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 schiuffed 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 half way 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 is 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 on 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 re-establish life. Any higher forms thawed out that way are dead. Though the individual cells revive, they die because there must be organisation and cooperative effort to live. That cooperation cannot be re-established. 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-axe 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 colour 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 coal 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 armour 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 sightiessly, the ruby eyeballs reflecting murky, smoky rays of light.
He realised 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 laboured, 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, summarising 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 wollen 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 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 down wind. 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 humour? 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 humour,’ 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-axe. 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 haif-terrorised 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, longtined 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-axe 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-axe 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 fore-planned drive to McReady’s attack. One of the giant blow-torches 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.
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