Джон Кэмпбелл - Frozen Hell

“There ain’t no such thing as good as dead. That’s going to be dead.” Connant stated flatly. “Gimme that ice axe.”

Commander Garry laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Wait a minute Connant. I want to get this straight. I agree with you that this thing is too unpleasant to have alive, but I had no idea there was even the faintest possibility of life.”

Dr. Copper pulled his pipe from between his teeth. “There isn’t,” he stated. “Blair’s being technical. That’s dead, dead as the mammoths they find frozen in Siberia. Potential life is like atomic energy; it may be there, but nobody’s shown it yet, and we have all sorts of proof that Things don’t live after being frozen. What’s the point, Blair?”

The little biologist shook himself. “The point is,” he said in an injured tone, “that the individual life cells might display some of the characteristics they had in life, if thawed properly. A man’s muscle cells live for hours after his body dies. Just because they live, and a few things like hair and fingernail cells live, you wouldn’t accuse a corpse of being a zombie, or something. Now, if I thaw this right, I may have a chance to find out something about the kind of world it’s native to. We don’t know, and can’t know, whether it came from Earth, or Mars, or Venus, or from beyond the stars. But if we find its cells are designed for a dry, desiccated, cool climate, we can guess Mars or a planet like it. If they’re suited to a hot, humid climate, we can think about another world.

“It’s all right to thaw a chicken for the pot by using a blowtorch, or a jet of live steam, but I don’t think any of you want this Thing cooked and served for—”

“Shut up, you louse. God, what a thought!” Benning, the aviation mechanic looked green about the gills.

“All right, then, don’t suggest I thaw it over the power plant boiler the way we do beef or chickens. It’s got to be thawed in a warm room overnight. I’ll chip this ice off, and we can put it in the Cosmos House.”

“Go ahead and get the Thing off my table, then,” Kinner growled. “But keep that canvas over it. It looks indecent, whether those are clothes it has on or not.”

“Kinner’s going modest on us.” Connant jeered.

Kinner slanted his eyes up toward the physicist. “All right, big man, and what were you grousing about a minute ago? We can set that Thing in a chair next to you tonight if you want.”

“Well, I’m not afraid of its face, anyway. I don’t like keeping a wake over its corpse particularly, but I’m going to do it.”

Kinner grinned. “Uh-huh.” He went off to the galley stove and shook down the ashes vigorously, drowning the brittle chipping of the ice as Blair went to work again.

McReady grinned toward Powell. “Bar told him he’d be the most popular man in camp when he sprang his little proposition.”

“I don’t wonder.” Powell found himself glancing at the vaguely translucent ice out of the corner of his eye “You’re none too popular with me right now. ”

“ Cluck ,” reported the cosmic ray counter, “ cluck-burrrrr-cluck .”

Connant started and dropped his pencil. “Damnation.”

The physicist looked toward the far corner, back at the Geiger counter on the table near that corner, and crawled under the desk at which he had been working to get the pencil. He sat down at his work again, trying to make his writing more even. It tended to have jerks and quavers in it, in time with the abrupt proud-hen noises of the Geiger counter. The muted whoosh of the pressure lamp he was using for illumination, the mingled grunts and bugle calls of a dozen men sleeping down the corridor in Paradise House formed the background sounds for the irregular, clucking noises of the counter, the occasional rustle of falling coal in the copper-bellied stove. And a soft, steady drip-drip-drip from the Thing in the corner.

Connant jerked a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, snapped it so that a cigarette protruded, and jabbed the cylinder into his mouth. The lighter failed to function, and he pawed angrily through the pile of papers in search of a match. He scratched the wheel of the lighter several times, dropped it with a curse, and got up to pluck a hot coal from the stove with the coal-tongs.

The lighter functioned instantly when he tried it on returning to the desk. The counter ripped out a series of chuckling guffaws as a burst of cosmic rays struck it. Connant turned to glower at it, then tried to concentrate on the interpretation of data collected during the past week. The weekly summary—

He gave up and yielded to curiosity, or nervousness. He lifted the pressure lamp from the desk and carried it over to the table in the corner. Then he returned to the stove and picked up the coal tongs.

The beast had been thawing for nearly 18 hours now. He poked at it with an unconscious caution; the flesh was no longer hard as armor plate, but had assumed a rubbery texture. It looked like wet, blue rubber glistening under droplets of water like little round jewels in the glare of the gasoline pressure lantern. Connant felt an unreasoning desire to pour the contents of the lamp’s reservoir over the Thing in its box and drop the cigarette into it. The three red eyes glared up at him sightlessly, the ruby eyeballs reflecting murky, smoky rays of light.

He realized vaguely that he had been looking at them a very long time, even vaguely understood that they were no longer sightless. But it did not seem of importance, of no more importance than the labored, slow motion of the tentacular things that sprouted from the base of the scrawny, slowly pulsing neck.

Connant picked up the pressure lamp and returned to his chair. He sat down, staring at the pages of mathematics before him. The clucking of the counter was less disturbing, the rustle of the coals in the stove less distracting. The creak of the floorboards behind him didn’t interrupt his thoughts as he went about his weekly report in an automatic manner, filling in columns of data and making brief, summarizing notes. The creak of the floorboards sounded nearer.

Blair came up from the nightmare–haunted depths of sleep abruptly. Connant’s face floated vaguely above him; for a moment it seemed a continuance of the wild horror of the dream. But Connant’s face was angry, and a little frightened. “Blair—Blair, you damned log, wake up.”

“Uh—eh?” the little biologist rubbed his eyes. From surrounding bunks, other faces lifted to stare down at them.

Connant straightened. “Get up—and get a move on. Your damned animal’s escaped.”

“Escaped—what!” Chief Pilot Van Wall’s bull voice roared out with a volume that shook the walls. Down the communication tunnels, other voices yelled suddenly. The dozen inhabitants of Paradise House tumbled in abruptly, Barclay in long woolen underwear and carrying a fire extinguisher.

“What the hell’s the matter?” Barclay demanded.

“Your damned beast got loose. I fell asleep about twenty minutes ago, and when I woke up, the Thing was gone. Hey, Doc, the hell you say those Things can’t come to life. Blair’s blasted potential life developed a hell of a lot of potential and walked out on us.”

Copper stared blankly. “It wasn’t—Earthly.” He sighed suddenly. “I—I guess Earthly laws don’t apply.”

“Well, it applied for leave of absence and took it. We’ve got to find it and capture it somehow.” Connant swore bitterly. “It’s a wonder the hellish creature didn’t eat me in my sleep.”

Blair started back, his eyes suddenly fear-struck. “Maybe it di—er—uh, we’ll have to find it.”

“ You find it. It’s your pet. I’ve had all I want to do with it, sitting there for seven hours, with the counter clucking every few seconds, and you birds in here singing night-music. It’s a wonder I got to sleep. I’m going through to the Ad Building.”