DUNE ROLLER

by Julian May

Copyright © 1951 by Julian May Dikty

Originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-28-02 [v1.0]

There were only two who saw the meteor fall into Lake Michigan, long ago. One was a Pottawatomie brave hunting rabbits among the dunes on the shore; he saw the, fire-streak arc down over the water and was afraid, because it was an omen of ill favor when the stars left the heaven and drowned themselves in the Great Water. The other who saw was a sturgeon who snapped greedily at the meteor as it fell—quite reduced in size by now—to the bottom of the fresh water sea. The big fish took it into his mouth and then spat it out again in disdain. It was not good to eat. The meteor drifted down through the cold black water and disappeared. The sturgeon swam away, and presently, he died… .

Dr. Ian Thorne squatted beside a shore pool and netted things. Under the sun of late July, the lake waves were sparkling deep blue far out, and glass-clear as they broke over the sandbar into Dr. Thorne’s pool. A squadron of whirligig beetles surfaced warily and came toward him leading little v-shaped shadow wakes along the tan sand bottom. A back-swimmer rowed delicately out of a green cloud of algae and snooped around a centigrade thermometer which was suspended in the water from a driftwood twig.

3:00 P.M., wrote Dr. Thorne in a large, stained notebook. Air temp 32, water temp—he leaned over to get a better look at the thermometer and the back-swimmer fled —28. Wind, light variable; wave action, diminishing. Absence of drifted specimens. He dated a fresh sheet of paper, headed it Fourteenth Day, and began the bug count.

He scribbled earnestly in the sun, a pleasant-faced man of thirty or so. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and shorts of delicious magenta color, decorated with most unbotanical green hibiscus. An old baseball cap was on his head.

He skirted the four-by-six pool on the bar side and noted that the sand was continuing to pile up. It would not be long before the pool was stagnant, and each day brought new and fascinating changes in its population. Gyrinidae, Hydrophilidae, a Corixa hiding in the rubbish on the other end. Some kind of larvae beside a piece of water-logged board; he’d better take a specimen or two of that. L. intacta sunning itself smugly on the thermometer.

The back-swimmer, its confidence returned, worked its little oars and zig-zagged in and out of the trash. N. undulata, wrote Dr. Thorne.

When the count was finished, he took a collecting bottle from the fishing creel hanging over his shoulder and maneuvered a few of the larvae into it, using the handle of the net to herd them into position.

And then he noticed that in the clear, algae-free end of the pool, something flashed with a light more golden than that of mere sun on water. He reached out the net to stir the loose sand away.

It was not a pebble or a piece of chipped glass as he had supposed; instead, he fished out a small, droplike object shaped like a marble with a tail. It was a beautiful little thing of pellucid amber color, with tiny gold flecks and streaks running through it. Sunlight glanced off its smooth sides, which were surprisingly free of the surface scratches that are the inevitable patina of flotsam in the sand-scoured dunes.

He tapped the bottom of the net until the drop fell into an empty collecting bottle and admired it for a minute. It would be a pretty addition to his collection of Useless Miscellanea. He might put it in a little bottle between the tooled brass yak bell and the six-inch copper sulfate crystal.

He was collecting his equipment and getting ready to leave when the boat came. It swept up out of the north and nosed in among the sand bars offshore, a dignified, forty-foot Matthews cruiser named Carlin, which belonged to his friend, Kirk MacInnes.

“‘Hoy, Mac!” Dr. Thorne yelled cordially. “Look out for the new bar the storm brought in!”

A figure on the flying bridge of the boat waved briefly and howled something unintelligible around a pipe clamped in its teeth. The cruiser swung about and the mutter of her motors died gently. She lay rocking in the little waves a few hundred feet offshore. After a short pause a yellow rubber raft dropped over the stern.

Good old Mac, thought Thorne. The little ex-engineer with that Skye terrier moustache and the magnificent boat visited him regularly, bringing the mail and his copy of the Biological Review, or bottled goods of a chemistry designed to prevent isolated scientists from catching cold. He was a frequent and welcome visitor, but he had always come alone.

Previous to this.

“Well, well,” said Dr. Thorne, and then looked again.

The girl was sitting in the stern of the raft while MacInnes paddled deftly, and as they drew closer Thorne saw that her hair was dark and curly. She wore a spotless white playsuit, and a deep blue handkerchief was knotted loosely around her throat. She was looking at him, and for the first time he had qualms about the Hawaiian shorts.

The yellow flank of the raft grated on the stony beach. MacInnes, sixty and grizzled, a venerable briar between his teeth, climbed out and wrung Thorne’s hand.

“Brought you a visitor this time, Ian. Real company. Jeanne, this gentleman in the shorts and fishing creel is Dr. Ian Thorne, the distinguished writer and lecturer. He writes books about dune ecology, whatever that is. Ian, my niece, Miss Wright.”

Thorne murmured politely. Why, that old scoundrel. That sly old dog. But she was pretty, all right.

“How engaging,” smiled the girl. “An ecologist with a leer.”

Dr. Thorne’s face abruptly attempted to adopt the protective coloration of his shorts. He said, “We’re really not bad fellows at heart, Miss Wright. It’s the fresh air that gives us the pointed ears.”

“I see,” she said, in a tone that made Thorne wonder just how much she saw. “Were you collecting specimens here today, Dr. Thorne?”

“Not exactly. You see, I’m preparing a chapter on the ecology of beach pool associations, and this little pool here is my guinea pig. The sand bar on the lake side will grow until the pool is completely cut off. As its stagnation increases, progressive forms of plant and animal life will inhabit it—algae, beetles, larvae, and so forth. If we have calm weather for the next few weeks, I can get an excellent cross section of the plant-animal societies which develop in this type of an environment. The chapter on the pool is one in a book I’m doing on ecological studies of the Michigan State dunes.”

“All you have to do is charge him up,” MacInnes remarked, yawning largely, “and he’s on the air for the rest of the day.” He pulled the raft up onto the sand and took out a flat package. “I brought you a present, if you’re interested.”

“What is it? The mail?” . ‘

“Something a heck of a lot more digestible. A brace of sirloins. I persuaded Jeanne to come along today to do them up for us. I’ve tasted your cooking.”

“I can burn a chop as well as the next man,” Thorne protested with dignity. “But I think I’ll concede the point. I was finished here. Shall we go right down to the shack? I live just down the shore, Miss Wright, in a place perched on top of a sand dune. It’s rugged but it’s home.”

MacInnes chuckled and led the way along the firm damp sand near the water’s edge.

In some places the tree-crowned dunes seemed to come down almost to the beach level. Juniper and pines and heavy undergrowth were the only things holding the vast creeping monster which are the traveling dunes. Without their green chains, they swept over farms and forests, leaving dead trees and silver-scoured boards in their wake.

The three of them cut inland and circled a great narrow-necked valley which widened out among the high sand hills. It was a barren, eery place of sharp, wind-abraded stumps and silent white spaces.

“A sand blow,” said Thorne. “The winds do it. Those dunes at the end of the valley in there are moving. See the dead trees? The hills buried them years ago and then moved on and left these skeletons. These were probably young oaks.”

“Poor things,” said the girl, as they moved on.

Then the dismal blow was gone, and green hills with scarcely a show of sand towered over them. At the top of the largest stood Thorne’s lodge, its rustic exterior blending inconspicuously into the conifers and maples which surrounded it on three sides. The front of the house was .banked with yew and prostrate juniper for sand control.

A stairway of hewn logs came down the slope of the dune. At its foot stood a wooden bench, a bright green pump, and an old ship’s bell on a pole.

“A dunes doorbell!” Jeanne exclaimed, seizing the rope. “Nobody home yet,” Thorne laughed, “but that’s the shack up there.”

“Yeah,” said MacInnes sourly. “And a hundred and thirty-three steps to the top.”

Later, they sat in comfortable rattan chairs on the porch while Thorne manipulated siphon and glasses.

“You really underestimate yourself, Dr. Thorne,” the girl said. “This is no shack, it’s a real home. A lodge in the pines.”

“Be it ever so humble,” he smiled. “I came up here to buy a two-by-four cabin to park my typewriter and microscopes in, and a guy wished this young chalet off on me.” “The view is magnificent. You can see for miles.” “But when the wind blows a gale off the lake, you think the house is going to be carried away! It’s just the thing for my work, though. No neighbors, not many picnickers, not even a decent road. I have to drive my jeep down the beach for a couple of miles before I can hit the cow path leading to the county trunk. No telephones, either. And I have my own little generating plant out back, or there wouldn’t be any electricity.”

“No phone?” Jeanne frowned. “But Uncle Kirk says he talks to you every day. I don’t understand.”

“Come out here,” he invited mysteriously. “I’ll show you something.”

He led the way to a tiny room with huge windows which lay just off the living room. Radio equipment stood on a desk and lined the walls. A large plaster model of a grasshopper squatting on the transmitter rack wore a pair of headphones.

“Ham radio used to be my hobby when I was a kid,” he said, “and now it keeps me in touch with the outside world. I met Mac over the air long before I ever saw him in the flesh. You must have seen his station at home. And I think he even has a little low power rig in the cruiser.”

“I’ve seen that. Do you mean he can talk to you any time he wants to?”

“Well, it’s not like the telephone,” Thorne admitted, “the other fellow has to be listening for you on your frequency. But your uncle and I keep a regular schedule every evening and sometimes in the morning. And hams in other parts of the country are very obliging in letting me talk to my friends and colleagues. It works out nicely all the way around.”

“Uncle Kirk had represented you as a sort of scientific anchorite,” she said, lifting a microphone and running her fingers over the smooth chrome. “But I’m beginning to think he was wrong.”

“Maybe,” he said quietly. “Maybe not. I manage to get along. The station is a big help in overcoming the isolation, but—there are other things. Shall we be getting back to the drinks?”

She put down the microphone and looked at him oddly. “If you like. Thank you for showing me your station.”

“Think nothing of it. If you’re ever in a jam, just howl for W8-Dog-Zed-Victor on ten meters.”

“All right,” she said to him. “If I ever am.” She turned and walked out of the door.

The casual remark he had been about to make died on his lips, and suddenly all the loneliness of his life in the dunes loomed up around him like the barren walls of the sand blow. And he was standing there with the dead trees all around and the living green forever out of reach… .

“This Scotch tastes like iodine,” said MacInnes from the porch.

Thorne left the little room and closed the door behind him. “It’s the only alcohol in the house, unless you want to try my specimen pickle,” said Thorne, dropping back into his chair. “As for the flavor—you should know. You brought the bottle over yourself last week.”

The girl took Thorne’s creel and began to arrange the bottles in a row on the table. Algae, beetles, and some horrid little things that squirmed when she shook them. Ugh.

“What’s this?” she asked curiously, holding up the bottle with the amber drop.

“Something I found in my beach pool this afternoon. I don’t know what it is. Rock crystal, perhaps, or somebody’s drowned jewelry.”

“I think it’s rather pretty,” she said admiringly. “It reminds me of something, with that little tail. I know—Prince Rupert drops. They look just like this, only they’re a bit smaller and have an air bubble in them. When you crack the little tail off them, the whole drop flies to powder.” She shrugged vaguely. “Strain, or something. I never saw one that had color like this, though. It’s almost like a piece of Venetian glass.”

“Keep it, if you like,” Thorne offered.

MacInnes poured himself another finger and thumb of Scotch and scrupulously added two drops of soda. In the center of the table, the small amber eye winked faintly in the sunlight.

Tommy Dittberner liked to walk down the shore after dinner and watch the sand toads play. There were hundreds of them that came out to feed as soon as dusk fell—little silvery-gray creatures with big jewel eyes, that swam in the mirror of the water or sat quietly on his hand when he caught them. There were all sizes, from big fellows over four inches long to tiny ones that could perch comfortably on his thumbnail.

Tommy came to Port Grand every August, and lived in a resort near the town. He knew he was not supposed to go too far from the cottage, but it seemed to him that there were always more and bigger toads just a little farther down the shore.

He would go just down to that sand spit, that was all. Well, maybe to that piece of driftwood down there. He wasn’t lost, like his mother said he would be if he went too far. He knew where he was; he was almost to the Bug Man’s house.

He was funny. He lived by himself and never talked to anyone—at least that’s what the kids said. But Tommy wasn’t too sure about that. Once last week the Bug Man and a pretty lady with black hair had been hiking in the dunes near Tommy’s cottage and Tommy had seen him kiss her. Boy, that had been something to tell the kids!

Here was the driftwood, and it was getting dark. He had been gone since six o’clock, and if he didn’t get home, Mom was going to give it to him, all right.

The toads were thicker than ever, and he had to walk carefully to avoid stepping on any of them. Suddenly he saw one lying in the sand down near the water’s edge. It was on its back and kicked feebly. He knelt down and peered closely at it.

“Sick,” he decided, prodding it with a finger. The animal winced from his touch, and its eyes were filmed with pain. But it wasn’t dead yet.

He picked it up carefully in both hands and scrambled over the top of the low shore dune to the foot of the great hill where the Bug Man lived.

Thorne opened the door to stare astonished at the little boy, and wondered whether or not to laugh. Sweat from the exertion of climbing the one hundred and thirty-three steps had trickled down from his hair, making little stripes of cleanness on the side of his face. His T-shirt had parted company from the belt of his jeans. He held out the toad in front of him.

“There’s this here toad I found,” he gasped breathlessly. “I think it’s sick.”

Without a word, Thorne opened the door and motioned the boy in. They went into the workroom together.

“Can you fix it up, mister?” asked the boy.

“Now, I’ll have to see what’s wrong first. You go wash your face in the kitchen and take a Coke out of the icebox while I look it over.”

He stretched it out on the table for examination. The abdomen was swollen and discolored, and even as he watched it the swelling movement of the floor of its mouth faltered and stopped, and the animal did not move again.

“It’s dead, ain’t it?” said a voice behind Thorne.

“I’m afraid so, sonny. It must have been nearly dead when you found it.”

The boy nodded gravely. He looked at it silently for a moment, then said: “What was the matter with it, mister?”

“I could tell if I dissected it. You know what that is, don’t you?” The boy shook his head. “Well, sometimes by looking inside of the sick thing that has died, you can find out what was wrong. Would you like to watch me do it?”

“I guess so.”

Scalpel and dissecting needle flashed under the table light. Thorne worked quickly, glancing at the boy now and then out of the corner of his eye. The instruments slicked within the redness of the incision and parted the oddly darkened and twisted organs.

Thorne stared. Then he arose and smiled kindly at the young face before him. “It died of cessation of cardiac activity, young fellow. I think you’d better be heading for home now. It’s getting dark and your mother will be worried about you. You wouldn’t want her to think anything had happened to you, would you? I didn’t think so. A big boy like you doesn’t worry his mother.”

“What’s a cardiac?” asked the boy, looking back over his shoulder at the toad as Thorne led him out.

“Means ‘pertaining to the heart,’” said Thorne. “Say, I’ll tell you what. We’ll drive home in my jeep. Would you like that?”

“I guess so.”

The screen door slammed behind them. The kid would forget the toad quickly enough, Thorne told himself. He couldn’t have seen what was inside it anyway.

In the lodge later, under the single little light, Thorne preserved the body of the toad in alcohol. Beside him on the table gleamed two tiny amber drops with tails which he had removed from the seared and ruptured remains of the toad’s stomach.

The marine chronometer on the wall of Thorne’s amateur station read five-fifteen. His receiver said to him: “I have to sign off now. The missus is hollering up that she wants me to see to the windows before supper. I’ll look for you tomorrow. This is W8GB over to W8DVZ, and W8GB is out and clear. Good night, Thorne.”

Thorne said, “Good night, Mac. W8DVZ out and clear,” and let the power die in his tubes.

He lit a cigarette and stood looking out of the window. In the blue sky over the lake hung a single, giant white thunderhead; it was like a marble spray billow, ponderous and sullen. The rising wind slipped whistling through the stiff branches of the evergreen trees on the dune, and dimly, through the glass, he could hear the sound of the waves.

He moped around inadequately after supper and waited for something to happen. He typed up the day’s notes, tidied the workroom, tried to read a magazine, and then thought about Jeanne. She was a sweet kid, but he didn’t love her. She didn’t understand.

The sand walls seemed to be going up around him again. He wasn’t among the dead trees—he was one of them, rooted in the sand with the living greenness stripped from his heart.

Oh, what the hell. The magazine flew across the room and disappeared behind the couch in a flutter of white pages.

He stormed into the workroom, bumped the shelves, and set the specimens in their bottles swaying sadly to and fro. In the second bottle from the end, right-hand side, was a toad. In the third were two small amber drops with tails, “whose label said only:

YOU TELL ME—8/5/57

Interest stirred. Now, there was a funny thing. He had almost forgotten. The beads, it would seem, had been the cause of the toad’s death. They had evidently affected the stomach and the surrounding tissues before they had had & chance to pass through the digestive tract. Fast work. He picked up the second bottle and moved it gently. The pale little thing inside rotated until the incision, with all the twisted organs plainly visible inside, faced him. Willy Seppel would have liked to see this; too bad he was across the state in Ann Arbor.

Idly, Thorne toyed with the idea of sending the pair of drops to his old friend. They were unusual looking—he could leave the label on, write a cryptic note, and fix Seppel’s clock for putting the minnows in his larvae pail on their last field trip together.

If he hurried, he could get the drops off tonight. There was a train from Port Grand in forty-five minutes. As for the storm, it was still a long way off; he doubted that it would break before nightfall. And the activity would do him good.

He found a small box and prepared it for the mails. Where was that book of stamps? The letter to Seppel: he slipped a sheet of paper into the typewriter and tapped rapidly. String—where was the string? Ah, here it was in the magazine rack. Now a slicker, and be sure the windows and doors are locked.

His jeep was in a shed at the bottom of the dune, protected by a thick scrub of cottonwood and cedar. Since there was no door, Thorne had merely to reverse gears, shoot out, swing around, and roar over the improvised stone drive to the hard, wet sand of the beach. Five miles down the shore was an overgrown but still usable wagon trail which led to the highway.

The clouds were closing ranks in the west as Dr. Thorne and his jeep disappeared over the crest of a tall dune.

Mr. Gimpy Zandbergen, gentleman of leisure, late of the high sea and presently of the open road, was going home. During a long and motley life, Mr. Zandbergen had wandered far from his native lakes to sail on more boisterous waters; but now his days as an oiler were over, and there came into his heart a nostalgic desire to see the fruit boats ship out of Port Grand once more. Since he possessed neither the money for a bus ticket home, nor the ambition to work to obtain it, he pursued his way via freight cars and such rides as he was able to hook from kindly disposed truck drivers.

His last ride had carried him to a point on the shore highway some miles south of his goal, at which he had regrettably disputed the intrinsic worth of the Detroit Tigers and had been invited to continue his journey on foot. But Mr. Zandbergen was a simple soul, so he merely shrugged his shoulders, fortified himself from the bottle in his pocket, and trudged along.

It was hot, though, as only Michigan in August can be, and the sun baked the concrete and reflected off the sand hills at the side of the road. He paused, pulled a blue bandanna handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped his balding head under his cap. He thought longingly of the cool dune path which he knew lay on the other side of the forest, toward the lake.

It had been a long time, but he knew he remembered it. It would lead to Port Grand and the fruit boats, and would be refreshingly cool.

When the storm came, Mr. Zandbergen was distinctly put out. He had not seen the gathering storm through the thick branches, and when the sky darkened, he assumed that it was merely one of the common summer sun showers and hoped for a quick clearing.

He was disturbed when the big drops continued to pelt down among the oak trees. He was annoyed as his path led him out between the smaller and less sheltering evergreens. He swore as the path ended high on a scrubby hill.

Lightning cut the black clouds and Mr. Zandbergen broke into a lope. He had taken the wrong turning, he knew that now. But he recognized this shore. He dimly remembered a driftwood shanty which lay near an old wagon road somewhere around here. If he made that, he might not get too wet after all.

He could see the lake now. The wind was raging and tearing at the waves, whipping the once placid waters of Michigan into black fury. Mr. Zandbergen shuddered in the driving rain and fled headlong down a dune. Great crashes of thunder deafened him and he could hardly see. Where was that road?

A huge sheet of lightning lit the sky as he struggled to the top of the next dune. There it was! The road was down there! And trees, and the shanty, too.

He went diagonally across the dune in gigantic leaps, dodging the storm-wracked trees and bushes. The wind lulled, then blasted the branches down ferociously, catching him a stinging blow across the face. He tripped, and with an agonized howl began to roll straight down the bare face of the sand hill. He landed in a prickly juniper hedge and lay, whimpering and cursing weakly, while the rain and wind pounded him.

The greenery ripped from the trees stung into him viciously as he tried to rise, gave up, and tried again. On the black beach several hundred feet away, waves leaped and stretched into the sky.

Then came another lull and a light appeared out in the lake. It rose and fell in the surf and in a few moments the flattened and horrified little man on the shore could see what it was. A solemn thunderclap drowned out his scream of terror.

Shouting wordless things, he stumbled swaying to his feet and clawed through the bushes to fall out onto the road. It saw him! He was sure it saw him! He struggled along on his knees in the sand for a short distance before he fell for the last time.

The wind shrilled again in the trees, but the fury of the storm had finally passed. The rain fell down steadily now on the sodden sand dunes, and dripped off the cottonwood branches onto the quiet form of Mr. Zandbergen, who would not see the fruit boats go out again after all.

The sheriff was a conversational man. “Now I’ve lived on the lake for forty years,” he said to Thorne, “but never —never did I see a storm like today’s. No sir!” He turned to his subordinate standing beside him. “Regular typhoon, eh, Sam? I guess we won’t be forgetting that one in a hurry.”

Dr. Thorne, at any rate, would not forget it. He could still hear in his mind the thunder as it had rolled away off over the dunes, and see the flaring white cones of his headlights cutting out his way through the rain. He had gone slowly over the sliding wet sand of the wagon road on the way home, but even at that he had almost missed seeing it. He remembered how he had thought it was a fallen branch at first, and how he got out of the car then and stood in the rain looking at it before he wrapped his slicker around it and drove back to town.

And now the rain had stopped at last, and the office of the Port Grand physician who was the county medical examiner was neat, dim, and stuffy with the smell of pharmaceuticals and wet raincoats. Over the other homely odors hung the stench of burnt flesh.

Snip, went the physician’s bandage shears through charred cloth. Thorne lit a cigarette and inhaled, but the sharp, sickening other smell remained in his nostrils.

“According to his Seamen’s International card, he was George Zandbergen of Port Grand,” said the sheriff to Sam, who carefully transcribed this information in his notebook. To Thorne he said, “Did you know him, mister?”

Thorne shook his head.

“I remember him, Peter,” said the physician, experimentally determining the stiffness of the dead fingers before him. “Appendicitis in 1946. Left town after that. I think he used to be an oiler on the Josephine Temple in the fruit fleet. I’ll have a file on him around somewhere.”

“Get that, Sam,” said the sheriff. He turned to Thorne, standing awkwardly at the foot of the examination table. “We’ll have to have your story for the record, of course. I hope this won’t take too long. Start at the beginning, please.”

Gulping down his nervousness and revulsion, Thorne told of returning from town about nine o’clock and finding the corpse of a man lying in the middle of a deserted side road. Dr. Thorne recalled puzzling at the condition of the body, for although it had been storming heavily at the time, portions of the body had been burned quite black.

Thorne had found something at the scene also, but failing to see that it had any connection with the matters at hand, prudently kept his discovery to himself. The sheriff would hardly be interested in it, he told himself, but nevertheless he hoped that the bulge it made in his pocket wasn’t too noticeable.

Officer Sam Stern made the last little tipped-v that stood for a period in his transcription and looked nervously about him. His chief peered approvingly—even if uncomprehendingly—at the notes and then said: “How does it look, doctor?”

“Third degree burns on fifty percent of the body area, seared to the bone in some parts of the face and about the right scapula. How did you say he was lying when you found him, Mr. Thorne?”

“In an unnatural kind of sprawled position, on the right side.”

The physician yawned, rummaged in a cabinet and produced a sheet with which he covered the charred body. “Pretty obvious, Peter, with these burns and all. Verdict is accidental death. The poor devil was struck by lightning. Time of death was about eight P.M.” He tucked the sheet securely around the head. “That lightning’s pretty odd stuff, now. Can blow the soles off a man’s shoes without scratching him, or generate enough heat to melt metal. You never know what tricks it’s going to play. Take this guy here: one side of him’s broiled black and the other’s not even singed. Well, you never know, do you?”

He picked up his phone and conversed briefly with the local undertaking parlor. When negotiations for the disposition of the unfortunate Mr. Zandbergen had been completed, he replaced the receiver and shuffled toward the door. Thorne could see that he had bedroom slippers on under his rubbers.

“You can finish up tomorrow, Peter,” he resumed. “My wife was kinda peeved at me coming out this way. You know how women are, ha-ha. Good night to you, Mr. Thorne. I think there’s an old overcoat in that closet I could let you take. You’ll be wanting to send yours to the cleaners.”

There was a genial guffaw from the sheriff. “We won’t keep you any longer tonight, Mr. Thorne. Just let me know how I can get in touch with you.”

“Through Kirk MacInnes on River Road,” said Thorne. “He’ll be glad to contact me through his amateur station.” He edged through the door into the quiet night. The sheriff came close behind.

“So you’re a ham, eh?” he said warmly. “Well, can you tie that! I used to have a ticket myself in the old days.”

Polite noises. How about that? Kindred souls. Sorry about all this sloppy business, old man. Tough luck you had to be the one to find him. Really nothing, old man. Why didn’t he stop talking? The weight in Thorne’s pocket seemed to grow.

“You know, I’ll be dropping in to see your rig some one of these days if you don’t mind. I’ll bet you could use a little company out there in the dunes, eh?”

No, why should he mind? Delighted, old man. Any time at all.

The thing in his pocket seemed to sag to his ankles. It would rip the pocket and fall out. And it had bits of charred cloth on it. Why didn’t they go? They couldn’t possibly suspect that he hadn’t—

Oh, yes, he was on ten meters. Phone. Oh, the sheriff had done c.w. on 180? Well, wasn’t that nice.

They walked to the cars under the big old elm trees that lined the comfortable street. A few stars came out and down where the street dead-ended into the river, they could see lights moving toward the deepwater channel that connected the river with the lake.

“Well, good night, Sheriff,” Thorne said. “Good night, Mr. Stern. I hope next time we’ll meet under more pleasant circumstances.”

“Good night, Mr. Thorne,” said Sam, who was thoroughly bored with talk he didn’t understand, and anxious to get home to his wife and baby.

The police got into their car and drove off. Thorne sat quietly behind the wheel of the jeep until he was sure they were gone, then gingerly removed the weight from his pocket and unwrapped the handkerchief that covered it.

This one was the size of a closed fist and irregular in shape. He had found it flattened under the black char that had once been a man’s shoulder, glowing with a bright yellow light in its heart. It looked the same as the three small drops he had previously seen, but he saw that what he had mistaken for golden flecks inside of it was really a fine network of metallic threads which formed a web apparently imbedded a few centimeters below the thing’s surface.

The damn thing, he thought. There was something funny about it, all right.

Around him, the lights of the quiet houses were going out one by one. It was eleven o’clock. A few wet patches still glistened on the street under the lamps, and a boat motor on the river pulsed, then stilled.

Thorne looked around him quickly, then got out of the car and laid the thing on the curb. The wet leaves in the gutter below it reflected yellow faintly.

It was funny that a mere matter of shape could change his feeling toward it so radically. The smaller drops had been rather beautiful in their droplike mystery, but this one, although it was made of the same wonderful stuff, had none of the beauty. The irregular cavity in its side that would fit a human shoulder blade made it a thing sinister; the dried blood and ashes made it monstrous.

He took a tire iron out of the tool kit and tapped the glowing thing experimentally. It was certainly stronger than it looked, at any rate. When harder taps failed to crack it, he raised the iron and brought it down with all his strength. The tool bounced, skidded, and chipped the concrete curbstone, but the thing flew undamaged into the gutter.

Thorne bent down and poked it incredulously. And suddenly, with a cry of agony, he dropped the tire iron. It was hot! The tool arced down and lay sizzling sullenly among the little drops of water that still clung to the grass blades. His hand—He clenched his teeth to keep from crying out.

But the glowing thing in the gutter was not hot. Steam rose from the iron in the grass, but the little rivulets bathing the glowing thing were cool. He seemed to remember something, but then the shocked numbness coming over his hand took his attention and he forgot it again.

Down among the leaves and trash, the thing that was not shattered by the strength of Dr. Thorne grew, momentarily, more golden; and with a deliberate, liquid ripple the ugly bulges on its surface smoothed and it assumed the perfect drop shape of its predecessors.

200000 AU PLUS PLENTY WATTS. TELL ME PRETTY MAIDEN ARE THERE ANY MORE AT HOME LIKE YOU? ARRIVE NOON THURSDAY. LOVE. SEPPEL.

“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” said Thorne.

“Yep,” said Willy Seppel smugly, smirking around the edge of his beer. He put down the glass and the smirk expanded to a grin. “Smart enough to see what those drops were that you sent me for a gag. That was a great little trick of yours, you know. I was all set to throw them out after reading that note of yours. The only thing that saved them was Archie Deck. He thought they might be Prince Rupert drops and tried to crack the tails off with a file.”

“Aha,” said Dr. Thorne.

Seppel looked at him with bright blue, innocent eyes. He was a large, pink-faced, elegantly dressed man with an eagle-beak nose and a crown of fine, blond hair.

“You don’t have to look at me like that,” said Thorne. “I’ve been able to find out a little bit more about them myself.”

“Tell me,” said the pink face complacently.

“They generate heat. And I found out the same way as Archie Deck probably did.” He gestured with one bandaged hand. “Only I managed it the hard way.” He swept up the empty glasses and beer bottles with a crash and disappeared into the kitchen. His voice continued distantly:

“I found those two I sent you inside the stomach of a toad. Or at least what was left of the stomach of a toad. Look in the lab room, the big shelf; second bottle from the end on the right-hand side.”

Wiping his good hand on his trousers, he returned to Seppel, who stood looking thoughtfully into the toad’s bottle. “It ate the drops,” Thorne said shortly.

“Mm—yes,” he mused. “The digestive juices might very possibly be able to—” .. “Come on, Willy. What is it?”

“You were almost right when you said it generated heat,” Willy said. “I brought one of them here to show you.” He left the room and returned in a minute with a large cowhide briefcase.

“This thing’s in a couple of pieces,” Seppel apologized.

“You’ll have to wait until I set it up. Have you got a step-down transformer?”

Thorne nodded and fetched it from the bookcase. “Now this little drop here may look like a bead, but it has some singular properties.” He removed the thing from a box which had been heavily sealed and padded, and set it in a nest of gray, woolly stuff in the middle of the table.

“It gives off long infrared, mostly stacked up around 200,000 Angstroms. But their energy is way out of proportion from what you’d expect from the equation. This little gadget is something Deck and I rigged up to measure it crudely. Essentially, it’s a TC130X couple hooked up to a spring gun. You put the drop in here, regulate the tension of the spring, and firing the gun releases this rod which delivers the drop an appropriate smack.” His fingers with their immaculately groomed nails worked deftly. “We don’t get a controlled measurement, of course, but it’ll show you what I mean… . Where do you hide your outlets?”

“Behind the fish tank. Be careful not to disconnect the aerator.”

“The screen on that end will show you the energy output. Watch now.”

The horizontal green line on the little gray screen bucked at the firing of the spring, then exploded into an oscillating fence of spikes.

“Mad, isn’t it?” remarked Dr. Thorne. “Hit it again, but lower the tension of the spring.”

If anything, the spikes were even higher. “The smack-energy ratio isn’t proportional,” said Seppel. “Sometimes a little nudge will set it off like a rocket. And again, after we tapped it for a week at Ann Arbor figuring out what it was, it showed a tendency to sulk and wouldn’t perform at all after awhile.”

“The energy output,” Thorne said. “It’s really quite small, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but still surprising for an object this size.” He removed the drop from the device and put it back into its little box. “We think that glowing heart has something to do with it. And those gold threads—they are gold, you know—come in there too. Old Camestres, the Medalist himself, was visiting the University, and he says that glow is something that’ll have the physicists crawling the walls.”

“Oh, come now,” said Dr. Thorne broadly.

“You just wait,” said Seppel. “We haven’t done the analysis yet, but we expect great things. The glow,” he added, “isn’t hard radiation, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Willy was proud of it, Thorne thought. It was really his discovery after all, not Thorne’s, and Seppel, who found challenge and stimulation in the oddest places, had hit the heights with the little golden drops.

But Thorne was remembering a larger drop, the size of a man’s fist, and the charred body of a dead man.

“I found another specimen,” he said, turning to a drawer in the worktable. “A larger one.” He took out Mr. Zandbergen’s drop.

“This is wonderful!” Seppel cried. “It’s almost the size of a grapefruit! Now we can—”

Thorne cut him off gently. “I want to tell you about this one. Then I’ll turn it over to you. When I first found it, it was irregularly shaped. Lumpy. Ugly. It’s smooth now, just like the others, but it changed right before my eyes. It just seemed to run fluid, then coalesce again into the drop shape. And there’s something else.”

He told Seppel about the attempt to crack the thing and the abrupt heating of the tire iron.

“Yes, that could be,” Seppel decided. “It’s easily possible that a larger specimen such as this one could cause a metal object near it to become perceptibly warm. Infrared rays aren’t hot in themselves, but when they penetrate a material their wave length is increased and the energy released heats the material. In the case of the tire iron, the conductivity of the metal was greater than that of your hand, and you felt the warm iron before the skin itself was affected.”

“The iron wasn’t warm, Willy. It was damn hot. And in a matter of seconds.”

Seppel shook his head. “I don’t know what to say. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever run across.”

“The dead man who lay down on it didn’t think it was funny,” said Thorne.

“You don’t think this little thing killed him, do you? He was charred to a cinder all along one side of him. Do you know what kind of infrared could do a thing like that? None.”

“I didn’t say I thought this one killed him,” said Thorne, with a cue that Seppel chose to ignore. “I just said the body was right on top of it.”

“Too wild for me,” said Seppel. He got up, stretched leisurely, and glanced at the clock. “And anyhow, it’s sack time. We can worry about it tomorrow, eh?”

Thorne had to smile. Good old Willy. No little glowing monster was going to keep him from his sleep.

“We’ll put grapefruit back in the drawer,” Seppel suggested, “have ourselves a snack, and go to bed.”

“Wouldn’t the big one be better off in a pail of ice?” asked Thorne, half laughingly.

“If it did decide to give out, it would probably melt the pail before it melted the ice. And besides,” he added with dapper complacency, “they never radiate unless they’re disturbed.”

In the dream, there was sand all around him. He was in it, buried up to his neck. There was a sun overhead that was gold and transparent, and a wind that never seemed to reach his feverish face threw up little whirls of yellow sand.

Sometimes the familiar face of a woman was there. He cried her name and she was gone. And after that, he forgot her, for small shapeless things gamboled out on the sand into the sunlight, only to be burnt black as the rays struck them… .

For the fifth time that night, it seemed, Thorne awoke, his eyes staring widely into the darkness. He cursed at himself and turned the perspiration-soaked pillow over, pummeling it into a semblance of plumpness. Seppel lay beside him, snoring gently.

Somewhere in the lodge a timber creaked, and he felt the fear come back again, and saw the black, huddled heap lying before his headlights, and felt the pain renewed in his slowly healing hand. Of the dream, strangely enough, there was no memory at all.

Only the fear.

But why should he be afraid? There was nothing out there. Nothing out there at all.

But the heap in the road. Lightning. But the little one had burned. So what? The little one was too small to burn a man seriously. I know that. He was burned. Lightning, you silly fool! He was burned! Shut up. One of them burned him. Shut up! Shut up! There’s another one out there tonight.

No. Nothing out there at all.

Nothing but the dunes and the lake. Nothing.

The wind squalls strummed the pine branches out there, and swirls of sand borne up the bluff from the beach below tickled faintly at the window. The waves of Michigan were roaring out there—but there was nothing else.

Finally, he was able to sleep.

It was nearly dawn when he woke again, but this time he was on guard and alert as he lowered his bare feet softly to the floor. His hand closed over the barrel of a flashlight on the chest of drawers, and he moved noiselessly so that he would not wake the sleeper beside him.

He tiptoed slowly through the workroom and the living room. Something was on the porch.

As he came through the doors, he said sharply: “Who’s there?”

An odor of burned wood hit his nostrils. He exclaimed shortly under his breath and shone the light down near the sill of the outside door. There was a round black hole in the door, smoking and glowing faintly around the edges.

He raced back into the workroom and pulled out the drawer that had held the grapefruit-sized drop. It was empty, and a hole gaped in the bottom of it. The hard wood, was still burning slowly.

He yanked out the drawer, put it in the kitchen sink, and turned on the water. Then he filled a pan and soaked the hole in the door thoroughly.

They never radiate unless they’re disturbed! That was a laugh. Not only had it radiated, but it had somehow focused the radiation. Dr. Thorne was no physicist, but he began to wonder whether the meter had told the whole story of the little glowing drop.

He unlocked the door and slid out into the night. Below the stair was a small, almost imperceptible track in the sand. He followed it down the ridge of the dune, lost it momentarily in a patch of scrub, then found it again in the undisturbed expanse of the sand blow.

He went down into the silent valley, the hobbling yellow light from his flash throwing the tiny track into high relief.

When he reached the center of the bowl, he stopped among the long shadows of the gaunt spiky trees.

There was another track in the sand, meeting and merging with the little one. And the track was three feet wide.

He followed it as if in a dream to the crest of the first low shore dune and stood on its summit among the sharp grass and wild grape. The moon’s crescent was low over the water and orange. He saw the track go down the slope and disappear into the waves which were swirling in a new depression in the sand.

The wind whipped his pajama shirt about his back as he stood there and knew that he was afraid of that track in the sand, and that no lightning had killed the little tramp.

It was not until he had locked the door of the lodge behind him that he realized he had run all of the way back.

Friday was a quiet day in the dunes country, but the police did receive three minor complaints. A farmer charged that someone had not only made off with and eaten three of his best laying hens, but had burned the feathers and bones and left them right in the chicken yard. The Ottawa County Highway Commission wanted to know who was building fires in the middle of their asphalt roads and plastering the landscape with hot tar. And a maiden lady complained that the artists in the local summer colony must be holding Wild Orgies again from the looks of the lights she had seen over there at three A.M.

Dr. Thorne bent down over the tracks in the sand. It certainly looked to him as though the big one had been waiting for Mr. Zandbergen’s drop.

Seppel said, “Get out of the way there,” and snapped his Graflex. “These sand tracks won’t last long in the winds around here. And I frankly tell you that if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it.” He circled the point of conjunction, laid his fountain pen beside it for size reference, and the Graflex flashed again.

“We’ll want the door, too,” he said, putting the camera aside and scrawling in his notebook.

Thorne howled.

“Well, just the part with the hole in it then,” Seppel conceded. “Did you find out where the large track came from?”

“I tracked it to the woods. The ground there is too soft and boggy to hold a wide track like that, and I finally lost it.”

Seppel struggled to his feet and retrieved his coat, which he had hung for safety’s sake on the white peg branch of a skeleton tree. “Just imagine the size of an object which would make a three-foot track in soft sand!” he exclaimed. “And to think it’s been in the lake for heaven knows how long and this is the first time it’s come into evidence!”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that—about this being the first time, I mean. There have been some funny old stories told along these shores. I heard one myself from my grandmother when I was about twelve. About the dune roller that was bigger than a schooner and lived in the caves at the bottom of the lake. It came out every hundred years and rolled through the dune forest, leaving a strip of bare sand behind it where it had eaten the vegetation. They said it looked for a man, and when it found one, it would stop rolling and sink back into the lake.”

“Great Caesar,” said Seppel solemnly. “I can see it now —the great glowing globe lurking deep in the caverns where the sun never shines and there is no life except a few diatoms drifting in the motionless waters.”

Thorne gaped at his friend for a minute, and then spied a suspicious twinkle in one blue eye.

“This is no laughing matter, you Sunday supplementist!” he said sharply.

“Hmp,” said Willy Seppel, and brushed a few grains of sand from the sleeve of his handsome suit.

It was late when Miss Jeanne Wright got out of the movie in Muskegon—so late that she barely had time to do the shopping which had, ostensibly, been her reason for taking Carlin out. “You just can’t buy decent dresses in Port Grand, Uncle Kirk,” she had pleaded, and he really wouldn’t mind if she took the boat, would he? MacInnes had growled indulgently from the depths of his new panadaptor and said he certainly did, confound it, and what was the matter with using the car? But he had tossed her the keys just the same.

The street lights of the city were going on when, laden with bundles, she finally hailed a cab and drove to the yacht basin. It was a beautiful evening, with soft-glowing stars in a sky that was still red-purple in the west. Carlin slipped majestically out among the anchored craft into Muskegon Lake.

A bonfire blazed cheerfully on the shore and singing voices from some beach party floated melodiously out over the water. They shouted a jocular greeting to Carlin and Jeanne blew a hail to them with the air horn. Her heart was light as she led the cruiser through the channel Into the lake and headed for home.

A secretive smile danced on her lips, and she thought kindly about a certain stern-faced young biologist. He was a strange man, occasionally even rude in an unintentional sort of way, and preoccupied with such dreary things as plant cycles and environmental adaptations. But he had walked with her in the dunes one day and changed for a little while, and kissed her once, very gently, on the lips. And after that she had known what she wanted.

He would be sitting in his workroom now, looking over the day’s bugs and not thinking of her at all. Or perhaps he would be talking to her uncle over the radio.

She hummed dreamily to herself. The cruiser’s speed increased to twenty, and it rocked momentarily in a trough, setting the little good luck charm hung up over the wheel to bobbing like a pendulum. Ian had given that to her. She loved it because of that.

After a while she turned on the short wave receiver that sat on one of the lockers in the deckhouse and listened to Ian and her uncle.

“I have a colleague of mine out from Ann Arbor,” Thorne was saying. “About that amber drop we found. Remember my telling you about it? I gave one to Jeanne for a souvenir. My friend is a biophysicist and thinks the drops are a great scientific discovery. His name is Willy Seppel. Say something, Willy.”

“Gambusia,” said Seppel, recalling the minnows in the larvae pail.

Jeanne listened absently. Ian was telling how the drops gave off hot light when they were disturbed. How he thought there might be bigger drops around that could really grind out the energy 40db. above S9 (What in the world did that mean?) Thorne and this Willy person would look for the bigger drops.

“Is it really hot?” Jeanne wondered, staring curiously at the pendant drop, swinging above the binnacle in its miniature silver basket. It didn’t seem to be. But then Ian had said the little ones didn’t radiate very much. Only enough to tickle a something-or-other.

Far out in the lake, the lights of an ore boat twinkled. She passed the little village of Lake Harbor and put out a bit farther from shore. There would be no more towns now until Port Grand.

Over the radio, her Uncle Kirk’s voice, homely and kind, was describing the great things in store for the new panadaptor. Ian would put in a comment here and there, but she noticed that he sounded tired, poor darling.

Cleanly, powerfully, Carlin sliced through the waves, pursuing the shadow of herself. The shadow was long, and very black. A boat with a searchlight, thought Jeanne, and looked astern.

It was there, riding high in the dark, choppy water: a great glowing globe of phosphorescence not twenty yards off the stern. It was coming after her, rapidly overtaking the cruiser.

She screamed then, and when the thing came on, she opened the throttle and attempted to outmaneuver it. But the great glowing monster would pause while she veered and spiraled, then overtake her easily when she tried to run away. The motors of the Matthews throbbed in the hull beneath her feet as she tried to urge them to a speed they were never meant for.

The thing was drawing closer. She could see trails of water streaming from it. What was it? What would it do if it caught her?

Bigger ones! Her eyes turned with horror to the tiny drop on its silver chain. Its glow was the perfect mintiature of the monstrous thing in the water behind her. She sobbed as she wrenched Carlin’s wheel from side to side in hysterical frenzy. Across the cabin, the quiet voice of Ian was telling MacInnes how to rig the panadaptor as a frequency monitor.

Ian!

And if you’re ever in a jam. …

With tears streaming down her cheeks she set the automatic pilot and fumbled with the little amateur transmitter that had been built into the locker. She had seen her uncle use it only once. That turned it on, she thought, but how did she know it was set right? Or did you set these things?

The little panel wore three switches, two knobs, a dial and a little red light. Naturally Kirk MacInnes had not labeled the controls of an instrument he had built himself. The panel was innocent of any such clutterment.

Carlin tore through the night. The glowing thing was less than fifteen yards behind.

Jeanne wept wildly and the placid voices over the receiver spoke sympathetically of the ruining of Thorne’s beach pool by the storm.

Oh, those knobs and switches! This one, then this one, she thought. No—that wouldn’t be right. The transmitter might not even be on the air at all. Or she might be in some part of the band where Ian and her uncle would fail to hear her. But what was she supposed to do? And she couldn’t read this funny tuning scale.

“I’ve got a swell mobile VFO in Carlin,” said Macinnes.

“What’s VFO?” said Seppel.

“In Mac’s case, it means Very Frequently Offband.”

Laughter.

Oh, what difference would it make? What could he do to help her? The brilliance of the huge thing was lighting up the water for yards around.

The calm voices floated from the receiver and the globe drew closer than it had ever been.

She clawed at the stand-by switch of the radio and suddenly her sobs and the beat of the engines were the only sounds in the deckhouse. She would try. That was all. She would try to reach Ian, and pray that her uncle had left the transmitter set to the correct frequency.

“Ian!” she cried, then remembered to press the button on the side of the little hand microphone. Forcing back her tears, she said, “Ian, Ian—can you hear me?”

Trembling, her hand touched the receiver.

“Jeanne!” the sound burst into the deckhouse. “Is that you? What are you doing?”

“It’s after me, Ian!” she screamed. “A glowing sphere fifteen feet high! It’s chasing the boat!”

“The boat,” came MacInnes’ voice numbly. “She took it to Muskegon.”

“Jeanne! Listen to me. I don’t know whether this will do any good, but you must try. You must do exactly as I say. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you. Ian! That thing is almost on top of the boat!”

“Listen. Listen to me, darling. You have that little amber drop somewhere in the boat. Do you remember? The little amber drop I gave you. Get it. Take it and throw it overboard. Throw it as far as you can. The amber drop! Now tell me if you heard me.”

“Yes. I hear you. The drop… .”

The drop. It danced on its little silver chain and the light in its core was bright and pulsating and warm. She tore it from its place over the wheel and groped back to the open cockpit of the cruiser. She clung for a full minute to the canopy stanchion, blinded by the golden light.

And then the small drop arched brightly over the water, even as a meteor had, many centuries past.

The light, reflecting off the walls painted a flat, clinical white, was full of blurred, fuzzy forms. They might have been almost anything, Thorne thought. And he shuddered as he thought of what they might have been. A table, for instance, with a burden that was sprawled and made black all along one side.

Without moving his head or changing his expression he squeezed his eyes shut very slowly and opened them again. But it was not the medical examiner’s office. It was the waiting room of the little local hospital, and Willy Seppel was sitting beside him on the leather couch. Through the open window behind lowered blinds, a clovery night breeze stirred, parting the smoke that filled the room and turning a page of the magazine that Seppel was staring at.

A young man of twenty-five or so sat across the room from them and ate prodigious quantities of Lifesavers. “My wife,” he had grinned nervously at them. “Our first.”

The persons in the waiting room could see through the open door to a room at the end of the hall. People in white would periodically enter and leave this room, but another, grimmer group which had entered nearly an hour ago had not come out.

“Willy, I’m going nuts,” Thorne burst out at last. “What are they doing in there? You’d think they’d at least let me know—let me see her.”

“Easy. It’ll be any minute now.” He proffered a gold cigarette case, but Thorne shook his head. “Why don’t you lie back and try to relax?” Seppel said. “You’ve been crouching there staring at the floor until your eyes look like a pair of burned-out bulbs. What good do you think you’re going to do her in that kind of shape?”

Thorne sank back and lay with the back of his hand shading his eyes. If he could have been there when they brought her in! But it takes time to find where an unmanned boat has drifted. Time while he sat before his receiver with nothing to do but wait. The hands of the clock had wound around to one A.M. before the call finally came and he knew she was saved.

It was three-thirty now. MacInnes and his wife were in there with her. He looked despairingly down the white corridor, and waited.

The sound of her voice, made broken and breathless with weeping, rose again in his mind. She had said the thing was fifteen feet high. The big one itself. And it could have—

This wouldn’t do at all. The memory of his dream the previous night stood out in his mind with horrible clarity. The bright golden sun and the little burned things. But infrared doesn’t burn. The bright golden sun. “Sun,” said Dr. Thorne to himself, very quietly.

“Mm’mm?” said Seppel.

“Sun,” he repeated firmly. “Willy, do you always think the same way?”

“Nope.”

“If I hit you, how do you think?”

“Mad,” said Seppel, with a winning smile.

“But if you figure the best way to sneak out of here without being seen, how do you think?”

“Rationally.”

“I’ve been thinking about the drops again. You know, we’ve got a pretty serious discrepancy in the so-called properties of the things. We’ve proved the infrared emission, but infrared doesn’t sear flesh.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” said Seppel, with patience.

“Nonetheless, I’m convinced that the big one Jeanne saw is the thing that did in the tramp. Now what if the energy emitted is not always infrared? What if the infrared is a sort of involuntary result of the blows we gave the drop, while ordinarily when it’s aroused it gives off another wavelength? Say something in the visible with a lot of energy, that that drop shape could focus into a beam.”

Seppel didn’t say a thing.

Silence precipitated heavily. The young man in the chair opposite them shifted his position and stared at them with gaping awe. Scientists!

There was a starchy swish and a nurse appeared in the doorway. Thorne started to his feet. “Can we—”

“Mr. De Angelo,” she beckoned coolly. “It’s a boy. Will you follow me, please?”

The young man gave a joyous, inarticulate cry and rushed out of the room.

Thorne dropped back. “Ye gods,” he muttered.

“You’ve really got it bad, haven’t you?” Seppel marveled.

“Oh, Willy, shut up. You know I’m only interested in her because of the thing that chased her. And wipe that look off your face. Between you and Machines a man doesn’t have a chance.”

Seppel looked slightly hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Thorne apologized briefly. He walked around the room. The young man with the new son had been so anxious to leave that he had forgotten his Lifesavers. Thorne ate one. It was wintergreen. He hated wintergreen.

Sepple yawned delicately, then leaned forward and glanced out the door. “Someone’s coming,” he warned—softly.

A tall man in a uniform of summer tans had left the room at the end of the corridor and walked purposefully toward the waiting room.

Seppel rose to his feet as the man entered the room. He said: “Good evening—or rather, good morning. Is there something I can do?”

“My name is Cunningham, commander of the Coast Guard cutter Manistique. Are you Mr. Ian Thorne?”

“My name is Seppel. This is Mr. Thorne. Won’t you sit down?”

“Thanks, I will.” To Thorne, who stood with his hands rudely clasped behind his back, he said briskly: “Mr. Thorne, at nine this evening your amateur station contacted our base with information that the cruiser Carlin was in difficulty off the mainland somewhere between Port Grand and Muskegon.”

“It wasn’t me, it was Kirk MacInnes.” Thorne was not interested in brisk, nautical gentlemen.

“We found the cruiser drifting, out of gas, some seven miles off the Port Grand light. Miss Wright, the operator of the craft, was found lying unconscious on the cockpit floor. I’ve just seen her—”

“How is she?” Thorne cut in.

“The doctors say she is suffering from shock, but other than that, they can’t find a thing wrong with her. Now what I’d like to know—”

“Is she conscious? Has she been able to talk?”

“She’s very weak and what she says makes no sense. I thought perhaps you might be able to help us on that score.”

Thorne looked at the Coast-Guardsman narrowly. “We were conversing with her over the radio, when she suddenly seemed to become disturbed and evidently fainted.”

“Didn’t MacInnes tell you anything?” asked Seppel.

“No.”

“Quiet, Willy,” Thorne said.

“She seemed to be trying to tell us that someone was chasing her,” Cunningham persisted. “Are you sure she said nothing in her talk with you that could give us a hint of the trouble?”

“I knew there was something wrong from the sound of her voice. That’s all. When she didn’t answer, Mr. MacInnes radioed the Coast Guard.”

“And we found her after a four-hour search. That young lady was very lucky that she ran out of gas. Her automatic pilot had the cruiser headed straight out into the middle of the lake.”

“There was—nothing else on the water near her?”

“The lake was empty.” Cunningham paused, then said casually, “Was there something you expected us to find, Dr. Thorne?”

“Certainly not. I was just wondering.”

“I see.” The officer got to his feet. “I don’t mind telling you gentlemen that I think there’s something you’re not letting me know. My job is done, and it’s true that legally I have no business questioning you at all. But my business is keeping the waterways safe. The young lady in the room down the hall didn’t faint from nervous exhaustion or hunger. Something scared the hell out of her out there on the lake. If you know what it was, I wish you’d tell me!”

“Have you ever read any science fiction, Commander Cunningham?” Seppel asked, toying with his gold cigarette case. Rather belatedly, he said, “Cigarette?”

The Coast-Guardsman took one with suspicious thanks. “Are you trying to tell me that the little green Martians have put outboards on their rocket ships and are chasing the pleasure craft on our lake?”

Thorne said harshly: “What Dr. Seppel means is this. We have reason to believe that a highly unusual occurrence was responsible for tonight’s unpleasantness. I don’t like to mince words, Commander. I think I do know what was out there last night, but I’m not going to tell you. I can’t begin to prove my suspicions, and I have a rather intense aversion to being laughed at.”

“I have no intention of laughing, Mr. Thorne. But if you have information relative to marine safety, let me remind you that you have an obligation to report it to the proper authorities.”

“Proper authorities are not notorious for their sympathy. They’d laugh in my face. No, thank you, Commander. Until I have proof, I say nothing.”

The door at the end of the corridor opened once more, and closed softly. Kirk MacInnes and his wife came down toward the waiting room. Thorne started up.

“She wants to see you, son,” MacInnes said tiredly. “She’s a little stronger now, and she asked for you. I’m taking Ellen back home. This has been pretty raw for her.”

“I’m all right,” his wife said stiffly. She clutched a damp, tightly balled lace handkerchief, but her features were immobile.

“Will Jeanne be all right?” Thorne asked brokenly.

“She’ll be fine,” said MacInnes, clapping him on the back. “Now get down there and see her before those medics decide she can’t have any more visitors.”

“I’m there now. And—thanks, Mac.” He disappeared down the corridor. The engineer and his wife left quietly.

“Thorne is a good man,” Seppel said, “even if he is a trifle mule-headed.” His bright blue eyes looked humorously into the half-angry face of the Coast Guard officer. He laughed, moved over on the leather couch, and said: “Sit down here, Commander. Have another cigarette. Have a Lifesaver, I’m going to tell you a singular story.”

It was shortly before lunchtime in Thorne’s dune lodge, but the bubbling beaker on the range that Willy Seppel was stirring exuded a decidedly unappetizing aroma. Pungent, acidic in an organic kind of way, with noisome and revolting overtones, the fumes finally brought indignant remarks from Thorne.

“Look,” he said, peering in the doorway, and holding his nose. “I’m the last one to criticize another man’s cooking, but will you tell me what in heaven’s name that is?”

“Oh, just a bit of digestive juice,” said Seppel cheerily, turning off the gas and removing the beaker with a pair of pot holders. He carried his foul-steaming container into the workroom. Thorne fled before him.

“I suppose I’d better not ask where you got it,” he said, from the sanctuary of the radio room.

“Don’t be silly,” said Seppel. “I merely raided your enzymes and warmed up a batch. Just an idea.”

He took the little drop out of its container and set it on the table beside the beaker. “I thought since digestive juice provoked it into emitting once, it might do it again.”

Thorne regarded him dubiously.

“I only wish,” Seppel went on to say, “that the grapefruit-sized one hadn’t escaped.” He set the drop in a loop of plastic and dipped it into the brew.

“Take it easy with that one, Willy. It’s the only link we have with the big one.”

“So you think they can communicate, too,” said Seppel without looking up.

“I don’t know whether it’s communication or sympathetic vibration or the call of the wild. But that thing did follow Jeanne because of the little drop in the boat, and it disappeared when it got what it wanted. The grapefruit heard mama, too, and got away. I’ll bet if that little one had been strong enough to get through your fancy insulation, it would have disappeared along with the other one.”

“And the two tracks merged into one,” said Seppel, testing the soaked drop in the thermocouple. Nothing happened. “As the rustic detective was heard to remark, ‘They was two sets o’ footsteps leadin’ to the scene of the crime, and only one set leadin’ away.’ I wonder what kind of a molecular bond that transparent envelope has?” He felt the drop with his finger, shrugged, and put it back into the juice.

“The big globe killed the tramp, if my idea is correct,” said Thorne. “He must have seen the thing coming out of the lake, turned to beat it, and fell on his face. And I think he picked exactly the wrong place to fall.”

“On grapefruit,” Seppel agreed. “All mama wanted to do was to pick up her offspring. She couldn’t help it if there was a body in the way.”

“But she killed just the same,” said Thorne. “Those old dune roller stories hint that she may have done it before.” He fished the miniature drop out of the liquid and looked into its yellow heart meditatively.

“And Willy,” he said abstractedly, “unless something is done soon, she’ll do it again.”

During the days that followed, Dr. Thorne went about his work with quiet preoccupation; and this in itself was enough to make Seppel more than a little suspicious. He rarely mentioned the drops, although he visited Jeanne every day, carrying sheaves of flowers and boxes of candy and fruit. Seppel went along on these pilgrimages for the ride, but almost always tactfully declined visiting the sickroom and hiked out instead to the Coast Guard station for a parley with his new ally, Commander Cunningham.

Anxiety furrowed Seppel’s pink forehead as he paced up and down the officer’s quarters. “He’s got something up his sleeve,” he maintained. “He goes off in the jeep in the morning and doesn’t come back until noon. When I ask him where he’s been, he says he just went into town to see Jeanne. But visiting hours are from two to four! If he doesn’t go to the hospital, where does he go?”

Cunningham shrugged, and picked up a folded newspaper that lay on the table. “Have you seen this, Willy? It might explain a few things.”

Mystified, Seppel read aloud: ” ‘We pay CASH for certain unusual minerals. Highest prices, free pickup. Samples wanted are round, semi-transparent, amber colored with metallic veining. HURRY! Write today, Box 236, Port Grand, Michigan.’”

Seppel stared aghast.

“I take it you weren’t acquainted with this,” the officer said. He walked to the window and looked down at a fruiter steaming through the channel. “Do you know what he plans to do?”

“No, but I know what I’d do. There’s some kind of an attraction between the big globe and the drops—a force that draws the little ones home to mama when they get her call. We found that out with a drop at Thorne’s lodge. But that attraction is so great that it works the other way too. Little Miss Wright told you that. If the drops can’t come, if we hold them back, mama comes after her children. That’s what Thorne will probably count on.”

It was Cunningham’s turn to stare. “You mean he’ll use the drops from the ad for bait?”

Seppel said gently: “What’s a man to do, Rob? He can’t let it go free. The fellow that finds the monster has three choices: he can run home and hide under the bed, and pretend he didn’t see it at all, he can try to inform the proper authorities, or he can attempt to dispose of the monster himself. Thorne knows nobody will believe his dune roller story so he just doesn’t waste time convincing people.”

Cunningham turned abruptly from the window and said violently: “You aren’t going to start on me too, are you, Willy? -Sure. Here I am, one slightly used but still serviceable authority. I believe your damn dune roller yarn for some reason or other. But it doesn’t do any good. I’d earn the biggest haw-haw from here to the Straits of Mackinac if I tried to initiate an official search for a round glowing thing fifteen feet high. The world won’t unite simply because Michigan has itself a monster, you know. And what can I do, even if I take the Manistique out? Maybe Ian Thorne knows how to catch monsters, but I certainly don’t.”

“You want to let him go on, I suppose,” Seppel said. He added a trifle wistfully, “I hate to see him get his hide fried off when he’s just beginning to think about settling down.”

“You watch him. That’s all. And let me know when you think he’s going to pull something. I’ll do everything I can.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to get out of here now, Willy. Keep your eyes open. All we can do is wait.”

“And that,” said Seppel, with dark doubt shading his pleasant voice, “seems to be all there is to say.”

The drops glowed on the kitchen table. “Seven!” said Ian Thorne triumphantly. “How do they look to you, Willy? From the size of a pea to a tennis ball. Seven little devil eyes.”

“What are you going to do with them?” asked Seppel. He wore an old lab apron over his trousers and wiped the breakfast dishes. It was very early in the morning.

“Just a little experiment. I got a bright idea the other day while I was visiting Jeanne. You can have the drops after I’m finished if you like, but I want to try this thing out first.”

“I wish you’d let me help you.”

“No, Willy.”

“Cunningham believes you, too,” Seppel went on recklessly. “Why don’t you tell us what you’re going to do?”

“No.” He scooped the drops into a bakelite box. “I’ll be gone most of the day. I have some collecting to do out in the dunes.”

He vanished into the bedroom and came out wearing hiking boots and a heavy leather jacket. An empty knapsack dangled over his arm. He put the bakelite box into the buckled pouch on the outside of the sack, and took a paper packet from the sink and stuffed it into his back pocket.

“Oops! Almost forgot my collecting bottles,” he laughed, and went into the radio room.

Seppel put down the dish towel and stepped softly after him. There were no collecting bottles in the radio room. He was just in time to see Thorne drop a handful of little metal cylinders and a black six-inch gadget into the knapsack.

Thorne did not seem at all abashed to find Seppel standing there. He brushed past and went out the kitchen door.

“So long, Willy. Keep the home fires burning. Send out the posse if I’m not back before dark.” The screen door slammed.

After waiting a minute, Seppel grabbed up the binoculars from the china shelf and glided silently through the sandy yard, past the generator building to the path that led down the side of the dune to the shed where the jeep was kept.

The early morning mist still curled around the trees and settled in the hollows, and a distant bird call echoed down on the forest floor. At a bend in the steep path, Seppel caught a glimpse of Thorne’s broad back dappled by the pale sun rising through the fog.

The path turned sharply and cut off diagonally down the dune toward the shed. Instead of continuing, Seppel stepped off the path, and treading cautiously, circled across through the woods to arrive at a point on the slope directly above the garage. Then he removed his apron, spread it on the twiggy, dew-wet ground, and stretched out among the bushes, bringing his binoculars to bear on the man below.

Thorne removed a small wooden crate from the rear of the jeep. It bore the red-stenciled inscription:

G. B. VANDER VREES & SONS—HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION

There were other words, too, but Thorne stood in the way of Seppel’s vision. He quickly transferred the contents of the crate to his knapsack, and with a single look around him, set off down the dune trail that ran through the forest, parallel to the lake shore.

As soon as Thorne was out of sight, Willy Seppel scrambled heavily to his feet and went back up the path to the lodge. There he addressed some intense words to the microphone of the amateur station, an operation which would have been frowned upon by the FCC, which discourages the use of such equipment by unlicensed persons.

He would have maintained his disinterest and scientific detachment if he had been asked about it, but the truth was that Dr. Ian Thorne deeply loved the dunes. He had lived in them during his childhood, grown up and gone away, and come back to find them substantially the same. He recalled that had surprised him a little. You expected the dunes to change, they were like a person, though only one who has known the heights and swamps of them can explain the curious sleeping vitality of the sands under the forest. Things with a smaller life than the dunes would flutter and creep and stalk boldly through them until you might think of them as dead and tame. But Dr. Thorne had seen the traveling dunes shifting restlessly before the winds and felt a kinship with the great never-lasting hills.

The path he strolled along was an old friend. He had pursued the invertebrate citizens of the forest along its meandering length, waded in the marshy inter-dunal pools which it carefully skirted, and had itched from encounters with the poison ivy that festooned the trunks and shrubs beside it.

The path wound along the shore for a good five miles— horizontally, at least—and he did not hurry. The knapsack was too heavy, for one thing, and the still air was warming slowly as the sun rose up through the pines and oak trees. An insect chirred sleepily in a gorge on his right, and as if at some prearranged signal, an excursion of mosquitoes bobbed out to worry the back of his neck.

The path took him through a clearing in the sand covered with patches of dusty, green grass and scarlet Indian weed. On the lee side of a great bare dune at the edge of the clearing stood a single, short cottonwood, half buried in the sand. But the tree had grown upward to escape, modifying its lower branches into roots. The tree was one of the few forms of life that defied the dunes—by growing with them—and its branches were brave and green.

Thoughtfully, Thorne passed on again into the dimmer depths of the forest.

It was nearly noon when he reached the foot of a cluster of sand dunes, the principal peak of which rose some hundred and fifty feet above the floor of the woods. It was the highest point for many miles along the shore, and its name was Mount Scott. The path circled its eastern slope and then continued on, but Thorne stepped off onto the faintly defined, spider-web laced trail leading to the summit.

The going was rough. Thornapple branches probed after his eyes, and as the ascent grew steeper, sudden shifts in the dirty sand under his feet brought him to his knees. The tree roots across the path had partially blocked the sand, forming crude natural steps in the lower reaches of the dune; but as he climbed higher, the trees were left behind while the sand grew cleaner and hotter, and the wild grape, creeper and ubiquitous poison ivy became the prevalent greenery.

He was winded and perspiring when he finally stood on the peak of the dune. He glanced briefly about him and selected a spot partially shaded by a scrub juniper as his campsite. He sat down, shucked the knapsack and his heavy jacket, and lit a cigarette.

The hills below rolled away in gentle, green waves toward the farmlands and orchards in the east and the brilliant blue lake in the west. He could see the spires of the town of Port Grand poking out of the haze a few miles down the shore, and some white sails appeared off the promontory that hid the entrance to the river harbor.

He turned his attention to Mount Scott itself. The summit of the dune was really composed of two shallow humps, with a depression on the lakeward side in which Thorne had made his camp. Below this, a sheer, fairly clean slope of sand swept down to the low tangle of woods which lay between him and the shore.

He looked cautiously in the knapsack and removed the seven small drops, grouping them in a circle on the white sand of the lake slope. After that, he retreated to his hollow and settled down as comfortably as he could.

The paper packet in his pocket yielded three ham-and-pickle sandwiches, slightly soggy, which he consumed leisurely. A short foray around the peak brought dessert in the form of a handful of late blueberries. After his meal he employed himself at length with the contents of the knapsack. When the job was finally done, he sat down under the juniper tree and began to wait.

The shade of the tree diminished, disappeared as the sun climbed higher, and then reappeared on the other side of the tree, leaving Thorne with the sun in his face and a monumental thirst. The blueberries, unfortunately, were all gone.

At last, at four P.M., the largest drop began to move.

It rolled slowly out of the shallow hole in the sand that cupped it and moved down the hill. Thorne watched it roll up a small pile of sand that blocked its path and disappear into the woods at the foot of the hill.

At 4:57 one of the smaller drops followed in the track of the first. It had a little trouble when it came to the pile of sand—which was one of several strung across the face of the dune—but it negotiated the obstacle at last and disappeared.

Just as the sun was beginning to redden the water, the third drop began its descent. Quietly, Thorne rose and replaced it in its hole. The faint gleam within it might have grown a bit brighter when he interfered, but perhaps it was only the reflection of the sun.

The five remaining drops were grouped in a horseshoe, downward pointing, and the drop whose elopement had just been foiled reposed at the end of one prong. A few minutes later, the larger drop at the other prong attempted to roll down the hill. Thorne put it back and rapped sharply on each of the others with his cigarette lighter, tamping them down further into the sand. He was strained forward alertly now, with his eyes on the strip of forest below. The sun slipped grudgingly behind the flat lake, and a tang of pine washed up the slope. The drops did not move again.

With the departure of the sun, the glow in the heart of each alien thing leaped higher and higher, until the string of them was like a softly glowing corona in the sand—a strange earthbound constellation.

But their glow was not beauty, Thorne reminded himself. It was death. Death had dwelt in their great, glowing mother who had already called two of her incredible children home. Death that rolled seeking through the lake and the dune forest… .

His cigarette end made a dimmer eye in the dusk than the glow of the drops. There was still enough light to see by—the sky was red around him and the dune forest was silent.

He wondered idly what long forgotten power had strewn the drops along the shore. They were not terrestial, he was almost sure of that. Perhaps they had been a meteor that had exploded over the lake, and the life of the great thing —if it was life—had been patiently gathering up its scattered substance ever since, assimilating the fragments during its long rests at the bottom of the lake.

From the size of it, it must have been growing for hundreds of years, collecting a drop of itself here and there, from roadbeds and sand dunes and farmyards, responding to those who imprudently hindered it with the only defense it knew.

And now he was to destroy it. It had killed a man. Perhaps before this, even, men had found the drops attractive and carelessly put them in their pockets … and the dune roller sought a man. It had killed the little tramp, and almost killed Jeanne. He couldn’t take a chance of letting it go again.

The image of Jeanne rose in his mind. The memory of the time they had walked down the winding forest path; and of a twig caught in her sandal. She had had grains of sand on her tanned arms, and a bright yellow flower stuck crazily in one dark curl. She had laughed when he plumped her down on the moss-soft root of an old oak and took the twig out, but she had not laughed when he kissed her.

Around him, the forest was still.

A cold breath whispered along his skin. The forest was still. Not a bird, not an insect, not an animal noise. The forest was still.

He felt like yelling at it: Come on out, you! Come out and chase me like you chased her!

He fingered the stud of the little black instrument in his hand. He would show it. Let it dare to come out

Come out!

It came.

He had never dreamed it would be so big.

It had made no noise at all. In a fascination of horror he watched it roll to the foot of the tall dune. It vanished among the trees, but a warm yellow radiance lit the undersides of the fluttering leaves as it moved beneath them. The light blazed as it emerged from the brush and came straight toward him, rolling up the hill.

The small drops pulsed in their sandy snares and he gave each one a savage rap. As if it, too, shared the insult, the great globe flared, then subsided sullenly. But its ponderous ascent was alarmingly rapid.

He could not take his eyes away from it. The smaller drops were rocks, were mere bits of oddly glowing crystal; but this great thing before him seemed the most beautiful and the most terrible thing he had ever seen in his life. And it was alive. No man could have looked upon it and said that it was not alive. The brilliant golden heart in it swelled and blazed upon the golden veining that closed it in.

There were noises now from the winding path in the forest below, and the twinkling pinpoint lights of men. But Thorne did not hear them, nor see any light except the great one before him. He could not move. Sweat stood out on his face and the instinct to flee dissolved into terror that folded his legs like boneless things. He half-crouched on hands and knees and stared…. and stared.

The thing was closer now, nearly up to the line of sand humps that Thorne had worked so hard on. He had to get away. There was no more time. He forced his paralyzed hands and feet to tear into the loose sand of the side of the depression and pull him up. He had to get on the other side of the hill.

In the last instant, his numbed fingers pressed the stud of the little transmitter that would activate the firing caps of the neonitro buried in the sand.

But the monster must have realized, somehow. Because he felt—when he flung himself out over the peak with the deep red sky around him—a searing, mounting pain that started on the inside and flooded outward. He rolled unconscious over the far side of the hill just as the five solemn detonations blasted the golden glowing globe to bits.

There were white, gauzy circles around the place where his eyes looked out. He was vaguely surprised to see six people with the eyes—three sets of two. He made the eyes blink and the six people changed into Seppel, MacInnes and Jeanne. He tried to raise an arm and was rewarded by a fierce jab of pain. The arm was thick and bandaged, like the rest of him.

The six—three—people had seen his eyes open and they moved closer to him. Jeanne sat down beside the bed and leaned her head close.

“I hope that’s you in there,” she said, and he was amazed to see there were tears in her eyes.

“How am I?” he mumbled through the bandages.

“Medium rare,” said Seppel. “You doggone crazy fool.”

“We almost got to the top, anyway,” said MacInnes gruffly. “But you went and beat us to it.”

“Had to,” Thorne said painfully.

“You would,” Jeanne said.

“Is it gone?” he asked. There were six people again and he felt very tired.

“Shivered to atoms,” said Seppel with finality. “You should see the crater in the sand. But we’ll still have small ones to study. Your ad brought in four more today. I was talking to Camestres on the phone, and he says he’s sure he can swing ,a nice fat research grant for us as soon as you’re able to get out of that bed—”

Thorne groaned.

“He says,” Jeanne translated firmly, “that he’s sticking to Ecological Studies of the Michigan Dunes, Chapter Eight. No more dune rollers, thank you.”

MacInnes laughed and wagged his gray old head. “You’d better surrender, Dr. Seppel. Jeanne’s got her mind made up. And one thing about her—whatever she says, she’ll always be Wright.”

“Don’t be too sure about that,” she said pertly, laying her two small hands gently on Thorne’s bandaged arm. It didn’t hurt a bit.

High on a dune above the lake, the moon rode high over a blackened crater in the sand. Two of the grains of sand, which gleamed in the moonlight a bit more golden than the rest, tumbled down together into a sheltered hollow to begin anew the work of three hundred years.

-END-

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