Monster That Threatened The Universe, The

The Monster That Threatened the Universe by Russ Winterbotham - From Chaos a space-consuming creature reached slimy tentacles toward trembling planets. And no man of the old fighting breed remained on effete Earth to battle the invulnerable monster. Limio hugged the dying fires of Chaos. He was not cold, for the fires that burned in the center of the cold star were not dead, only dying. But they were the source of life to the monster who lived in the depths of a black hole of space. The Black Hole, about thirty degrees from the solar quadrant in the terrestrial galaxy, was not dark, but twilight to Limio, whose eyes were sensitive to infra-red radiation. These eyes, hundreds of them floating on huge cranial bumps that dotted the thousands of miles of his massive body, caught the ruddy glow of a rocket ship entering The Black Hole. Limio grunted. These iron creatures were hard to crack, but inside their hulls were juicy tidbits of carbon and oxygen in various combinations. It had seemed to Limio that these tasty morsels were alive; that they might even possess intelligence. Of course, it would be hard to conceive of anything so small having much intelligence, but Limio had run across strange things in the universe in his millions of years of existence. Limio had come to Chaos a single spore. He had grown into a slimy, reptilian, nauseating mass, the supreme hideosity in a warp of creation. His body lacked form, except as a tenuous syrupy blanket covering a fourth of the surface of Chaos. Here and there in the skin of this monster were toothed craters ready to devour any carbon molecule that might fall from space. Food was not important to Limio, for it only made him grow. The energy of the inner fires of Chaos supplied the needs of his existence. He ate simply to destroy, for Limio wanted no competitive form of life on Chaos. Competition might mean death and Limio loved his immortality.