the general what had happened in the past few days.

'It must be moved,' the general said. 'This convoy must go through.' He walked closer and looked at the leech. 'You say it can't be jacked up by a crowbar? A torch won't burn it?'

'That's right,' Micheals said, smiling faintly.

'Driver,' the general said over his shoulder. 'Ride over it.'

Micheals started to protest, but stopped himself. The military mind would have to find out in its own way.

The driver put his jeep in gear and shot forward, jumping the leech's four-inch edge. The jeep got to the center of the leech and stopped.

'I didn't tell you to stop!' the general bellowed.

'I didn't, sir!' the driver protested.

The jeep had been yanked to a stop and had stalled. The driver started it again, shifted to four-wheel drive, and tried to ram forward. The jeep was fixed immovably, as though set in concrete.

'Pardon me,' Micheals said. 'If you look, you can see that the tires are melting down.'

The general stared, his hand creeping automatically toward his pistol belt. Then he shouted, 'Jump, driver! Don't touch that gray stuff.'

White-faced, the driver climbed to the hood of his jeep, looked around him, and jumped clear.

There was complete silence as everyone watched the jeep. First its tires melted down, and then the rims. The body, resting on the gray surface, melted, too.

The aerial was the last to go.

The general began to swear softly under his breath. He turned to the driver. 'Go back and have some men bring up hand grenades and dynamite.'

The driver ran back to the convoy.

'I don't know what you've got here,' the general said. 'But it's not going to stop a U.S. Army convoy.'

Micheals wasn't so sure.

The leech was nearly awake now, and its body was calling for more and more food. It dissolved the soil under it at a furious rate, filling it in with its own body, flowing outward.

A large object landed on it, and that became food also. Then suddenly—

A burst of energy against its surface, and then another, and another. It consumed them gratefully, converting them into mass. Little metal pellets struck it, and their kinetic energy was absorbed, their mass converted. More explosions took place, helping to fill the starving cells.

It began to sense things—controlled combustion around it, vibrations of wind, mass movements.

There was another, greater explosion, a taste of real food! Greedily it ate, growing faster. It waited anxiously for more explosions, while its cells screamed for food.

But no more came. It continued to feed on the soil and on the Sun's energy. Night came, noticeable for its lesser energy possibilities, and then more days and nights. Vibrating objects continued to move around it.

It ate and grew and flowed.

Micheals stood on a little hill, watching the dissolution of his house. The leech was several hundred yards across now, lapping at his front porch.

Good-by, home, Micheals thought, remembering the ten summers he had spent there.

The porch collapsed into the body of the leech. Bit by bit, the house crumpled.

The leech looked like a field of lava now, a blasted spot on the green Earth.

'Pardon me, sir,' a soldier said, coming up behind him. 'General O'Donnell would like to see you.'

'Right,' Micheals said, and took his last look at the house.

He followed the soldier through the barbed wire that had been set up in a half-mile circle around the leech. A company of soldiers was on guard around it, keeping back the reporters and the hundreds of curious people who had flocked to the scene. Micheals wondered why he was still allowed inside. Probably, he decided, because most of this was taking place on his land.

The soldier brought him to a tent. Micheals stooped and went in. General O'Donnell, still in suntans, was seated at a small desk. He motioned Micheals to a chair.

'I've been put in charge of getting rid of this leech,' he said to Micheals.

Micheals nodded, not commenting on the advisability of giving a soldier a scientist's job.

'You're a professor, aren't you?'

'Yes. Anthropology.'

'Good. Smoke?' The general lighted Micheals' cigarette. 'I'd like you to stay around here in an advisory capacity. You were one of the first to see this leech. I'd appreciate your observations on—' he smiled—'the enemy.'

'I'd be glad to,' Micheals said. 'However, I think this is more in the line of a physicist or a biochemist.'

'I don't want this place cluttered with scientists,' General O'Donnell said, frowning at the tip of his cigarette. 'Don't get me wrong. I have the greatest appreciation for science. I am, if I do say so, a scientific soldier. I'm always interested in the latest weapons. You can't fight any kind of a war any more without science.'

O'Donnell's sunburned face grew firm. 'But I can't have a team of longhairs poking around this thing for the next month, holding me up. My job is to destroy it, by any means in my power, and at once. I am going to do just that.'

'I don't think you'll find it that easy,' Micheals said.

'That's what I want you for,' O'Donnell said. 'Tell me why and I'll figure out a way of doing it.'

'Well, as far as I can figure out, the leech is an organic mass-energy converter, and a frighteningly efficient one. I would guess that it has a double cycle. First, it converts mass into energy, then back into mass for its body. Second, energy is converted directly into the body mass. How this takes place, I do not know. The leech is not protoplasmic. It may not even be cellular—'

'So we need something big against it,' O'Donnell interrupted. 'Well, that's all right. I've got some big stuff here.'

'I don't think you understand me,' Micheals said. 'Perhaps I'm not phrasing this very well. The leech eats energy. It can consume the strength of any energy weapon you use against it.'

'What happens,' O'Donnell asked, 'if it keeps on eating?'

'I have no idea what its growth-limits are,' Micheals said. 'Its growth may be limited only by its food source.'

'You mean it could continue to grow probably forever?'

'It could possibly grow as long as it had something to feed on.'

'This is really a challenge,' O'Donnell said. 'That leech can't be totally impervious to force.'

'It seems to be. I suggest you get some physicists in here. Some biologists also. Have them figure out a way of nullifying it.'

The general put out his cigarette. 'Professor, I cannot wait while scientists wrangle. There is an axiom of mine which I am going to tell you.' He paused impressively. 'Nothing is impervious to force. Muster enough force and anything will give. Anything.

'Professor,' the general continued, in a friendlier tone, 'you shouldn't sell short the science you represent. We have, massed under North Hill, the greatest accumulation of energy and radioactive weapons ever assembled in one spot. Do you think your leech can stand the full force of them?'

'I suppose it's possible to overload the thing,' Micheals said doubtfully. He realized now why the general wanted him around. He supplied the trappings of science, without the authority to override O'Donnell.

'Come with me,' General O'Donnell said cheerfully, getting up and holding back a flap of the tent. 'We're going to crack that leech in half.'

After a long wait, rich food started to come again, piped into one side of it. First there was only a little, and then more and more. Radiations, vibrations, explosions, solids, liquids—an amazing variety of edibles. It accepted them all. But the food was coming too slowly for the starving cells, for new cells were constantly adding their