“So far so good,” An Li replied.
“Well, it used that to extrude into the control room. I think that, once it came out, it did it with as much speed as it could muster. It simply consumed everything and everybody who fit this new food model.”
“You said ‘extrude,’ ” Cross noted. “You think it’s able to come through the keyhole?”
“Probably, yes. It’s certainly a shape changer or it wouldn’t have that human copy ability. I don’t know what stiffens it, what powers it, or whatever, but I think it can flow almost like a thick liquid. Probably not a keyhole, but those buckled plates in the floor didn’t allow all that much room. But they didn’t have much time to do anything, and they had no real defense. I think we’re dealing with a big single organism, but one that can spin off parts of itself and, although unconnected, use them just like we use arms, legs, whatever.”
“But how does it learn?” Sark wondered. “And where’s its brain since it does? And why did it take so long to learn stuff?”
“Maybe it didn’t,” the anthropologist replied. “If it, and lots of extensions of it, wiped out this colony in a matter of a day or so, a colony that had no heavy defenses or even a lot of light arms, it had a ton of experiences and new knowledge. But think of how that must have been incredibly confusing to it, even bewildering. This thing adapts. It’s the most adaptable creature I’ve ever heard of, just judging from what we’ve seen. But ‘alien’ is a very good term to remember. We don’t know its evolution, we don’t know its composition, origins, or makeup. Does it reason or just copy?”
“It figured out how to override the fire doors,” Nagel pointed out. “I’d call that some good measure of reasoning, particularly since the fire doors weren’t tripped in the first place. How could they have seen that? They had to figure it out.”
“A point, but we don’t know how they did it. Still, I’m willing to admit to a level of reasoning here. They didn’t come for us when we were well in and exposed. They had to know that we were part of a larger group, and they held back and followed us. Only when it looked like we were on to them, or were going to get out fast and clean, did they try for us. That shows cunning. Also, we ran ferrets through every square millimeter of that place before we went down, yet they showed nothing organic, no life, and nothing moving. That meant that they were all within the control room area, maybe inside, where our instruments and ferrets wouldn’t be able to tell them from the residual radiation.”
“Yeah, we didn’t send any ferrets into the core area because of the reception problems and the fact that it seemed normal,” An Li agreed. “So, it hid. It watched our little toys scramble around, then it watched you two without showing itself even after you found the main body of the thing. It’s smart and it’s sneaky. But if you look close at one side of the face, it also has problems with the sandstorm. Otherwise, it would just have gone out the side door and waited for you. It came through the fire door rather than going around, so we know it has weaknesses.”
“The question is,” said Randi Queson, “did it learn what it did by observing and then over years digesting and correlating and meditating on all that it saw, or does it, somehow, have some or much of the knowledge of those it consumed? Even if the former this thing is one of the most dangerous organisms ever found. If the latter, it’s the most dangerous organism.”
“You know, according to our charter, if this is a reasoning, sentient organism previously unknown we can’t disturb it, let alone hurt it, so long as it stays on its own planet,” An Li pointed out. “This can make salvage really sticky in a legal sense.”
“Okay,” Achmed growled. “So how do we kill it?”
III: SALVAGE OPERATION
There wasn’t an awful lot of sentiment among the crew for respecting a new lifeform. There just wasn’t much love lost for a creature or creatures who had killed so many humans so wantonly and who had then tried to get at them. There were some, including Randi and Jerry, who wondered about the safety of continuing, and whether or not it was worth the potential cost even if doable, but the general sentiment was, if it could be done, let’s do it, and if this thing gets in the way, let’s deal with it.
“I’m not at all sure what would kill it,” Randi Queson commented. “Something certainly can—if it eats, it can be gotten—but without a lot of experimentation on it who can tell? I doubt if shooting it with anything we have would do much. The industrial stuff, maybe, but not any sort of slicer and dicer. We’d simply make a big one into a few littler ones who’d recombine and be even angrier. We can probably incinerate it, if we’re sure we do it completely, or totally and completely disintegrate it, but if we do we’d better get all of it or it’ll just come back.”
“Seems to me the best thing to do would be to poison it,” Sark suggested. “Get the whole damned thing at once. Let it gobble up its own doom.”
“That’s great, except that it probably wouldn’t work. Any poison would probably be ingested by one of the smaller bits, and if it was very slow acting the thing would probably adapt to the new substance and either expel it or figure out a way to eat it. Fast and it’s not going to be able to infect all the pieces. As we said, if you miss even one, we’re potentially toast.”
The problem was fed to the ship’s master computer, which came up with a compromise none of them had considered.
The lifeforms all burned food for energy in a range that made them show up on sensors the same as people. That meant they could be located. Doing anything to the large mass in the core would be impractical, maybe impossible with what they had available, and would certainly take better lab work than they could do even if they could figure out how to safely get and contain a tissue sample of the creature or creatures. They also had mass, but couldn’t come through walls or floors or solid rock, and certainly they still had problems with inorganic substances overall.
The obvious solution was to use the big industrial salvage lasers to sever the greenhouses from the main complex and then create a molten rock flow that would cover and seal in the cliffside complex, core and all. Then it would be a matter of sending in small disassembler robots with full torches and dealing with the small ones that might be left outside. From that point on, and with a constant watch on the cliffside to insure that there were no more holes and that there was no breakout by the main mass, they could methodically and safely disassemble the greenhouses. The profit would still be huge; it just wouldn’t be as huge as if they could have reclaimed the interior complex and the reactor. Humans would be placed in harm’s way only when absolutely necessary, always fully armed and fully suited up, and with cover.
“The computer believes we could do this operation in six weeks or less, that the profit on the enterprise would still be in the millions, and that it’s the most likely compromise,” An Li told them. “Of course, it assumes that we can contain the thing and deal with any small ones left outside.”