Barclay leapt forward and jabbed. A weird, sharp 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.
CHAPTER VI
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 agree can sit up with i 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. Prom 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 worldwide 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 the 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 85 pounds. Charnauk weighed about 90. It would have become Charnauk, and had 85 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—y 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 a dive 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 per cent water; blood differs only in having a couple per cent 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. “Hub? Am I what?”
“Are you there?” Blair burst into gales of laughter.
Connant? The beast wanted to be a man—not a dog—“
CHAPTER VII
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, none the less, 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 cam” “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 mad man 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, talks 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 reaction. It i. 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 super-human 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 a 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 t
hat 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 saw-bones! 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 doghandler, 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 half way 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.
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