DUNE ROLLER

DUNE ROLLER

"It was not a pebble or a piece of chipped glass as he had supposed; instead, he fished out a small, drop-like object shaped like a marble with a tail. It was a beautiful little thing of pellucid amber color with tiny gold flecks and streaks running through it. Sunlight glanced off its smooth sides which were surprisingly free of the surface scratches that are the inevitable patina of flotsam in the sand-scoured dunes."

"'It reminds me of something, with that little tail. I know — Prince Rupert drops.'"

"It looked the same as the three small drops he had previously seen, but he saw that what he had mistaken for golden flecks inside of it was really a fine network of metallic threads which formed a web apparently imbedded a few centimeters below the thing's surface."

"'There have been some funny old stories told along these shores. I heard one myself from my grandmother when I was about twelve. About the Dune Roller that was bigger than a schooner and lived in the caves at the bottom of the lake. It came out every hundred years and rolled through the dune forest, leaving a strop of bare sand behind it where it had eaten the vegetation. They said it looked for a man, and when i found one, it would stop rolling and sink back into the lake.'"

J.C. May, Dune Roller

Read Scott's essay about Dune Roller here

I've said in preview SFTB entries that I love a challenge. Well, the "creatures" from Dune Roller were surely that.

Here's the cover of Astounding with art by Hubert Rogers & May's title illustration.

The story, by J.C. May (aka Julian Clare May), is about these small objects discovered on a Michigan beach that look like amber "prince rupert's drops" with a network of tiny gold flecks connected by filaments.

"Prince Rupert's drops are toughened glass beads created by dripping molten glass into cold water, which causes it to solidify into a tadpole-shaped droplet with a long, thin tail. These droplets are characterized internally by very high residual stresses, which give rise to counter-intuitive properties, such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer or a bullet on the bulbous end without breaking, while exhibiting explosive disintegration if the tail end is even slightly damaged."

The rest of May's illustrations.

They're just a local curiosity, until they start burning things. And in classic pulp fiction style, it turns out these small ones are just the babies and the mother is on her way to get her offspring! This is the very first story Julian May ever sold and it was accompanied by her own great illustrations (Astounding Science Fiction, December 1951).



It was later adapted for tv as an episode for Tales Of Tomorrow and for the silver screen as The Cremators. Swipe to see some of May’s original illustrations for this story and a poster for The Cremators.