The Killer Thing

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There was the desert, glittering white sand that shifted like talcum when touched, cottony white sky, a quarter of it glaring with the white heat of the sun. There was no wind, no movement anywhere; not a grain of the powdery sand stirred. It looked like a blanket of white wool interwoven with silver threads in a random pattern, a blanket tossed down carelessly so that it rippled in smooth hills, all rising diagonally in a series. The cover stretched endlessly, hiding the rocky land under it from the gaze of the man; and where his vision failed, the bleached wood merged with the white cotton and the world was enclosed, as if he stood on the inside of a flattened sphere. Behind him and in the distance, between him and the desert, naked rocks thrust from the burned ground as barren as the view before him.

The rocks were basalts, granites, quartzites. Nothing as soft and weather vulnerable as sandstone existed above ground surface, but no weather stirred the air now, no wind blew. It would blow later, when the sun started to sink and the ground radiated away some of the heat load of the long day; it would blow for five or six hours then, exchanging heat for cool air, thin columns of tornado-like wind rising from the superheated ground to the high, thin atmosphere, to fall back through masses of hot air, whirling them about, starting new funnels.

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