“So Commander Garry sent the ’gyro when the sun came up, and brought back Dr. Copper. But it was an unpleasant twelve hours of waiting.”
McReady nodded. “We knew it must be, but there wasn’t a thing we could do. I thought of sending up a sounding balloon with a candle on it in hopes you’d see and know we were alive, but realized it was too small. We got some of your later calls, as you know, because Barclay patched up a receiver out of spares, junk, and will power. But the secondary magnet’s gone. And the chance of learning the secrets of a more ancient, alien race gone with it. The magnetic men are through out there, through forever, but I think we might try to organize an expedition in that direction. The winds are unique, to put it gently.”
Powell chuckled. “Dr. Copper said something about it being coolish.”
“I never saw a 35-mile wind with a temperature of -50° or below before. It’s more or less of an axiom that high winds bring high temperatures—air friction warms them if nothing else. But even that didn’t work out there. I think that in all the ages that beast was frozen there, the temperature never rose above freezing; it was chilled by winds straight from the Polar Plateau.”
They reached the outlying shack of the meteorologists and ducked into it together. McReady threw his things on his bunk and glanced automatically at the recording instruments set in the wall. He grinned, nodded toward them, and chuckled.
“Man, those little lines look funny. That wind velocity—wait ’til you see the cards we brought back. Let’s go on over to the Ad Building.”
Comparatively mild as it was here at Big Magnet, the weather was not that of a Temperate Zone spring day. They started down the communication tunnel, the combined storeroom and passageway under the surface. Crates and boxes formed its walls, some empty, some still full. Gasoline and canned food, instrument cards, and best boot-grease. Tooth brushes and dehydrated carrots, canned beer, and spare parts for recording hygrometers. Crates, boxes, and snow blocks. The roofing was a strip of waterproof paper over chicken wire laid on wooden slats. The inevitable antarctic drift covered it in a thick blanket. And the wire, the slats, and the crates were coated with magnificent ice-jewels that sparkled in the light of McReady’s pressure lamp; ice crystals, perfect flat hexagons, some of them two inches across, all similar yet none identical.
The packed snow floor rose and fell irregularly. Ahead, the Ad Building door opened momentarily and closed again. The others were streaming into camp. Other corridors under the snow joined theirs; they passed the entrance to the Radio building, and the tunnel strung with insulated cables that lead off in majestic isolation to the power plant nearly a quarter of a mile away. Another quarter of a mile in the opposite direction lay the magnetic observatory.
McReady turned to Powell with a slight smile. “This crowded city, with its teeming population, oppresses me. That, and the dominance of human sounds above the sounds of wind.”
“Secondary Magnetic seem rather isolated?” Powell smiled.
“Beyond the end of nowhere. It was unreal. That beast from the pit—the incredible ship that couldn’t have been—the impossible wind that never stopped. They were parts of a nightmare dreamt by an insane mind.”
“That animal—I haven’t seen it yet.” Powell said.
The smile left McReady’s face. “Well—don’t. Let Blair pickle that damned Thing if he wants to, then ask him questions. That bald plateau was a superior place of torture in this frozen hell, and that beast should be the high chief devil that runs it. Part of the reason this whole expeditions seems like a nightmare is that I had one—and it’s so real, it’s hard to disentangle. I dreamed that child of nature, as Blair called it, had somehow retained a sluggish life. That it was vaguely understanding everything going on about it, all the endless infinity of black polar nights and glittering polar days through all the ages it lay there trapped. A sluggish life that stirred at our coming, and wasn’t destroyed even with the ice axe through its brain. And an inhuman, unhuman hatred and determination.”
“Quite a dream.”
“Damnedest nightmare I ever had, though that face is enough to give anybody a nightmare. Even subconsciously I must have revolted against it, because in the dream it seemed to run and change and mold slowly into Vane’s face.”
Powell halted just outside the Ad Building door and looked at McReady. “Uhh. ‘Pleasant dreams,’ I take it, is not the proper nightly salutation after watching that animal. Turned into Vane’s face, did it?”
McReady nodded. “That wasn’t the worst part. I had the damnedest conviction it turned into Vane’s face because it wanted to, and that it could turn into anything, or anybody. That it had a secret, unholy knowledge of life and life-stuff, protoplasm, gained through ages of experiment and thought. That it wasn’t bound to any form or size or shape, but could mold its very blood and flesh and smallest cell to not merely imitate, but duplicate the blood and flesh and cells of any other thing it chose. And read the thoughts, the habits, the mind of anyone.”
Powell grunted. “Sufficiently screwy ideas. I don’t think I’ll look at that creature, if that’s the sort of dream it evokes.”
McReady laughed uncertainly. “I wouldn’t if I were in your place. I’d give a year of my life to forget it now. It stirs your mind with unpleasant ideas, thoughts, and dreamings of other worlds man was never intended to know. Such as that concept I just suggested. Did you pause to think what would happen if such a creature—a being with such powers—were loosed on Earth?”
“You’re not suggesting this Thing had them?” Powell demanded.
McReady shook his head. “The nightmare put the conception in my mind. You won’t thank me for mentioning it, you’ll find, because it sticks like a burr. It brings an uneasy look-over-your-shoulder feeling, a sort of mental examining of your friends.”
“Of your friends?”
McReady put his hand on the doorknob of the Ad Building. His eyes did not meet Powell’s as he laughed.
“Yeah—your friends. If a Thing like that could be—reading minds—duplicating tissue, face, mannerisms—how are you going to know I—or any other person you meet is—is human? It might just be… call it an imitation, a perfect imitation, conceived in hell and dedicated to purposes you couldn’t follow.”
Powell cursed softly. “Christ, Mac, you think of the damnedest, unhappiest things. Ye Gods—damn it, I’d know—why—I could—”
McReady nodded. “Sorry, Stan. I shouldn’t have told you, but that’s been riding me ever since I had that dream. I’m a louse to pass it on, but mulling over the idea by yourself drives you slowly nuts.”
Powell knocked McReady’s hand from the door and yanked it open viciously. “Oh, hell. I’d—”
His voice trailed into silence as he joined the group collected around the central table. A tarpaulin was spread out on it, and a rough cylinder of ice, half sheeted on that. Blair was picking gently at the ice with a tack hammer and a cold chisel.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I know you don’t like the Thing, Connant, but it’s just got to be thawed out right. You say leave it as is ’til we get back to civilization. Swell, but how are we going to keep it from thawing and rotting while we cross the equator? You don’t want to sit up with it one night. What do you suggest, that I hang its corpse in the freezer with the beef?” Blair looked up from his work 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 that ever were, I’ll put you in to keep it company. You birds have brought everything you could think of in on my tables here already, but you go putting things like that in my meat box, or my meat cache here, and you cook your own damn grub.”