Джон Кэмпбелл - Frozen Hell

“Blood—would one of those imitations bleed?” Powell demanded.

“Sure, nothing mystic about blood,” Copper assured him. “Muscle is about 90% water. Blood differs only having a couple percent more water and less connective tissue. They’d bleed, all right.

Blair sat up in his bunk suddenly. “Connant—where’s Connant?”

The physicist moved over toward the little biologist. “Here I am. What do you want?”

“Are you?” giggled Blair. He lapsed back into the bunk contorted with silent laughter.

Connant looked at him blankly. “Huh? Am I what?”

“ Are you there?” Blair burst into gales of laughter. “ Are you Connant? The beast wanted to be a man —not a dog—”

Dr. Copper rose wearily from the bunk and washed the hypodermic carefully. The little tinkles it made seemed loud in the packed room, now that Blairʼs gurgling laughter had finally quieted. Copper looked toward Garry and shook his head slowly. “Hopeless, I’m afraid. I don’t think we can ever convince him the Thing is dead now.”

Powell laughed uncertainly. “I’m not sure you can convince me. Oh, damn you, McReady.”

“McReady?” Commander Garry turned to look from Powell to McReady curiously.

“His nightmares,” Powell explained. “He told me about a nightmare he had at the Secondary Magnetic Station after finding that thing.”

“And that was… ?” Garry looked at McReady levelly.

The meteorologist cleared his throat and moved uneasily. “That the creature wasn’t dead, had a sort of enormously slowed existence, an existence that permitted it, none the less, to be vaguely aware of the passing of time, of our coming after endless years. I had a dream it could imitate things.”

“Well,” Copper grunted, “it can.”

“Don’t be an ass,” Powell snapped. “That’s not what’s bothering me. He said it could read minds, read thoughts and ideas and—mannerisms.”

“What’s so bad about that? It seems to be worrying you more than the thought of the joy we’re going to have with a madman in an Antarctic camp.” Copper nodded toward Blair’s sleeping form.

McReady’s face twisted in a grin. “You birds know damn well that Connant is Connant, because he not merely looks like Connant—which we’re beginning to believe the beast might be able to do—but he thinks like Connant, talks like Connant, moves himself around the way Connant does. And that takes more than merely a body that looks like him. That takes Connant’s own mind and thoughts and mannerisms. Therefore, though you know that the Thing might make itself look like Connant, you aren’t much bothered, because you know damn well it has a mind from another world, a totally unhuman mind, that couldn’t possibly react and think and talk like a man we know, and do it so well as to fool us for a moment. The idea of the creature imitating one of us is fascinating, but unreal because it is too completely unhuman to deceive us. It doesn’t have a human mind.”

“As I said before,” Powell repeated, looking steadily at McReady, “you can say the damnedest things at the damnedest times. Will you be so good as to finish that thought—one way or the other?”

Kinner, standing near Connant, suddenly moved down the length of the crowded room toward his familiar galley. He shook the ashes from the galley stove noisily.

“It would do it no good,” said Dr. Copper, softly as though thinking out loud, “to merely look like something it was trying to imitate; it would have to understand its feelings, its reactions. It is unhuman; it has powers of imitation beyond any conception of man. A good actor, by training himself, can imitate another man, another man’s mannerisms, well enough to fool most people. Of course, no actor could imitate so perfectly as to deceive men who had been living with the imitated one in the complete lack of privacy of an antarctic camp. That would take a superhuman skill.”

“Oh, you’ve got the bug too.” Powell cursed softly.

Connant, standing alone at one end of the room, looked about him wildly, his face white. A gentle eddying of the men had crowded them slowly down toward the other end of the room so that he stood quite alone.

“My God, will you two Jeremiah’s shut up?” Connant’s voice shook. “What am I? Some kind of a microscopic specimen you’re dissecting? Some unpleasant worm you’re discussing in the third person?”

McReady looked up at him; his slowly twisting hands stopped for a moment. “Having a lovely time. Wish you were here. Signed: Everybody. Connant, if you think you’re having a hell of a time, just move over on the other end for a while. You’ve got one thing we haven’t; you know what the answer is. I’ll tell you this, right now you’re the most feared and respected man in Big Magnet.”

“Christ, I wish you could see your eyes,” Connant gasped. “Stop staring, will you! What the hell are you going to do?”

“Have you any suggestions, Dr. Copper?” Commander Garry asked steadily. “The present situation is impossible.”

“Oh, is it?” Connant snapped. “Come over here and look at that crowd. By God, they look exactly like that gang of huskies around the corridor bend. Benning, will you stop hefting that damned ice axe?”

The coppery blade rang on the floor as the aviation mechanic nervously dropped it. He bent over and picked it up instantly, hefting it slowly, turning it in his hands, his brown eyes moving jerkily about the room.

Copper sat down on the bunk beside Blair. The wood creaked noisily in the room. Far down a corridor, a dog yelped in pain, and the dog-drivers’ tense voices floated softly back.

“Microscopic examination,” said the doctor thoughtfully, “would be useless, as Blair pointed out. Considerable time has passed. However, serum tests would be definitive.”

“Serum tests? What do you mean, exactly?” Commander Garry asked.

“If I had a rabbit that had been injected with human blood—a poison to rabbits, of course, as is the blood of any animal save that of another rabbit—and the injections continued in increasing doses for some time, the rabbit would be human-immune. If a small quantity of its blood were drawn off, allowed to separate in a test-tube, and to the clear serum, a bit of human blood were added, there would be a visible reaction, proving the blood was human. If cow, or dog blood were added—or any protein material other than that one thing, human blood—no reaction would take place. That would prove definitely.”

“Can you suggest where I might catch a rabbit for you, Doc?” McReady asked. “That is, nearer than Australia; we don’t want to waste time going that far.”

“I know there aren’t any rabbits in Antarctica,” Copper said with a nod, “but that is simply the usual animal. Any animal except man will do. A dog, for instance. But it will take several days, and due to the greater size of the animal, considerable blood. Two of us will have to contribute.”

“Would I do?” Garry asked.

“That will make two,” Copper nodded. “I’ll get to work on it right away.”

“What about Connant in the meantime?” Kinner demanded. “I’m going out that door and head off for the Ross Sea before I cook for him.”\

“He may be human—” Copper started.

Connant burst out in a flood of curses. “Human, may be human, you damned sawbones! What in hell do you think I am?”

“A monster,” Copper snapped sharply. “Now shut up and listen.”

Connant’s face drained of color and he sat down heavily as the indictment was put in words.

Copper continued, “Until we know—you know as well as we do that we have reason to question the fact, and only you know how that question is to be answered—we may reasonably be expected to lock you up. If you are—unhuman—you’re a lot more dangerous than poor Blair there, and I’m going to see that he’s locked up thoroughly. I expect that his next stage will be a violent desire to kill you, all the dogs, and probably all of us. When he wakes, he will be convinced we’re all unhuman, and nothing on the planet will ever change his conviction. It would be kinder to let him die, but we can’t do that, of course. He’s going in one shack, and you can stay in Cosmos House with your cosmic ray apparatus, which is about what you’d do anyway. I’ve got to fix up a couple of dogs.”