Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward, pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands--found holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in him. The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer, slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: "I'm already asleep--this is a nightmare." Once, listening to that insidious voice, he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with pounding heart. Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond, which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now.... * * * * * He lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and sighing--but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do. Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the enemy--the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat.... Westover no longer saw the murky moonlight, the far faint glitter of the flood or the slope of the living mountain. He saw, as he had seen from a circling jet plane, an immense tree of smoke that rose and expanded under the noonday sun, creamy white above and black and oily below, and beneath the black cloud something that writhed and flowed sluggishly in a cyclopean death agony. That picture dissolved, and was replaced by the face of a man--one who might now be alive or dead, elsewhere in the chaos of a desolated planet. It was an ordinary face, roundish, spectacled, but etched now by tragedy; the voice that went with it was flat, unemotional, pedantic. "There are so many of them, and we've destroyed so few--and to kill those few took our mightiest weapons. Examination of the ones that have been killed discloses the reason why ordinary projectiles and bombs and poisons are ineffective against them--apart, that is, from the chief reason of sheer size. The creatures are so loosely organized that a local injury hardly affects the whole. In a sense, each one of them is a single cell--like the slime molds, the Earthly life forms that most resemble them.