A hole opened up ahead of him. He screamed and darted off at right angles to it, seeming to gain new strength from terror. The hole disappeared, but a second gaped ahead of him. Again, he raced away, this time diagonally to the hole.
Another wave began to build up before him. He whirled, slipped, fell hard, rolled over, and stumbled away. Presently, the swelling, which had risen directly between Palamabron and the Lords, grew so high that it walled him off from their sight. After that, the wave froze for a moment, rigid except for a slight trembling. Gradually, it subsided, and the plain was flat again, with the exception of a six-foot long mound.
“Swallowed up,” Vala said. She seemed thrilled. Her eyes were wide open, her mouth parted, the lower lip wet. Her tongue flicked out to trace with its tip the oval of both lips.
Wolff said, “Our father has indeed created a monster for us. Perhaps, this entire planet is covered with the skin of … of this Weltthier.”
“What?” said Theotormon. His eyes were still glazed with terror. And though he had been shrinking during the starvation on the last world, he now seemed to have dwindled off fifty pounds in the past two minutes. His skin hung in loops.
“Weltthier. World-animal. From German, a Terrestrial language.”
A planet covered with skin, he thought. Or maybe it was not so much a skin as a continent-sized amoeba spread out over the globe. The idea made him boggle.
The skin existed; there was no denying that. But how did it keep from starving to death? The millions and millions of tons of protoplasm had to be fed. Certainly, although it ate animals, it could not get nearly enough of these to maintain itself.
Wolff decided to investigate the subject, if he ever got the chance. He was as curious as a monkey or a Siamese cat, always probing, pondering, speculating, and analyzing. He could not rest until he knew the why and how.
He sat down to rest while he considered what to do. The others, Vala excepted, also sat or lay down. She walked from the “safety zone,” placing her feet carefully with each step. Watching her, he understood what she was doing. Why had he not thought of that? She was avoiding contact with the plants (hairs?) that grew from the holes (pores?). After traveling on a circle with a radius of about twenty-five yards, she returned to the gate area. Not once had the skin trembled or begun to form threatening shapes.
Wolff stood up and said, “Very good, Vala. You beat me to it. The beast, or whatever it is, detects life by touch through the feelers or hairs. If we navigate as cautiously as ships going through openings in reefs, we can cross over this thing. Only trouble is, how do we get past those?”
He pointed outwards to the horny buttes, the excrescentoid hills. The hairs began to crowd together at their bases, and beyond the buttes they carpeted the ground.
She shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”
“We’ll worry about it when we get to it,” he said. He began walking, looking downwards to guide himself among the feelers. The Lords followed him in Indian file, with Vala again being the only exception. She paralleled his course at a distance of five or six yards to his right.
“It’s going to be very difficult to hunt animals for food under these conditions,” he said. “We’ll have to keep one eye on the hairs and one on the animal. A terrible handicap.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” she said. “There may be no animals.”
“There is one I’m sure exists,” Wolff said. He did not say anything more on the subject although it was evident that Vala was wondering what he meant. He headed towards the “tree” in a branch of which he saw the nest. A circular pile of sticks and leaves, it was lodged at the junction of the trunk and a branch and was about three feet across. The sticks and leaves seemed to be held together with a gluey substance.
He stepped between two feelers, propped his club against the tree, and shinnied up the trunk. Halfway up, he saw the tops of two hexagons on one of the buttes. When he got to the nest, he clung to the trunk with his legs, one arm around the trunk, while with the other hand he poked through leaves on top of the nest. He uncovered two eggs, speckled green and black and about twice the size of turkey eggs. Removing them one by one, he dropped them to Vala.