“But the center section of the ship had an impossible magnetic mass, the section where driving engines ought to be. All that attraction we detected 80 miles away at Big Magnet originated in a section about 20 by 20 feet. That’s fact. This isn’t even theory, it’s just guess. I think that ship came down to Earth too near the magnetic pole, and the driving mechanism—however it may have worked—soaked up too much of Earth’s magnetic field and blew out. Earth’s field isn’t particularly intense, but it’s big. A hundred million ampere current circulating the equator might cause it. If that ship’s engines tangled with the planet’s field, something would blow. It wouldn’t be the Earth’s field.
“So that thing came out of its ship, trapped. It must belong to an older race than man. It looked out over an Antarctica already frozen, perhaps even colder then than now. Four hundred miles of it in every direction, four hundred miles of impassable glaciation without a living thing bigger than a microbe or an alga between it and an unattainable sea. And oh, God the hatred in that three-eyed face, with its blue earthworm hair.
“Damn it man, let’s turn in. Tomorrow’s soon enough to, think about that Thing out of the Pit.”
Vane grunted, knocked out his dead pipe against the belly of the copper stove, and started fixing up his bunk. The wind mouthed throaty gurgles down the stove pipe, curses and maledictions whose seeming syllables made one listen, struggling to understand the nearly-intelligible vindictiveness. Syllables, perhaps, that the Thing out in the frozen pit had taught it once, ages ago.
* * * *
The wind was belching the same vague syllables when they rose in the morning. Norris, taking his turn at starting the sullen stove, cursed and kicked it back to life.
When they started out, the wind slashed at them with an edge keened by a -45° temperature. The lashings of the sledge grunting and thrumming under its pressure. The unremitting force seemed to be pushing them away, trying to turn them back from the flag-marked trail. Many of the tough, orange cloth flags had been whipped to three-inch tattered remnants in the 30 hours since they had been placed, and some of them had been torn away completely.
But the trail was marked now. They no longer had to feel an uncertain way through the treacherous crevasses, and as they passed the region cracked and torn by pressure from the ice-river to the south, the orange blot of the tractor loomed up against the colored wash of the northern horizon. Close beyond it, the wind-leveled heaps of ice chips the Magnetic Station party had cut from around the buried ship marked the entrance to the excavation.
They parked and dismounted. McReady lead the way into the tunnel, substituting a furiously incandescent magnesium-metal torch for the dimmer pressure lamps used on the trail. The magnesium strips burned with an incredible white light in the blue crystalline tube, the ice slanting down about them in rough, blazing gems of crystalline refraction. The fierce thrust of the radiance seeped through the ice for a distance of more than a hundred feet. From the surface, the men below became vast bat-like shadows writhing beneath the ice, the whole ice field glowing with an inner incandescence for 100 feet around save for the immense black shadow of the strange ship, frozen in this glacier unknown ages before.
When they reached the Thing, Blair and Copper looked thoughtfully at the face staring up from the scintillant floor of the tube. Ice chips blown in by the wind had dusted it with a powder that glittered like diamond-dust under the brilliance of the magnesium flare.
Blair drew a bulky little camera out from under his windproof clothes and took half a dozen pictures. The face seemed disembodied, a mad sculptor’s interpretation of incarnate evil tossed carelessly on a jeweled floor. Copper scraped carefully with an ice axe and passed his ungloved hand over the smoothed surface. His body heat fused the surface to a black, slick, wavy lens giving view to the depths below.
McReady grinned as the doctor hastily scuffed the surface with the ice crampons on his heel. “That’s our pretty beastie, Doc. We have got to dig the damned thing out.”
“Ugh. Damned is right. That thing belongs in this sunken pit in the middle of a frozen hell. It isn’t quite so bad, here. That glittering ice under the rather unreal light of that flare—” Copper shook himself. “Hell of a thing for a medical man and a scientist to say, but I don’t want to dig it out.”
Blair continued to stare down at the face. The little biologist spoke suddenly above the organ thrum of the wind over the pit’s mouth. “You split the head accidentally, when you were digging down to it?”
McReady nodded. “You couldn’t see what you were approaching because of the ice chips. This ice is as clear as glass once you smooth it, but it’s like frosted glass when you’re digging. First warning we had was when I struck and heard a different scrunch sound. Those beryllium-bronze tools are heavy, and my axe went right through that—that skull.”
“It’s a member of a race far more ancient than man’s, all right.” The biologist nodded. “The developments would indicate that. Strange, though, the way fur sprouts on the flesh. Looks almost active now—as though it had been just beginning when the creature froze here. But it’s not so bad. It has a rather—uh—unpleasant expression, but it’s as much a child of nature, and her strange moods, as are men or dogs or the algae that somehow manage to live down here, where no other living thing is.”
“Unpleasant.” Copper grunted. “I suppose we have to get that thing out and start investigating the ship. I hope there aren’t more like it inside.”
“There probably are,” McReady said. “Vane estimated that it would take at least ten beings to run it—and that it could readily carry three hundred.”
Copper whistled. “What do you think it weighs? Can we get it out in one piece?”
McReady glanced at him. “I don’t know. I’ve never had to estimate anything like this.
“Say 85 pounds,” Blair said. “It’s as big as a husky dog.”
“Are you sure you want it out?” Copper asked Blair. “As Vane said, for sheer, unadulterated malignity, I’d stack that up against a cross between a cornered rat, a fer-de-lance and a tenth century devil straight out of hell.”
“Your hybrid would lose.” McReady shook his head. “I hope Baldwin doesn’t look at this thing. If that artist ever gets this burned into his brain, his pictures are going to be unholy things. We’ve got to cut this loose. Barclay’s starting the tractor, and by the time he gets up steam, we ought to have this, and its surrounding block of ice cut loose.”
Vane slid down the shaft in a shower of ice chips. “Like our pet, Copper?”
“Ugh. I’ll get over my damned curiosity after this. Is Norris handy up there?”
“He is.”
“Ask him to throw down a tarpaulin or something. I’ll work better with that face covered.”
“It isn’t ugly,” Vane pointed out judicially. “In a way, though those three eyes are rather startling, and that—hair, I guess you’d call it, Though it may be an organ of some unknown sense. Anyway, it may be startling, but when you come down to it, the features are rather fine, almost classically fine.”
“Hell is ruled by a fallen angel.” Copper turned toward the blank metal wall of the ship. “What’s this metal, found out?”
Vane shook his head. “We haven’t apparatus to find out. tried some acid from the battery, but it didn’t make any impression, just rolled off. It’s harder than our beryllium-bronze tools, and a spare gear from the tractor, made of specially hardened chrome-alloy steel, didn’t touch it. The bluish cast in the light suggests a high-chrome alloy, but God knows what those beings would use. It’s magnetic as blazes, so probably some high-chrome steel. But as I say, we don’t know the properties of their alloys, nor the source of their metals. We’re near the center of their ship, though, and I think I saw a shadow of a huge metal plate when Mac was burning that torch down here. Let’s dig that thing loose and angle down to the right here.”
The ice axes bit into the brittle crystal. McReady propped the remnant of his magnesi
um torch in a cleft in the ice, where it burned with an occasional splutter. The tail end vanished in a last burst of furious incandescence and blue flame as it burned down, and through the pool of water it had melted, reacting as viciously with the water as it had with the cold air.
In the light of pressure lamps, the cavity expanded outward and downward. The tractor on the surface had steam up now, and its winch snaked the loosened ice chips to the surface, relieving them of the heaviest work. The Thing in the ice had become a vague shadow encased in a glinting, refractive pillar. When the pillar was some 5 feet tall and 3 feet in diameter, they cut it loose. The tractor pulled it up, while Vane and Norris steadied it, eased it past the rough spots.
The brilliant wash of color from the slow-rising sun glinted on the block as they lashed it to a sledge, and covered it with a tarpaulin. The temperature was rising slowly, toward -40°, and with it, the wind howled slightly higher notes about the orange cab of the tractor, snaking the black cloud of smoke from its stack into instant disappearance.
Norris went below to relieve Vane, while Vane took his place at the mouth of the pit, dumping the sacks of chips and ice chunks that came up. Barclay and McReady worked together at something for a while, then McReady went down the pit with the carpenter’s hand saw, trailing a power lead from the tractor’s humming dynamo. The schuff of the ice axes stopped, giving way to the angry snarl of the saw driving through the ice in swift lines. The ice began coming up in five-inch-thick slabs two feet square.
* * * *
The sun was sweeping down again toward the horizon when Vane went below. They had reached the great metal plate they had seen as a coned shadow against the light of the magnesium flare; it was a great lock-door, nearly six feet square and a foot thick, swung open to leave a crack a foot wide. The saw and axes freed its outer surface and cut back into the airlock beyond as far as possible, but the immense door was held fast by the solid blue pack of ice within, and beyond their reach.
Barclay came down to examine it, a blowtorch melting smooth windows in the ice that made possible examination of the mechanism within. Immense metal bolts designed to hold the door fast against rubbery grommets were dimly visible, bolts retracted now into screw-toothed sheaths.
“If we could loosen that ice pack inside, I think I could get the tractor jack in this crack here, and pull her open.“ Barclay reported at last. “About loosening that ice, I don’t know. We have the decanite explosive bombs, but I think they’d wreck more than help. But how about the thermite?”
“Think they’d do the trick?” Vane asked.
“They should. They soften ice by the radiant heat, for a radius of about twenty feet, which is more than enough.”
“Might they not start a fire, though?” Copper objected.
Barclay grunted. “Some fire, Doc, that can burn in solid ice. Besides, there’s nothing but metal in there that I can see.”
“One, or two?” Vane asked.
“One, and then another if necessary. Too much heat in that confined space might make some steam. The door will probably pop open anyway. I’ll place the bomb, wire it, and then move the tractor back beyond the ridge. The escaping radiant heat might rot some of this other ice and open a crevasse under our feet.”
Barclay watched as McReady, last to leave, crawled out of the prepared hole.
“All clear!” he called. “Wait ’til I get over there.”
He ran toward them, running the long electric cable leading from tractor to bomb through his hand as he came, checking for possible breaks. The six men stood on the peak of the ridge, the slight slope down to the pit clear before them. The equipment had been moved back, save for ice axes, shovels and small items. There was no great danger of crevassing, but none at all beyond the rock ridge, where the ice pressure changed direction. Barclay speeded the dynamo until it hummed softly, then choked with a startled snarl as he closed the knife switch.
A light appeared in the ice beneath the pit mouth—25 pounds of aluminum powder and iron oxide/thermite mixture starting into an incredible inferno. Molten metallic iron flared at a temperature almost high enough to make the metal boil, running from the suddenly molten-steel casing into the ice. The ice exploded into steam, cracking, pushing, the intolerable glare of radiant energy shooting out paths of weakness through the solid stuff.
A puff of steam shot up from the pit mouth. “That ought to be about all,” Barclay decided as the fierce glare began to fade slowly. He waited a moment, slowing the dynamo. The others started forward slowly—started, and stopped. The glare was building up again, becoming more brilliant. Another puff of steam belched up from the pit into the Antarctic twilight. The fierce light below was growing stronger still.
A slow hissing roar built up, a roar that forced itself against the rushing stream of the wind toward them; white clouds of steam become ice-smoke whipped away from the pit mouth in the breach of the wind. The glare was spreading, a wide patch of ice that sent a dazzling spear of light high into the dark Antarctic sky, a roar that became a thunder. The pit was growing visibly before the mad rush of a vast jet of steam. Incredibly, the ice above the buried Thing from unknown ages began to heave, cracking in spreading radiants with a muffled tearing rip. Vastly the surface of the ice heaved and cracked, became a white, glowing mass, behind which there was an incredible, unearthly torch. The thunder of the vast plume of steam bellowing through the growing pit was whipped away by the wind as the men threw themselves flat on the ice. A sky-shaking roar thrust fifty-foot blocks of ice into the air, freeing an incandescent, growing lake of molten, blazing metal. For a moment the vast shape of the stranger ship was limned in its pyre: a slumping streamlined oblong 300 feet in length, sixty feet in diameter, lying precariously on a rocky slope, its vast nose crumpled against a towering bastion of grey, hard granite.
An incredible torch in the midst of a vast, blasted area of ice. A dazzling, blue-white stream of molten stuff tumbled from a softened rent in the side of the ship to roll down toward the mightier, towering ramparts of ice still undefeated. It struck them with a vast hissing roar, and they crumbled before it, tumbling into exploding steam as they fell into the growing lake of supernal fire. White-hot spheres of flaming metal exploded outward, to thunder downward through thousand-foot-thick ice.
The howling, rushing wind seemed to gain strength, thrusting the ice-smoke toward the distant Antarctic ocean. Great blocks of ice tumbled madly through the air. For a moment, resistant in blue white heat, withstanding even the lapping sea of molten fury, vast dazzling bulks stood out firm in the center section of the ship, huge machines of curving, dazzling splendor, shedding the rain of blazing metal from incandescent, adamantine backs. Then abruptly, they dissolved in a vaster, fiercer flame that sent darting rays through the towering, tottering glaciers looking on about the ship. The black, glistening rock of the ice-drowned mountainside glowed faintly red before that onslaught.
The wavering curtains of the aurora overhead jerked suddenly, spiraled in a mad vortex of shimmering light, and beat down a savage stalk to the incandescent fury. From the mountain, from the ice, vast angry tongues of lightning crashed against the molten pool. Lesser lightnings darted from the tractor, from the steel treads to the ice. Ice axes and shovels grew warm in the hands of the men, as thrilling shocks darted from wristwatches and metal buckles.
Along the mountainside, a vast motion of ice swept in. From the glacier to the south, pressed for ages by the weight of ice spilling over the mountain ridge a convulsion of billions of tons of ice thrust mile-long blocks of ice. The dwindling, flaming pool of metal vanished under a hissing, screaming bellow of tumbling ice.
The driving, rushing wind from the south whipped away a last trace of ice-smoke. It thrummed monotonously through the tractor rigging, cutting with a cold-keened edge. High in the sky, the curtains of the aurora wavered and moved in their immemorial fashion, against the rose-and-lavender wash of the setting sun.
Vane staggered to his feet. “It was a magnes
ium-aluminum alloy, hardened with beryllium and other metals.”
“There aren’t any more where that came from,” said McReady grimly, nodding toward the sledge. “What happened? We set off their fuel supply?”
Vane shook his head. “I think it was just the ship’s metal. An immense magnesium metal torch. Hundreds and hundreds of tons of it. That flare toward the end—when the engines went—I think it was the power that thing soaked out of Earth’s magnetic field ages ago, getting loose again with the final dissolution of the engines. The aurora felt it, the lightnings felt it—”
“The dynamo felt it,” Barclay called. “The coils are fused in a solid lump. The transformers and coils of the radio are also fused. Your magnetic apparatus looks as though you’d stepped in it. We can’t signal Big Magnet ’til we get back to the Station, if then. And they’ll be worrying about us, I imagine.”
“They saw that,” Vane nodded. “We’ll have to get back to the station at once, though they may guess that it would burn out coils here. There’s nothing more we can do around here, if we can leave. The crevasses—”
“The ice hasn’t moved much this side of the ridge.” McReady pointed toward the west. “But it will. We’d better go while we can.”
The tractor stirred, a cough of steam spurting from the exhaust. “We can talk that over later—if we move now.” suggested Barclay.
CHAPTER THREE
“Peaceful place!” Barclay shouted over the clatter of the tractor.
Big Magnet base lay in the sheltered hollow below, a dirtied stretch of drift-snow, lumped and humped over the buried shacks. Half a dozen stove-pipes smoked languidly, the dark soot moving off in startlingly slow spirals, in a manner seeming almost magical to these men returning from the wind-rushed bald plateau at Secondary Magnetic Station, the station that was no more.
McReady nodded vigorously. The clatter of metal parts and the hiss of steam made conversation too much of an effort. The howl of the huskies in Dogtown succeeded, somehow, in piercing the rattle of the tractor with a rolling, despairing note.
Frozen Hell Page 5