Джон Кэмпбелл - Frozen Hell

Commander Garry ducked through the doorway, pulling his belt tight. “You won’t have to. Van’s roar sounded like the Boeing taking off down wind. So it wasn’t dead?”

“I didn’t carry it off in my arms, I assure you.” Connant snapped. “The last I saw, that split skull was oozing green goo, like a squashed caterpillar. Doc just said our laws don’t work—it’s unearthly. Well, it’s an unearthly monster, with an unearthly disposition, judging by the face, wandering around with a split skull and brains oozing out.”

Powell and McReady appeared in the doorway, a doorway filling with other shivering men.

“Has anybody seen it coming over here?” Powell asked innocently. “About four feet tall, three red eyes—brains oozing out—Hey, has anybody checked to make sure this isn’t a cracked idea of humor? If it is, I think we’ll unite in tying Blair’s pet around Connant’s neck like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. Personally, that sounds much more possible to me.”

“It’s no joke.” Connant shivered. “God, I wish it were. I’d rather wear—” He stopped.

A wild, long, howl shrieked through the corridors. The men stiffened abruptly and half turned.

“I think it’s been located,” Connant finished.

He darted back to his bunk in Paradise House, to return almost immediately with a heavy .45 revolver and an ice axe. He hefted both gently as he started for the corridor toward Dogtown. “It blundered down the wrong corridor—and landed among the huskies. Listen—the dogs have broken their chains—”

The half-terrorized howl of the dog pack had changed to a wild hunting melee. The voices of the dogs thundered in the narrow corridors, and through them came a low rippling snarl of pure hate. A shrill of pain, a dozen snarling yelps.

Connant broke for the door. Close behind him, McReady, then Barclay and Commander Garry came. Other men headed for the Ad Building and weapons, or the sledge house. Pomroy, in charge of Big Magnet’s five cows, started down the corridor on the opposite direction; he had a six-foot-handled, long-tined pitchfork in mind.

Barclay slid to a halt as McReady turned abruptly away from the tunnel leading to Dogtown and vanished off at an angle. Uncertainly the mechanician wavered a moment, the fire extinguisher in his hands moving from one side to the other, then he was racing after Connant’s broad back.

Connant stopped at the bend in the corridor. His breath hissed suddenly through his throat.

“Great God—!”

The revolver exploded thunderously, three numbing, palpable waves of sound crashed through the confined corridors. Two more. The revolver dropped to the hard-packed snow of the trail, and Barclay saw the ice axe shift into defensive position. Connant’s powerful body blocked his vision, but beyond, he heard something mewing, and, insanely, chuckling. The dogs were quieter; there was a deadly seriousness in their low snarls. Taloned feet scratched at hard-packed snow; broken chains were clinking and tangling.

Connant shifted abruptly, and Barclay could see what lay beyond. For a second he stood frozen, then his breath went out in a gusty curse.

The Thing launched itself at Connant.

The powerful arms of the man swung the ice axe flat-side first at what might have been a head. It scrunched horribly, and the tattered flesh, ripped by a half-dozen savage huskies, leapt to its feet again. The red eyes blazed with an unearthly hatred, an unearthly, unkillable vitality.

Barclay turned the fire extinguisher on it; the blinding, blistering stream of chemical spray confused it, baffled it. Together with the savage attacks of the huskies, not for long afraid of anything that did or could live, that held it at bay.

McReady wedged men out of his way as he drove down the narrow, packed corridor to reach the scene. There was a sure, fore-planned drive to McReady’s attack; he held one of the giant blowtorches used in warming the plane’s engines in his hands. It roared gustily as he turned the corner and opened the valve. The mad mewing hissed louder. The dogs scrambled back from the three-foot lance of blue-hot flame.

“Bar, get a power cable, run it in here somehow. And a handle. We can electrocute this—monster, if I don’t incinerate it.” McReady spoke with an authority of planned action, Barclay turned down the long corridor to the power plant, but already before him, Dutton and Van Wall were racing ahead.

Barclay found the cable in the electrical cache in the tunnel wall. In a half minute he was hacking at it, walking back. Van Wall’s voice rang out in warning, “Power!” as the emergency gasoline-powered dynamo thudded into action. Half a dozen other men were down there now, pouring kindling and coal into the firebox of the steam power plant. Dutton was working with quick, sure fingers on the other end of Barclay’s cable, plying in a contactor in one of the power leads.

The dogs had fallen back when Barclay reached the corridor bend, fallen back before a furious monstrosity that glared from baleful red eyes, mewing in trapped hatred. The dogs were a semi-circle of red-dipped muzzles, with a fringe of glistening white teeth, whining with a vicious eagerness that near matched the fury of the red eyes. McReady stood confidently alert at the corridor bend, the gustily muttering torch held loose and ready for action in his hands. He stepped aside without moving his eyes from the beast as Barclay came up. There was a slight, tight smile on his lean bronzed face.

Dutton’s voice called down the corridor, and Barclay stepped forward. The cable was taped to the long handle of a snow-shovel, the two conductors split and held 18 inches apart by a scrap of lumber lashed at right angles across the far end of the handle. Bare copper conductors, charged with 220 volts, glinted in the light of pressure lamps. The Thing mewed and dodged. McReady advanced at Barclay’s side. The dogs beyond sensed the plan with the almost telepathic intelligence of trained huskies. Their whining grew shriller, softer, their mincing steps carried them nearer. Abruptly a huge, night-black Alaskan leapt onto the trapped Thing. It turned squalling, saber-clawed feet slashing.

Barclay leapt forward and jabbed. A weird, shrill scream rose and choked out. The smell of burnt flesh in the corridor intensified; greasy smoke curled up. The echoing pound of the gas-electric dynamo down the corridor became a slogging thud.

The red eyes clouded over in a stiffening, jerking travesty of a face. Arm-like, leg-like members quivered and jerked. The dogs leapt forward, and Barclay yanked back his shovel-handled weapon. The Thing on the snow did not move as gleaming teeth ripped it open.

Garry looked about the crowded room. Thirty-two men, some tensed nervously, standing against the wall, some uneasily relaxed, some sitting, most perforce standing, as intimate as sardines. Thirty-two, plus the five engaged in sewing up wounded dogs made thirty-seven, the total personnel.

Garry started speaking. “All right, I guess we’re here. Some of you—three or four at most—saw what happened. All of you have seen that Thing on the table, and can get a general idea. Anyone hasn’t, I’ll lift—” his hand strayed to the tarpaulin bulking over the Thing on the table. There was an acrid odor of singed flesh seeping out of it. The men stirred restlessly, hasty denials.

“It looks rather as though Charnauk isn’t going to lead any more teams,” Garry went on. “Blair wants to get at it and make some more detailed examination. We want to know what happened, and make sure right now that it is permanently, totally dead. Right?”

Connant grinned. “Anybody that doesn’t can sit up with it tonight.”

“All right then, Blair, what can you say about it? What in God’s name was it?” Garry turned to the little biologist.