I’m composing a blog on John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and the prequel, also
entitled The Thing (2011).
First, as a tribute to the author, John W. Campbell, the following is his original source
novella: Who Goes
There?
This is one of my favorite science fiction stories, an accomplished exercise
in suspense and paranoia:
In
memory of John W. Campbell
June 8, 1910 – July 11, 1971
Who Goes There?
The place
stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic
camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of
melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combated the musty smell of
sweat-and-snow-drenched furs. The acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the
animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air.
Lingering
odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and
leather. Yet, somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their
associates—dogs, machines, and cooking—came another taint. It was a queer,
neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of
industry and life. And it was a life-smell. But it came from the thing that lay
bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically onto
the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the unshielded glare of the electric
light.
Blair,
the little bald-pated biologist of the expedition, twitched nervously at the
wrappings, exposing clear, dark ice beneath and then pulling the tarpaulin back
into place restlessly. His little birdlike motions of suppressed eagerness
danced his shadow across the fringe of dingy gray underwear hanging from the
low ceiling, the equatorial fringe of stiff, graying hair around his naked
skull a comical halo about the shadow's head.
Commander
Garry brushed aside the lax legs of a suit of underwear, and stepped toward the
table. Slowly his eyes traced around the rings of men sardined into the
Administration Building. His tall, stiff body straightened finally, and he
nodded. "Thirty-seven. All here." His voice was low, yet carried the
clear authority of the commander by nature, as well as by title.
"You
know the outline of the story back of that find of the Secondary Pole
Expedition. I have been conferring with Second-in-Command McReady, and Norris,
as well as Blair and Dr. Copper. There is a difference of opinion, and because
it involves the entire group, it is only just that the entire Expedition
personnel act on it.
"I
am going to ask McReady to give you the details of the story, because each of
you has been too busy with his own work to follow closely the endeavors of the
others. McReady?"
Moving
from the smoke-blued background, McReady was a figure from some forgotten myth,
a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked. Six feet four inches he
stood as he halted beside the table, and with a characteristic glance upward to
assure himself of room under the low ceiling beams, straightened. His rough,
clashingly orange windproof jacket he still had on, yet on his huge frame it
did not seem misplaced. Even here, four feet beneath the drift-wind that droned
across the Antarctic waste above the ceiling, the cold of the frozen continent
leaked in, and gave meaning to the harshness of the man. And he was bronze—his
great red-bronze beard, the heavy hair that matched it. The gnarled, corded
hands gripping, relaxing, gripping and relaxing on the table planks were
bronze. Even the deep-sunken eyes beneath heavy brows were bronzed.
Age-resisting
endurance of the metal spoke in the cragged heavy outlines of his face, and the
mellow tones of the heavy voice. "Norris and Blair agree on one thing;
that animal we found was not—terrestrial in origin. Norris fears there may be
danger in that; Blair says there is none.
"But
I'll go back to how, and why we found it. To all that was known before we came
here, it appeared that this point was exactly over the South Magnetic Pole of
Earth. The compass does point straight down here, as you all know. The more
delicate instruments of the physicists, instruments especially designed for
this expedition and its study of the magnetic pole, detected a secondary
effect, a secondary, less powerful magnetic influence about eighty miles
southwest of here.
"The
Secondary Magnetic Expedition went out to investigate it. There is no need for
details. We found it, but it was not the huge meteorite or magnetic mountain
Norris had expected to find. Iron ore is magnetic, of course; iron more so—and
certain special steels even more magnetic. From the surface indications, the
secondary pole we found was small, so small that the magnetic effect it had was
preposterous. No magnetic material conceivable could have that effect. Soundings
through the ice indicated it was within one hundred feet of the glacier
surface.
"I
think you should know the structure of the place. There is a broad plateau, a
level sweep that runs more than 150 miles due south from the Secondary Station,
Van Wall says. He didn't have time or fuel to fly farther, but it was running
smoothly due south then. Right there, where that buried thing was, there is an
ice-drowned mountain ridge, a granite wall of unshakable strength that has
dammed back the ice creeping from the south.
"And
four hundred miles due south is the South Polar Plateau. You have asked me at
various times why it gets warmer here when the wind rises, and most of you
know. As a meteorologist I'd have staked my word that no wind could blow at -70
degrees; that no more than a five-mile wind could blow at -50; without causing
warming due to friction with ground, snow and ice and the air itself.
"We
camped there on the lip of that ice-drowned mountain range for twelve days. We
dug our camp into the blue ice that formed the surface, and escaped most of it.
But for twelve consecutive days the wind blew at forty-five miles an hour. It
went as high as forty-eight, and fell to forty-one at times. The temperature
was -63 degrees. It rose to -60 and fell to -68. It was meteorologically
impossible, and it went on uninterruptedly for twelve days and twelve nights.
"Somewhere
to the south, the frozen air of the South Polar Plateau slides down from that
18,000-foot bowl, down a mountain pass, over a glacier, and starts north. There
must be a funneling mountain chain that directs it, and sweeps it away for four
hundred miles to hit that bald plateau where we found the secondary pole, and
350 miles farther north reaches the Antarctic Ocean.
"It's
been frozen there since Antarctica froze twenty million years ago. There never
has been a thaw there.
"Twenty
million years ago Antarctica was beginning to freeze. We've investigated,
though and built speculations. What we believe happened was about like this.
"Something
came down out of space, a ship. We saw it there in the blue ice, a thing like a
submarine without a conning tower or directive vanes, 280 feet long and 45 feet
in diameter at its thickest.
"Eh,
Van Wall? Space? Yes, but I'll explain that better later." McReady's
steady voice went on.
"It
came down from space, driven and lifted by forces men haven't discovered yet,
and somehow—perhaps something went wrong then—it tangled with Earth's magnetic
field. It came south here, out of control probably, circling the magnetic pole.
That's a savage country there; but when Antarctica was still freezing, it must
have been a thousand times more savage. There must have been blizzard snow, as
well as drift, new snow falling as the continent glaciated. The swirl there
must have been particularly bad, the wind hurling a solid blanket of white over
the lip of that now-buried mountain.
"The
ship struck solid granite head-on, and cracked up. Not every one of the
passengers in it was killed, but the ship must have been ruined, her driving
mechanism locked. It tangled with Earth's field, Norris believes. No thing made
by intelligent beings can tangle with the dead immensity of a planet's natural
forces and survive.
"One
of its passengers stepped out. The wind we saw there never fell below
forty-one, and the temperature never rose above -60. Then—the wind must have
been stronger. And there was drift falling in a solid sheet. The thing
was lost completely in ten paces." He paused for a moment, the deep,
steady voice giving way to the drone of wind overhead and the uneasy, malicious
gurgling in the pipe of the galley stove.
Drift—a
drift-wind was sweeping by overhead. Right now the snow picked up by the
mumbling wind fled in level, blinding lines across the face of the buried camp.
If a man stepped out of the tunnels that connected each of the camp buildings
beneath the surface, he'd be lost in ten paces. Out there, the slim, black
finger of the radio mast lifted three hundred feet into the air, and at its
peak was the clear night sky. A sky of thin, whining wind rushing steadily from
beyond to another beyond under the licking, curling mantle of the aurora. And
off north, the horizon flamed with queer, angry colors of the midnight
twilight. That was Spring three hundred feet above Antarctica.
At the
surface—it was white death. Death of a needle-fingered cold driven before the
wind, sucking heat from any warm thing. Cold—and white mist of endless,
everlasting drift, the fine, fine particles of licking snow that obscured all
things.
Kinner,
the little, scar-faced cook, winced. Five days ago he had stepped out to the
surface to reach a cache of frozen beef. He had reached it, started back—and
the drift-wind leapt out of the south. Cold, white death that streamed across
the ground blinded him in twenty seconds. He stumbled on wildly in circles. It
was half an hour before rope-guided men from below found him in the
impenetrable murk.
It was
easy for man—or thing—to get lost in ten paces.
"And
the drift-wind then was probably more impenetrable than we know."
McReady's voice snapped Kinner's mind back. Back to the welcome, dank warmth of
the Ad Building. "The passenger of the ship wasn't prepared either, it
appears. It froze within ten feet of the ship.
"We
dug down to find the ship, and our tunnel happened to find the frozen—animal.
Barclay's ice-ax struck its skull.
"When
we saw what it was, Barclay went back to the tractor, started the fire up and
when the steam pressure built, sent a call for Blair and Dr. Copper. Barclay
himself was sick then. Stayed sick for three days, as a matter of fact.
"When
Blair and Copper came, we cut out the animal in a block of ice, as you see,
wrapped it and loaded it on the tractor for return here. We wanted to get into
that ship.
"We
reached the side and found the metal was something we didn't know. Our
beryllium-bronze, non-magnetic tools wouldn't touch it. Barclay had some
tool-steel on the tractor, and that wouldn't scratch it either. We made
reasonable tests—even tried some acid from the batteries with no results.
"They
must have had a passivating process to make magnesium metal resist acid that
way, and the alloy must have been at least ninety-five percent magnesium. But
we had no way of guessing that, so when we spotted the barely opened lock door,
we cut around it. There was clear, hard ice inside the lock, where we couldn't
reach it. Through the little crack we could look in and see that only metal and
tools were in there, so we decided to loosen the ice with a bomb.
"We
had decanite bombs and thermite. Thermite is the ice-softener; decanite might
have shattered valuable things, where the thermite's heat would just loosen the
ice. Dr. Copper, Norris and I placed a twenty-five-pound thermite bomb, wired
it, and took the connector up the tunnel to the surface, where Blair had the
steam tractor waiting. A hundred yards the other side of that granite wall we
set off the thermite bomb.
"The
magnesium metal of the ship caught of course. The glow of the bomb flared and
died, then it began to flare again. We ran back to the tractor, and gradually
the glare built up. From where we were we could see the whole ice-field
illuminated from beneath with an unbearable light; the ship's shadow was a
great, dark cone reaching off toward the north, where the twilight was just
about gone. For a moment it lasted, and we counted three other shadow-things
that might have been other—passengers—frozen there. Then the ice was crashing
down and against the ship.
"That's
why I told you about that place. The wind sweeping down from the Pole was at
our backs. Steam and hydrogen flame were torn away in white ice-fog; the
flaming heat under the ice there was yanked away toward the Antarctic Ocean
before it touched us. Otherwise we wouldn't have come back, even with the
shelter of that granite ridge that stopped the light.
"Somehow
in the blinding inferno we could see great hunched things—black bulks. They
shed even the furious incandescence of the magnesium for a time. Those must
have been the engines, we knew. Secrets going in blazing glory—secrets that
might have given Man the planets. Mysterious things that could lift and hurl
that ship—and had soaked in the force of the Earth's magnetic field. I saw
Norris' mouth move, and ducked. I couldn't hear him.
"Insulation—something—gave
way. All Earth's field they'd soaked up twenty million years before broke
loose. The aurora in the sky above licked down, and the whole plateau there was
bathed in cold fire that blanketed vision. The ice-ax in my hand got red hot,
and hissed on the ice. Metal buttons on my clothes burned into me. And a flash
of electric blue seared upward from beyond the granite wall.
"Then
the walls of ice crashed down on it. For an instant it squealed the way dry ice
does when it's pressed between metal.
"We
were blind and groping in the dark for hours while our eyes recovered. We found
every coil within a mile was fused rubbish, the dynamo and every radio set, the
earphones and speakers. If we hadn't had the steam tractor, we wouldn't have
gotten over to the Secondary Camp.
"Van
Wall flew in from Big Magnet at sun-up, as you know. We came home as soon as
possible. That is the history of—that." McReady's great bronze beard
gestured toward the thing on the table.
Blair
stirred uneasily, his little, bony fingers wriggling under the harsh light.
Little brown freckles on his knuckles slid back and forth as the tendons under
the skin twitched. He pulled aside a bit of the tarpaulin and looked
impatiently at the dark ice-bound thing inside.
McReady's
big body straightened somewhat. He'd ridden the rocking, jarring steam tractor
forty miles that day, pushing on to Big Magnet here. Even his calm will had
been pressed by the anxiety to mix again with humans. It was lone and quiet out
there in Secondary Camp, where a wolf-wind howled down from the Pole. Wolf-wind
howling in his sleep—winds droning and the evil, unspeakable face of that
monster leering up as he'd first seen it through clear, blue ice, with a bronze
ice-ax buried in its skull.
The
giant meteorologist spoke again. "The problem is this. Blair wants to
examine the thing. Thaw it out and make micro slides of its tissues and so
forth. Norris doesn't believe that is safe, and Blair does. Dr. Copper agrees
pretty much with Blair. Norris is a physicist, of course, not a biologist. But
he makes a point I think we should all hear. Blair has described the
microscopic life-forms biologists find living, even in this cold and
inhospitable place. They freeze every winter, and thaw every summer—for three
months—and live.
"The
point Norris makes is—they thaw, and live again. There must have been
microscopic life associated with this creature. There is with every living
thing we know. And Norris is afraid that we may release a plague—some germ
disease unknown to Earth—if we thaw those microscopic things that have been
frozen there for twenty million years.
"Blair
admits that such micro-life might retain the power of living. Such unorganized
things as individual cells can retain life for unknown periods, when solidly
frozen. The beast itself is as dead as those frozen mammoths they find in
Siberia. Organized, highly developed life-forms can't stand that treatment.
"But
micro-life could. Norris suggests that we may release some disease-form that
man, never having met it before, will be utterly defenseless against.
"Blair's
answer is that there may be such still-living germs, but that Norris has the
case reversed. They are utterly nonimmune to man. Our life-chemistry
probably—"
"Probably!"
The little biologist's head lifted in a quick, birdlike motion. The halo of
gray hair about his bald head ruffled as though angry. "Heh, one
look—"
"I
know," McReady acknowledged. "The thing is not Earthly. It does not
seem likely that it can have a life-chemistry sufficiently like ours to make
cross-infection remotely possible. I would say that there is no danger."
McReady
looked toward Dr. Copper. The physician shook his head slowly. "None
whatever," he asserted confidently. "Man cannot infect or be infected
by germs that live in such comparatively close relatives as the snakes. And
they are, I assure you," his clean-shaven face grimaced uneasily, "much
nearer to us that—that."
Vance
Norris moved angrily. He was comparatively short in this gathering of big men,
some five feet eight, and his stocky, powerful build tended to make him seem
shorter. His black hair was crisp and hard, like short, steel wires, and his
eyes were the gray of fractured steel. If McReady was a man of bronze, Norris
was all steel. His movements, his thoughts, his whole bearing had the quick,
hard impulse of a steel spring. His nerves were steel—hard, quick acting—swift
corroding.
He was
decided on his point now, and he lashed out in its defense with a
characteristic quick, clipped flow of words. "Different chemistry be
damned. That thing may be dead—or, by God, it may not—but I don't like it. Damn
it, Blair, let them see the monstrosity you are petting over there. Let them
see the foul thing and decide for themselves whether they want that thing
thawed out in this camp.
"Thawed
out, by the way. That's got to be thawed out in one of the shacks tonight, if
it is thawed out. Somebody—who's watchman tonight? Magnetic—oh, Connant. Cosmic
rays tonight. Well, you get to sit up with that twenty-million-year-old mummy
of his. Unwrap it, Blair. How the hell can they tell what they are buying, if
they can't see it? It may have a different chemistry. I don't care what else it
has, but I know it has something I don't want. If you can judge by the look on
its face—it isn't human so maybe you can't—it was annoyed when it froze.
Annoyed, in fact, is just about as close an approximation of the way it felt,
as crazy, mad, insane hatred. Neither one touches the subject.
"How
the hell can these birds tell what they are voting on? They haven't seen those
three red eyes and that blue hair like crawling worms. Crawling—damn, it's
crawling there in the ice right now!
"Nothing
Earth ever spawned had the unutterable sublimation of devastating wrath that
thing let loose in its face when it looked around its frozen desolation twenty
million years ago. Mad? It was mad clear through—searing, blistering mad!
"Hell,
I've had bad dreams ever since I looked at those three red eyes. Nightmares.
Dreaming the thing thawed out and came to life—that it wasn't dead, or even
wholly unconscious all those twenty million years, but just slowed,
waiting—waiting. You'll dream, too, while that damned thing that Earth wouldn't
own is dripping, dripping in the Cosmos House tonight.
"And,
Connant," Norris whipped toward the cosmic ray specialist, "won't you
have fun sitting up all night in the quiet. Wind whining above—and that thing
dripping—" he stopped for a moment, and looked around.
"I
know. That's not science. But this is, it's psychology. You'll have nightmares
for a year to come. Every night since I looked at that thing I've had 'em.
That's why I hate it—sure I do—and don't want it around. Put it back where it
came from and let it freeze for another twenty million years. I had some swell
nightmares—that it wasn't made like we are—which is obvious—but of a different
kind of flesh that it can really control. That it can change its shape, and
look like a man—and wait to kill and eat—
"That's
not a logical argument. I know it isn't. The thing isn't Earth-logic anyway.
"Maybe
it has an alien body-chemistry, and maybe its bugs do have a different
body-chemistry. A germ might not stand that, but, Blair and Copper, how about a
virus? That's just an enzyme molecule, you've said. That wouldn't need anything
but a protein molecule of any body to work on.
"And
how are you so sure that, of the million varieties of microscopic life it may
have, none of them are dangerous. How about diseases like
hydrophobia—rabies—that attack any warm-blooded creature, whatever its
body-chemistry may be? And parrot fever? Have you a body like a parrot, Blair?
And plain rot—gangrene—necrosis if you want? That isn't choosy about
body chemistry!"
Blair
looked up from his puttering long enough to meet Norris' angry, gray eyes for
an instant. "So far the only thing you have said this thing gave off that
was catching was dreams. I'll go so far as to admit that." An impish,
slightly malignant grin crossed the little man's seamed face. "I had some,
too. So. It's dream-infectious. No doubt an exceedingly dangerous malady.
"So
far as your other things go, you have a badly mistaken idea about viruses. In
the first place, nobody has shown that the enzyme-molecule theory, and that
alone, explains them. And in the second place, when you catch tobacco mosaic or
wheat rust, let me know. A wheat plant is a lot nearer your body-chemistry than
this other-world creature is.
"And
your rabies is limited, strictly limited. You can't get it from, nor give it
to, a wheat plant or a fish—which is a collateral descendant of a common
ancestor of yours. Which this, Norris, is not." Blair nodded pleasantly
toward the tarpaulined bulk on the table.
"Well,
thaw the damned thing in a tub of formalin if you must. I've suggested
that—"
"And
I've said there would be no sense in it. You can't compromise. Why did you and
Commander Garry come down here to study magnetism? Why weren't you content to
stay at home? There's magnetic force enough in New York. I could no more study
the life this thing once had from a formalin-pickled sample than you could get
the information you wanted back in New York. And—if this one is so treated, never
in all time to come can there be a duplicate! The race it came from must
have passed away in the twenty million years it lay frozen, so that even if it
came from Mars then, we'd never find its like. And—the ship is gone.
"There's
only one way to do this—and that is the best possible way. It must be thawed
slowly, carefully, and not in formalin."
Commander
Garry stood forward again, and Norris stepped back muttering angrily. "I
think Blair is right, gentlemen. What do you say?"
Connant
grunted. "It sounds right to us, I think—only perhaps he ought to stand
watch over it while it's thawing." He grinned ruefully, brushing a stray
lock of ripe-cherry hair back from his forehead. "Swell idea, in fact—if
he sits up with his jolly little corpse."
Garry
smiled slightly. A general chuckle of agreement rippled over the group. "I
should think any ghost it may have had would have starved to death if it hung
around here that long, Connant," Garry suggested. "And you look
capable of taking care of it. 'Ironman' Connant ought to be able to take out
any opposing players, still."
Connant
shook himself uneasily. "I'm not worrying about ghosts. Let's see that
thing. I—"
Eagerly
Blair was stripping back the ropes. A single throw of the tarpaulin revealed
the thing. The ice had melted somewhat in the heat of the room, and it was
clear and blue as thick, good glass. It shone wet and sleek under the harsh
light of the unshielded globe above.
The
room stiffened abruptly. It was face up there on the plain, greasy planks of
the table. The broken haft of the bronze ice-ax was still buried in the queer
skull. Three mad, hate-filled eyes blazed up with a living fire, bright as
fresh-spilled blood, from a face ringed with a writhing, loathsome nest of
worms, blue, mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow—
Van
Wall, six feet and two hundred pounds of ice-nerved pilot, gave a queer,
strangled gasp, and butted, stumbled his way out to the corridor. Half the
company broke for the doors. The others stumbled away from the table.
McReady
stood at one end of the table watching them, his great body planted solid on
his powerful legs. Norris from the opposite end glowered at the thing with smouldering
hate. Outside the door, Garry was talking with half a dozen of the men at once.
Blair
had a tack hammer. The ice that cased the thing schluffed crisply under
its steel claw as it peeled from the thing it had cased for twenty thousand
thousand years—
"I
know you don't like the thing, Connant, but it just has to be thawed out right.
You say leave it as it is till we get back to civilization. All right, I'll
admit your argument that we could do a better and more complete job there is
sound. But—how are we going to get this across the Line? We have to take this
through one temperate zone, the equatorial zone, and halfway through the other
temperate zone before we get it to New York. You don't want to sit with it one
night, but you suggest, then, that I hang its corpse in the freezer with the
beef?" Blair looked up from his cautious chipping, his bald freckled skull
nodding triumphantly.
Kinner,
the stocky, scar-faced cook, saved Connant the trouble of answering. "Hey,
you listen, mister. You put that thing in the box with the meat, and by all the
gods there ever were, I'll put you in to keep it company. You birds have
brought everything movable in this camp in onto my mess tables here already,
and I had to stand for that. But you go putting things like that in my meat
box, or even my meat cache here, and you cook your own damn grub."
"But,
Kinner, this is the only table in Big Magnet that's big enough to work
on," Blair objected. "Everybody's explained that."
"Yeah,
and everybody's brought everything in here. Clark brings his dogs every time
there's a fight and sews them up on that table. Ralsen brings in his sledges.
Hell, the only thing you haven't had on that table is the Boeing. And you'd 'a'
had that in if you coulda figured a way to get it through the tunnels."
Commander
Garry chuckled and grinned at Van Wall, the huge Chief Pilot. Van Wall's great
blond beard twitched suspiciously as he nodded gravely to Kinner. "You're
right, Kinner. The aviation department it the only one that treats you right."
"It
does get crowded, Kinner," Garry acknowledged. "But I'm afraid we all
find it that way at times. Not much privacy in an Antarctic camp."
"Privacy?
What the hell's that? You know, the thing that really made me weep, was when I
saw Barclay marchin' through here chantin' 'The last lumber in the camp! The
last lumber in the camp!' and carryin' it out to build that house on his
tractor. Damn it, I missed that moon cut in the door he carried out more'n I
missed the sun when it set. That wasn't just the last lumber Barclay was
walkin' off with. He was carryin' off the last bit of privacy in this blasted
place."
A grin
rode even Connant's heavy face as Kinner's perennial, good-natured grouch came
up again. But it died away quickly as his dark, deep-set eyes turned again to
the red-eyed thing Blair was chipping from its cocoon of ice. A big hand ruffed
his shoulder-length hair, and tugged at a twisted lock that fell behind his ear
in a familiar gesture. "I know that cosmic ray shack's going to be too crowded
if I have to sit up with that thing," he growled. "Why can't you go
on chipping the ice away from around it—you can do that without anybody butting
in, I assure you—and then hang the thing up over the power-plant boiler? That's
warm enough. It'll thaw out a chicken, even a whole side of beef, in a few
hours."
"I
know," Blair protested, dropping the tack hammer to gesture more
effectively with his bony, freckled fingers, his small body tense with
eagerness, "but this is too important to take any chances. There never was
a find like this; there never can be again. It's the only chance men will ever
have, and it has to be done exactly right.
"Look,
you know how the fish we caught down near the Ross Sea would freeze almost as
soon as we got them on deck, and come to life again if we thawed them gently?
Low forms of life aren't killed by quick freezing and slow thawing. We
have—"
"Hey,
for the love of Heaven—you mean that damned thing will come to life!"
Connant yelled. "You get the damned thing— Let me at it! That's going to
be in so many pieces—"
"No!
No, you fool—" Blair jumped in front of Connant to protect his
precious find. "No. Just low forms of life. For Pete's sake let me
finish. You can't thaw higher forms of life and have them come to. Wait a moment
now—hold it! A fish can come to after freezing because it's so low a form of
life that the individual cells of its body can revive, and that alone is enough
to reestablish life. Any higher forms thawed out that way are dead. Though the
individual cells revive, they die because there must be organization and
cooperative effort to live. That cooperation cannot be reestablished. There is
a sort of potential life in any uninjured, quick-frozen animal. But it
can't—can't under any circumstances—become active life in higher animals. The
higher animals are too complex, too delicate. This is an intelligent creature
as high in its evolution as we are in ours. Perhaps higher. It is as dead as a
frozen man would be."
"How
do you know?" demanded Connant, hefting the ice-ax he had seized a moment
before.
Commander
Garry laid a restraining hand on his heavy shoulder. "Wait a minute,
Connant. I want to get this straight. I agree that there is going to be no
thawing of this thing if there is the remotest chance of its revival. I quite
agree it is much too unpleasant to have alive, but I had no idea there was the
remotest possibility."
Dr.
Copper pulled his pipe from between his teeth and heaved his stocky, dark body
from the bunk he had been sitting in. "Blair's being technical. That's
dead. As dead as the mammoths they find frozen in Siberia. We have all sorts of
proof that things don't live after being frozen—not even fish, generally
speaking—and no proof that higher animal life can under any circumstances.
What's the point, Blair?"
The
little biologist shook himself. The little ruff of hair standing out around his
bald pate waved in righteous anger. "The point is," he said in an
injured tone, "that the individual cells might show the characteristics
they had in life if it is properly thawed. A man's muscle cells live many hours
after he has died. Just because they live, and a few things like hair and
fingernail cells still live, you wouldn't accuse a corpse of being a zombie, or
something.
"Now
if I thaw this right, I may have a chance to determine what sort of world it's
native to. We don't, and can't know by any other means, whether it came from
Earth or Mars or Venus or from beyond the stars.
"And
just because it looks unlike men, you don't have to accuse it of being evil, or
vicious or something. Maybe that expression on its face is its equivalent to a
resignation to fate. White is the color of mourning to the Chinese. If men can
have different customs, why can't a so-different race have different
understandings of facial expressions?"
Connant
laughed softly, mirthlessly. "Peaceful resignation! If that is the best it
could do in the way of resignation, I should exceedingly dislike seeing it when
it was looking mad. That face was never designed to express peace. It just
didn't have any philosophical thoughts like peace in its make-up.
"I
know it's your pet—but be sane about it. That thing grew up on evil, adolesced
slowly roasting alive the local equivalent of kittens, and amused itself
through maturity on new and ingenious torture."
"You
haven't the slightest right to say that," snapped Blair. "How do you
know the first thing about the meaning of a facial expression inherently
inhuman? It may well have no human equivalent whatever. That is just a
different development of Nature, another example of Nature's wonderful
adaptability. Growing on another, perhaps harsher world, it has different form
and features. But it is just as much a legitimate child of Nature as you are.
You are displaying that childish human weakness of hating the different. On its
own world it would probably class you as a fish-belly, white monstrosity with
an insufficient number of eyes and a fungoid body pale and bloated with gas.
"Just
because its nature is different, you haven't any right to say it's necessarily
evil."
Norris
burst out a single, explosive, "Haw!" He looked down at the thing.
"May be that things from other worlds don't have to be evil just
because they're different. But that thing was! Child of Nature, eh?
Well, it was a hell of an evil Nature."
"Aw,
will you mugs cut crabbing at each other and get the damned thing off my
table?" Kinner growled. "And put a canvas over it. It looks
indecent."
"Kinner's
gone modest," jeered Connant.
Kinner
slanted his eyes up to the big physicist. The scarred cheek twisted to join the
line of his tight lips in a twisted grin. "All right, big boy, and what
were you grousing about a minute ago? We can set the thing in a chair next to
you tonight, if you want."
"I'm
not afraid of its face," Connant snapped. "I don't like keeping a
wake over its corpse particularly, but I'm going to do it."
Kinner's
grin spread. "Uh-huh." He went off to the galley stove and shook down
ashes vigorously, drowning the brittle chipping of the ice as Blair fell to
work again.
"Cluck,"
reported the cosmic-ray counter, "cluck-burrrp-cluck."
Connant
started and dropped his pencil.
"Damnation."
The physicist looked toward the far corner, back at the Geiger counter on the
table near that corner. And crawled under the desk at which he had been working
to retrieve the pencil. He sat down at his work again, trying to make his
writing more even. It tended to have jerks and quavers in it, in time with the
abrupt proud-hen noises of the Geiger counter. The muted whoosh of the pressure
lamp he was using for illumination, the mingled gargles and bugle calls of a
dozen men sleeping down the corridor in Paradise House formed the background
sounds for the irregular, clucking noises of the counter, the occasional rustle
of falling coal in the copper-bellied stove. And a soft, steady drip-drip-drip
from the thing in the corner.
Connant
jerked a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, snapped it so that a cigarette
protruded, and jabbed the cylinder into his mouth. The lighter failed to function,
and he pawed angrily through the pile of papers in search of a match. He
scratched the wheel of the lighter several times, dropped it with a curse and
got up to pluck a hot coat from the stove with the coal tongs.
The
lighter functioned instantly when he tried it on returning to the desk. The
counter ripped out a series of chuckling guffaws as a burst of cosmic rays
struck through to it. Connant turned to glower at it, and tried to concentrate
on the interpretation of data collected during the past week. The weekly
summary—
He gave
up and yielded to curiosity, or nervousness. He lifted the pressure lamp from
the desk and carried it over to the table in the corner. Then he returned to
the stove and picked up the coal tongs. The beast had been thawing for nearly
eighteen hours now. He poked at it with an unconscious caution; the flesh was
no longer hard as armor plate, but had assumed a rubbery texture. It looked
like wet, blue rubber glistening under droplets of water like little round
jewels in the glare of the gasoline pressure lantern. Connant felt an
unreasoning desire to pour the contents of the lamp's reservoir over the thing
in its box and drop the cigarette into it. The three red eyes glared up at him
sightlessly, the ruby eyeballs reflecting murky, smoky rays of light.
He
realized vaguely that he had been looking at them for a very long time, even
vaguely understood that they were no longer sightless. But it did not seem of
importance, of no more importance than the labored, slow motion of the
tentacular things that sprouted from the base of the scrawny, slowly pulsing
neck.
Connant
picked up the pressure lamp and returned to his chair. He sat down, staring at
the pages of mathematics before him. The clucking of the counter was strangely
less disturbing, the rustle of the coals in the stove no longer distracting.
The
creak of the floorboards behind him didn't interrupt his thoughts as he went
about his weekly report in an automatic manner, filling in columns of data and
making brief, summarizing notes.
The
creak of the floorboards sounded nearer.
Blair
came up from the nightmare-haunted depths of sleep abruptly. Connant's face
floated vaguely above him; for a moment it seemed a continuance of the wild
horror of the dream. But Connant's face was angry, and a little frightened.
"Blair—Blair you damned log, wake up."
"Uh-eh?"
the little biologist rubbed his eyes, his bony, freckled finger crooked to a
mutilated child-fist. From surrounding bunks other faces lifted to stare down
at them.
Connant
straightened up. "Get up—and get a lift on. Your damned animal's
escaped."
"Escaped—what!"
Chief Pilot Van Wall's bull voice roared out with a volume that shook the
walls. Down the communication tunnels other voices yelled suddenly. The dozen
inhabitants of Paradise House tumbled in abruptly, Barclay, stocky and bulbous
in long woolen underwear, carrying a fire extinguisher.
"What
the hell's the matter?" Barclay demanded.
"Your
damned beast got loose. I fell asleep about twenty minutes ago, and when I woke
up, the thing was gone. Hey, Doc, the hell you say those things can't come to
life. Blair's blasted potential life developed a hell of a lot of potential and
walked out on us."
Copper
stared blankly. "It wasn't—Earthly," he sighed suddenly. "I—I
guess Earthly laws don't apply."
"Well,
it applied for leave of absence and took it. We've got to find it and capture
it somehow." Connant swore bitterly, his deep-set black eyes sullen and
angry. "It's a wonder the hellish creature didn't eat me in my sleep."
Blair
started back, his pale eyes suddenly fear-struck. "Maybe it di—er—uh—we'll
have to find it."
"You
find it. It's your pet. I've had all I want to do with it, sitting there for
seven hours with the counter clucking every few seconds, and you birds in here
singing night-music. It's a wonder I got to sleep. I'm going through to the Ad
Building."
Commander
Garry ducked through the doorway, pulling his belt tight. "You won't have
to. Van's roar sounded like the Boeing taking off downwind. So it wasn't
dead?"
"I
didn't carry it off in my arms, I assure you," Connant snapped. "The
last I saw, the split skull was oozing green goo, like a squashed caterpillar.
Doc just said our laws don't work—it's unearthly. Well, it's an unearthly
monster, with an unearthly disposition, judging by the face, wandering around
with a split skull and brains oozing out." Norris and McReady appeared in
the doorway, a doorway filling with other shivering men. "Has anybody seen
it coming over here?" Norris asked innocently. "About four feet
tall—three red eyes—brains oozing out— Hey, has anybody checked to make sure
this isn't a cracked idea of humor? If it is, I think we'll unite in tying
Blair's pet around Connant's neck like the Ancient Mariner's albatross."
"It's
no humor," Connant shivered. "Lord, I wish it were. I'd rather
wear—" He stopped. A wild, weird howl shrieked through the corridors. The
men stiffened abruptly, and half turned.
"I
think it's been located," Connant finished. His dark eyes shifted with a
queer unease. He darted back to his bunk in Paradise House, to return almost
immediately with a heavy .45 revolver and an ice-ax. He hefted both gently as
he started for the corridor toward Dogtown.
"It
blundered down the wrong corridor—and landed among the huskies. Listen—the dogs
have broken their chains—"
The
half-terrorized howl of the dog pack had changed to a wild hunting melee. The
voices of the dogs thundered in the narrow corridors, and through them came a
low rippling snarl of distilled hate. A shrill of pain, a dozen snarling yelps.
Connant
broke for the door. Close behind him, McReady, then Barclay and Commander Garry
came. Other men broke for the Ad Building, and weapons—the sledge house.
Pomroy, in charge of Big Magnet's five cows, started down the corridor in the
opposite direction—he had a six-foot-handled, long-tined pitchfork in mind.
Barclay
slid to a halt, as McReady's giant bulk turned abruptly away from the tunnel
leading to Dogtown, and vanished off at an angle. Uncertainly, the mechanician
wavered a moment, the fire extinguisher in his hands, hesitating from one side
to the other. Then he was racing after Connant's broad back. Whatever McReady
had in mind, he could be trusted to make it work.
Connant
stopped at the bend in the corridor. His breath hissed suddenly through his
throat. "Great God—" The revolver exploded thunderously; three
numbing, palpable waves of sound crashed through the confined corridors. Two
more. The revolver dropped to the hard-packed snow of the trail, and Barclay saw
the ice-ax shift into defensive position. Connant's powerful body blocked his
vision, but beyond he heard something mewing, and, insanely, chuckling. The
dogs were quieter; there was a deadly seriousness in their low snarls. Taloned
feet scratched at hard-packed snow, broken chains were clinking and tangling.
Connant
shifted abruptly, and Barclay could see what lay beyond. For a second he stood
frozen, then his breath went out in a gusty curse. The Thing launched itself at
Connant, the powerful arms of the man swung the ice-ax flat-side first at what
might have been a head. It scrunched horribly, and the tattered flesh, ripped
by a half-dozen savage huskies, leapt to its feet again. The red eyes blazed
with an unearthly hatred, an unearthly, unkillable vitality.
Barclay
turned the fire extinguisher on it; the blinding, blistering stream of chemical
spray confused it, baffled it, together with the savage attacks of the huskies,
not for long afraid of anything that did, or could live, and held it at bay.
McReady
wedged men out of his way and drove down the narrow corridor packed with men
unable to reach the scene. There was a sure foreplanned drive to McReady's
attack. One of the giant blowtorches used in warming the plane's engines was in
his bronzed hands. It roared gustily as he turned the corner and opened the
valve. The mad mewing hissed louder. The dogs scrambled back from the
three-foot lance of blue-hot flame.
"Bar,
get a power cable, run it in somehow. And a handle. We can electrocute
this—monster, if I don't incinerate it." McReady spoke with an authority
of planned action. Barclay turned down the long corridor to the power plant,
but already before him Norris and Van Wall were racing down.
Barclay
found the cable in the electrical cache in the tunnel wall. In a half minute he
was hacking at it, walking back. Van Wall's voice rang out in warning shout of
"Power!" as the emergency gasoline-powered dynamo thudded into
action. Half a dozen other men were down there now; the coal, kindling were
going into the firebox of the steam power plant. Norris, cursing in a low,
deadly monotone, was working with quick, sure fingers on the other end of
Barclay's cable, splicing a contractor into one of the power leads.
The
dogs had fallen back when Barclay reached the corridor bend, fallen back before
a furious monstrosity that glared from baleful red eyes, mewing in trapped
hatred. The dogs were a semi-circle of red-dipped muzzles with a fringe of
glistening white teeth, whining with a vicious eagerness that near matched the
fury of the red eyes. McReady stood confidently alert at the corridor bend, the
gustily muttering torch held loose and ready for action in his hands. He
stepped aside without moving his eyes from the beast as Barclay came up. There
was a slight, tight smile on his lean, bronzed face.
Norris'
voice called down the corridor, and Barclay stepped forward. The cable was
taped to the long handle of a snow shovel, the two conductors split and held
eighteen inches apart by a scrap of lumber lashed at right angles across the
far end of the handle. Bare copper conductors, charged with 220 volts, glinted
in the light of pressure lamps. The Thing mewed and hated and dodged. McReady
advanced to Barclay's side. The dogs beyond sensed the plan with the almost telepathic
intelligence of trained huskies. Their whining grew shriller, softer, their
mincing steps carried them nearer. Abruptly a huge night-black Alaskan leapt
onto the trapped thing. It turned squalling, saber-clawed feet slashing.
Barclay
leapt forward and jabbed. A weird, shrill scream rose and choked out. The smell
of burnt flesh in the corridor intensified; greasy smoke curled up. The echoing
pound of the gas-electric dynamo down the corridor became a slogging thud.
The red
eyes clouded over in a stiffening, jerking travesty of a face. Armlike, leglike
members quivered and jerked. The dogs leapt forward, and Barclay yanked back
his shovel-handled weapon. The thing on the snow did not move as gleaming teeth
ripped it open.
Garry
looked about the crowded room. Thirty-two men, some tensed nervously standing
against the wall, some uneasily relaxed, some sitting, most perforce standing
as intimate as sardines. Thirty-two, plus the five engaged in sewing up wounded
dogs, made thirty-seven, the total personnel.
Garry
started speaking. "All right, I guess we're here. Some of you—three or
four at most—saw what happened. All of you have seen that thing on the table,
and can get a general idea. Anyone hasn't, I'll lift—" His hand strayed to
the tarpaulin bulking over the thing on the table. There was an acrid odor of
singed flesh seeping out of it. The men stirred restlessly, hasty denials.
"It
looks rather as though Charnauk isn't going to lead any more teams," Garry
went on. "Blair wants to get at this thing, and make some more detailed
examination. We want to know what happened, and make sure right now that this
is permanently, totally dead. Right?"
Connant
grinned. "Anybody that doesn't can sit up with it tonight."
"All
right then, Blair, what can you say about it? What was it?" Garry turned
to the little biologist.
"I
wonder if we ever saw its natural form," Blair looked at the covered mass.
"It may have been imitating the beings that built that ship—but I don't
think it was. I think that was its true form. Those of us who were up near the
bend saw the thing in action; the thing on the table is the result. When it got
loose, apparently, it started looking around. Antarctica still frozen as it was
ages ago when the creature first saw it—and froze. From my observations while
it was thawing out, and the bits of tissue I cut and hardened then, I think it
was native to a hotter planet than Earth. It couldn't, in its natural form,
stand the temperature. There is no life-form on Earth that can live in Antarctica
during the winter, but the best compromise is the dog. It found the dogs, and
somehow got near enough to Charnauk to get him. The others smelled it—heard
it—I don't know—anyway they went wild, and broke chains, and attacked it before
it was finished. The thing we found was part Charnauk, queerly only half-dead,
part Charnauk half-digested by the jellylike protoplasm of that creature, and
part the remains of the thing we originally found, sort of melted down to the
basic protoplasm.
"When
the dogs attacked it, it turned into the best fighting thing it could think of.
Some other-world beast apparently."
"Turned,"
snapped Garry. "How?"
"Every
living thing is made up of jelly—protoplasm and minute, submicroscopic things
called nuclei, which control the bulk, the protoplasm. This thing was just a
modification of that same world-wide plan of Nature; cells made up of
protoplasm, controlled by infinitely tinier nuclei. You physicists might
compare it—an individual cell of any living thing—with an atom; the bulk of the
atom, the space-filling part, is made up of the electron orbits, but the
character of the thing is determined by the atomic nucleus.
"This
isn't wildly beyond what we already know. It's just a modification we haven't
seen before. It's as natural, as logical, as any other manifestation of life.
It obeys exactly the same laws. The cells are made of protoplasm, their
character determined by the nucleus.
"Only,
in this creature, the cell nuclei can control those cells at will. It
digested Charnauk, and as it digested, studied every cell of his tissue, and
shaped its own cells to imitate them exactly. Parts of it—parts that had time
to finish changing—are dog-cells. But they don't have dog-cell nuclei."
Blair lifted a fraction of the tarpaulin. A torn dog's leg, with stiff gray fur
protruded. "That, for instance, isn't dog at all; it's imitation. Some
parts I'm uncertain about; the nucleus was hiding itself, covering up with
dog-cell imitation nucleus. In time, not even a microscope would have shown the
difference."
"Suppose,"
asked Norris bitterly, "it had had lots of time?"
"Then
it would have been a dog. The other dogs would have accepted it. We would have
accepted it. I don't think anything would have distinguished it, not
microscope, nor X-ray, nor any other means. This is a member of a supremely
intelligent race, a race that has learned the deepest secrets of biology, and
turned them to its use."
"What
was it planning to do?" Barclay looked at the humped tarpaulin.
Blair
grinned unpleasantly. The wavering halo of thin hair round his bald pate
wavered in a stir of air. "Take over the world, I imagine."
"Take
over the world! Just it, all by itself?" Connant gasped. "Set itself
up as a lone dictator?"
"No,"
Blair shook his head. The scalpel he had been fumbling in his bony fingers
dropped; he bent to pick it up, so that his face was hidden as he spoke.
"It would become the population of the world."
"Become—populate
the world? Does it reproduce asexually?"
Blair
shook his head and gulped. "It's—it doesn't have to. It weighed
eighty-five pounds. Charnauk weighed about ninety. It would have become
Charnauk, and had eight-five pounds left, to become—oh, Jack, for instance, or
Chinook. It can imitate anything—that is, become anything. If it had reached
the Antarctic Sea, it would have become a seal, maybe two seals. They might
have attacked a killer whale, and become either killers, or a herd of seals. Or
maybe it would have caught an albatross, or a skua gull, and flown to South
America."
Norris
cursed softly. "And every time it digested something, and imitated
it—"
"It
would have had its original bulk left, to start again," Blair finished.
"Nothing would kill it. It has no natural enemies, because it becomes
whatever it wants to. If a killer whale attacked it, it would become a killer
whale. If it was an albatross, and an eagle attacked it, it would become an
eagle. Lord, it might become a female eagle. Go back—build a nest and lay
eggs!"
"Are
you sure that thing from hell is dead?" Dr. Copper asked softly.
"Yes,
thank Heaven," the little biologist gasped. "After they drove the
dogs off, I stood there poking Bar's electrocution thing into it for five
minutes. It's dead and—cooked."
"Then
we can only give thanks that this is Antarctica, where there is not one,
single, solitary, living thing for it to imitate, except these animals in
camp."
"Us,"
Blair giggled. "It can imitate us. Dogs can't make four hundred miles to
the sea; there's no food. There aren't any skua gulls to imitate at this
season. There aren't any penguins this far inland. There's nothing that can
reach the sea from this point—except us. We've got brains. We can do it. Don't
you see—it's got to imitate us—it's got to be one of us—that's the only way
it can fly an airplane—fly a plane for two hours, and rule—be—all Earth's
inhabitants. A world for the taking—if it imitates us!
"It
didn't know yet. It hadn't had a chance to learn. It was rushed—hurried—took
the thing nearest its own size. Look—I'm Pandora! I opened the box! And the only
hope that can come out is—that nothing can come out. You didn't see me. I did
it. I fixed it. I smashed every magneto. Not a plane can fly. Nothing can
fly." Blair giggled and lay down on the floor crying.
Chief
Pilot Van Wall made for the door. His feet were fading echoes in the corridors
as Dr. Copper bent unhurriedly over the little man on the floor. From his
office at the end of the room he brought something and injected a solution into
Blair's arm. "He might come out of it when he wakes up," he sighed,
rising. McReady helped him lift the biologist onto a nearby bunk. "It all
depends on whether we can convince him that thing is dead."
Van
Wall ducked into the shack, brushing his heavy blond beard absently. "I
didn't think a biologist would do a thing like that up thoroughly. He missed
the spares in the second cache. It's all right. I smashed them."
Commander
Garry nodded. "I was wondering about the radio."
Dr.
Copper snorted. "You don't think it can leak out on a radio wave, do you?
You'd have five rescue attempts in the next three months if you stop the
broadcasts. The thing to do is talk loud and not make a sound. Now I
wonder—"
McReady
looked speculatively at the doctor. "It might be like an infectious
disease. Everything that drank any of its blood—"
Copper
shook his head. "Blair missed something. Imitate it may, but it has, to a
certain extent, its own body chemistry, its own metabolism. If it didn't, it
would become a dog—and be a dog and nothing more. It has to be an imitation
dog. Therefore you can detect it by serum tests. And its chemistry, since it
comes from another world, must be so wholly, radically different that a few
cells, such as gained by drops of blood, would be treated as disease germs by
the dog, or human body."
"Blood—would
one of those imitations bleed?" Norris demanded.
"Surely.
Nothing mystic about blood. Muscle is about 90% water; blood differs only in
having a couple percent more water, and less connective tissue. They'd bleed
all right," Copper assured him.
Blair
sat up in his bunk suddenly. "Connant—where's Connant?"
The
physicist moved over toward the little biologist. "Here I am. What do you
want?"
"Are
you?" giggled Blair. He lapsed back into the bunk contorted with silent
laughter.
Connant
looked at him blankly. "Huh? Am I what?"
"Are
you there?" Blair burst into gales of laughter. "Are you
Connant? The beast wanted to be man—not a dog—"
Dr.
Copper rose wearily from the bunk, and washed the hypodermic carefully. The
little tinkles it made seemed loud in the packed room, now that Blair's
gurgling laughter had finally quieted. Copper looked toward Garry and shook his
head slowly. "Hopeless, I'm afraid. I don't think we can ever convince him
the thing is dead now."
Norris
laughed uncertainly. "I'm not sure you can convince me. Oh, damn you,
McReady."
"McReady?"
Commander Garry turned to look from Norris to McReady curiously.
"The
nightmares," Norris explained. "He had a theory about the nightmares
we had at the Secondary Station after finding that thing."
"And
that was?" Garry looked at McReady levelly.
Norris
answered for him, jerkily, uneasily. "That the creature wasn't dead, had a
sort of enormously slowed existence, an existence that permitted it,
nonetheless, to be vaguely aware of the passing of time, of our coming, after
endless years. I had a dream it could imitate things."
"Well,"
Copper grunted, "it can."
"Don't
be an ass," Norris snapped. "That's not what's bothering me. In the
dream it could read minds, read thoughts and ideas and mannerisms."
"What's
so bad about that? It seems to be worrying you more than the thought of the joy
we're going to have with a madman in an Antarctic camp." Copper nodded
toward Blair's sleeping form.
McReady
shook his great head slowly. "You know that Connant is Connant, because he
not merely looks like Connant—which we're beginning to believe that beast might
be able to do—but he thinks like Connant, moves himself around as Connant does.
That takes more than merely a body that looks like him; that takes Connant's own
mind, and thoughts and mannerisms. Therefore, though you know that the thing
might make itself look like Connant, you aren't much bothered, because
you know it has a mind from another world, a totally unhuman mind, that
couldn't possibly react and think and talk like a man we know, and do it so
well as to fool us for a moment. The idea of the creature imitating one of us
is fascinating, but unreal, because it is too completely unhuman to deceive us.
It doesn't have a human mind."
"As
I said before," Norris repeated, looking steadily at McReady, "you
can say the damnedest things at the damnedest times. Will you be so good as to
finish that thought—one way or the other?"
Kinner,
the scar-faced expedition cook, had been standing near Connant. Suddenly he moved
down the length of the crowded room toward his familiar galley. He shook the
ashes from the galley stove noisily.
"It
would do it no good," said Dr. Copper, softly as though thinking out loud,
"to merely look like something it was trying to imitate; it would have to
understand its feelings, its reactions. It is unhuman; it has powers of
imitation beyond any conception of man. A good actor, by training himself, can
imitate another man, another man's mannerisms, well enough to fool most people.
Of course no actor could imitate so perfectly as to deceive men who had been
living with the imitated one in the complete lack of privacy of an Antarctic
camp. That would take a superhuman skill."
"Oh,
you've got the bug, too?" Norris cursed softly.
Connant,
standing alone at one end of the room, looked about him wildly, his face white.
A gentle eddying of the men had crowded them slowly down toward the other end
of the room, so that he stood quite alone. "My God, will you two Jeremiahs
shut up?" Connant's voice shook. "What am I? Some kind of microscopic
specimen you're dissecting? Some unpleasant worm you're discussing in the third
person?"
McReady
looked up at him; his slowly twisting hands stopped for a moment. "Having
a lovely time. Wish you were here. Signed: Everybody.
"Connant,
if you think you're having a hell of a time, just move over on the other end
for a while. You've got one thing we haven't; you know what the answer is. I'll
tell you this, right now you're the most feared and respected man in Big Magnet."
"Lord,
I wish you could see your eyes," Connant gasped. "Stop staring, will
you! What the hell are you going to do?"
"Have
you any suggestions, Dr. Copper?" Commander Garry asked steadily.
"The present situation is impossible."
"Oh,
is it?" Connant snapped. "Come over here and look at that crowd. By
Heaven, they look exactly like that gang of huskies around the corridor bend.
Benning, will you stop hefting that damned ice-ax?"
The
coppery blade rang on the floor as the aviation mechanic nervously dropped it.
He bent over and picked it up instantly, hefting it slowly, turning it in his
hands, his brown eyes moving jerkily about the room.
Copper
sat down on the bunk beside Blair. The wood creaked noisily in the room. Far
down a corridor, a dog yelped in pain, and the dog drivers' tense voices
floated softly back. "Microscopic examination," said the doctor
thoughtfully, "would be useless, as Blair pointed out. Considerable time
has passed. However, serum tests would be definitive."
"Serum
tests? What do you mean exactly?" Commander Garry asked.
"If
I had a rabbit that had been injected with human blood—a poison to rabbits, of
course, as is the blood of any animal save that of another rabbit—and the
injections continued in increasing doses for some time, the rabbit would be
human-immune. If a small quantity of its blood were drawn off, allowed to
separate in a test tube, and to the clear serum, a bit of human blood were
added, there would be a visible reaction, proving the blood was human. If cow, or
dog blood were added—or any protein material other than that one thing—human
blood—no reaction would take place. That would prove definitely."
"Can
you suggest where I might catch a rabbit for you, Doc?" Norris asked.
"That is, nearer than Australia; we don't want to waste time going that
far."
"I
know there aren't any rabbits in Antarctica," Copper nodded, "but
that is simply the usual animal. Any animal except man will do. A dog for
instance. But it will take several days, and due to the greater size of the
animal, considerable blood. Two of us will have to contribute."
"Would
I do?" Garry asked.
"That
will make two," Copper nodded. "I'll get to work on it right
away."
"What
about Connant in the meantime," Kinner demanded. "I'm going out that
door and head off for the Ross Sea before I cook for him."
"He
may be human—" Copper started.
Connant
burst out in a flood of curses. "Human! May be human, you damned
sawbones! What in hell do you think I am?"
"A
monster," Copper snapped sharply. "Now shut up and listen."
Connant's face drained of color and he sat down heavily as the indictment was
put in words. "Until we know—you know as well as we do that we have reason
to question the fact, and only you know how that question is to be answered—we
may reasonably be expected to lock you up. If you are—unhuman—you're a lot more
dangerous than poor Blair there, and I'm going to see that he's locked up
thoroughly. I expect that his next stage will be a violent desire to kill you,
all the dogs, and probably all of us. When he wakes, he will be convinced we're
all unhuman, and nothing on the planet will ever change his conviction. It
would be kinder to let him die, but we can't do that, of course. He's going in
one shack, and you can stay in Cosmos House with your cosmic ray apparatus.
Which is about what you'd do anyway. I've got to fix up a couple of dogs."
Connant
nodded bitterly. "I'm human. Hurry that test. Your eyes—Lord, I wish you
could see your eyes staring—"
Commander
Garry watched anxiously as Clark, the dog-handler, held the big brown Alaskan
husky, while Copper began the injection treatment. The dog was not anxious to
cooperate; the needle was painful, and already he'd experienced considerable
needle work that morning. Five stitches held closed a slash that ran from his
shoulder, across the ribs, halfway down his body. One long fang was broken off
short; the missing part was to be found half buried in the shoulder bone of the
monstrous thing on the table in the Ad Building.
"How
long will that take?" Garry asked, pressing his arm gently. It was sore
from the prick of the needle Dr. Copper had used to withdraw blood.
Copper
shrugged. "I don't know, to be frank. I know the general method. I've used
it on rabbits. But I haven't experimented with dogs. They're big, clumsy
animals to work with; naturally rabbits are preferable, and serve ordinarily.
In civilized places you can buy a stock of human-immune rabbits from suppliers,
and not many investigators take the trouble to prepare their own."
"What
do they want with them back there?" Clark asked.
"Criminology
is one large field. A says he didn't murder B, but that the blood on his shirt
came from killing a chicken. The State makes a test, then it's up to A to
explain how it is the blood reacts on human-immune rabbits, but not on
chicken-immunes."
"What
are we going to do with Blair in the meantime?" Garry asked wearily.
"It's all right to let him sleep where he is for a while, but when he
wakes up—"
"Barclay
and Benning are fitting some bolts on the door of Cosmos House," Copper
replied grimly. "Connant's acting like a gentleman. I think perhaps the
way the other men look at him makes him rather want privacy. Lord knows,
heretofore we've all of us individually prayed for a little privacy."
Clark
laughed brittlely. "Not any more, thank you. The more the merrier."
"Blair,"
Copper went on, "will also have to have privacy—and locks. He's going to
have a pretty definite plan in mind when he wakes up. Ever hear the old story
of how to stop hoof-and-mouth disease in cattle?"
Clark
and Garry shook their heads silently.
"If
there isn't any hoof-and-mouth disease, there won't be any hoof-and-mouth
disease," Copper explained. "You get rid of it by killing every
animal that exhibits it, and every animal that's been near the diseased animal.
Blair's a biologist, and knows that story. He's afraid of this thing we loosed.
The answer is probably pretty clear in his mind now. Kill everybody and
everything in this camp before a skua gull or a wandering albatross coming in with
the spring chances out this way and—catches the disease."
Clark's
lips curled in a twisted grin. "Sounds logical to me. If things get too
bad—maybe we'd better let Blair get loose. It would save us committing suicide.
We might also make something of a vow that if things get bad, we see that that
does happen."
Copper
laughed softly. "The last man alive in Big Magnet—wouldn't be a man,"
he pointed out. "Somebody's got to kill those—creatures that don't desire
to kill themselves, you know. We don't have enough thermite to do it all at
once, and the decanite explosive wouldn't help much. I have an idea that even
small pieces of one of those beings would be self-sufficient."
"If,"
said Garry thoughtfully, "they can modify their protoplasm at will, won't
they simply modify themselves to birds and fly away? They can read all about
birds, and imitate their structure without even meeting them. Or imitate,
perhaps, birds of their home planet."
Copper
shook his head, and helped Clark to free the dog. "Man studied birds for
centuries, trying to learn how to make a machine to fly like them. He never did
do the trick; his final success came when he broke away entirely and tried new
methods. Knowing the general idea, and knowing the detailed structure of wing
and bone and nerve-tissue is something far, far different. And as for
other-world birds, perhaps, in fact very probably, the atmospheric conditions
here are so vastly different that their birds couldn't fly. Perhaps, even, the
being came from a planet like Mars with such a thin atmosphere that there were
no birds."
Barclay
came into the building, trailing a length of airplane control cable. "It's
finished, Doc. Cosmos House can't be opened from the inside. Now where do we
put Blair?"
Copper
looked toward Garry. "There wasn't any biology building. I don't know
where we can isolate him."
"How
about East Cache?" Garry said after a moment's thought. "Will Blair
be able to look after himself—or need attention?"
"He'll
be capable enough. We'll be the ones to watch out," Copper assured him
grimly. "Take a stove, a couple of bags of coal, necessary supplies and a
few tools to fix it up. Nobody's been out there since last fall, have
they?"
Garry
shook his head. "If he gets noisy—I thought that might be a good
idea."
Barclay
hefted the tools he was carrying and looked up at Garry. "If the muttering
he's doing now is any sign, he's going to sing away the night hours. And we
won't like his song."
"What's
he saying?" Copper asked.
Barclay
shook his head. "I didn't care to listen much. You can if you want to. But
I gathered that the blasted idiot had all the dreams McReady had, and a few
more. He slept beside the thing when we stopped on the trail coming in from
Secondary Magnetic, remember. He dreamt the thing was alive, and dreamt more
details. And—damn his soul—knew it wasn't all dream, or had reason to. He knew
it had telepathic powers that were stirring vaguely, and that it could not only
read minds, but project thoughts. They weren't dreams, you see. They were stray
thoughts that thing was broadcasting, the way Blair's broadcasting his thoughts
now—a sort of telepathic muttering in its sleep. That's why he knew so much
about its powers. I guess you and I, Doc, weren't so sensitive—if you want to
believe in telepathy."
"I
have to," Copper sighed. "Dr. Rhine of Duke University has shown that
it exists, shown that some are much more sensitive than others."
"Well,
if you want to learn a lot of details, go listen in on Blair's broadcast. He's
driven most of the boys out of the Ad Building; Kinner's rattling pans like
coal going down a chute. When he can't rattle a pan, he shakes ashes.
"By
the way, Commander, what are we going to do this spring, now the planes are out
of it?"
Garry
sighed. "I'm afraid our expedition is going to be a loss. We cannot divide
our strength now."
"It
won't be a loss—if we continue to live, and come out of this," Copper
promised him. "The find we've made, if we can get it under control, is
important enough. The cosmic ray data, magnetic work, and atmospheric work
won't be greatly hindered."
Garry
laughed mirthlessly. "I was just thinking of the radio broadcasts. Telling
half the world about the wonderful results of our exploration flights, trying
to fool men like Byrd and Ellsworth back home there that we're doing
something."
Copper
nodded gravely. "They'll know something's wrong. But men like that have
judgment enough to know we wouldn't do tricks without some sort of reason, and
will wait for our return to judge us. I think it comes to this: men who know
enough to recognize our deception will wait for our return. Men who haven't
discretion and faith enough to wait will not have the experience to detect any
fraud. We know enough of the conditions here to put through a good bluff."
"Just
so they don't send 'rescue' expeditions," Garry prayed.
"When—if—we're ever ready to come out, we'll have to send word to Captain
Forsythe to bring a stock of magnetos with him when he comes down. But—never
mind that."
"You
mean if we don't come out?" asked Barclay. "I was wondering if a nice
running account of an eruption or an earthquake via radio—with a swell windup
by using a stick of decanite under the microphone—would help. Nothing, of
course, will entirely keep people out. One of those swell, melodramatic 'last-man-alive-scenes'
might make 'em go easy though."
Garry
smiled with genuine humor. "Is everybody in camp trying to figure that
out, too?"
Copper
laughed. "What do you think, Garry? We're confident we can win out. But
not too easy about it, I guess."
Clark
grinned up from the dog he was petting into calmness. "Confident, did you
say, Doc?"
Blair
moved restlessly around the small shack. His eyes jerked and quivered in vague,
fleeting glances at the four men with him; Barclay, six feet tall and weighing
over 190 pounds; McReady, a bronze giant of a man; Dr. Copper, short, squatly
powerful; and Benning, five feet ten of wiry strength.
Blair
was huddled up against the far wall of the East Cache cabin, his gear piled in
the middle of the floor beside the heating stove, forming an island between him
and the four men. His bony hands clenched and fluttered, terrified. His pale
eyes wavered uneasily as his bald, freckled head darted about in birdlike
motion.
"I
don't want anybody coming here. I'll cook my own food," he snapped
nervously. "Kinner may be human now, but I don't believe it. I'm going to
get out of here, but I'm not going to eat any food you send me. I want cans.
Sealed cans."
"OK,
Blair, we'll bring 'em tonight," Barclay promised. "You've got coal,
and the fire's started. I'll make a last—" Barclay started forward.
Blair
instantly scurried to the farthest corner. "Get out! Keep away from me,
you monster!" the little biologist shrieked, and tried to claw his way
through the wall of the shack. "Keep away from me—keep away—I won't be
absorbed—I won't be—"
Barclay
relaxed and moved back. Dr. Copper shook his head. "Leave him alone, Bar.
It's easier for him to fix the thing himself. We'll have to fix the door, I
think—"
The
four men let themselves out. Efficiently, Benning and Barclay fell to work.
There were no locks in Antarctica; there wasn't enough privacy to make them
needed. But powerful screws had been driven in each side of the door frame, and
the spare aviation control cable, immensely strong, woven steel wire, was
rapidly caught between them and drawn taut. Barclay went to work with a drill
and a key-hole saw. Presently he had a trap cut in the door through which goods
could be passed without unlashing the entrance. Three powerful hinges made from
a stock crate, two hasps and a pair of three-inch cotter pins made it proof
against opening from the other side.
Blair
moved about restlessly inside. He was dragging something over to the door with
panting gasps, and muttering frantic curses. Barclay opened the hatch and
glanced in, Dr. Copper peering over his shoulder. Blair had moved the heavy
bunk against the door. It could not be opened without his cooperation now.
"Don't
know but what the poor man's right at that," McReady sighed. "If he gets
loose, it is his avowed intention to kill each and all of us as quickly as
possible, which is something we don't agree with. But we've something on our
side of that door that is worse than a homicidal maniac. If one or the other
has to get loose, I think I'll come up and undo these lashings here."
Barclay
grinned. "You let me know, and I'll show you how to get these off fast.
Let's go back."
The sun
was painting the northern horizon in multicolored rainbows still, though it was
two hours below the horizon. The field of drift swept off to the north,
sparkling under its flaming colors in a million reflected glories. Low mounds
of rounded white on the northern horizon showed the Magnet Range was barely
awash above the sweeping drift. Little eddies of wind-lifted snow swirled away
from their skis as they set out toward the main encampment two miles away. The
spidery finger of the broadcast radiator lifted a gaunt black needle against
the white of the Antarctic continent. The snow under their skis was like fine
sand, hard and gritty.
"Spring,"
said Benning bitterly, "is come. Ain't we got fun! And I've been looking
forward to getting away from this blasted hole in the ice."
"I
wouldn't try it now, if I were you." Barclay grunted. "Guys that set
out from here in the next few days are going to be marvelously unpopular."
"How
is your dog getting along, Dr. Copper?" McReady asked. "Any results
yet?"
"In
thirty hours? I wish there were. I gave him an injection of my blood today. But
I imagine another five days will be needed. I don't know certainly enough to
stop sooner."
"I've
been wondering—if Connant were—changed, would he have warned us so soon after
the animal escaped? Wouldn't he have waited long enough for it to have a real
chance to fix itself? Until we woke up naturally?" McReady asked slowly.
"The
thing is selfish. You didn't think it looked as though it were possessed of a
store of the higher justices, did you?" Dr. Copper pointed out.
"Every part of it is all of it, every part of it is all for itself, I
imagine. If Connant were changed, to save his skin, he'd have to—but Connant's
feelings aren't changed; they're imitated perfectly, or they're his own.
Naturally, the imitation, imitating perfectly Connant's feelings, would do
exactly what Connant would do."
"Say,
couldn't Norris or Vane give Connant some kind of a test? If the thing is
brighter than men, it might know more physics than Connant should, and they'd
catch it out," Barclay suggested.
Copper
shook his head wearily. "Not if it reads minds. You can't plan a trap for
it. Vane suggested that last night. He hoped it would answer some of the
questions of physics he'd like to know answers to."
"This
expedition-of-four idea is going to make life happy." Benning looked at
his companions. "Each of us with an eye on the other to make sure he
doesn't do something—peculiar. Man—aren't we going to be a trusting bunch! Each
man eyeing his neighbors with the grandest exhibition of faith and truth—I'm
beginning to know what Connant meant by 'I wish you could see your eyes.' Every
now and then we all have it, I guess. One of you looks around with a sort of
'I-wonder-if-the-other-three-are-look.' Incidentally, I'm not excepting
myself."
"So
far as we know, the animal is dead, with a slight question as to Connant. No
other is suspected," McReady stated slowly. "The 'always-four' order
is merely a precautionary measure."
"I'm
waiting for Garry to make it four-in-a-bunk," Barclay sighed. "I
thought I didn't have any privacy before, but since that order—"
None
watched more tensely than Connant. A little sterile glass test tube, half
filled with straw-colored fluid. One—two—three—four—five drops of the clear
solution Dr. Copper had prepared from the drops of blood from Connant's arm.
The tube was shaken carefully, then set in a beaker of clear, warm water. The
thermometer read blood heat, a little thermostat clicked noisily, and the
electric hotplate began to glow as the lights flickered slightly. Then—little
white flecks of precipitation were forming, snowing down in the clear
straw-colored fluid. "Lord," said Connant. He dropped heavily into a
bunk, crying like a baby. "Six days—" Connant sobbed, "six days
in there—wondering if that damned test would lie—"
Garry
moved over silently, and slipped his arm across the physicist's back.
"It
couldn't lie," Dr. Copper said. "The dog was human-immune—and the
serum reacted."
"He's—all
right?" Norris gasped. "Then—the animal is dead—dead forever?"
"He
is human," Copper spoke definitely, "and the animal is dead."
Kinner
burst out laughing, laughing hysterically. McReady turned toward him and
slapped his face with a methodical one-two, one-two action. The cook laughed,
gulped, cried a moment, and sat up rubbing his cheeks, mumbling his thanks
vaguely. "I was scared. Lord, I was scared—"
Norris
laughed brittlely. "You think we weren't, you ape? You think maybe Connant
wasn't?"
The Ad
Building stirred with a sudden rejuvenation. Voices laughed, the men clustering
around Connant spoke with unnecessarily loud voices, jittery, nervous voices
relievedly friendly again. Somebody called out a suggestion, and a dozen
started for their skis. Blair, Blair might recover— Dr. Copper fussed with his
test tubes in nervous relief, trying solutions. The party of relief for Blair's
shack started out the door, skis clapping noisily. Down the corridor, the dogs
set up a quick yelping howl as the air of excited relief reached them.
Dr.
Copper fussed with his tubes. McReady noticed him first, sitting on the edge of
the bunk, with two precipitin-whitened test tubes of straw-colored fluid, his
face whiter than the stuff in the tubes, silent tears slipping down from
horror-widened eyes.
McReady
felt a cold knife of fear pierce through his heart and freeze in his breast.
Dr. Copper looked up. "Garry," he called hoarsely. "Garry, for
God's sake, come here."
Commander
Garry walked toward him sharply. Silence clapped down on the Ad Building.
Connant looked up, rose stiffly from his seat.
"Garry—tissue
from the monster—precipitates, too. It proves nothing. Nothing—but the dog was
monster-immune too. That one of the two contributing blood—one of us two,
you and I, Garry—one of us is a monster."
"Bar,
call back those men before they tell Blair," McReady said quietly. Barclay
went to the door; faintly his shouts came back to the tensely silent men in the
room. Then he was back.
"They're
coming," he said. "I didn't tell them why. Just that Dr. Copper said
not to go."
"McReady,"
Garry sighed, "you're in command now. May God help you. I cannot."
The
bronzed giant nodded slowly, his deep eyes on Commander Garry.
"I
may be the one," Garry added. "I know I'm not, but I cannot prove it
to you in any way. Dr. Copper's test has broken down. The fact that he showed
it was useless, when it was to the advantage of the monster to have that
uselessness not known, would seem to prove he was human."
Copper
rocked back and forth slowly on the bunk. "I know I'm human. I can't prove
it either. One of us two is a liar, for that test cannot lie, and it says one
of us is. I gave proof that the test was wrong, which seems to prove I'm human,
and now Garry has given that argument which proves me human—which he, as the
monster, should not do. Round and round and round and round and—"
Dr.
Copper's head, then his neck and shoulders began circling slowly in time to the
words. Suddenly he was lying back on the bunk, roaring with laughter. "It
doesn't have to prove one of us is a monster! It doesn't have to prove
that at all! Ho-ho. If we're all monsters it works the same—we're all
monsters—all of us—Connant and Garry and I—and all of you."
"McReady,"
Van Wall, the blond-bearded Chief Pilot, called softly, "you were on the
way to an M.D. when you took up meteorology, weren't you? Can you make some
kind of test?"
McReady
went over to Copper slowly, took the hypodermic from his hand, and washed it
carefully in ninety-five percent alcohol. Garry sat on the bunk edge with
wooden face, watching Copper and McReady expressionlessly. "What Copper
said is possible," McReady sighed. "Van, will you help me here?
Thanks." The filled needle jabbed into Copper's thigh. The man's laughter
did not stop, but slowly faded into sobs, then sound sleep as the morphia took
hold.
McReady
turned again. The men who had started for Blair stood at the far end of the
room, skis dripping snow, their faces as white as their skis. Connant had a
lighted cigarette in each hand; one he was puffing absently, and staring at the
floor. The heat of the one in his left hand attracted him and he stared at it
and the one in the other hand stupidly for a moment. He dropped one and crushed
it under his heel slowly.
"Dr.
Copper," McReady repeated, "could be right. I know I'm human—but of
course can't prove it. I'll repeat the test for my own information. Any of you
others who wish may do the same."
Two
minutes later, McReady held a test tube with white precipitin settling slowly
from straw-colored serum. "It reacts to human blood too, so they aren't
both monsters."
"I
didn't think they were," Van Wall sighed. "That wouldn't suit the
monster either; we could have destroyed them if we knew. Why hasn't the monster
destroyed us, do you suppose? It seems to be loose."
McReady
snorted. Then laughed softly. "Elementary, my dear Watson. The monster
wants to have life-forms available. It cannot animate a dead body, apparently.
It is just waiting—waiting until the best opportunities come. We who remain
human, it is holding in reserve."
Kinner
shuddered violently. "Hey. Hey, Mac. Mac, would I know if I was a monster?
Would I know if the monster had already got me? Oh Lord, I may be a monster
already."
"You'd
know," McReady answered.
"But
we wouldn't," Norris laughed shortly, half hysterically.
McReady
looked at the vial of serum remaining. "There's one thing this damned
stuff is good for, at that," he said thoughtfully. "Clark, will you
and Van help me? The rest of the gang better stick together here. Keep an eye
on each other," he said bitterly. "See that you don't get into
mischief, shall we say?"
McReady
started down the tunnel toward Dogtown, with Clark and Van Wall behind him.
"You need more serum?" Clark asked.
McReady
shook his head. "Tests. There's four cows and a bull, and nearly seventy
dogs down there. This stuff reacts only to human blood and—monsters."
McReady
came back to the Ad Building and went silently to the wash stand. Clark and Van
Wall joined him a moment later. Clark's lips had developed a tic, jerking into
sudden, unexpected sneers.
"What
did you do?" Connant exploded suddenly. "More immunizing?"
Clark
snickered, and stopped with a hiccough. "Immunizing. Haw! Immune all
right."
"That
monster," said Van Wall steadily, "is quite logical. Our immune dog
was quite all right, and we drew a little more serum for the tests. But we
won't make any more."
"Can't—can't
you use one man's blood on another dog—" Norris began.
"There
aren't," said McReady softly, "any more dogs. Nor cattle, I might
add."
"No
more dogs?" Benning sat down slowly.
"They're
very nasty when they start changing," Van Wall said precisely. "But
slow. That electrocution iron you made up, Barclay, is very fast. There is only
one dog left—our immune. The monster left that for us, so we could play with
our little test. The rest—" He shrugged and dried his hands.
"The
cattle—" gulped Kinner.
"Also.
Reacted very nicely. They look funny as hell when they start melting. The beast
hasn't any quick escape, when it's tied in dog chains, or halters, and it had
to be to imitate."
Kinner
stood up slowly. His eyes darted around the room, and came to rest horribly
quivering on a tin bucket in the galley. Slowly, step by step, he retreated
toward the door, his mouth opening and closing silently, like a fish out of
water.
"The
milk—" he gasped. "I milked 'em an hour ago—" His voice broke
into a scream as he dived through the door. He was out on the ice cap without
windproof or heavy clothing.
Van
Wall looked after him for a moment thoughtfully. "He's probably hopelessly
mad," he said at length, "but he might be a monster escaping. He
hasn't skis. Take a blow torch—in case."
The
physical motion of the chased helped them; something that needed doing. Three
of the men were quietly being sick. Norris was lying flat on his back, his face
greenish, looking steadily at the bottom of the bunk above him.
"Mac,
how long have the—cows been not-cows—"
McReady
shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. He went over to the milk bucket, and with
his little tube of serum set to work on it. The milk clouded it, making
certainty difficult. Finally he dropped the test tube in the stand, and shook
his head. "It tests negatively. Which means either they were cows then, or
that, being perfect imitations, they gave perfectly good milk."
Copper
stirred restlessly in his sleep and gave a gurgling cross between a snore and a
laugh. Silent eyes fastened on him. "Would morphia—a monster—"
somebody started to ask.
"Lord
knows," McReady shrugged. "It affects every Earthly animal I know
of."
Connant
suddenly raised his head. "Mac! The dogs must have swallowed pieces of the
monster, and the pieces destroyed them! The dogs were where the monster
resided. I was locked up. Doesn't that prove—"
Van
Wall shook his head. "Sorry. Proves nothing about what you are, only
proves what you didn't do."
"It
doesn't do that," McReady sighed. "We are helpless because we don't
know enough, and so jittery we don't think straight. Locked up! Ever watch a
white corpuscle of the blood go through the wall of a blood vessel? No? It
sticks out a pseudopod. And there it is—on the far side of the wall."
"Oh,"
said Van Wall unhappily. "The cattle tried to melt down, didn't they? They
could have melted down—become just a thread of stuff and leaked under a door to
re-collect on the other side. Ropes—no—no, that wouldn't do it. They couldn't
live in a sealed tank or—"
"If,"
said McReady, "you shoot it through the heart, and it doesn't die, it's a
monster. That's the best test I can think of, offhand."
"No
dogs," said Garry quietly, "and no cattle. It has to imitate men now.
And locking up doesn't do any good. Your test might work, Mac, but I'm afraid
it would be hard on the men."
Clark
looked up from the galley stove as Van Wall, Barclay, McReady, and Benning came
in, brushing the drift from their clothes. The other men jammed into the Ad
Building continued studiously to do as they were doing, playing chess, poker,
reading. Ralsen was fixing a sledge on the table; Vane and Norris had their
heads together over magnetic data, while Harvey read tables in a low voice.
Dr.
Copper snored softly on the bunk. Garry was working with Dutton over a sheaf of
radio messages on the corner of Dutton's bunk and a small fraction of the radio
table. Connant was using most of the table for cosmic ray sheets.
Quite
plainly through the corridor, despite two closed doors, they could hear
Kinner's voice. Clark banged a kettle onto the galley stove and beckoned
McReady silently. The meteorologist went over to him.
"I
don't mind the cooking so damn much," Clark said nervously, "but
isn't there some way to stop that bird? We all agreed that it would be safe to
move him into Cosmos House."
"Kinner?"
McReady nodded toward the door. "I'm afraid not. I can dope him, I
suppose, but we don't have an unlimited supply of morphia, and he's not in
danger of losing his mind. Just hysterical."
"Well,
we're in danger of losing ours. You've been out for an hour and a half. That's
been going on steadily ever since, and it was going for two hours before.
There's a limit, you know."
Garry
wandered over slowly, apologetically. For an instant, McReady caught the feral
spark of fear—horror—in Clark's eyes, and knew at the same instant it was in
his own. Garry—Garry or Copper—was certainly a monster.
"If
you could stop that, I think it would be a sound policy, Mac," Garry spoke
quietly. "There are—tensions enough in this room. We agreed that it would
be safe for Kinner in there, because everyone else in camp is under constant
eyeing." Garry shivered slightly. "And try, try in God's name, to
find some test that will work." McReady sighed. "Watched or unwatched,
everyone's tense. Blair's jammed the trap so it won't open now. Says he's got
food enough, and keeps screaming 'Go away, go away—you're monsters. I won't be
absorbed. I won't. I'll tell men when they come. Go away.' So—we went
away."
"There's
no other test?" Garry pleaded.
McReady
shrugged his shoulders. "Copper was perfectly right. The serum test could
be absolutely definitive if it hadn't been—contaminated. But that's the only
dog left, and he's fixed now."
"Chemicals?
Chemical tests?"
McReady
shook his head. "Our chemistry isn't that good. I tried the microscope you
know."
Garry
nodded. "Monster-dog and real dog were identical. But—you've got to go on.
What are you going to do after dinner?"
Van
Wall had joined them quietly. "Rotation sleeping. Half the crowd sleep;
half stay awake. I wonder how many of us are monsters? All the dogs were. We
thought we were safe, but somehow it got Copper—or you." Van Wall's eyes
flashed uneasily. "It may have gotten every one of you—all of you but myself
may be wondering, looking. No, that's not possible. You'd just spring then, I'd
be helpless. We humans must somehow have the greater numbers now. But—" he
stopped.
McReady
laughed shortly. "You're doing what Norris complained of in me. Leaving it
hanging. 'But if one more is changed—that may shift the balance of power.' It
doesn't fight. I don't think it ever fights. It must be a peaceable thing, in
its own—inimitable—way. It never had to, because it always gained its end
otherwise."
Van
Wall's mouth twisted in a sickly grin. "You're suggesting then, that
perhaps it already has the greater numbers, but is just waiting—waiting,
all of them—all of you, for all I know—waiting till I, the last human, drop my
wariness in sleep. Mac, did you notice their eyes, all looking at us."
Garry
sighed. "You haven't been sitting here for four straight hours, while all
their eyes silently weighed the information that one of us two, Copper or I, is
a monster certainly—perhaps both of us."
Clark
repeated his request. "Will you stop that bird's noise? He's driving me
nuts. Make him tone down, anyway."
"Still
praying?" McReady asked.
"Still
praying," Clark groaned. "He hasn't stopped for a second. I don't
mind his praying if it relieves him, but he yells, he sings psalms and hymns and
shouts prayers. He thinks God can't hear well way down here."
"Maybe
he can't," Barclay grunted. "Or he'd have done something about this
thing loosed from hell."
"Somebody's
going to try that test you mentioned, if you don't stop him," Clark stated
grimly. "I think a cleaver in the head would be as positive a test as a
bullet in the heart."
"Go
ahead with the food. I'll see what I can do. There may be something in the
cabinets." McReady moved wearily toward the corner Copper had used as his
dispensary. Three tall cabinets of rough boards, two locked, were the
repositories of the camp's medical supplies. Twelve years ago, McReady had
graduated, had started for an internship, and been diverted to meteorology.
Copper was a picked man, a man who knew his profession thoroughly and modernly.
More than half the drugs available were totally unfamiliar to McReady; many of
the others he had forgotten. There was no huge medical library here, no series
of journals available to learn the things he had forgotten, the elementary,
simple things to Copper, things that did not merit inclusion in the small
library he had been forced to content himself with. Books are heavy, and every
ounce of supplies had been freighted in by air.
McReady
picked a barbiturate hopefully. Barclay and Van Wall went with him. One man
never went anywhere alone in Big Magnet.
Ralsen
had his sledge put away, and the physicists had moved off the table, the poker
game broken up when they got back. Clark was putting out the food. The clicks
of spoons and the muffled sounds of eating were the only sign of life in the
room. There were no words spoken as the three returned; simply all eyes focused
on them questioningly while the jaws moved methodically.
McReady
stiffened suddenly. Kinner was screeching out a hymn in a hoarse, cracked
voice. He looked wearily at Van Wall with a twisted grin and shook his head.
"Uh-uh."
Van
Wall cursed bitterly, and sat down at the table. "We'll just plumb have to
take that till his voice wears out. He can't yell like that forever."
"He's
got a brass throat and a cast-iron larynx," Norris declared savagely.
"Then we could be hopeful, and suggest he's one of our friends. In that
case he could go on renewing his throat till doomsday."
Silence
clamped down. For twenty minutes they ate without a word. Then Connant jumped
up with an angry violence. "You sit as still as a bunch of graven images.
You don't say a word, but oh, Lord, what expressive eyes you've got. They roll
around like a bunch of glass marbles spilling down a table. They wink and blink
and stare—and whisper things. Can you guys look somewhere else for a change,
please?
"Listen,
Mac, you're in charge here. Let's run movies for the rest of the night. We've
been saving those reels to make 'em last. Last for what? Who is it's going to
see those last reels, eh? Let's see 'em while we can, and look at something
other than each other."
"Sound
idea, Connant. I, for one, am quite willing to change this in any way I
can."
"Turn
the sound up loud, Dutton. Maybe you can drown out the hymns," Clark
suggested.
"But
don't," Norris said softly, "turn off the lights altogether."
"The
lights will be out." McReady shook his head. "We'll show all the
cartoon movies we have. You won't mind seeing the old cartoons will you?"
"Goody,
goody—a moom-pitcher show. I'm just in the mood." McReady turned to look
at the speaker, a lean, lanky New Englander, by the name of Caldwell. Caldwell
was stuffing his pipe slowly, a sour eye cocked up to McReady.
The
bronze giant was forced to laugh. "OK, Bart, you win. Maybe we aren't
quite in the mood for Popeye and trick ducks, but it's something."
"Let's
play Classifications," Caldwell suggested slowly. "Or maybe you call
it Guggenheim. You draw lines on a piece of paper, and put down classes of
things—like animals, you know. One for 'H' and one for 'U' and so on. Like
'Human' and 'Unknown' for instance. I think that would be a hell of a lot
better game. Classification, I sort of figure, is what we need right now a lot
more than movies. Maybe somebody's got a pencil that he can draw lines with,
draw lines between the 'U' animals and the 'H' animals for instance."
"McReady's
trying to find that kind of a pencil," Van Wall answered quietly,
"but, we've got three kinds of animals here, you know. One that begins
with 'M.' We don't want any more."
"Mad
ones, you mean. Uh-huh. Clark, I'll help you with those pots so we can get our
little peep show going." Caldwell got up slowly.
Dutton
and Barclay and Benning, in charge of the projector and sound mechanism
arrangements, went about their job silently, while the Ad Building was cleared
and the dishes and pans disposed of. McReady drifted over toward Van Wall
slowly, and leaned back in the bunk beside him. "I've been wondering,
Van," he said with a wry grin, "whether or not to report my ideas in
advance. I forgot the 'U animal' as Caldwell named it, could read minds. I've a
vague idea of something that might work. It's too vague to bother with, though.
Go ahead with your show, while I try to figure out the logic of the thing. I'll
take this bunk."
Van
Wall glanced up, and nodded. The movie screen would be practically on a line
with this bunk, hence making the pictures least distracting here, because least
intelligible. "Perhaps you should tell us what you have in mind. As it is,
only the unknowns know what you plan. You might be—unknown before you got it
into operation."
"Won't
take long, if I get it figured out right. But I don't want any more
all-but-the-test-dog-monsters things. We better move Copper into this bunk
directly above me. He won't be watching the screen either." McReady nodded
toward Copper's gently snoring bulk. Garry helped them lift and move the
doctor.
McReady
leaned back against the bunk, and sank into a trance, almost, of concentration,
trying to calculate chances, operations, methods. He was scarcely aware as the
others distributed themselves silently, and the screen lit up. Vaguely Kinner's
hectic, shouted prayers and his rasping hymn-singing annoyed him till the sound
accompaniment started. The lights were turned out, but the large, light-colored
areas of the screen reflected enough light for ready visibility. Kinner was
still praying, shouting, his voice a raucous accompaniment to the mechanical
sound. Dutton stepped up the amplification.
So long
had the voice been going on, that only vaguely at first was McReady aware that
something seemed missing. Lying as he was, just across the narrow room from the
corridor leading to Cosmos House, Kinner's voice had reached him fairly
clearly, despite the sound accompaniment of the pictures. It struck him
abruptly that it had stopped.
"Dutton,
cut that sound," McReady called as he sat up abruptly. The pictures
flickered a moment, soundless and strangely futile in the sudden, deep silence.
The rising wind on the surface above bubbled melancholy tears of sound down the
stove pipes. "Kinner's stopped," McReady said softly.
"For
God's sake start that sound then; he may have stopped to listen," Norris
snapped.
McReady
rose and went down the corridor. Barclay and Van Wall left their places at the
far end of the room to follow him. The flickers bulged and twisted on the back
of Barclay's gray underwear as he crossed the still-functioning beam of the
projector. Dutton snapped on the lights, and the pictures vanished.
Norris
stood at the door as McReady had asked. Garry sat down quietly in the bunk
nearest the door, forcing Clark to make room for him. Most of the others had
stayed exactly where they were. Only Connant walked slowly up and down the
room, in steady, unvarying rhythm.
"If
you're going to do that, Connant," Clark spat, "we can get along
without you altogether, whether you're human or not. Will you stop that damned
rhythm?"
"Sorry."
The physicist sat down in a bunk, and watched his toes thoughtfully. It was
almost five minutes, five ages, while the wind made the only sound, before
McReady appeared at the door.
"Well,"
he announced, "haven't got enough grief here already. Somebody's tried to
help us out. Kinner has a knife in his throat, which was why he stopped
singing, probably. We've got monsters, madmen and murderers. Any more 'M's' you
can think of, Caldwell? If there are, we'll probably have 'em before
long."
"Is
Blair loose?" someone asked.
"Blair
is not loose. Or he flew in. If there's any doubt about where our gentle helper
came from—this may clear it up." Van Wall held a foot-long, thin-bladed
knife in a cloth. The wooden handle was half burnt, charred with the peculiar
pattern of the top of the galley stove.
Clark
stared at it. "I did that this afternoon. I forgot the damn thing and left
it on the stove."
Van
Wall nodded. "I smelled it, if you remember. I knew the knife came from
the galley."
"I
wonder," said Benning, looking around at the party warily, "how many
more monsters have we? If somebody could slip out of his place, go back of the
screen to the galley and then down to the Cosmos House and back—he did come
back, didn't he? Yes—everybody's here. Well, if one of the gang could do all
that—"
"Maybe
a monster did it," Garry suggested quietly.
"There's
that possibility."
"The
monster, as you pointed out today, has only men left to imitate. Would he
decrease his—supply, shall we say?" Van Wall pointed out. "No, we
just have a plain, ordinary louse, a murderer to deal with. Ordinarily we'd
call him an 'inhuman murderer' I suppose, but we have to distinguish now. We
have inhuman murderers, and now we have human murderers. Or one at least."
"There's
one less human," Norris said softly. "Maybe the monsters have the
balance of power now."
"Never
mind that," McReady sighed and turned to Barclay. "Bar, will you get
your electric gadget? I'm going to make certain—"
Barclay
turned down the corridor to get the pronged electrocuter, while McReady and Van
Wall went back toward Cosmos House. Barclay followed them in some thirty
seconds.
The
corridor to Cosmos House twisted, as did nearly all corridors in Big Magnet,
and Norris stood at the entrance again. But they heard, rather muffled,
McReady's sudden shout. There was a savage flurry of blows, dull ch-thunk,
shluff sounds. "Bar—Bar—" And a curious, savage mewing scream,
silenced before even quick-moving Norris had reached the bend.
Kinner—or
what had been Kinner—lay on the floor, cut half in two by the great knife
McReady had had. The meteorologist stood against the wall, the knife dripping
red in his hand. Van Wall was stirring vaguely on the floor, moaning, his hand
half-consciously rubbing at his jaw. Barclay, an unutterably savage gleam in
his eyes, was methodically leaning on the pronged weapon in his hand,
jabbing—jabbing, jabbing.
Kinner's
arms had developed a queer, scaly fur, and the flesh had twisted. The fingers
had shortened, the hand rounded, the fingernails become three-inch long things
of dull red horn, keened to steel-hard, razor-sharp talons.
McReady
raised his head, looked at the knife in his hand and dropped it. "Well,
whoever did it can speak up now. He was an inhuman murderer at that—in that he
murdered an inhuman. I swear by all that's holy, Kinner was a lifeless corpse
on the floor here when we arrived. But when It found we were going to jab It
with the power—It changed."
Norris
stared unsteadily. "Oh, Lord, those things can act. Ye gods—sitting in
here for hours, mouthing prayers to a God it hated! Shouting hymns in a cracked
voice—hymns about a Church it never knew. Driving us mad with its ceaseless
howling—
"Well.
Speak up, whoever did it. You didn't know it, but you did the camp a favor. And
I want to know how in blazes you got out of the room without anyone seeing you.
It might help in guarding ourselves."
"His
screaming—his singing. Even the sound projector couldn't drown it." Clark
shivered. "It was a monster."
"Oh,"
said Van Wall in sudden comprehension. "You were sitting right next
to the door, weren't you? And almost behind the projection screen
already."
Clark
nodded dumbly. "He—it's quiet now. It's a dead—Mac, your test's no damn
good. It was dead anyway, monster or man, it was dead."
McReady
chuckled softly. "Boys, meet Clark, the only one we know is human! Meet
Clark, the one who proves he's human by trying to commit murder—and failing.
Will the rest of you please refrain from trying to prove you're human for a
while? I think we may have another test."
"A
test!" Connant snapped joyfully, then his face sagged in disappointment.
"I suppose it's another either-way-you-want-it."
"No,"
said McReady steadily. "Look sharp and be careful. Come into the Ad
Building. Barclay, bring your electrocuter. And somebody—Dutton—stand with
Barclay to make sure he does it. Watch every neighbor, for by the Hell these
monsters came from, I've got something, and they know it. They're going to get
dangerous!"
The
group tensed abruptly. An air of crushing menace entered into every man's body,
sharply they looked at each other. More keenly than ever before—is that man
next to me an inhuman monster?
"What
is it?" Garry asked, as they stood again in the main room. "How long
will it take?"
"I
don't know, exactly," said McReady, his voice brittle with angry
determination. "But I know it will work, and no two ways about it.
It depends on a basic quality of the monsters, not on us. 'Kinner'
just convinced me." He stood heavy and solid in bronzed immobility,
completely sure of himself again at last.
"This,"
said Barclay, hefting the wooden-handled weapon tipped with its two
sharp-pointed, charged conductors, "is going to be rather necessary, I
take it. Is the power plant assured?"
Dutton
nodded sharply. "The automatic stoker bin is full. The gas power plant is
on standby. Van Wall and I set it for the movie operation—and we've checked it
over rather carefully several times, you know. Anything those wires touch,
dies," he assured them grimly. "I know that."
Dr.
Copper stirred vaguely in his bunk, rubbed his eyes with fumbling hand. He sat
up slowly, blinked his eyes blurred with sleep and drugs, widened with an
unutterable horror of drug-ridden nightmares. "Garry," he mumbled,
"Garry—listen. Selfish—from hell they came, and hellish shellfish—I mean
self— Do I? What do I mean?" He sank back in his bunk, and snored softly.
McReady
looked at him thoughtfully. "We'll know presently," he nodded slowly.
"But selfish is what you mean, all right. You may have thought of that,
half sleeping, dreaming there. I didn't stop to think what dreams you might be
having. But that's all right. Selfish is the word. They must be, you see."
He turned to the men in the cabin, tense, silent men staring with wolfish eyes
each at his neighbor. "Selfish, and as Dr. Copper said—every part is a
whole. Every piece is self-sufficient, an animal in itself.
"That,
and one other thing, tell the story. There's nothing mysterious about blood;
it's just as normal a body tissue as a piece of muscle, or a piece of liver.
But it hasn't so much connective tissue, though it has millions, billions of
life-cells."
McReady's
great bronze beard ruffled in a grim smile. "This is satisfying, in a way.
I'm pretty sure we humans still outnumber you—others. Others standing here. And
we have what you, your other-world race, evidently doesn't. Not an imitated,
but a bred-in-the-bone instinct, a driving, unquenchable fire that's genuine.
We'll fight, fight with a ferocity you may attempt to imitate, but you'll never
equal! We're human. We're real. You're imitations, false to the core of your
every cell."
"All
right. It's a showdown now. You know. You, with your mind reading.
You've lifted the idea from my brain. You can't do a thing about it.
"Let
it pass. Blood is tissue. They have to bleed; if they bleed when cut, then by
Heaven, they're phoney from hell! If they don't bleed—then that blood,
separated from them, is an individual—a newly formed individual in its own
right, just as they—split, all of them, from one original—are individuals!
"Get
it, Van? See the answer, Bar?"
Van
Wall laughed very softly. "The blood—the blood will not obey. It's a new
individual, with all the desire to protect its own life that the original—the
main mass from which it was split—has. The blood will live—and try to
crawl away from a hot needle, say!"
McReady
picked up the scalpel from the table. From the cabinet, he took a rack of test
tubes, a tiny alcohol lamp, and a length of platinum wire set in a little glass
rod. A smile of grim satisfaction rode his lips. For a moment he glanced up at
those around him. Barclay and Dutton moved toward him slowly, the
wooden-handled electric instrument alert.
"Dutton,"
said McReady, "suppose you stand over by the splice there where you've
connected that in. Just make sure no—thing pulls it loose."
Dutton
moved away. "Now, Van, suppose you be first on this."
White-faced,
Van Wall stepped forward. With a delicate precision, McReady cut a vein in the
base of his thumb. Van Wall winced slightly, then held steady as a half inch of
bright blood collected in the tube. McReady put the tube in the rack, gave Van
Wall a bit of alum, and indicated the iodine bottle.
Van
Wall stood motionlessly watching. McReady heated the platinum wire in the
alcohol lamp flame, then dipped it into the tube. It hissed softly. Five times
he repeated the test. "Human, I'd say," McReady sighed, and
straightened. "As yet, my theory hasn't been actually proven—but I have
hopes. I have hopes.
"Don't,
by the way, get too interested in this. We have with us some unwelcome ones, no
doubt. Van, will you relieve Barclay at the switch? Thanks. OK, Barclay, and
may I say I hope you stay with us? You're a damned good guy."
Barclay
grinned uncertainly; winced under the keen edge of the scalpel. Presently,
smiling widely, he retrieved his long-handled weapon.
The
tensity was released in that second. Whatever of hell the monsters may have had
within them, the men in that instant matched it. Barclay had no chance to move
his weapon, as a score of men poured down on the thing that had seemed Dutton.
It mewed, and spat, and tried to grow fangs—and was a hundred broken, torn
pieces. Without knives, or any weapon save the brute-given strength of a staff
of picked men, the thing was crushed, rent.
Slowly
they picked themselves up, their eyes smouldering, very quiet in their motions.
A curious wrinkling of their lips betrayed a species of nervousness.
Barclay
went over with the electric weapon. Things smouldered and stank. The caustic
acid Van Wall dropped on each spilled drop of blood gave off tickling,
cough-provoking fumes.
McReady
grinned, his deep-set eyes alight and dancing. "Maybe," he said
softly, "I underrated man's abilities when I said nothing human could have
the ferocity in the eyes of that thing we found. I wish we could have the
opportunity to treat in a more befitting manner these things. Something with
boiling oil, or melted lead in it, or maybe slow roasting in the power boiler.
When I think what a man Dutton was—
"Never
mind. My theory is confirmed by—by one who knew? Well, Van Wall and Barclay are
proven. I think, then, that I'll try to show you what I already know. That I,
too, am human." McReady swished the scalpel in absolute alcohol, burned it
off the metal blade, and cut the base of his thumb expertly.
Twenty
seconds later he looked up from the desk at the waiting men. There were more
grins out there now, friendly grins, yet withal, something else in the eyes.
"Connant,"
McReady laughed softly, "was right. The huskies watching that thing in the
corridor bend had nothing on you. Wonder why we think only the wolf blood has
the right to ferocity? Maybe on spontaneous viciousness a wolf takes tops, but
after these seven days—abandon all hope, ye wolves who enter here!
"Maybe
we can save time. Connant, would you step for—"
Again
Barclay was too slow. There were more grins, less tensity still, when Barclay
and Van Wall finished their work.
Garry
spoke in a low, bitter voice. "Connant was one of the finest men we had
here—and five minutes ago I'd have sworn he was a man. Those damnable things
are more than imitation." Garry shuddered and sat back in his bunk.
And
thirty seconds later, Garry's blood shrank from the hot platinum wire, and
struggled to escape the tube, struggled as frantically as a suddenly feral,
red-eyed, dissolving imitation of Garry struggled to dodge the snake-tongue
weapon Barclay advanced at him, white-faced and sweating. The Thing in the test
tube screamed with a tiny, tinny voice as McReady dropped it into the glowing
coal of the galley stove.
"The
last of it?" Dr. Copper looked down from his bunk with bloodshot, saddened
eyes. "Fourteen of them—"
McReady
nodded shortly. "In some ways—if only we could have permanently prevented
their spreading—I'd like to have even the imitations back. Commander
Garry—Connant—Dutton—Clark—"
"Where
are they taking those things?" Copper nodded to the stretcher Barclay and
Norris were carrying out.
"Outside.
Outside on the ice, where they've got fifteen smashed crates, half a ton of
coal, and presently will add ten gallons of kerosene. We've dumped acid on
every spilled drop, every torn fragment. We're going to incinerate those."
"Sounds
like a good plan." Copper nodded wearily. "I wonder, you haven't said
whether Blair—"
McReady
started. "We forgot him? We had so much else! I wonder—do you suppose we
can cure him now?"
"If—"
began Dr. Copper, and stopped meaningly.
McReady
started a second time. "Even a madman. It imitated Kinner and his praying
hysteria—" McReady turned toward Van Wall at the long table. "Van,
we've got to make an expedition to Blair's shack."
Van
looked up sharply, the frown of worry faded for an instant in surprised
remembrance. Then he rose, nodded. "Barclay better go along. He applied
the lashings, and may figure how to get in without frightening Blair too
much."
Three
quarters of an hour, through -37° cold, while the aurora curtain bellied
overhead. The twilight was nearly twelve hours long, flaming in the north on
snow like white, crystalline sand under their skis. A five-mile wind piled it
in drift-lines pointing off to the northwest. Three quarters of an hour to
reach the snow-buried shack. No smoke came from the little shack, and the men
hastened.
"Blair!"
Barclay roared into the wind and when he was still a hundred yards away.
"Blair!"
"Shut
up," said McReady softly. "And hurry. He may be trying a lone hike.
If we have to go after him—no planes, the tractors disabled—"
"Would
a monster have the stamina a man has?"
"A
broken leg wouldn't stop it for more than a minute," McReady pointed out.
Barclay
gasped suddenly and pointed aloft. Dim in the twilit sky, a winged thing
circled in curves of indescribable grace and ease. Great white wings tipped
gently, and the bird swept over them in silent curiosity. "Albatross—"
Barclay said softly. "First of the season, and wandering way inland for
some reason. If a monster's loose—"
Norris
bent down on the ice, and tore hurriedly at his heavy, windproof clothing. He
straightened, his coat flapping open, a grim blue-metaled weapon in his hand.
It roared a challenge to the white silence of Antarctica.
The
thing in the air screamed hoarsely. Its great wings worked frantically as a
dozen feathers floated down from its tail. Norris fired again. The bird was
moving swiftly now, but in an almost straight line of retreat. It screamed
again, more feathers dropped, and with beating wings it soared behind a ridge
of pressure ice, to vanish.
Norris
hurried after the others. "It won't come back," he panted.
Barclay
cautioned him to silence, pointing. A curiously, fiercely blue light beat out
from the cracks of the shack's door. A very low, soft humming sounded inside, a
low, soft humming and a clink and clink of tools, the very sounds somehow
bearing a message of frantic haste.
McReady's
face paled. "Lord help us if that thing has—" He grabbed Barclay's
shoulder, and made snipping motions with his fingers, pointing toward the
lacing of control cables that held the door.
Barclay
drew the wire cutters from his pocket, and kneeled soundlessly at the door. The
snap and twang of cut wires made an unbearable racket in the utter quiet of the
Antarctic hush. There was only that strange, sweetly soft hum from within the
shack, and the queerly, hecticly clipped clicking and rattling of tools to
drown their noises.
McReady
peered through a crack in the door. His breath sucked in huskily and his great
fingers clamped cruelly on Barclay's shoulder. The meteorologist backed down.
"It isn't," he explained very softly, "Blair. It's kneeling on
something on the bunk—something that keeps lifting. Whatever it's working on is
a thing like a knapsack—and it lifts."
"All
at once," Barclay said grimly. "No. Norris, hang back, and get that
iron of yours out. It may have—weapons."
Together,
Barclay's powerful body and McReady's giant strength struck the door. Inside,
the bunk jammed against the door screeched madly and crackled into kindling.
The door flung down from broken hinges, the patched lumber of the doorpost
dropping inward.
Like a
blue rubber ball, a Thing bounced up. One of its four tentacle-like arms looped
out like a striking snake. In a seven-tentacled hand a six-inch pencil of
winking, shining metal glinted and swung upward to face them. Its line-thin
lips twitched back from snake-fangs in a grin of hate, red eyes blazing.
Norris'
revolver thundered in the confined space. The hate-washed face twitched in
agony, the looping tentacle snatched back. The silvery thing in its hand a
smashed ruin of metal, the seven-tentacled hand became a mass of mangled flesh
oozing greenish-yellow ichor. The revolver thundered three times more. Dark
holes drilled each of the three eyes before Norris hurled the empty weapon
against its face.
The
Thing screamed in feral hate, a lashing tentacle wiping at blinded eyes. For a
moment it crawled on the floor, savage tentacles lashing out, the body
twitching. Then it struggled up again, blinded eyes working, boiling hideously,
the crushed flesh sloughing away in sodden gobbets.
Barclay
lurched to his feet and dove forward with an ice-ax. The flat of the weighty
thing crushed against the side of the head. Again the unkillable monster went
down. The tentacles lashed out, and suddenly Barclay fell to his feet in the
grip of a living, livid rope. The thing dissolved as he held it, a white-hot
band that ate into the flesh of his hands like living fire. Frantically he tore
the stuff from him, held his hands where they could not be reached. The blind
Thing felt and ripped at the tough, heavy, windproof cloth, seeking flesh—flesh
it could convert—
The
huge blowtorch McReady had brought coughed solemnly. Abruptly it rumbled
disapproval throatily. Then it laughed gurglingly, and thrust out a blue-white,
three-foot tongue. The Thing on the floor shrieked, flailed out blindly with
tentacles that writhed and withered in the bubbling wrath of the blowtorch. It
crawled and turned on the floor, it shrieked and hobbled madly, but always
McReady held the blowtorch on the face, the dead eyes burning and bubbling
uselessly. Frantically the Thing crawled and howled.
A
tentacle sprouted a savage talon—and crisped in the flame. Steadily McReady
moved with a planned, grim campaign. Helpless, maddened, the Thing retreated
from the grunting torch, the caressing, licking tongue. For a moment it rebelled,
squalling in inhuman hatred at the touch of the icy snow. Then it fell back
before the charring breath of the torch, the stench of its flesh bathing it.
Hopelessly it retreated—on and on across the Antarctic snow. The bitter wind
swept over it, twisting the torch-tongue; vainly it flopped, a trail of oily,
stinking smoke bubbling away from it—
McReady
walked back toward the shack silently. Barclay met him at the door. "No
more?" the giant meteorologist asked grimly.
Barclay
shook his head. "No more. It didn't split?"
"It
had other things to think about," McReady assured him. "When I left
it, it was a glowing coal. What was it doing?"
Norris
laughed shortly. "Wise boys, we are. Smash magnetos, so planes won't work.
Rip the boiler tubing out of the tractors. And leave that Thing alone for a
week in this shack. Alone and undisturbed."
McReady
looked in at the shack more carefully. The air, despite the ripped door, was
hot and humid. On a table at the far end of the room rested a thing of coiled
wires and small magnets, glass tubing and radio tubes. At the center a block of
rough stone rested. From the center of the block came the light that flooded
the place, the fiercely blue light bluer than the glare of an electric arc, and
from it came the sweetly soft hum. Off to one side was another mechanism of
crystal glass, blown with an incredible neatness and delicacy, metal plates and
a queer, shimmery sphere of insubstantiality.
"What
is that?" McReady moved nearer.
Norris
grunted. "Leave it for investigation. But I can guess pretty well. That's
atomic power. That stuff to the left—that's a neat little thing for doing what
men have been trying to do with hundred-ton cyclotrons and so forth. It
separates neutrons from heavy water, which he was getting from the surrounding
ice.
"Where
did he get all—oh. Of course. A monster couldn't be locked in—or out. He's been
through the apparatus caches." McReady stared at the apparatus.
"Lord, what minds that race must have—"
"The
shimmery sphere—I think it's a sphere of pure force. Neutrons can pass through
any matter, and he wanted a supply reservoir of neutrons. Just project neutrons
against silica—calcium—beryllium—almost anything, and the atomic energy is
released. That thing is the atomic generator."
McReady
plucked a thermometer from his coat. "It's 120° in here, despite the open
door. Our clothes have kept the heat out to an extent, but I'm sweating
now."
Norris
nodded. "The light's cold. I found that. But it gives off heat to warm the
place through that coil. He had all the power in the world. He could keep it
warm and pleasant, as his race thought of warmth and pleasantness. Did you
notice the light, the color of it?"
McReady
nodded. "Beyond the stars is the answer. From beyond the stars. From a
hotter planet that circled a brighter, bluer sun they came."
McReady
glanced out the door toward the blasted, smoke-stained trail that flopped and
wandered blindly off across the drift. "There won't be any more coming. I
guess. Sheer accident it landed here, and that was twenty million years ago.
What did it do all that for?" He nodded toward the apparatus.
Barclay
laughed softly. "Did you notice what it was working on when we came?
Look." He pointed toward the ceiling of the shack.
Like a
knapsack made of flattened coffee tins, with dangling cloth straps and leather
belts, the mechanism clung to the ceiling. A tiny, glaring heart of supernal
flame burned in it, yet burned through the ceiling's wood without scorching it.
Barclay walked over to it, grasped two of the dangling straps in his hands, and
pulled it down with an effort. He strapped it about his body. A slight jump
carried him in a weirdly slow arc across the room.
"Antigravity,"
said McReady softly.
"Antigravity,"
Norris nodded. "Yes, we had 'em stopped, with no planes, and no birds. The
birds hadn't come—but it had coffee tins and radio parts, and glass and the
machine shop at night. And a week—a whole week—all to itself. America in a
single jump—with antigravity powered by the atomic energy of matter.
"We
had 'em stopped. Another half hour—it was just tightening these straps on the
device so it could wear it—and we'd have stayed in Antarctica, and shot down
any moving thing that came from the rest of the world."
"The
albatross—" McReady said softly. "Do you suppose—"
"With
this thing almost finished? With that death weapon it held in its hand?
"No,
by the grace of God, who evidently does hear very well, even down here, and the
margin of half an hour, we keep our world, and the planets of the system, too.
Antigravity, you know, and atomic power. Because They came from another sun, a
star beyond the stars. They came from a world with a bluer sun."
The end.
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