by George Worts
It shot up swiftly with splayed ends to attain a height of perhaps twenty feet, then plunged unerringly at the schooner’s stern. It touched the rail with a thud which Sammy could hear above the shouts of the men and Julie’s horrified screams. Then it came arching and writhing aboard.
The splayed ends were like the forked tongue of a snake — a snake as large as a mountain.
They struck down at Senga. He darted away from the wheel, but he could not escape. The headless thing reached his head with incredible alacrity. It wound and enfolded his head. The Malay screamed once. Sammy saw his head vanish — mysteriously and horribly crushed and torn, into fragments. He saw the Malay’s arms torn out and he saw them disintegrate.
He leaped at that twisting column. He slashed at it with his cutlass. He could not sever that terrible snake-like arm. He had supposed that the stuff was a soft slime. It was not a soft slime. It was as tough as the hide of a shark.
Senga had entirely vanished — swiftly destroyed and mysteriously and dreadfully consumed by this hideous unknown thing.
The arm had coiled about Sammy. He felt the sharp sting, the pressure of it on his back. He slashed and hacked. He did not know that he was cursing and shrieking like a madman. He did not know that all over the ship men were cursing and shrieking like madmen.
Hacking and slashing, Sammy presently severed the head of the tentacle. He hacked at the clinging mass about his chest. The stuff fell away from him to the deck. Instantly it changed shape. It became a pool of slime with live tentacles reaching out frantically in all directions.
And this was the most shocking discovery so far. This awful slime, of tough consistency, had no central brain. Each part of it was its own center of energy and motion.
Desperately, he hacked at the writhing pool of the stuff at his feet. It was reaching out for the main body, or mass. Suddenly, a tentacle joined it. Miraculously, the puddle of slime flowed into the tentacle: instantly became part of it. And this re-formed tentacle struck at him again!
Sammy leaped back and ran to the other side of the ship. Bryce Robbins was hacking away at a mass of tentacles of all sizes, some as thick as a man’s wrist, some as thick as a man’s thigh, which came flowing aboard and which seemed determined to enfold and destroy him.
Sammy had a momentary fear that none of them would leave the lagoon alive. Every man was fighting for his life. Even Hector Barling, with his white dinner jacket in shreds, was cursing and slashing at the oncoming tentacles.
Stopping at the mainmast shrouds, Sammy received the most sickening shock so far. A tentacle at least five inches in diameter had swarmed up the shrouds — to where Julie clung. She was striking at it with her cutlass. Below her, Larry McGurk was similarly engaged, trying to free her.
Sammy lent his help. He began chopping at the tentacle as a man would chop at a tree. With a better purchase for his feet than either Julie or the mate had, he severed it swiftly.
The slender column of phosphorescent slime came slithering down. He did not wait for it all to reach the deck, but hacked at it as it came. He severed it again. He kicked the chunks away from each other. He continued to bring the cutlass down as if it were an ax. When he had cut the column into a half dozen lengths, he hacked at them.
Someone shouted hoarsely: “It’s going! We’re leaving it astern!”
Sammy ran aft. Bryce Robbins had taken the wheel. One of his hands was limp. He was panting and weakly cursing.
Streaming aft, the mass of the thing was dragging through the water. Perhaps a hundred tentacles ran like hawsers from the rail and the hull to the shapeless great mass.
Sammy chopped away at these. Lucky Jones came limping aft to join him. Larry McGurk came aft and aided them. Tentacles when they snapped formed pools on the deck and were joined by other pools. Some of these reached the rail and slithered overboard.
The Blue Goose suddenly seemed to leap ahead. This was due to the fact that the last of the clinging tentacles had been chopped through, or had snapped.
They were, for the present, at least, free of that hideous, shapeless thing.
The schooner forged through the water. And behind it came the thing, a wallowing, churning monstrous mass — of what? There existed no question, at least, of its disposition.
The thing followed them, churning the lagoon to foam, shooting out long tentacles like arms of lightning at the escaping hull. But the Blue Goose, at eleven knots, could not be overtaken.
When Singapore realized this, he laughed and sobbed with relief. He knew that they were dead men who had been miraculously spared.
Senga’s last living act had spared them. By giving the engine full throttle, he had defeated the thing.
But now came another danger. The schooner was lost in the mist from the volcanic mudpots. It was impossible, from deck, to see a hundred yards into the mist. The engine speed could not be checked, or they would be overtaken, and annihilated by the thing.
Sammy knew that he could fight no more. He was exhausted by his efforts and the nervous strain. Yet the Blue Goose could not be checked, could not be anchored until dawn came and they found the inlet. And they could not safely maneuver about in the lagoon. The thing might corner them in a cove, or they might run aground. In either case, they would be annihilated.
Looking aloft, he saw that Julie was still clinging to the shrouds at the crosstree.
He shouted: “Julie! What can you see from up there? Can you see the inlet?”
She called, down, faintly: “No. But it’s off over there to starboard. I saw it a moment ago. I can just see the Wanderer’s lights.”
A thud on deck behind him made him turn about. Bryce had fainted at the wheel.
Sammy took his place while Larry McGurk joined Julie at the crosstree. She was afraid, she said, that she would faint.
But she didn’t faint. Only two of that company were unconscious from the horror they had been through. One was Bryce. The other was Hector Barling.
Not daring to let a sharp, sudden turn reduce the schooner’s speed, Sammy put the wheel over easily, a few spokes, and made a long, wide circle. Then, as the mate called down directions, he headed the Blue Goose for the inlet.
The wake was almost a perfect semicircle. Threshing and churning about in it, lashing the water into liquid green fire with its tentacles and the writhing and lungings of its great central mass, the nameless horror followed.
Bryce Robbins regained consciousness as Sammy piloted the schooner through the inlet. He sat up and saw Lucky, standing near by in the stern, shouting oaths and taunts and emptying the last of three machine guns into the frenzied, threshing mass astern.
The scientist came weakly to his feet and shouted: “Stop that!”
Lucky jeered: “What the hell? If you expect to take that thing back alive, you’re nuts!”
Bryce staggered to the taffrail. Panting, he rested his hands on it.
Lucky snarled: “Yah! There’s your octopus, smart guy!”
Someone forward announced that the Wanderer had come close inshore was lying broadside off the mouth of the inlet. Through the thinning mists, Sammy heard the hysterical screams of Mrs. Farrington. Later, Sammy learned that Captain Milikin had heard their shouts and cries and had come close in to render what assistance he could, but had not dared take the yacht into the lagoon.
Sammy estimated his distances. It looked to him as if there was insufficient room for the schooner to squeeze out past the yacht, and he must keep the engine turning over at top speed. He was certain that incredible, tentacled mass, in its malignant fury, would pursue them out into the sea.
But it did not. The tide had turned. There was a sharp green line marking the tiderip. The lagoon water was vividly green, while the ingoing water from the sea was only faintly luminous. At that sharp line, the nameless monster stopped. Not only did it stop, but it began to move away — toward the center of the lagoon.
Bryce shouted, “I knew it! It checks with my theory! That lagoon water has some el
ement in which that thing exists. It cannot exist in ordinary sea water. We must go back! We must prove it!”
“You’re crazy,” Singapore said. “We’re lucky to be out of there with our skins.”
Bryce came toward him, with the glassy, dark eyes, the snow-white skin of a man insane.
“Get away from that wheel!” he shouted. “I’ll take her in!”
Lucky sprang at him, struck him twice in the head with fists like hobnail boots. The scientist went down to hands and knees, shaking his head as a punch drunk fighter does in the ring, muttering and almost sobbing, with blood drooling from his lips.
One hand pounced on an automatic pistol lying in the slime on the deck. But before he could aim it, Lucky kicked it out of his hand and Bryce groaned: “Before we’re through, I’m going to kill you!”
Sam told Lucky to take the wheel. When Lucky relieved him, Sam helped the scientist to his feet. He said sternly, “Keep your head on, fella. You saw what happened to Senga. Anyhow, why prove your theory all over again?”
He took Bryce down to his cabin and gave him a stiff drink of whisky. Then he went on deck and took inventory. Senga was the only outright casualty. Senga had died instantly and horribly — doubtless as Pegleg Pyke had died, and twenty-six years before him, Gurt Vandernoot.
Julie and Larry McGurk had come down from the crosstree. The lower part of her white sailor’s jacket had been torn off. The tentacle had encircled her waist, had burned her skin on the left hip in a patch as large as her hand.
Bryce had suffered a broken wrist bone. Ah Fong had lost two fingers of his left hand, and an ear. Mr. Barling’s right arm was broken at the elbow. Oangi’s right foot was smashed. Lucky’s left ankle was sprained. And Singapore Sammy had a wrenched back. It was beginning to hurt. And it was going to hurt worse.
Strangely — or not so strangely, perhaps — the man who was doomed to die, the man who couldn’t be killed, had not been hurt in the least!
Chapter 17: Bryce Explains
JULIE called to the Wanderer for immediate medical assistance. Mr. Barling’s personal physician was too ill to leave his cabin. Dr. Plank was suffering from sun fever, was running a high temperature, and was almost delirious. But he came.
He bound up sprains, sewed up wounds, set broken bones and smeared acid burns with unguents. When he had finished his work, Dr. Plank collapsed. So did Mr. Barling. The doctor and Mr. Barling, the latter suffering from complete exhaustion, were taken aboard the Wanderer.
And the survivors of that fantastic battle with the most dangerous, most horrible creature that ever lived in the sea, huddled in the stern of the schooner, drank whisky in an attempt to restore their shattered nerves, and hysterically discussed what they had individually seen and experienced.
Bryce Robbins was not among them. Immediately after the Blue Goose anchored, he took two stiff drinks of whisky and went to his stateroom with samples of that strange, tough, slimy substance.
He returned to the afterdeck with the announcement that they had all taken part in one of the most amazing discoveries in the history of science.
Flushed with this new excitement, stuttering in his eagerness, he burst out: “An anomaly! An absolute anomaly!”
And Lucky Jones growled: “What the hell is an anomaly?”
“An exception — a reversal of rules. This is a reversal of all the rules I know. Do you know what that thing is?” he cried. “It’s an amoeba! A giant, monstrous amoeba! It revolutionizes all scientific concepts. It is utterly and stupendously amazing! It is a giant mass of protoplasm — a unicellular organism of tremendous size!”
“Keep it simple,” Julie advised. “We aren’t scientists.”
He tried to explain it to them in simple layman’s language.
“Men, animals, are composed of billions of cells. An amoeba is a microscopic creature, composed of one cell. An amoeba reproduces by splitting in halves. This thing in the lagoon is an amoeba, but it is a freak. Instead of reproducing, it grew from a speck of life invisible except under a microscope, to this incredible size! Why, I don’t know. Perhaps some curious freak of its structure caused it — aided by the strange acid in the lagoon water. In other words, a tiny, single cell has become this hideous and horrible thing — a single cell weighing many tons, possessed of a shrewd and horrible intelligence. It is probably millions of years old. It is the most amazing thing the world has ever known!”
Julie said, “Why, it’s tur-rific! Does this thing look like an amoeba, Bryce? Does it act the same?”
He cried: “It is an amoeba, only with these astounding differences. The amoeba changes form continually. Short processes flow out from the cell body in different directions, and the rest of the protoplasm appears to flow or be pulled along after them. In this way the amoeba is able to progress slowly, by means of these pseudopodia, or false feet. They are protruded at any part of the cell body or on several parts at the same time. I am talking about the microscopic amoeba.
“When this amoeba encounters a vagrant bacterium or other food, it throws out these false feet, on both sides of the object; they flow around it, feet beyond, and thus swallow into the body the wandering bacterium. The food has been ingested. Inside the amoeba are products secreted which digest it. The parts of the food which are indigestible the amoeba rejects by a reverse process called egesting. These three processes are not localized, but take place in any part of the body.
“Now this monster is the same amoeba, only a terrific size, invested with a shrewd and malignant intelligence, and of remarkable speed. It shoots out pseudopodia, or tentacles, with almost lightning swiftness. We saw it shoot a tentacle up the shrouds and attempt to seize and ingest Julie. We saw it shoot a tentacle out of the water to a height of twenty-five feet and attack the serang. It enclosed his head and shoulders. It ingested his body, tearing it into little fragments, so swiftly that the eye could hardly follow. It was the same with Pegleg.
“Such parts of him as were unfit for food were rejected — his clothing, his teeth, his wooden leg, the buttons of his clothes, his shoes, and so forth.
“We know now how it devoured Pegleg. It sent a tentacle into the room through that three-inch hole. It fairly poured itself through the hole. Once inside that room, it took new forms — shooting out large and small tentacles to overcome and devour Pegleg. Once he was consumed, it simply flowed itself out of that peephole again. No wonder we were amazed and terrified!”
Larry McGurk interrupted: “Is this anything like that fragment of chicken heart which Dr. Carrol kept alive in broth in New York, and which would grow to the size of the earth if it weren’t kept under control and constantly cut away?”
Bryce said, “There is no similarity. That fragment of chicken’s heart consists of millions of cells. This — this thing consists of but one cell. Yet I must contradict myself. It brings us to the most amazing, most fantastic phase of this creature’s structure and being. You will hardly believe me, yet I am sure I am speaking the truth.”
He paused. He shook a finger at the semi-circle of upraised faces as if he were addressing students in a classroom.
“I said that this creature, this thing, this monstrous amoeba, consists of one cell. But let me tell you a horrible thing. Floating, or somehow moving about within this strange, tough, slimy mass, are brain cells! They are not the type of cells, or centers, found in the ordinary amoeba. In the ordinary amoeba, the center is called the nucleus. This monster has strictly speaking, no nucleus.
“But scattered about in the mass of it are free, or independent, brain cells — and these brain cells are the brain cells of men it has ingested!”
Julie protested: “Oh, Bryce! After all, you’ve told us that it secretes a powerful kind of acid, and that this acid is the stuff with which it digests things so quickly. If it digests skulls and fingernails, how can a brain cell escape?”
Bryce smiled excitedly. “You’re getting into deep water. I can explain it, but not simply. In this tough, slimy stuff of whi
ch it consists there are small patches or clusters of a neutral kind of stuff — I mean they contain no acid. They have the power to digest nothing. If this creature wished, it could surround any object — your finger, let us say — with this neutral stuff — and your finger would not be digested. That is what happens with occasional brain cells of men it ingests.”
Sammy interrupted: “Are you trying to tell us that — that thing does its thinking with the brain cells of men it has killed and ingested?”
“Exactly!”
“How horrible!” Julie wailed.
“But,” Bryce said, “and get this straight: It has no central brain. There are strings, or clusters, of these human brain cells scattered throughout it like — like raisins in a cake! I don’t say that this monster thinks, in the sense with which we use the word. But with these brain cells it is enabled shrewdly, even cleverly, to carry out its purpose on earth.”
Lucky jeered: “This is gettin’ good. Tell us what its purpose is on earth.”
“To eat! That’s all! It has no other purpose or function. Its sole job on earth is to keep itself supplied with food. Since time began — since its time began — it has had no other job. It is nothing but appetite incarnate. You saw it attack us. You saw it furiously, with a horrible eagerness, thresh and plunge after us in the water. It did not attack us because we are its enemy. It recognizes us only as food — food for an appetite so ravenous, so horrible, that you could not possibly imagine hunger like it.”
Sam stopped him with: “What do you mean — it recognizes us? Can it see us?”
“Positively not. It has no eyes, no ears, no taste, no smell. It has nothing — but supersensitive feeling. To this sensitive surface, all things are alike — sound, waves, light waves and other vibrations. I question whether it could distinguish between heat and cold. Its surface is supersensitive, however, to the nearness of anything fit for food. Once it senses the imminence of food, it attacks. It can attack with horrible wrath, as we saw it attack, or it can attack with diabolical ingenuity, as we know it attacked Pegleg. We saw the sureness and fury with which it seized and ingested the shark. We saw the speed and cleverness with which it plucked birds from the air. And that’s all it is — stark, insensate, insatiable hunger!”