Джон Кэмпбелл - Frozen Hell

Van Wall nodded. “I smelled it, if you remember. I knew the knife came from the galley.”

“I wonder,” said Benning looking around at the party warily,” how many more monsters we have? If somebody could slip out of his place, go back of the screen to the galley and then down to Cosmos house and back—he did come back didn’t he? Yes—everybody’s here. Well, if one of the gang could do all that—”

“Maybe a monster did it.” Garry suggested quietly. “There’s that possibility.”

“The monster, as you pointed out today, has only men left to imitate. Would he decrease his—supply, shall we say?” McReady pointed out. “No, we just have a plain, ordinary louse, a murderer to deal with. Ordinarily we’d call him an ‘inhuman murderer’ I suppose, but we have to distinguish now. We have inhuman murderers, and now we have human murderers—or one at least.”

“There’s one less human,” Powell said softly. “Maybe the monsters have the balance of power now—”

“Never mind that,” McReady sighed and turned to Barclay. “Bar, will you get your electric gadget. I’m just going to make certain—”

Barclay turned down the corridor to get the pronged electrocuter, while McReady and Van Wall went back toward Cosmos House. Barclay followed them in some thirty seconds.

The corridor to Comsos House twisted, as did nearly all corridors in Big Magnet, and Powell stood at the entrance again. But they heard, rather muffled, McReady’s sudden shout. There was a savage flurry of blows, dull ch-thunk — shluff sounds. “Bar—Bar—for God’s sake—”And a curious, savage mewing scream, silenced before even Powell had reached the bend.

Kinner—or what had been Kinner, lay on the floor, cut half in two by McReady’s great knife. The meteorologist leaned panting against the wall, the knife dripping red in his hand. Van Wall was stirring vaguely on the floor, moaning, his hand half-consciously rubbing at his jaw. Barclay, a unutterably savage gleam in his eyes, was methodically leaning on the pronged weapon in his hands, jabbing—jabbing—jabbing.

Kinner’s arms had developed a queer, scaly fur, and the flesh had twisted. The fingers had shortened, the hand rounded, the finger-nails become three-inch long things of dull red horn, keened to steel-hard, razor-sharp talons.

McReady raised his head, looked vaguely at the knife in his hand, and dropped it. His laugh was shaky, almost a laugh of relief. “Well, whoever did it can speak up now. He was an inhuman murderer at that—in that he murdered an inhuman. I swear by all that’s holy, Kinner was a lifeless corpse on the floor here when we arrived—but when it found we were going to jab it with the power gadget there—it changed.

“Oh, Lord, those Things can act. My God—sitting in here for hours, mouthing prayers to a God it hated! Shouting hymns in a cracked voice—hymns about a Church it never knew. Driving us mad with its ceaseless howling—

“Well. Speak up, whoever did it. You didn’t know it, but you did the camp a favor. And I want to know how in blazes you got out of that room without anyone seeing you. It might help in guarding ourselves.”

“His screaming—his singing. Even the sound projector couldn’t drown it.” Dwight shivered. “It was a monster.”

“Oh,” said Van Wall in sudden comprehension. “You were sitting right next to the door, weren’t you. And almost behind the projection screen already.”

Dwight nodded dumbly. “He—it’s quiet now. It’s a dead—Mac—your test’s no damn good. It was dead anyway, monster or man, it was dead.”

McReady chuckled softly. “Boys, meet Dwight, the only one we know is human! Meet Dwight, the guy who proves he’s human by trying to commit murder—and failing. Will the rest of you please refrain from trying to prove you’re human for a while? I think we may have another test.”

“A test!” Connant snapped joyfully, then his face sagged in disappointment. “I suppose it’s another either-way-you-want-it.”

“No,” said McReady sharply. “Look sharp and be careful. Come into the Ad Building. Barclay, bring your electrocuter—and, by God, somebody—Button—stand with Barclay to make sure he does it. Watch every neighbor, for by the Hell these monsters came from, I’ve got something, and they know it. They’re going to get dangerous!”

The group tensed abruptly. An air of crushing menace entered into every man’s body, sharply they looked at each other. More keenly than ever before—is that man next to me an inhuman monster?

“What is it?” Garry asked, as they stood again in the main room. “How long will it take?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” said McReady, his voice brittle with angry determination,” but I know it will work, and no two ways about it. It depends on a basic quality of the monsters , not on us. ‘Kinner’ just convinced me.”

“This,” said Barclay hefting the wooden-handled weapon, tipped with its two sharp-pointed, charged conductors, ”is going to be rather necessary, I take it. Is the power plant assured?”

Dutton nodded sharply. “The automatic stoker bin is full. The gas power plant is on stand-by. I set it for the movie operation and—we’ve checked it over rather carefully several times, you know. Anything those wires touch, dies,” he assured them grimly. “I know that.”

Dr. Copper stirred vaguely in his bunk, rubbed his eyes with a fumbling hand. He sat up slowly, blinked eyes blurred widened with an unutterable horror of drug-ridden nightmares with sleep and drugs.

“Garry,” he mumbled, “Garry—listen. Selfish—from hell they came, and hellish shellfish—I mean self—do I?—what do I mean?” He sank back in his bunk and snored softly.

McReady looked at him thoughtfully. “We’ll know presently, my friend,” he nodded slowly, “But selfish is what you mean, all right. You may have thought of that, half-sleeping, dreaming there. I didn’t stop to think what a sweet collection of dreams you might be having—but that’ s all right. Selfish is the word. They must be, you see,” He turned to the men in the cabin, tense, silent men staring with wolfish eyes each at his neighbor. “Selfish, and as Dr. Copper said—every part is a whole, every piece is self-sufficient, an animal in itself.

“That, and one other thing, tell the story. There’s nothing mysterious about blood; it’s just as normal a body tissue as a piece of muscle, or a piece of liver. But it hasn’t so much connective tissue, though it has millions, billions of life-cells.”

McReady’s lips twisted in a wolfish smile. “This is fun, in a way. I’m pretty sure we humans still outnumber you—others. Others standing here. And we have what you, your other-world race, evidently doesn’t. Not an imitated, but a bred-in-the-bone instinct, a driving, unquenchable fire that’s genuine. We’ll fight, fight with a ferocity you may attempt to imitate, but you’ll never equal! We’re human—we’re real—you’re a bunch of imitations, false to the core of your every cell.

“All right. It’s a showdown now. You know—you, with your mind reading, you’ve lifted the idea from my brain—you can’t do a thing about it.

“Standing here—”

“Let it pass. Blood is tissue. They have to bleed, if they don’t bleed when cut, then by God, they’re phoney, phoney from hell! If they bleed—then that blood, separated from them, is an individual— a newly formed individual in its own right, just as they — split, all of them, from one original — are individuals!

“Get it, Van? See the answer, Bar?”

Van Wall laughed very softly. “The blood—the blood will not obey. It’s a new individual, with all the desire to protect its own life that the original—the main mass from which it was split—has. The blood will live—and try to crawl away from a hot needle, say!”