Again Barclay was too slow. There were more grins, less tensity still, when Barclay and Van Wall finished their work.
Garry spoke in a low, bitter voice. “Connant was one of the finest men we had here—and five minutes ago, I’d have sworn he was. God in Heaven—those damnable Things are more than imitation.” Garry shuddered and sat back in his bunk.
And thirty seconds later, his blood shrank from the hot platinum wire, and struggled to escape the tube, struggled as frantically as a suddenly feral, red-eyed dissolving imitation of Garry struggled to dodge the snake-tongue weapon. Barclay advanced at him, white-faced and sweating. The Thing in the test-tube screamed with a tiny, tinny voice as McReady dropped it into the glowing coal of the galley stove. A wave of foul, stinking smoke puffed up.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“The last of it?” Dr. Copper looked down from his bunk with blood-shot, saddened eyes. “Fourteen of them—”
McReady nodded shortly. “In some ways—if only we could have permanently prevented their spreading—I’d like to have even the imitations back. Commander Garry—Connant—Dutton—” McReady laughed bitterly. “Even Dwight. Dwight who we thought we knew was human. What in blazes could have been his motive—the monster’s motive?”
Copper shook his head slowly. “I’m too headachy. What theory did you have?”
“Van Wall suggested more selfishness—and too good imitation. Perhaps, imitating Dwight so exactly, it felt his feelings. In the background, was the selfishness that each, though part of one original, was yet an entire individual, with its own individual ambitions. The ambition to reproduce. By ‘killing’ Kinner, it forced the other monster to assume an inactive role, finally it turned out, killed it. Forcing it to inactivity, would have given ‘Dwight’ more freedom to operate.”
“Where are they taking those—things?” Copper nodded to the stretcher Barclay and Powell were carrying out.
“Outside. Outside on the ice, where they’ve got fifteen smashed crates, half a ton of coal, and presently will add 10 gallons of kerosene. We’ve dumped acid on every spilled drop, every torn fragment. We’re going to incinerate those.”
“Sounds like a good play.” Copper nodded wearily. “I wonder, you haven’t said whether Blair—”
McReady started. “We forgot him! We had so much else! I wonder—do you suppose we can cure him now?”
“If—” began Dr. Copper, and stopped meaningfully.
McReady started a second time. “Even a madman. It imitated Kinner and his praying hysteria—” McReady turned toward Van Wall at the long table. “Van—we’ve got to make an expedition to Blair’s shack.”
Van looked up sharply, the frown of worry faded for an instant in surprised remembrance. Then he rose, nodding. “Barclay better go along. He applied the lashings, and may figure how to get in without frightening Blair too much.”
Three quarters of an hour, through -37° cold, while the Aurora curtains bellied overhead. The twilight was nearly 12 hours long, flaming in the north, on snow like white, crystalline sand under their skis. A 15 mile wind piled it in drift-lines pointing off to the north-west. Three quarters of an hour to reach the snow-buried shack. No smoke came from the little stack, and the men hastened.
“Blair!” Barclay roared into the wind when he was still a hundred yards away. “Blair!”
“Shut up,” said McReady softly, “And hurry. He may be trying a lone hike. If we have to go after him—no planes, the tractors disabled—”
“Would a monster have the stamina a man has?”
“A broken leg wouldn’t stop it for more than a minute.” McReady pointed out.
Barclay gasped suddenly and pointed aloft. Dim in the twilit sky, a winged thing circled in curves of indescribable grace and ease. Great white wings tipped gently, and the bird swept over them in silent curiosity.
“Albatross—” Barclay said softly. “First of the season, and wandering way inland for some reason. If a monster’s loose—”
Powell bent down on the ice and tore hurriedly at his heavy windproof clothing. He straightened, his coat flapping open, a grim blue-metaled weapon in his hand. It roared a challenge to the white silence of Antarctica.
The thing in the air screamed hoarsely. Its great wings worked frantically as a dozen feathers floated down from its tail. Powell fired again. The bird was moving swiftly now, but in an almost straight line of retreat. It screamed again, more feathers dropped, and with beating wings it soared behind a ridge of pressure ice, to vanish.
Powell hurried after the others. “It won’t—come back.” he panted.
Barclay cautioned him to silence, pointing. A curiously, fiercely blue light beat out from the cracks of the shack’s door. A very low, soft humming sounded inside, a low, soft humming and a clink and click of tools, the very sounds somehow bearing a message of frantic haste.
McReady’s face paled. “God help us if that Thing has—” He grabbed Barclay’s shoulder, and made snipping motions with his fingers, pointing toward the lacing of control-cables that held the door.
Barclay drew the wire-cutters from his pocket, and kneeled soundlessly at the door. The snap and twang of cut wires made an unbearable racket in the utter quiet of the Antarctic hush. There was only that strange, sweetly soft hum from within the shack, and the queerly, hectically clipped clicking and rattling of tools to drown their noises—
McReady peered through a crack in the door. His breath sucked in huskily and his fingers clamped cruelly on Barclay’s shoulder. The meteorologist backed down. “It isn’t,” he explained very softly, ”Blair. It’s kneeling on something on the bunk—something that keeps lifting. Whatever it’s working on is a thing like a knapsack—and it lifts.”
“All at once,” Barclay said grimly. “No, Powell, hang back, and get that iron of yours out. It may have—weapons.”
Together Barclay’s powerful body and McReady’s lean strength struck the door. Inside, the bunk jammed against the door screeched madly, and crackled into kindling. The door flung down from broken hinges, the patched lumber of the doorpost dropping inward.
Like a blue-rubber ball, a Thing bounced up. One of its four tentacle-like arms looped out like a striking snake; in a seven-tentacled hand was a six-inch pencil of winking, shining metal that glinted and swung upward to face them. Its line-thin lips twitched back from snake-fangs in a grin of hate, red eyes blazing.
Powell’s revolver thundered in the confined space. The hate-washed face twitched in agony, the looping tentacle snatched back, the silvery thing in its hand a smashed ruin of metal, the seven-tentacled hand a mass of mangled flesh oozing greenish-yellow ichor. The revolver thundered three times more, dark holes drilled each of the three eyes before Powell hurled the empty weapon against its face.
The Thing screamed in feral hate, a lashing tentacle wiping at blinded eyes. For a moment it crawled on the floor, savage tentacles lashing out, the body twitching. Then it staggered up again, blinded eyes working, boiling hideously, the crushed flesh sloughing away in sodden gobbets.
Barclay lurched to his feet and dove forward with an ice axe. The flat of the weighty blade crushed against the side of the head. Again the unkillable monster went down. The tentacles lashed out, and suddenly Barclay fell to his feet in the grip of a living, livid rope. The rope dissolved as he held it, becoming a white-hot band that burned the flesh of his hands like living fire. Frantically he tore the stuff from him, held his hands where they could not be reached. The blind Thing felt and ripped at the tough, heavy wind-proof cloth, seeking flesh—flesh it could convert—