Unfortunately too many, acquired at considerable danger to the volunteers, were found apparently moribund in the metal or heavy plastic containers in which they had been contained. Seemingly, after about twenty minutes, all the frenetic activity, the replications of the original strand several thousand times into big wriggling “sausages,” ceased. The form unraveled, blackened, and turned into an utterly lifeless, sticky, tarry mess, within a tougher shell.

The captain of the Mayflower, which had been trawling at the ragged northern edge of the Fall, inadvertently discovered a segment of Thread in a pail of fish bait, slapped on a tight lid, and reported the find to Landing. He was told to keep it alive, if possible, by judicious feeding until it could be flown to Landing.

By then, the Thread had to be housed in the biggest heavy-gauge plastic barrel on board the Mayflower. Ongola transported the tightly sealed barrel, using a long steel cable attached to the big engineering sled. Only when the crew saw the sled disappearing in the distance would they come on deck. The captain was later astonished to learn that his act was considered one of extreme bravery.

By the time the pulsing life-form reached Landing, it coiled, a gross meter long and perhaps ten centimeters in circumference, resembling a heavy hawser. Double-thick slabs of transparent silicon-based building plastic, tightly banded with metal strips, were rigged into a cage, its base quikplased to the floor. Several thin slits with locking flaps were created. A hole the size of the barrel opening was incised in the top, the barrel lid readied, and with the help of grimly anxious volunteers the terrible creature was transferred from barrel to cage. The top opening was sealed as soon as the life-form was dropped into the plastic cube.

One of the men scrambled for a corner to be sick in. Others averted their faces. Only Tarvi and Mar Dook seemed unmoved by the creature’s writhing as it engulfed the food that had been placed in the cube.

In its urgency to ingest, the thing rippled in waves of gray, greasy colors: sickly greens, dull pink tones, and an occasional streak of yellow flowed across its surface, the image sickeningly distorted by the thick clear plastic. The outer covering of the beast seemed to thicken. The thick shell probably formed at its demise, the observers guessed, for such remains had been found in rocky places where the organism had starved. The interior of the beast evidently deteriorated as rapidly as it had initially expanded. Was it really alive? Or was it some malevolent chemical entity feeding on life? Certainly its appetite was voracious, although the very act of eating seemed to interfere with whatever physical organization the beast had, as if what it consumed hastened its destruction.