Джон Кэмпбелл - Frozen Hell

“Unpleasant.” Copper grunted. “I suppose we have to get that thing out and start investigating the ship. I hope there aren’t more like it inside.”

“There probably are,” McReady said. “Vane estimated that it would take at least ten beings to run it—and that it could readily carry three hundred.”

Copper whistled. “What do you think it weighs? Can we get it out in one piece?”

McReady glanced at him. “I don’t know. I’ve never had to estimate anything like this.

“Say 85 pounds,” Blair said. “It’s as big as a husky dog.”

“Are you sure you want it out?” Copper asked Blair. “As Vane said, for sheer, unadulterated malignity, I’d stack that up against a cross between a cornered rat, a fer-de-lance and a tenth century devil straight out of hell.”

“Your hybrid would lose.” McReady shook his head. “I hope Baldwin doesn’t look at this thing. If that artist ever gets this burned into his brain, his pictures are going to be unholy things. We’ve got to cut this loose. Barclay’s starting the tractor, and by the time he gets up steam, we ought to have this, and its surrounding block of ice cut loose.”

Vane slid down the shaft in a shower of ice chips. “Like our pet, Copper?”

“Ugh. I’ll get over my damned curiosity after this. Is Norris handy up there?”

“He is.”

“Ask him to throw down a tarpaulin or something. I’ll work better with that face covered.”

“It isn’t ugly,” Vane pointed out judicially. “In a way, though those three eyes are rather startling, and that—hair, I guess you’d call it, Though it may be an organ of some unknown sense. Anyway, it may be startling, but when you come down to it, the features are rather fine, almost classically fine.”

“Hell is ruled by a fallen angel.” Copper turned toward the blank metal wall of the ship. “What’s this metal, found out?”

Vane shook his head. “We haven’t apparatus to find out. tried some acid from the battery, but it didn’t make any impression, just rolled off. It’s harder than our beryllium-bronze tools, and a spare gear from the tractor, made of specially hardened chrome-alloy steel, didn’t touch it. The bluish cast in the light suggests a high-chrome alloy, but God knows what those beings would use. It’s magnetic as blazes, so probably some high-chrome steel. But as I say, we don’t know the properties of their alloys, nor the source of their metals. We’re near the center of their ship, though, and I think I saw a shadow of a huge metal plate when Mac was burning that torch down here. Let’s dig that thing loose and angle down to the right here.”

The ice axes bit into the brittle crystal. McReady propped the remnant of his magnesium torch in a cleft in the ice, where it burned with an occasional splutter. The tail end vanished in a last burst of furious incandescence and blue flame as it burned down, and through the pool of water it had melted, reacting as viciously with the water as it had with the cold air.

In the light of pressure lamps, the cavity expanded outward and downward. The tractor on the surface had steam up now, and its winch snaked the loosened ice chips to the surface, relieving them of the heaviest work. The Thing in the ice had become a vague shadow encased in a glinting, refractive pillar. When the pillar was some 5 feet tall and 3 feet in diameter, they cut it loose. The tractor pulled it up, while Vane and Norris steadied it, eased it past the rough spots.

The brilliant wash of color from the slow-rising sun glinted on the block as they lashed it to a sledge, and covered it with a tarpaulin. The temperature was rising slowly, toward -40°, and with it, the wind howled slightly higher notes about the orange cab of the tractor, snaking the black cloud of smoke from its stack into instant disappearance.

Norris went below to relieve Vane, while Vane took his place at the mouth of the pit, dumping the sacks of chips and ice chunks that came up. Barclay and McReady worked together at something for a while, then McReady went down the pit with the carpenter’s hand saw, trailing a power lead from the tractor’s humming dynamo. The schuff of the ice axes stopped, giving way to the angry snarl of the saw driving through the ice in swift lines. The ice began coming up in five-inch-thick slabs two feet square.

The sun was sweeping down again toward the horizon when Vane went below. They had reached the great metal plate they had seen as a coned shadow against the light of the magnesium flare; it was a great lock-door, nearly six feet square and a foot thick, swung open to leave a crack a foot wide. The saw and axes freed its outer surface and cut back into the airlock beyond as far as possible, but the immense door was held fast by the solid blue pack of ice within, and beyond their reach.

Barclay came down to examine it, a blowtorch melting smooth windows in the ice that made possible examination of the mechanism within. Immense metal bolts designed to hold the door fast against rubbery grommets were dimly visible, bolts retracted now into screw-toothed sheaths.

“If we could loosen that ice pack inside, I think I could get the tractor jack in this crack here, and pull her open.“ Barclay reported at last. “About loosening that ice, I don’t know. We have the decanite explosive bombs, but I think they’d wreck more than help. But how about the thermite?”

“Think they’d do the trick?” Vane asked.

“They should. They soften ice by the radiant heat, for a radius of about twenty feet, which is more than enough.”

“Might they not start a fire, though?” Copper objected.

Barclay grunted. “Some fire, Doc, that can burn in solid ice. Besides, there’s nothing but metal in there that I can see.”

“One, or two?” Vane asked.

“One, and then another if necessary. Too much heat in that confined space might make some steam. The door will probably pop open anyway. I’ll place the bomb, wire it, and then move the tractor back beyond the ridge. The escaping radiant heat might rot some of this other ice and open a crevasse under our feet.”

Barclay watched as McReady, last to leave, crawled out of the prepared hole.

“All clear!” he called. “Wait ’til I get over there.”

He ran toward them, running the long electric cable leading from tractor to bomb through his hand as he came, checking for possible breaks. The six men stood on the peak of the ridge, the slight slope down to the pit clear before them. The equipment had been moved back, save for ice axes, shovels and small items. There was no great danger of crevassing, but none at all beyond the rock ridge, where the ice pressure changed direction. Barclay speeded the dynamo until it hummed softly, then choked with a startled snarl as he closed the knife switch.

A light appeared in the ice beneath the pit mouth—25 pounds of aluminum powder and iron oxide/thermite mixture starting into an incredible inferno. Molten metallic iron flared at a temperature almost high enough to make the metal boil, running from the suddenly molten-steel casing into the ice. The ice exploded into steam, cracking, pushing, the intolerable glare of radiant energy shooting out paths of weakness through the solid stuff.

A puff of steam shot up from the pit mouth. “That ought to be about all,” Barclay decided as the fierce glare began to fade slowly. He waited a moment, slowing the dynamo. The others started forward slowly—started, and stopped. The glare was building up again, becoming more brilliant. Another puff of steam belched up from the pit into the Antarctic twilight. The fierce light below was growing stronger still.

A slow hissing roar built up, a roar that forced itself against the rushing stream of the wind toward them; white clouds of steam become ice-smoke whipped away from the pit mouth in the breach of the wind. The glare was spreading, a wide patch of ice that sent a dazzling spear of light high into the dark Antarctic sky, a roar that became a thunder. The pit was growing visibly before the mad rush of a vast jet of steam. Incredibly, the ice above the buried Thing from unknown ages began to heave, cracking in spreading radiants with a muffled tearing rip. Vastly the surface of the ice heaved and cracked, became a white, glowing mass, behind which there was an incredible, unearthly torch. The thunder of the vast plume of steam bellowing through the growing pit was whipped away by the wind as the men threw themselves flat on the ice. A sky-shaking roar thrust fifty-foot blocks of ice into the air, freeing an incandescent, growing lake of molten, blazing metal. For a moment the vast shape of the stranger ship was limned in its pyre: a slumping streamlined oblong 300 feet in length, sixty feet in diameter, lying precariously on a rocky slope, its vast nose crumpled against a towering bastion of grey, hard granite.