The Leech

This is an OK story. It's interesting up until the end - and the author handled the ending well enough. But I do hate negative endings, so I'm not rating the story too well.

A monster from space seeks to *eat" the Earth. A solution is finally found to the problem - for now.

Well, a spore adrift in space for a gazillion years falls to Earth and starts eating. Anything. Matter, energy, it isn't particular. The military's efforts to destroy it only help it grow. What\'s to be done?
A sort of a magicscience fiction story, in that "science can't explain" how the thing is, but it is, just accept it. The characters could be two-dimensional, if they were developed a little more. The general is convincingly stupid, and, luckily, no women were ever placed in danger, because there seem not to be any on this Earth.

Predating both the 1953 film, War of the Worlds, and the 1958 The Blob, this is the sort of story I think of when people talk about \"The Golden Age\" of science fiction; a simpler time, when scientists all used slide-rulers, the hero in horn-rimmed glasses might as well be named Doctor Clayton Forrester, and the military general in charge of getting rid of the enemy can\'t wait to use nuclear weapons in upstate New York. It\'s also the sort of story where generic Science is simply a stand-in for magic; it doesn\'t matter what sort of science is being used as a weapon (the hero is an anthropologist, great for explaining patterns in human culture, perhaps not my first choice in battling blob-like extraterrestrials), but quibbling about this is missing the point. It\'s a fun story, even if there are no female characters and the military decided to use the code name Operation Leech when attacking the Leech, because apparently that\'s how code names worked in 1952.">\"Have you figured out some scientific way of killing it?\"