“Oh, man,” I whispered. “Oh, man!”
Suddenly fastidious about what my feet might accidentally touch, I tiptoed through the human debris, going faster and faster until I reached the uncontaminated part of the gallery at a near-run. The only conventional way of utterly destroying a man, as Dave Maddern had been destroyed, would have been to immerse him in a vat of liquid oxygen and then go to work on the frozen body with a sledge hammer – but there was another possibility.
All icewell personnel were assured that it was impossible for the alpha-locus to wander from its prescribed path. A computer and triplex controls kept it moving in a regular and pre-ordained pattern through the island, continuously reinforcing the ice structure with the unthinkable coldness of space – but since when had men been able to build perfect machines? What if accidents sometimes did happen? We were busy sucking the last drops of oil from the Earth’s crust, using new techniques that had been born of a desperate need, and no government in the world would draw back on account of a few operational mishaps. It would be perfectly natural to conceal the fact that every now and then there was a glitch in the telecongruency warp system, that every now and then the controls wavered and sent an invisible killer cruising through icewell living quarters. The bleak focus of interstellar cold would only have to brush through a man once to turn him into a crystalline statue.
I wasn’t thinking as clearly as that while I ran for the stair that led down to the duty room. Shock, revulsion and fear had numbed my brain to the extent that I could scarcely nail down a coherent thought, and to make matters worse silent voices were screaming at me, hurling confused questions. Is this what you’ve been looking for?
What have you really explained about Dave Maddern? Was Sharly, in some way that you don’t yet understand, driven over that rail? All right, you’ve frozen Maddern to death – but who or what broke him up like so much peanut brittle? And why?
I clattered down on to Level Three and sprinted a short distance along the gallery to the bright rectangle of the duty room window, but slid to a halt just before reaching it, all instincts of self-preservation newly alerted.
The place was cold.
Icewells, by their very nature, are chilly places and our part of the world never warmed up, even in the middle of summer, but this was a different sort of coldness. It was hostile, totally inimical, far more so than the polar wind, and I sensed – even before looking into the room – that it was a bad omen.
Perhaps there had been three men in the room, perhaps as many as half-a-dozen. I wasn’t able to say for sure, because the entire floor area was covered with a gruesome organic rubble, the redness of which was slowly beginning to disappear under a coating of rime frost. The furniture in the room was quite untouched, but its occupants had been pulverized, degraded, robbed of every last vestige of their humanity. Had it not been for the previous experience with Maddern I wouldn’t even have recognized them for what they were.
And, reacting according to a classic human pattern, I had two virtually simultaneous thoughts: Thank God that didn’t happen to me, and, How can I make sure it doesn’t ever happen to me?
There was no room behind my eyes for anything but those two linked expressions of self-interest. I turned towards the elevator, determined to ride it up to Level Ten and the starlit surface of the island, and it was then that I saw the thing with many legs.
It was huge – easily the size of a car – black and nightmarish, and it was rushing towards me with hideous, soul-withering speed. There was no time to think, only to react, and so I did the most natural thing in the world.
I grabbed the gallery rail and vaulted over it into space.
For a second or so I fully expected to die – just as Sharly had done – but the remarkable thing was that I didn’t mind. I had avoided being taken by the black obscenity and in that first airborne instant nothing else mattered – then I hit a large-diameter pipe and caromed off it into a latticed stanchion with a force that came near to breaking my ribs. My carbine flailed away into the dimness as I tried to throw my arms around the stanchion, but I had gained too much impetus for that to work and I continued falling, slithering, bouncing, impacting with steel, with lagged pipes, and finally with sloping buttresses of ice. Seemingly a long, long time after clearing the rail at Level Three I found myself lying on my side in a shallow pool of water. The surface below me was cold soft mud, and I knew I was almost right down on the seabed. All the complex structures and machinery associated with the wellhead towered up somewhere above me in a spatial confusion of shadows and areas of wan, misty light.
I lay without moving for an indeterminate period, not so much recovering from the fall as trying to construct a new version of reality in which there was a place for the horror I had glimpsed before jumping. I have been told many times since that I didn’t actually see anything on Level Three. The theory is that human beings are naturally programmed, that we are incapable of perceiving any phenomenon which lies beyond the in-built limitations of our world-picture. I had faced a manifestation which inspired me with the ultimate dread, and I therefore had endowed it with the attributes of dread, which in my case happened to be a multiplicity of legs. All that might account for my impression that the thing, although black in colour, was transparent to some degree, like a badly done special effect in a movie, but I’m not sure if I really can accept all that stuff about the limits of perception. The people who are so positive about it have no idea what it was like to be there at the time, and I knew I had seen something big and black and with a lot of legs.
The trouble was that I wasn’t certain of anything else. A kind of detachment had stolen over me as I lay there in the bilges of the icewell – waiting for my breath to return and for my body to give some evidence, one way or the other, about its general condition – and I was able to think more rationally than one might have expected. But I couldn’t fit the pieces together. A number of my friends had died in a particularly horrendous manner, but to me the cause had seemed highly technical – I had predicted something like an intermittent fault in a computerized control system – and what had showed up was the worst possible embodiment of ancient nightmares and superstitions. Coincidence? Not likely. Impossible was more like it, but what sort of creature could or would turn its victims into ice and crunch them into a bloody slush? And where in God’s name had it come from? There had to be something missing somewhere, a connection I had failed to make.
Still numb with sensory overload, I raised myself to a sitting position and tried to make a decision about what to do next. I wanted to get away from the well and reach Field Control at the other end of the island, and there were only two possible routes – through the service tunnel at Level Nine or along the surface from Level Ten. Both alternatives involved passing through the region of the well where the black thing stalked the galleries, and I had a powerful aversion to doing that. I put my wrist set to my mouth and tried calling up Lieutenant Oliver. There was no reply. Either the radio was broken, or the nightmare creature had roved further afield.
Perhaps I was the only person left alive on the entire island…
Repressing violent spasms of shivering, I looked around in the cavernous dimness and tried to establish exactly where I was. Faint reflections marked numerous dark pools, and there was no way of telling which might be drain tunnels through which waste liquids were pressure-pumped into the sea. This part of the well was a Stygian no-man’s-land, visited very infrequently by maintenance inspectors, and to get out of it I would have to locate a ladder and climb it to the first gallery. I decided the most likely place would be near the automatic pumping station which was steadily pounding somewhere off to my left, rippling the reflected lights.