“But Kinner, this is the only table that’s big enough to work on,” Blair objected. “Everybody’s explained that.”
“Yeah, and everybody’s brought everything else in here. Clark brings in his dogs every time there’s a fight, and he sews ’em up on that table. Ralsen brings in his sledges. Jesus, the only thing you haven’t brought in is the Boeing plane, and you’d have that in if you could figure a way to get it through the tunnels.”
Commander Garry chuckled. “It gets a bit crowded, eh Kinner? I guess we all find it that way at times.”
“I know the cosmic ray shack’s going to be too crowded if I have to sit up with that Thing,” Connant growled. “Why can’t you go on chipping the ice away from around it—you can do that without anybody butting in on you, I assure you—and then hang the Thing up over the power plant boiler? That’s warm enough. It’ll thaw out a chicken—even a side of beef—in about 10 hours.”
“I know,” Blair protested, dropping the cold chisel and hammer to gesture more effectively, his small body tense with excitement and earnestness, “but this is too damned important to take any chances. There never was a find like this before; I guess there never will be again. It’s the only chance men will ever have, and its got to be done right. I’ve got to get this thing dissected and pickled in formaldehyde before something happens. Microscopic observations will have to be made at once.
“Look, you remember how fish we caught down near the Ross Sea would freeze almost as soon as we got ’em on deck, and come to life if we thawed ’em out. Low forms of life aren’t killed by fast freezing—”
“Hey, for Christ’s sake, you mean that Thing will come to life?” Connant yelled. “You get the damned Thing—let me at it! That’s gonna be in so many pieces—”
“No—no, you fool—” Blair jumped in front of Connant to protect his treasure. “No, only low forms of life. For Pete’s sake let me finish. You can’t thaw higher forms of life and have ’em come to. Wait a minute now. Hold it. A fish can come to, because it’s so low a form of life, so slightly organized, that the individual cells of its body can revive, and that’s enough to reestablish life. Any higher forms thawed out that way are dead, because, though the individual cells revive, they die because they must have organization to live. There’s a sort of potential life in quick-frozen animals of any sort, but it can’t, under any conceivable circumstances, become active life in a higher animal. The higher animals are too complex. This is dead, or as good as dead.”
“There ain’t no such thing as good as dead. That’s going to be dead.” Connant stated flatly. “Gimme that ice axe.”
Commander Garry laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Wait a minute Connant. I want to get this straight. I agree with you that this thing is too unpleasant to have alive, but I had no idea there was even the faintest possibility of life.”
Dr. Copper pulled his pipe from between his teeth. “There isn’t,” he stated. “Blair’s being technical. That’s dead, dead as the mammoths they find frozen in Siberia. Potential life is like atomic energy; it may be there, but nobody’s shown it yet, and we have all sorts of proof that Things don’t live after being frozen. What’s the point, Blair?”
The little biologist shook himself. “The point is,” he said in an injured tone, “that the individual life cells might display some of the characteristics they had in life, if thawed properly. A man’s muscle cells live for hours after his body dies. Just because they live, and a few things like hair and fingernail cells live, you wouldn’t accuse a corpse of being a zombie, or something. Now, if I thaw this right, I may have a chance to find out something about the kind of world it’s native to. We don’t know, and can’t know, whether it came from Earth, or Mars, or Venus, or from beyond the stars. But if we find its cells are designed for a dry, desiccated, cool climate, we can guess Mars or a planet like it. If they’re suited to a hot, humid climate, we can think about another world.
“It’s all right to thaw a chicken for the pot by using a blowtorch, or a jet of live steam, but I don’t think any of you want this Thing cooked and served for—”
“Shut up, you louse. God, what a thought!” Benning, the aviation mechanic looked green about the gills.
“All right, then, don’t suggest I thaw it over the power plant boiler the way we do beef or chickens. It’s got to be thawed in a warm room overnight. I’ll chip this ice off, and we can put it in the Cosmos House.”
“Go ahead and get the Thing off my table, then,” Kinner growled. “But keep that canvas over it. It looks indecent, whether those are clothes it has on or not.”
“Kinner’s going modest on us.” Connant jeered.
Kinner slanted his eyes up toward the physicist. “All right, big man, and what were you grousing about a minute ago? We can set that Thing in a chair next to you tonight if you want.”
“Well, I’m not afraid of its face, anyway. I don’t like keeping a wake over its corpse particularly, but I’m going to do it.”
Kinner grinned. “Uh-huh.” He went off to the galley stove and shook down the ashes vigorously, drowning the brittle chipping of the ice as Blair went to work again.
McReady grinned toward Powell. “Bar told him he’d be the most popular man in camp when he sprang his little proposition.”
“I don’t wonder.” Powell found himself glancing at the vaguely translucent ice out of the corner of his eye “You’re none too popular with me right now. ”
“Cluck,” reported the cosmic ray counter, “cluck-burrrrr-cluck.”
Connant started and dropped his pencil. “Damnation.”
The physicist looked toward the far corner, back at the Geiger counter on the table near that corner, and crawled under the desk at which he had been working to get the pencil. He sat down at his work again, trying to make his writing more even. It tended to have jerks and quavers in it, in time with the abrupt proud-hen noises of the Geiger counter. The muted whoosh of the pressure lamp he was using for illumination, the mingled grunts and bugle calls of a dozen men sleeping down the corridor in Paradise House formed the background sounds for the irregular, clucking noises of the counter, the occasional rustle of falling coal in the copper-bellied stove. And a soft, steady drip-drip-drip from the Thing in the corner.
Connant jerked a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, snapped it so that a cigarette protruded, and jabbed the cylinder into his mouth. The lighter failed to function, and he pawed angrily through the pile of papers in search of a match. He scratched the wheel of the lighter several times, dropped it with a curse, and got up to pluck a hot coal from the stove with the coal-tongs.
The lighter functioned instantly when he tried it on returning to the desk. The counter ripped out a series of chuckling guffaws as a burst of cosmic rays struck it. Connant turned to glower at it, then tried to concentrate on the interpretation of data collected during the past week. The weekly summary—
He gave up and yielded to curiosity, or nervousness. He lifted the pressure lamp from the desk and carried it over to the table in the corner. Then he returned to the stove and picked up the coal tongs.
The beast had been thawing for nearly 18 hours now. He poked at it with an unconscious caution; the flesh was no longer hard as armor plate, but had assumed a rubbery texture. It looked like wet, blue rubber glistening under droplets of water like little round jewels in the glare of the gasoline pressure lantern. Connant felt an unreasoning desire to pour the contents of the lamp’s reservoir over the Thing in its box and drop the cigarette into it. The three red eyes glared up at him sightlessly, the ruby eyeballs reflecting murky, smoky rays of light.