More men were materializing from the Antarctic snow, popping up out of the scattered snow-buried shacks and heading toward the arriving party. The tractor ground and vibrated to a shivering halt beside its mates, and McReady clambered stiffly down from it. The air here at Big Magnet seemed positively balmy; it was -45°, but with practically no wind at all. Norris, Vane, and Blair were straightening up from the two trailed sledges, Norris and Vane from the first, Blair from the second. Blair wasn’t the only one who would ride on that second sledge; it had another passenger, who had now acquired the title of Scarecrow.
“I suggest we wait a while.” McReady nodded toward the men advancing across the snow toward them. “I’m feeling a bit cramped, and maybe the hard work of hauling those damned sledges over to camp would strain me.”
Vane grinned. “I guess they’ll help. Will you ask Bar for me just how it is he finds all the bumps on the trail? It’s a peculiar miracle to me that I didn’t part company with that sledge at least forty times during the last five miles.”
“That’s his secret. Blair, where do you want that little pet of yours taken? We might as well shift the rest of the load of that sledge to this one now and save double hauling.”
“I don’t know where I’ll want it taken,” Blair answered doubtfully. “I want it to thaw out as quickly as possible, but I can’t use violent methods. I think the best thing to do is to find out who’s night watchman tonight and decide from that. It’ll probably be either one of the meteor observers, the cosmic ray group, the magnetic group, or a meteorologist. If they’ve got the job, we can take the Thing to the appropriate shack and keep it warm for the next 36 hours running. It will thaw out in that time.”
“What if it’s aviation’s turn for night watchman?”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to wait, then. They don’t heat the hangar at any time, let alone at night.”
Barclay laughed suddenly. “Blair, you’re going to be the most popular guy in camp when they find out what you’ve got on the ball. That Thing is going to be great company for the bird that’s got to sit up with it all night.”
McReady, Vane, and Norris joined in the laugh, but the little biologist was too serious about his find. “It’s no worse than those frozen seals and things, so far as I can see. It’s just as dead, and just as natural a thing—”
“That,” McReady pronounced, “is wrong. It’s been dead too long, and it isn’t natural. Not to this planet, anyway. You can lay money on it—even the entire camp’s poker-gambling capital, the entire, famous $42.23, that Scarecrow isn’t going to be popular until you’ve got him nicely dissected and pickled in formaldehyde. If then.”
The Big Magnet party washed up around them, the physics and mechanics departments gravitating naturally with Vane and Norris and Barclay to the tractor, examining the fused dynamo and radio equipment. The group spread out, trickling back to the wrapped, crude cylinder on the rearmost sledge. Commander Garry stood with Blair and Dr. Copper discussing the Thing, planning what to do with it. Vane and Norris drifted over, to add information about the immolation of the strange ship.
The sledges began to move apart, goods piled from Blair’s sledge onto the larger first trailer. McReady came back to learn what decisions had been made.
“I understand Connant is watchman tonight,” he said and smiled. “His interest in cosmic rays hold up after you mentioned your little plan, Blair?”
Commander Garry chuckled. “I can’t say I blame him too much, but he doesn’t seem enthusiastic. We’ve heard stories about this fellow. It sounds like Jerry’s in for an unpleasant evening.”
“Wait ’til you see him.” McReady promised. There was no smile on his face. “The cosmic ray hut is small, and Jerry Connant is going to wish for more separation before this evening’s over.”
“All set!” Barclay’s voice rang out. “Clear out.”
The group around the tractor moved back. There was a shower of hissing, glowing coals from the fire box. A cloud of dirty steam rose up about the machine. Then a moment later, the shrill whistle of the boiler water driving out of the boiler drain-cock under the pressure of the steam. Clouds of ice-smoke rolled off slowly in the direction of the camp, slowing as the whistle changed to a scream as the last of the water jetted out, and steam thrust from the drain. The roar died away; hot metal began to tink with contraction. Cold was taking hold of the tractor.
McReady walked back toward the Administration Building beside Powell, the Expedition’s senior meteorologist. “That wind there rather saved you when the ship started going, then?”
McReady nodded. “No rather about it; it did. Hundred’s of tons of magnesium metal. Only the fact that ice is opaque to heat rays, that we were on the far side of a solid rock ridge, and that bitter, steady wind saved us.”
“It seems to me you’d have been able, somehow, to recognize magnesium metal,” Powell said hesitantly. “I—now I don’t mean that you slipped; what I mean is—why was it impossible to recognize the difference?”
“We couldn’t lift it, so we had no idea of specific gravity. It was harder than our tools, so we couldn’t get a sample. It was an utterly unknown alloy of an alien race. And they’d rendered it passive somehow. Maybe there was a coat of chromium plate. Anyway, it didn’t react with alphuric acid, and that suggested an inactive, not a voraciously active metal. We didn’t go out there with analytical equipment; the simple acid test we made was Barclay’s idea, and he used ordinary storage battery acid. God, that alloy alone would have been worth a fortune to us! It alone would have financed this expedition. And what unguessable secrets of lifting and propulsion we lost in that fire—well, it was a tragedy as great as any in history. It would have remade all Earth’s history if we had been able to enter and examine that ship.”
Powell nodded thoughtfully. “You had us worried for a while. We saw that enormous flame, and saw the aurora bend down, of course. The magnetic instruments detected the thing, but we didn’t realize that at first—they were recording. Dutton was calling at the transmitter there for an hour, with the whole camp hanging over his shoulder, sitting there absolutely still. Not a sound but the wash of static.
“‘There’s no schedule,’ Dutton said.
“‘Don’t be an ass,’ Connant snapped at him. ‘They wouldn’t wait for schedule to report a thing like that. They’re more apt to have been in that, whatever it was.’
“We hadn’t any idea then about the magnetic explosion. That was Tolman’s idea.
“‘That strange ship was the magnet,’ he said suddenly, ‘and I’ll bet that ship was what blew up out there. We can’t fly until the sun’s up, or we hear from them that they’ve lighted the field. If the ship blew up, the magnetic force would be released—’ and Tolman dived for the recorders. It was there, of course—two of the pens jammed clear off the paper, and trying to get back on, the vertical, component recorder still tracing out a diminishing sine wave.
“Tolman looked at the Thing, then called over to Dutton, ‘You may as well quit that, because they can’t hear you, and they sure as hell can’t transmit. That ship blew up, and it released all the magnetic force. Every coil within ten miles of the thing that was capable of acting as an inductance is fused rubbish. Their dynamo, transformers, inductances, probably even condensers are all shot. They might be alive. We’ll have to fly tomorrow.’