Джон Кэмпбелл - Frozen Hell

“How about the—thing you found?” Blair asked.

“No dope.” Vane stoked his pipe and lit it. “We didn’t mess with it much, Unpleasant animal, I can tell you that. I think we said about all we knew about it. Frozen hard as the ice it’s in. Might have been there a million years—or fifty million. Perfectly preserved, of course, and dead as those mammoths they find in Siberia. It’s kept for some while already, so we figured it’d keep until you got here. You can play with it. We didn’t like it.”

“You described the head rather vaguely,” the biologist objected. “Is it anthropomorphous?”

“Man-like? The rest of it’s under the ice and rather blurred. What we could see suggested that we let you look at it. We saw enough. If it had a disposition such as the face indicated, I’m not interested, even if it’s been dead since Antarctica froze.”

“Disposition—the face—?” Blair looked curiously at the members of the Station party.

Barclay spat into the little stove and heaved in a few lumps of coal. “You can look at it tomorrow. You’d rather.”

“Eh?”

“He means you’ll sleep better,” Vane said. “There aren’t any scientific terms for facial expression, so far as I know.” He looked into the fire for a moment silently. “Anyway, the face isn’t human, so maybe we can’t interpret it. He might actually be registering resignation in the only way his kind of face could. But I don’t think so. Certainly if he was, he started out with a terrible handicap; that face wasn’t designed to register any peaceable emotion. From human experience—which one glance at the face would assure you has nothing to do with the problem whatever—it isn’t remotely human—I’d say the thing was trapped, and it was mad. Not crazy, though any human to have as much distilled essence of hatred in his eyes would have to be crazy. I think it was just angry.

“Vaguely through the ice, I got a suggestion that the flying submarine-thing was jammed up against a rock wall, the nose crumpled in. The small section we exposed was strained and bent; I think the nose was ruined. From the build and the lines, I’d say that whatever it had been, it was fast—damn fast. Make the trip from the magnetic pole to where it was in maybe 30 seconds, say, or—perhaps—a trip from Mars or Venus in three or four days. Nothing Earth ever spawned had the inexpressibly cruel hatred those three red eyes displayed, I know that.

“But the center section of the ship had an impossible magnetic mass, the section where driving engines ought to be. All that attraction we detected 80 miles away at Big Magnet originated in a section about 20 by 20 feet. That’s fact. This isn’t even theory, it’s just guess. I think that ship came down to Earth too near the magnetic pole, and the driving mechanism—however it may have worked—soaked up too much of Earth’s magnetic field and blew out. Earth’s field isn’t particularly intense, but it’s big. A hundred million ampere current circulating the equator might cause it. If that ship’s engines tangled with the planet’s field, something would blow. It wouldn’t be the Earth’s field.

“So that thing came out of its ship, trapped. It must belong to an older race than man. It looked out over an Antarctica already frozen, perhaps even colder then than now. Four hundred miles of it in every direction, four hundred miles of impassable glaciation without a living thing bigger than a microbe or an alga between it and an unattainable sea. And oh, God the hatred in that three-eyed face, with its blue earthworm hair.

“Damn it man, let’s turn in. Tomorrow’s soon enough to, think about that Thing out of the Pit.”

Vane grunted, knocked out his dead pipe against the belly of the copper stove, and started fixing up his bunk. The wind mouthed throaty gurgles down the stove pipe, curses and maledictions whose seeming syllables made one listen, struggling to understand the nearly-intelligible vindictiveness. Syllables, perhaps, that the Thing out in the frozen pit had taught it once, ages ago.

The wind was belching the same vague syllables when they rose in the morning. Norris, taking his turn at starting the sullen stove, cursed and kicked it back to life.

When they started out, the wind slashed at them with an edge keened by a -45° temperature. The lashings of the sledge grunting and thrumming under its pressure. The unremitting force seemed to be pushing them away, trying to turn them back from the flag-marked trail. Many of the tough, orange cloth flags had been whipped to three-inch tattered remnants in the 30 hours since they had been placed, and some of them had been torn away completely.

But the trail was marked now. They no longer had to feel an uncertain way through the treacherous crevasses, and as they passed the region cracked and torn by pressure from the ice-river to the south, the orange blot of the tractor loomed up against the colored wash of the northern horizon. Close beyond it, the wind-leveled heaps of ice chips the Magnetic Station party had cut from around the buried ship marked the entrance to the excavation.

They parked and dismounted. McReady lead the way into the tunnel, substituting a furiously incandescent magnesium-metal torch for the dimmer pressure lamps used on the trail. The magnesium strips burned with an incredible white light in the blue crystalline tube, the ice slanting down about them in rough, blazing gems of crystalline refraction. The fierce thrust of the radiance seeped through the ice for a distance of more than a hundred feet. From the surface, the men below became vast bat-like shadows writhing beneath the ice, the whole ice field glowing with an inner incandescence for 100 feet around save for the immense black shadow of the strange ship, frozen in this glacier unknown ages before.

When they reached the Thing, Blair and Copper looked thoughtfully at the face staring up from the scintillant floor of the tube. Ice chips blown in by the wind had dusted it with a powder that glittered like diamond-dust under the brilliance of the magnesium flare.

Blair drew a bulky little camera out from under his windproof clothes and took half a dozen pictures. The face seemed disembodied, a mad sculptor’s interpretation of incarnate evil tossed carelessly on a jeweled floor. Copper scraped carefully with an ice axe and passed his ungloved hand over the smoothed surface. His body heat fused the surface to a black, slick, wavy lens giving view to the depths below.

McReady grinned as the doctor hastily scuffed the surface with the ice crampons on his heel. “That’s our pretty beastie, Doc. We have got to dig the damned thing out.”

“Ugh. Damned is right. That thing belongs in this sunken pit in the middle of a frozen hell. It isn’t quite so bad, here. That glittering ice under the rather unreal light of that flare—” Copper shook himself. “Hell of a thing for a medical man and a scientist to say, but I don’t want to dig it out.”

Blair continued to stare down at the face. The little biologist spoke suddenly above the organ thrum of the wind over the pit’s mouth. “You split the head accidentally, when you were digging down to it?”

McReady nodded. “You couldn’t see what you were approaching because of the ice chips. This ice is as clear as glass once you smooth it, but it’s like frosted glass when you’re digging. First warning we had was when I struck and heard a different scrunch sound. Those beryllium-bronze tools are heavy, and my axe went right through that—that skull.”

“It’s a member of a race far more ancient than man’s, all right.” The biologist nodded. “The developments would indicate that. Strange, though, the way fur sprouts on the flesh. Looks almost active now—as though it had been just beginning when the creature froze here. But it’s not so bad. It has a rather—uh—unpleasant expression, but it’s as much a child of nature, and her strange moods, as are men or dogs or the algae that somehow manage to live down here, where no other living thing is.”