A Meeting With Medusa Read Free

nearly collided with him.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ Jerry asked. ‘Seen something?’
    ‘That dark patch of rock over there. I noticed it before we stopped at the lake.’
    ‘What about it? It looks ordinary enough to me.’
    ‘ I think it’s grown bigger .’
    All his life, Jerry was to remember this moment. Somehow he never doubted Hutchins’ statement; by this time he could believe anything, even that rocks could grow. The sense of isolation and mystery, the presence of that dark and brooding lake, the never-ceasing rumble of distant storms and the green flickering of the aurora—all these had done something to his mind, had prepared it to face the incredible. Yet he felt no fear; that would come later.
    He looked at the rock. It was about five hundred feet away, as far as he could estimate. In this dim, emerald light it was hard to judge distances or dimensions. The rock—or whatever it was—seemed to be a horizontal slab of almost black material, lying near the crest of a low ridge. There was a second, much smaller, patch of similar material near it; Jerry tried to measure and memorise the gap between them, so that he would have some yardstick to detect any change.
    Even when he saw that the gap was slowly shrinking, he still felt no alarm—only a puzzled excitement. Not until it had vanished completely, and he realised how his eyes had tricked him, did that awful helpless terror strike into his heart.
    Here were no growing or moving rocks. What they were watching was a dark tide, a crawling carpet, sweeping slowly but inexorably toward them over the top of the ridge.
    The moment of sheer, unreasoning panic lasted, mercifully, no more than a few seconds. Garfield’s first terror began to fade as soon as he recognised its cause. For that advancing tide had reminded him, all too vividly, of a story he had read many years ago about the army ants of the Amazon, and the way in which they destroyed everything in their path…
    But whatever this tide might be, it was moving too slowly to be a real danger, unless it cut off their line of retreat. Hutchins was staring at it intently through their only pair of binoculars; he was the biologist, and he was holding his ground. No point in making a fool of myself, thought Jerry, by running like a scalded cat, if it isn’t necessary.
    ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said at last, when the moving carpet was only a hundred yards away and Hutchins had not uttered a word or stirred a muscle. ‘What is it?’
    Hutchins slowly unfroze, like a statue coming to life.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten all about you. It’s a plant, of course. At least, I suppose we’d better call it that.’
    ‘But it’s moving !’
    ‘Why should that surprise you? So do terrestrial plants. Ever seen speeded-up movies of ivy in action?’
    ‘That still stays in one place—it doesn’t crawl all over the landscape.’
    ‘Then what about the plankton plants of the sea? They can swim when they have to.’
    Jerry gave up; in any case, the approaching wonder had robbed him of words.
    He still thought of the thing as a carpet—a deep-pile one, ravelled into tassels at the edges. it varied in thickness as it moved; in some parts it was a mere film; in others, it heaped up to a depth of a foot or more. As it came closer and he could see its texture, Jerry was reminded of black velvet. He wondered what it felt like to the touch, then remembered that it would burn his fingers even if it did nothing else to them. He found himself thinking, in the lightheaded nervous reaction that often follows a sudden shock: ‘If there are any Venusians, we’ll never be able to shake hands with them. They’d burn us, and we’d give them frostbite.’
    So far, the thing had shown no signs that it was aware of their presence. It had merely flowed forward like the mindless tide that it almost certainly was. Apart from the fact that it climbed over small obstacles, it might have been an advancing flood of