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 magnesium 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.”