"You mean," the Professor demanded, dryly, "if the—hm!—this suppositious Thing wants to—?"
"It'll do any infernal thing it takes a fancy to, yes! If it happens to want us—"
"But what could Things like that want of us? Why should They come here, at all?"
"Oh, for various reasons. For inanimate objects, at times, and then again for living beings. They've come here lots of times, I tell you," Jandron asserted with strange irritation, "and got what They wanted, and then gone away to—Somewhere. If one of Them happens to want us, for any reason, It will take us, that's all. If It doesn't want us, It will ignore us, as we'd ignore gorillas in Africa if we were looking for gold. But if it was gorilla-fur we wanted, that would be different for the gorillas, wouldn't it?"
"What in the world," asked Vivian, "could a—well, a Thing from Outside want of us?"
"What do men want, say, of guinea-pigs? Men experiment with 'em, of course. Superior beings use inferior, for their own ends. To assume that man la the supreme product of evolution is gross self-conceit. Might not some superior Thing want to experiment with human beings?
"But how?" demanded Marr,
"The human brain is the most highly-organized form of matter known to this planet. Suppose, now—"
"Nonsense!" interrupted the Professor. "All hands to the sleeping-bags, and no more of this. I've got a wretched headache. Let's anchor in Blanket Bay!"
He, and both the women, turned in. Jandron and Marr sat a while longer by the fire. They kept plenty of wood piled on it, too, for an unnatural chill transfixed the night-air. The fire burned strangely blue, with greenish flicks of flame.
At length, after vast acerbities of disagreement, the geologist and the newspaperman sought their sleeping-bags. The fire was a comfort. Not that a fire could avail a pin's weight against a Thing from interstellar spacs, but subjectively it was a comfort. The instincts of a million years, centering around protection by fire, cannot be obliterated.
After a time—worn out by a day of nerve-strain and of battling with swift currents, of flight from Something invisible, intangible—they all slept.
The depths of space, star-sprinkled, hung above them with vastness immeasurable, cold beyond all understanding of the human mind.
Jandron woke first, in a red dawn.
He blinked at the fire, as he crawled from his sleeping-bag. The fire was dead; and yet it had not burned out. Much wood remained unconsumed, charred over, as if some gigantic extinguisher had in the night been lowered over it.
"Hmmm!" growled Jandron. He glanced about him, on the ledge. "Prints, too. I might have known!"
He aroused Marr. Despite all the jourelist's mocking hostility, Jandron felt more in common with this man of his own age than with the Professor, who was close on sixty.
"Look here, now!" said he. "It has been all around here. See? It put out our fire—maybe the fire annoyed It, some way—and It walked round us, everywhere." His gray eyes smouldered. "I guess, by gad, you've got to admit facts, now!"
The journalist could only shiver and stare.
"Lord, what a head I've got on me, this morning!" he chattered. He rubbed his forehead with a shaking hand, and started for the river. Most of his assurance had vanished. He looked badly done up.
"Well, what say?" demanded Jandron. "See these fresh prints?"
"Damn the prints!" retorted Marr, and fell to grumbling some unintelligible thing. He washed unsteadily, and remained crouching at the river's lip, inert, numbed.
Jandron, despite a gnawing at the base of his, brain, carefully examined the ledge. He found prints scattered everywhere, and some even on the river-bottom near the shore. Wherever water had collected in the prints on the rock, it had frozen hard. Each print in the river-bed, too, was white with ice. Ice that the rushing current could not melt.
"Well, by gad!" he exclaimed. He lighted his pipe and tried to think. Horribly afraid—yes, he felt horribly afraid, but determined. Presently, as a little power of concentration came back, he noticed that all the prints were in straight lines, each mark about two feet from the next.
"It was observing us while we slept," said Jandron.
"What nonsense are you talking, eh?" demanded Marr. His dark, heavy face sagged. "Fire, now, and grub!"
He got up and shuffled unsteadily away from the river. Then he stopped with a jerk, staring.
"Look! Look a' that axe!" he gulped, pointing.
Jandron picked up the axe, by the handle, taking good care not to touch the steel. The blade was white-furred with frost. And deep into it, punching out part of the edge, one of the prints was stamped.
"This metal," said he, "is clean gone. It's been absorbed. The Thing doesn't recognize any difference in materials. Water and steel and rock are all the same to It.
"You're crazy!" snarled the journalist. "How could a Thing travel on one leg, hopping along, making marks like that?"
"It could roll, if it was disk-shaped. And—"
A cry from the Professor turned them. Thorburn was stumbling toward them, hands out and tremulous.
"My wife—!" he choked.
Vivian was kneeling beside her sister, frightened, dazed.
"Something's happened!" stammered the Professor. "Here—come here—!"
Mrs. Thorburn was beyond any power of theirs, to help. She was still breathing; but her respirations were stertorous, and a complete paralysla had stricken her. Her eyes, half-open and expressionless, showed pupils startlingly dilated. No resources of the party's drug-kit produced the slightest effect on the woman.
The next half-hour was a confused panic, breaking camp, getting Mrs. Thorburn into a canoe, and leaving that accursed place, with a furious energy of terror that could no longer reason. Up-stream, ever up against the swirl of the current the party fought, driven by horror. With no thought of food or drink, paying no heed to landmarks, lashed forward only by the mad desire to be gone, the three
