“What is he doing?”, Moore asking to Ironside. “Why doesn’t he shoot?”
The man doesn’t reply, intent on watching the scene with binoculars.
While a person’s body forms before the eyes of Macready, more nuances continue to emerge, as drawn by an invisible artist. Dark hair grows on its head, as quickly as a full beard on its face.
The heart of the Major seems to become heavier, while the creature’s chest rises, taking a deep breath.
The transformation is completed, the being opens its eyes, looking around. Then it focuses its gaze on him, staring at him intently.
“You can’t…”, murmurs Macready. “R.J…”
Mesmerized by the figure materialized in front of his eyes, and pervaded by a sense of numbness that flows tempting in his veins, the Major doesn’t notice the small movements of the sand in front of the creature. The sand bumps, as if something is making its way into the ground, snaking slowly toward him.
The being moves its head, as if to stretch the neck muscles. The features of its face, just meters from Macready, relax. Its mouth opens in a friendly smile, its eyes watching him with a mild stare.
“You look really messy, Albie…”
The sense of loss of the Major leaves space to a profound sense of sadness. Meanwhile the thing crawling in the sand is now two meters from him.
Hearing those words, many thoughts stir in Macready’s mind. Memories come to the surface, almost violently, as driven by an external source.
Scenes of his childhood with his older brother. The moments lived when he came back from Vietnam, so changed and restless. The difficulties when he started drinking, until that day when he decided to take the job in Antarctica in a desperate attempt to escape his demons.
Suddenly, that moment of stasis gives way to a high-speed movie, taking Macready back to the present.
The machine gun on the armored vehicle unlocks, and Ironside doesn’t waste any time. A burst centers in full one of the canisters launched earlier by Macready.
At the same time a tentacle squirts out of the sand, darting towards the Major’s face.
The man has lowered his guard in those fractions of a second when his mind was a jungle of thoughts. He looks at the tip of one tentacle opening in a vertical mouth bristling with fangs of a metallic black.
The fireball and shock wave caused by the explosion of the incendiary mixture hits the creature, wrapping and throwing it to the ground a few meters away. At the same moment the tentacle that has almost reached Macready’s face retracts, pulled away by the rapid movement of the creature on whose foot it is attached.
Macready keeps watching the thing that for a few moments had taken on the appearance of his brother, writhing in the flames. The monster lets out a terrifying roar that seems to resonate in a cavity of the earth, while the Major moves away running.
Other tentacles burst out from the sand, leaning in his direction, but they are short-lived. Another burst of Ironside hits the canister abandoned by Macready few moments before. The explosion forms a second burning cloud, which expands quickly reaching the first. The sand is burning, seething, while other tentacles struggle in the flames, whipping the air.
The horrendous groans issued by the flaming creature slowly become silent.
It stops squirming, almost simultaneously.
Slender black smoke plumes mark the places where the creatures are burning.
Macready, Moore and Ironside are under an open hangar. The massive roof of the structure protects them from the sun nearing the zenith.
The three people take stock of the situation, preparing for the arrival of rescue teams.
Macready thanks the other two for saving his life. Ironside barely nods.
“Why did you hesitate?”, Moore asks. The woman watched from a distance the last transformation of the creature. She could not see the details, but the imitation seemed to resemble the older man in the picture she had found in the Major’s room.
Macready’s gaze moves back, as if to look at his own memories with his mind’s eye. “I had a brother. He was a very tough guy. One of the few to come back in one piece from Vietnam, at least physically. He raised me, and I must thank his stubbornness if I wear this uniform now. He was on duty at that damn American outpost in Antarctica, 1982.”
The man remains silent for a moment, then he goes on: “It was right before my eyes, I saw it forming, I knew it was one of those monsters, and yet… When he opened his eyes and looked at me… His look, the way he spoke and smiled… It was him, he was my brother. I felt his presence, it was not a simple imitation.”
“Ivanov said something about…”, Ironside intervenes after a few moments of silence.
“Yes”, Moore goes on. “He said that despite years and years of studies, they had not been able to determine whether the imitations were completely unaware of being so, or it was just a perfect acting by the creature.”
“I’m afraid we’ll never know”, Ironside adds.
“Not necessarily”, Moore.
The two men raise their eyes, watching her uncertain.
“The test with the electricity has failed…”, she continues the scientist, “…and the three of us have not been in sight of each other for all the time. We can’t be entirely sure that all the three of us are humans.”
The woman waits, allowing time for the two to assimilate her words. The two men take one step backwards.
“We know that the creature is treacherous and clever at hiding. It has withstood the test with fire and with electricity and it has proved its capacity to sacrifice a part of itself to survive. The three of us fought to destroy it, but we can’t rule out that one of us is pretending.”
“If we were all three of the creatures we wouldn’t cooperate to eliminate it, and if two of us were of those beings, they would have already attacked the third. This means that one thing is certain: two of us are definitely human”, Ironside exclaims.
“We can’t be sure of anything”, replies the woman. “Not until I can do sure testing of our blood in a proper laboratory.”
“We could use battery acid, as you said before”, proposes Macready.
“The creature has learned to resist fire and electricity, it can’t be ruled out for certain whether it has learned to resist the attack of acids or not”, she says.
“Wait”, Macready intervenes. “If you were one of those monsters, you could have infected me earlier when I’ve practiced artificial respiration, but I am sure of being human, so you have to be too.”
“And if you two were replicas, you would have attacked me”, Ironside’s conclusion. “I think we can rule out the possibility that one of us is playing, right?”
“Unfortunately it isn’t so simple”, Moore adds. “If imitations aren’t aware of being such, none of us can be certain to be human, no matter how sure about that. The only thing we can do is to stay in sight of each other and tell the truth to the rescue team. Hopefully they will handle the situation better than we did.”
The three stay silent for long moments, each lost in their own thoughts. Moore speaks first, giving voice to their thoughts. “There are things of which Ivanov spoke to me. At first I thought he had invented it all, but you have also seen that in the end he was not lying when he talked about the metamorphic organism. We must think about it, work on it, but right now I wouldn’t rule out that the rest of his story might be true.”
“Why? What else did he say?”, Ironside asks curiously. Macready just contracts his lips in a grimace.
“He talked about expeditions to Antarctica, the discovery of vestiges of civilization so remote that make you dizzy. Maybe we’ll talk about this. What now matters is another aspect. According to him the creature was not from outer space, or at least not from the extraterrestrial aircraft mentioned in the story of the woman who was found frozen to death. Ivanov was convinced that these beings dwelled deep underground in Antarctica, under the blanket of ice.”