Джон Кэмпбелл - Frozen Hell

McReady turned to Powell with a slight smile. “This crowded city, with its teeming population, oppresses me. That, and the dominance of human sounds above the sounds of wind.”

“Secondary Magnetic seem rather isolated?” Powell smiled.

“Beyond the end of nowhere. It was unreal. That beast from the pit—the incredible ship that couldn’t have been—the impossible wind that never stopped. They were parts of a nightmare dreamt by an insane mind.”

“That animal—I haven’t seen it yet.” Powell said.

The smile left McReady’s face. “Well—don’t. Let Blair pickle that damned Thing if he wants to, then ask him questions. That bald plateau was a superior place of torture in this frozen hell, and that beast should be the high chief devil that runs it. Part of the reason this whole expeditions seems like a nightmare is that I had one—and it’s so real, it’s hard to disentangle. I dreamed that child of nature, as Blair called it, had somehow retained a sluggish life. That it was vaguely understanding everything going on about it, all the endless infinity of black polar nights and glittering polar days through all the ages it lay there trapped. A sluggish life that stirred at our coming, and wasn’t destroyed even with the ice axe through its brain. And an inhuman, unhuman hatred and determination.”

“Quite a dream.”

“Damnedest nightmare I ever had, though that face is enough to give anybody a nightmare. Even subconsciously I must have revolted against it, because in the dream it seemed to run and change and mold slowly into Vane’s face.”

Powell halted just outside the Ad Building door and looked at McReady. “Uhh. ‘Pleasant dreams,’ I take it, is not the proper nightly salutation after watching that animal. Turned into Vane’s face, did it?”

McReady nodded. “That wasn’t the worst part. I had the damnedest conviction it turned into Vane’s face because it wanted to, and that it could turn into anything, or anybody. That it had a secret, unholy knowledge of life and life-stuff, protoplasm, gained through ages of experiment and thought. That it wasn’t bound to any form or size or shape, but could mold its very blood and flesh and smallest cell to not merely imitate, but duplicate the blood and flesh and cells of any other thing it chose. And read the thoughts, the habits, the mind of anyone.”

Powell grunted. “Sufficiently screwy ideas. I don’t think I’ll look at that creature, if that’s the sort of dream it evokes.”

McReady laughed uncertainly. “I wouldn’t if I were in your place. I’d give a year of my life to forget it now. It stirs your mind with unpleasant ideas, thoughts, and dreamings of other worlds man was never intended to know. Such as that concept I just suggested. Did you pause to think what would happen if such a creature—a being with such powers—were loosed on Earth?”

“You’re not suggesting this Thing had them?” Powell demanded.

McReady shook his head. “The nightmare put the conception in my mind. You won’t thank me for mentioning it, you’ll find, because it sticks like a burr. It brings an uneasy look-over-your-shoulder feeling, a sort of mental examining of your friends.”

“Of your friends?”

McReady put his hand on the doorknob of the Ad Building. His eyes did not meet Powell’s as he laughed.

“Yeah—your friends. If a Thing like that could be—reading minds—duplicating tissue, face, mannerisms—how are you going to know I—or any other person you meet is—is human? It might just be… call it an imitation, a perfect imitation, conceived in hell and dedicated to purposes you couldn’t follow.”

Powell cursed softly. “Christ, Mac, you think of the damnedest, unhappiest things. Ye Gods—damn it, I’d know—why—I could—”

McReady nodded. “Sorry, Stan. I shouldn’t have told you, but that’s been riding me ever since I had that dream. I’m a louse to pass it on, but mulling over the idea by yourself drives you slowly nuts.”

Powell knocked McReady’s hand from the door and yanked it open viciously. “Oh, hell. I’d—”

His voice trailed into silence as he joined the group collected around the central table. A tarpaulin was spread out on it, and a rough cylinder of ice, half sheeted on that. Blair was picking gently at the ice with a tack hammer and a cold chisel.

“I know you don’t like the Thing, Connant, but it’s just got to be thawed out right. You say leave it as is ’til we get back to civilization. Swell, but how are we going to keep it from thawing and rotting while we cross the equator? You don’t want to sit up with it one night. What do you suggest, that I hang its corpse in the freezer with the beef?” Blair looked up from his work triumphantly.

Kinner, the stocky, scar-faced cook, saved Connant the trouble of answering. “Hey you listen mister, you put that thing in the box with the meat, and by all the gods that ever were, I’ll put you in to keep it company. You birds have brought everything you could think of in on my tables here already, but you go putting things like that in my meat box, or my meat cache here, and you cook your own damn grub.”

“But Kinner, this is the only table that’s big enough to work on,” Blair objected. “Everybody’s explained that.”

“Yeah, and everybody’s brought everything else in here. Clark brings in his dogs every time there’s a fight, and he sews ’em up on that table. Ralsen brings in his sledges. Jesus, the only thing you haven’t brought in is the Boeing plane, and you’d have that in if you could figure a way to get it through the tunnels.”

Commander Garry chuckled. “It gets a bit crowded, eh Kinner? I guess we all find it that way at times.”

“I know the cosmic ray shack’s going to be too crowded if I have to sit up with that Thing,” Connant growled. “Why can’t you go on chipping the ice away from around it—you can do that without anybody butting in on you, I assure you—and then hang the Thing up over the power plant boiler? That’s warm enough. It’ll thaw out a chicken—even a side of beef—in about 10 hours.”

“I know,” Blair protested, dropping the cold chisel and hammer to gesture more effectively, his small body tense with excitement and earnestness, “but this is too damned important to take any chances. There never was a find like this before; I guess there never will be again. It’s the only chance men will ever have, and its got to be done right . I’ve got to get this thing dissected and pickled in formaldehyde before something happens. Microscopic observations will have to be made at once.

“Look, you remember how fish we caught down near the Ross Sea would freeze almost as soon as we got ’em on deck, and come to life if we thawed ’em out. Low forms of life aren’t killed by fast freezing—”

“Hey, for Christ’s sake, you mean that Thing will come to life?” Connant yelled. “You get the damned Thing—let me at it! That’s gonna be in so many pieces—”

“No— no , you fool—” Blair jumped in front of Connant to protect his treasure. “No, only low forms of life. For Pete’s sake let me finish. You can’t thaw higher forms of life and have ’em come to. Wait a minute now. Hold it. A fish can come to, because it’s so low a form of life, so slightly organized, that the individual cells of its body can revive, and that’s enough to reestablish life. Any higher forms thawed out that way are dead, because, though the individual cells revive, they die because they must have organization to live. There’s a sort of potential life in quick-frozen animals of any sort, but it can’t, under any conceivable circumstances, become active life in a higher animal. The higher animals are too complex. This is dead, or as good as dead.”