“Nope. It’s all up top at that moment. So, Jerry, you want to tell us about it or keep us in suspense?”
“Yeah, Nagel,” Achmed rumbled. “What the devil could scare you, anyway?”
Nagel reached over, picked up his beer, and swigged it, downing maybe half a liter before he paused. Then he gave a loud, ugly belch.
“Oh, Jerry! If you can’t mind your manners go outside and play!” Randi told him, not really grossed out but knowing that Jerry was putting on a performance, either to deflect questions or to show he wasn’t as frightened as she’d seen him. She wondered about that most of all. Was it unusual, or had she simply seen him for the first time with his guard down? It sure wasn’t down now.
“All right, Jerry, if that’s how comfortable you are, want to tell me what you saw when I was being lifted off?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “I still want to see the video, considering the situation and the visibility,” he replied, “but, if you must know, I thought I saw a kind of man climbing up the last part of that ladder.”
“A man? And that scared you?”
“Well, it didn’t make me feel great,” he told them. “I said it was a kind of man. All I saw was an arm and a head, but it had the usual requirements. Except that it wasn’t right. You remember the texture of that worm thing, whatever it was? Kind of an icky translucent character, like clear glues?”
“Yes. You mean—”
He nodded. “Yep. It was a man made out of that stuff. Not covered by it, made of it. Kind of like a man sculpted out of stiff water or fluid ice.”
The ship-to-surface intercom opened at that. “Hello, everybody,” An Li’s voice came to them. “I just overheard the description and it’s basically what we saw and what he said in the debriefing. Take a look. First, real time. Look real sharp!”
The holographic projector over the table in the center of the room showed some static, then suddenly became a three-dimensional replay, without sound, of those last awful moments on the roof, all from Jerry’s point of view. He was watching the shape of the shuttle emerge from the storm, then helping Randi position herself to grab the first cable. At that moment he seemed to hear or sense something and turned, and he looked back at the ladder. A right hand, then more of an arm came up as something was climbing the last rungs of the ladder. Then, quickly, there was a figure partially visible, and then Jerry turned and took a running leap and grabbed the second cable even though he wasn’t fully in position for it.
“Oooowee! Superman!” Cross noted approvingly. “That’s one hell of a leap, there!”
The video cut out at that point. “Any more and you’d get very dizzy very fast,” An Li warned them. “Did you see it?”
“Yeah, we all saw it,” Sark commented. “Not much to see, though. So fast I dunno if I was seeing what I thought or what he told me to look for.”
“Okay, here we go again, only this time we’ll hold each frame for one second.”
At sixty frames a second, that gave them a good five minutes to look at the very short video, more than enough. In fact, it was almost maddening waiting for that hand to appear, then slowly, ever so slowly, advance, exposing a little more of the person or thing behind it as it climbed the ladder. Jerry had been a good observer, though. It was a very human hand and arm made of something no human had ever been made of.
Now, with agonizing slowness, the head began to emerge, and Randi Queson was suddenly aware that it had become so quiet in the room she could hear her own breathing.
The picture was grainy; the sandstorm wasn’t the best environment for clear pictures, but it wasn’t so bad that the details couldn’t be made out, particularly when isolated and enlarged as An Li had done.
You could see the hair almost to individual strands in some frames, yet there was one thing about it that was very unusual.
“That hair’s fixed, like a sculpture,” Randi noted, breaking the silence.
“Yeah, or more like gelatin, some kind of clear gelatin,” Lucky Cross added. “Weird, ’cause the figure’s animated just like a human. Look at how the hand grabs and the muscles implied on the arm flex.”
The living sculpture, as they began to think of it, continued to slowly emerge, until they finally saw the full face and part of a shoulder. The other hand was just about to come up to grab the other side of the ladder nearer the top; you could tell that by the very natural climbing motion it was making, much like any of them would look climbing a ladder.
The face was also a living sculpture; the eyes were made of the same stuff, but did give some odd sense of looking around, and the lips parted a bit, revealing some teeth. But that was all they got before it suddenly ended.
Everybody sat back in their chairs. Sark looked over at Cross, grabbed the glass with some of the pastel blue stuff, and took a swig.
“Back home, my people would have considered that a demonic being,” Achmed said. “Although I am a rational and logical man and well traveled, at the moment I can think of no other explanation myself.”
“Well?” An Li prompted. “It’s not like we can take samples and do analysis of this. We need some input, people!”
Jerry shrugged. “Nice to see I’m not nuts or given to panicky hallucinations. I have to assume that if the whole thing climbed up on the roof it would be a copy of a human being in full, probably including his dick and pubic hair. That’s what it is, though. There was no muscle inside that stuff. It just knew exactly what a man looked like and was copying everything but the coloration. Since there was more than one, I’m sure of that, we got to assume that the second one was either below or climbing up behind him. I have to admit that it was the teeth that shook me. I mean, why bother?”
“Because whatever it is knew precisely how the human body worked and should look,” Randi said, thinking. “I think whatever is required for consistency simply is made, maybe faster than the eye can see, as required. Did you notice the features on him?”
Nagel nodded. “Yeah. Kind of east Indian or South Asian, like the people who built this place. It was copying one of them for sure, as close as it could, but it just doesn’t have any pigment. Or, at least, it doesn’t have any way to color the various parts of people.”
“Okay, so they’re alien organisms who can mimic humans,” Randi said. “So the next question is, why?”
“Huh?”
“Why mimic us if you can’t fool us? They’re absolutely related to that worm or whatever. Extensions of it, maybe, or offspring, or maybe just smaller relatives.”
“Yeah, but, if they can do that, how come the scenes all over the colony?” An Li put in. “How come they couldn’t get through any inorganic substances before and now they know how to throw the switches and force doors open?”
Randi Queson was thinking. “Maybe they didn’t know when they attacked the colony. Maybe they learned. Unless we can access the records from the control room we’ll probably never know for sure, but I’ve got a scenario in mind that fits. Maybe it’s all wrong, but it’s at least a working hypothesis.”
“Shoot.”
“Suppose those new greenhouses were just being put on line. Until then, this creature, whatever it was, was happy and dumb and living somewhere in that sea down there eating who knows what? Then they ramped up the reactor power to power up the new complex, and test things all out, and that was enough of a jolt or enough warmth that it got attracted to the core. Who knows if it was that big or lots of little ones or whatever? It probably bided its time. Maybe it ate one of the service supervisors in there, at a quiet time, night shift, or whatever, when it might be assumed that he or she fell in. Maybe somebody did fall in by accident. Anyway, it got a sample, and somehow this thing used that sample to adapt to consuming and converting our organic tissue. Little by little, it figured a way in. That buckling was probably some kind of structural mistake or sloppiness that developed over time, but the settlers hadn’t bothered to fix it because the radiation levels weren’t triggering any dangers and they had other things to do. Heck, replacing some of it might have caused a temporary shutdown, so the maintenance boys went against the political boys and you know who always wins those arguments.”