The huge blowtorch McReady had brought coughed solemnly. Abruptly it rumbled disapproval throatily. Then it laughed gurglingly, and thrust out a blue-white three-foot tongue. The Thing on the floor shrieked, flailed out blindly with tentacles that writhed and withered in the bubbling wrath of the blowtorch. It crawled and turned on the floor, it shrieked and hobbled madly, but always McReady held the blowtorch on the face, the dead eyes burning and bubbling uselessly. Frantically the Thing crawled and howled.
A tentacle sprouted a savage talon—and crisped in the flame. Steadily McReady moved with a planned, grim campaign. Helpless, maddened, the Thing retreated from the guttering torch, the caressing, licking tongue. For a moment it rebelled, squalling in inhuman hatred at the touch of the icy snow. Then it fell back before the charring breath of the torch, the stench of its flesh bathing it. Hopelessly it retreated—on and on across the Antarctic snow. The bitter wind swept over it, twisting the torch tongue; vainly it flopped, a trail of oily, stinking smoke bubbling away from it—
McReady walked back toward the shack silently. Barclay met him at the door. “No more?” the meteorologist asked grimly.
Barclay shook his head. “No more. It didn’t split?”
“It had other things to think about,” McReady assured him. “When I left it, it was a glowing coal. What was it doing?”
Barclay laughed shortly. “Wise boys, we are. Smash magnetos, so planes won’t work. Rip the boiler tubing out of the tractors. And leave that Thing alone for a week in this shack, alone and undisturbed.”
McReady looked in at the shack more carefully. The air, despite the ripped door, was hot and humid. On a table at the far end of the room rested a mass of coiled wires and small magnets, glass tubes and radio tubes. At the center, a block of rough stone rested. From the center of the block came the light that flooded the place, the fiercely blue light bluer than the glare of an electric arc, and from it came the sweetly soft hum. Off to one side was another mechanism of crystal glass, blown with an incredible neatness and delicacy, metal plates and a queer, shimmery sphere of insubstantiality.
“What is that?” McReady moved nearer.
Barclay grunted. “Leave it for Vane and Norris. But I can guess pretty well that’s atomic power. That stuff to the left—that’s a neat little thing for doing what we’ve been trying to do with 100-ton cyclotrons and so forth. It separates neutrons from heavy water, which he was getting from the surrounding ice.”
“Where did he get all—oh. Of course. A monster couldn’t be locked in—or out. He’s been through the apparatus caches.” McReady stared at the apparatus. “God, what minds that race must have—”
“The shimmery sphere—I think it’s a sphere of pure force. Neutrons can pass through any matter, and he wanted a supply, a reservoir of neutrons. Just project neutrons against silica—calcium—beryllium—almost anything, and the atomic energy is released. That thing is the atomic generator.”
Powell tucked a thermometer into his coat. “It’s 120° in here now, despite the open door. Our clothes have kept the heat out to an extent, but I’m sweating now.”
Barclay nodded. “The light’s cold. I found that. But it gives off heat to warm the place through that coil. He had all the power in the world, he could keep it warm and pleasant, as his race thought of warmth and pleasantness. Did you notice the light, the color of it?”
McReady nodded. “Beyond the stars is the answer. From beyond the stars, from a hotter planet that circled a brighter, bluer sun they came.” McReady glanced out the door toward the blasted, smoke-stained trail that flopped and wandered blindly off across the drift. “There won’t be any more coming, I guess. Sheer accident it landed here. What in God’s name did it do all that for?” He nodded toward the apparatus.
Barclay laughed softly. “Did you notice what it was working on when we came? Look.” He pointed toward the ceiling of the shack.
Like a knapsack made of flattened coffee-tins, with dangling cloth straps and leather belts, the mechanism clung to the ceiling. A tiny, glaring heart of supernal flame burned in it, yet burned through the ceiling’s wood without scorching it. Barclay walked over to it, grasped two of the dangling straps in his hands, and pulled it down by an effort. He strapped it about his body. A slight jump carried him in a weirdly slow arc across the room.
“Anti-gravity,” said Powell softly.”
“Anti-gravity,” Barclay nodded. “Yeah, we had ’em stopped, with no planes, and no birds. The birds hadn’t come—but they had coffee-tins and radio parts, and glass and the machine shop at night. And a week—a whole week all to itself. America in a single jump—with anti-gravity powered by the atomic energy of matter.
“We had ’em stopped. Another half hour—it was just tightening these straps on the device so it could wear it—another half hour, and we’d have stayed in Antarctica, and shot down any moving thing that came from the rest of the world.”
“The Albatross—” Powell said softly. “Do you suppose—”
“With this thing almost finished—with that death weapon it held in its hand?”
“No, by the grace of God, who evidently does hear very well, even down here, and the margin of half an hour, we keep our world, and the planets of the system too. Anti-gravity, you know, and atomic power. Because They came from another sun, a star beyond the stars, They came from a world with a bluer sun.”
PREVIEW OF THE SEQUEL
What follows is a preview of the next work to feature the Thing (or, in this case, Things). It’s a novel-length book with a tentative working title of The Things from Another World (assuming we can get the rights to use it!) which is, of course, a nod to the Howard Hawks film, The Thing from Another World. It is an attempt to build upon John W. Campbell’s world and creations, while remaining 100% true to the source material—in this case, both the novella “Who Goes There?” and Frozen Hell.
I hope you enjoy the beginning of the story and will return when the full work is finished.
—John Gregory Betancourt
Author of the sequel
PROLOGUE
The Pentagon
Arlington, Virginia
General Artemis Wu bellowed for his secretary. But instead of Lieutenant Kirby, Colonel Bloch entered his office, shut the door, and quietly approached his desk. Bloch, with his beak of a nose and watery brown eyes that seemed to look through rather than at you, had never impressed the general as anything more than a pencil-pusher, the tiniest of cogs in the U.S. military machine. He was the sort of bland little career officer who rose slowly but steadily through the ranks, competent at every level but no more than that.
“Sir,” Bloch said. His face remained stony.
“I assume from your presence here,” said Wu, gazing at him over the black frames of his glasses, “that you are responsible for this?” He thumped a stack of papers with a blunt index finger.
Typed on thin, age-yellowed paper, with a rusting staple in one corner, the report—dated October 29, 1938, and bearing the faded rubber-stamp marks of a dozen government agencies, plus a bright red CLASSIFIED across the top—clearly had been written by someone either crazy, on drugs, or both. A UFO buried in the ice in Antarctica…conveniently blown up, so no evidence remained? A telepathic monster that could absorb—and assume the shape of—any creature it encountered…also conveniently destroyed? Ridiculous.