“Incredible!” Mr. Swift murmured. “It’s almost as if those hillocks were alive!”
A “LIVE” 3-D-CAST 163
“Dad! That may be the answer!” Tom exclaimed.
“You mean those formations are alive?”
“Yes! Don’t you see?” Tom turned excitedly to all the scientists. “We’ve been thinking of the Orb as an inanimate object-like an asteroid-but peopled by some form of life.”
“And now you’re saying-?” Ahlgren queried.
“That the Green Orb itself is a living thing-or rather a colony of living things!”
Tom replied. “Those hillocks may be unit cells of the whole organism-like coral polyps that have combined to form a coral reef-only this one is in space!”
“An even better comparison would be the Portuguese man-of-war,” Mr. Swift said thoughtfully. “It looks and acts like a single creature, but is actually a colony of hundreds of tiny creatures banded together into one organism.”
“But we’ve been assuming the Orb life has a high order of intelligence,” Dr.
Palfrey objected. “In fact, it must have if it was able to convey highly technical information.”
“The Orb may have a centralized intelligence,” Tom argued. “Take the comparison Dad made. The Portuguese man-of-war is made up of hundreds of small polyps. Some of those polyps form tentacles to sting and capture its prey.
Some gobble up the prey. Others carry on the work of reproduction. The Orb, too, may have specialized thinking and communication cells-maybe inside its green outer body!”
164 3-D TELEJECTOR
“Tom! The Vikings are in danger!” Bud cried out.
The sinuous waving of the green hills or “polyps” had become more violent.
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