Frozen Hell

by John W. Campbell Jr.

  The Administration Building suddenly seemed to shake itself free of the snow, and half a dozen men stumbled outside, shading their eyes to look toward the approaching tractor and its trailed sledge. The spidery finger of the radio tower cast a long, broken shadow out across the roiled snow toward them.

  “Imagine!” Barclay shouted. “No wind at all for as much as seventy hours running! I wonder if I’ll be able to sleep down here!”

  “You can go back if you insist!” McReady shouted back. “I could still find something of interest out there, even if Vane and Norris’s pet project doesn’t exist any more!”

  “Hold on! I’m turning!” Barclay stomped on the left clutch, and the rattle of the tractor changed its tone. The left caterpillar stopped, while the right continued moving. The clumsy machine lurched sideways, then turned toward the jumbled snow of the tractor garage. Five tarpaulin-covered masses, half drifted over, represented the rest of the Base force of mechanical ground transport.

  More men were materializing from the Antarctic snow, popping up out of the scattered snow-buried shacks and heading toward the arriving party. The tractor ground and vibrated to a shivering halt beside its mates, and McReady clambered stiffly down from it. The air here at Big Magnet seemed positively balmy; it was -45°, but with practically no wind at all. Norris, Vane, and Blair were straightening up from the two trailed sledges, Norris and Vane from the first, Blair from the second. Blair wasn’t the only one who would ride on that second sledge; it had another passenger, who had now acquired the title of Scarecrow.

  “I suggest we wait a while.” McReady nodded toward the men advancing across the snow toward them. “I’m feeling a bit cramped, and maybe the hard work of hauling those damned sledges over to camp would strain me.”

  Vane grinned. “I guess they’ll help. Will you ask Bar for me just how it is he finds all the bumps on the trail? It’s a peculiar miracle to me that I didn’t part company with that sledge at least forty times during the last five miles.”

  “That’s his secret. Blair, where do you want that little pet of yours taken? We might as well shift the rest of the load of that sledge to this one now and save double hauling.”

  “I don’t know where I’ll want it taken,” Blair answered doubtfully. “I want it to thaw out as quickly as possible, but I can’t use violent methods. I think the best thing to do is to find out who’s night watchman tonight and decide from that. It’ll probably be either one of the meteor observers, the cosmic ray group, the magnetic group, or a meteorologist. If they’ve got the job, we can take the Thing to the appropriate shack and keep it warm for the next 36 hours running. It will thaw out in that time.”

  “What if it’s aviation’s turn for night watchman?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to wait, then. They don’t heat the hangar at any time, let alone at night.”

  Barclay laughed suddenly. “Blair, you’re going to be the most popular guy in camp when they find out what you’ve got on the ball. That Thing is going to be great company for the bird that’s got to sit up with it all night.”

  McReady, Vane, and Norris joined in the laugh, but the little biologist was too serious about his find. “It’s no worse than those frozen seals and things, so far as I can see. It’s just as dead, and just as natural a thing—”

  “That,” McReady pronounced, “is wrong. It’s been dead too long, and it isn’t natural. Not to this planet, anyway. You can lay money on it—even the entire camp’s poker-gambling capital, the entire, famous $42.23, that Scarecrow isn’t going to be popular until you’ve got him nicely dissected and pickled in formaldehyde. If then.”

  The Big Magnet party washed up around them, the physics and mechanics departments gravitating naturally with Vane and Norris and Barclay to the tractor, examining the fused dynamo and radio equipment. The group spread out, trickling back to the wrapped, crude cylinder on the rearmost sledge. Commander Garry stood with Blair and Dr. Copper discussing the Thing, planning what to do with it. Vane and Norris drifted over, to add information about the immolation of the strange ship.

  The sledges began to move apart, goods piled from Blair’s sledge onto the larger first trailer. McReady came back to learn what decisions had been made.

  “I understand Connant is watchman tonight,” he said and smiled. “His interest in cosmic rays hold up after you mentioned your little plan, Blair?”

  Commander Garry chuckled. “I can’t say I blame him too much, but he doesn’t seem enthusiastic. We’ve heard stories about this fellow. It sounds like Jerry’s in for an unpleasant evening.”

  “Wait ’til you see him.” McReady promised. There was no smile on his face. “The cosmic ray hut is small, and Jerry Connant is going to wish for more separation before this evening’s over.”

  “All set!” Barclay’s voice rang out. “Clear out.”

  The group around the tractor moved back. There was a shower of hissing, glowing coals from the fire box. A cloud of dirty steam rose up about the machine. Then a moment later, the shrill whistle of the boiler water driving out of the boiler drain-cock under the pressure of the steam. Clouds of ice-smoke rolled off slowly in the direction of the camp, slowing as the whistle changed to a scream as the last of the water jetted out, and steam thrust from the drain. The roar died away; hot metal began to tink with contraction. Cold was taking hold of the tractor.

  McReady walked back toward the Administration Building beside Powell, the Expedition’s senior meteorologist. “That wind there rather saved you when the ship started going, then?”

  McReady nodded. “No rather about it; it did. Hundred’s of tons of magnesium metal. Only the fact that ice is opaque to heat rays, that we were on the far side of a solid rock ridge, and that bitter, steady wind saved us.”

  “It seems to me you’d have been able, somehow, to recognize magnesium metal,” Powell said hesitantly. “I—now I don’t mean that you slipped; what I mean is—why was it impossible to recognize the difference?”

  “We couldn’t lift it, so we had no idea of specific gravity. It was harder than our tools, so we couldn’t get a sample. It was an utterly unknown alloy of an alien race. And they’d rendered it passive somehow. Maybe there was a coat of chromium plate. Anyway, it didn’t react with alphuric acid, and that suggested an inactive, not a voraciously active metal. We didn’t go out there with analytical equipment; the simple acid test we made was Barclay’s idea, and he used ordinary storage battery acid. God, that alloy alone would have been worth a fortune to us! It alone would have financed this expedition. And what unguessable secrets of lifting and propulsion we lost in that fire—well, it was a tragedy as great as any in history. It would have remade all Earth’s history if we had been able to enter and examine that ship.”

  Powell nodded thoughtfully. “You had us worried for a while. We saw that enormous flame, and saw the aurora bend down, of course. The magnetic instruments detected the thing, but we didn’t realize that at first—they were recording. Dutton was calling at the transmitter there for an hour, with the whole camp hanging over his shoulder, sitting there absolutely still. Not a sound but the wash of static.

  “‘There’s no schedule,’ Dutton said.

  “‘Don’t be an ass,’ Connant snapped at him. ‘They wouldn’t wait for schedule to report a thing like that. They’re more apt to have been in that, whatever it was.’

  “We hadn’t any idea then about the magnetic explosion. That was Tolman’s idea.

  “‘That strange ship was the magnet,’ he said suddenly, ‘and I’ll bet that ship was what blew up out there. We can’t fly until the sun’s up, or we hear from them that they’ve lighted the field. If the ship blew up, the magnetic force would be released—’ and Tolman dived for the recorders. It was there, of course—two of the pens jammed clear off the paper, and trying to get back on, the vertical, component recorder still tracing out a diminishing sine wave.

  “Tolman looked at the Thing, then called over to Dutton, ‘You may as well quit tha
t, because they can’t hear you, and they sure as hell can’t transmit. That ship blew up, and it released all the magnetic force. Every coil within ten miles of the thing that was capable of acting as an inductance is fused rubbish. Their dynamo, transformers, inductances, probably even condensers are all shot. They might be alive. We’ll have to fly tomorrow.’

  “So Commander Garry sent the ’gyro when the sun came up, and brought back Dr. Copper. But it was an unpleasant twelve hours of waiting.”

  McReady nodded. “We knew it must be, but there wasn’t a thing we could do. I thought of sending up a sounding balloon with a candle on it in hopes you’d see and know we were alive, but realized it was too small. We got some of your later calls, as you know, because Barclay patched up a receiver out of spares, junk, and will power. But the secondary magnet’s gone. And the chance of learning the secrets of a more ancient, alien race gone with it. The magnetic men are through out there, through forever, but I think we might try to organize an expedition in that direction. The winds are unique, to put it gently.”

  Powell chuckled. “Dr. Copper said something about it being coolish.”

  “I never saw a 35-mile wind with a temperature of -50° or below before. It’s more or less of an axiom that high winds bring high temperatures—air friction warms them if nothing else. But even that didn’t work out there. I think that in all the ages that beast was frozen there, the temperature never rose above freezing; it was chilled by winds straight from the Polar Plateau.”

  They reached the outlying shack of the meteorologists and ducked into it together. McReady threw his things on his bunk and glanced automatically at the recording instruments set in the wall. He grinned, nodded toward them, and chuckled.

  “Man, those little lines look funny. That wind velocity—wait ’til you see the cards we brought back. Let’s go on over to the Ad Building.”

  Comparatively mild as it was here at Big Magnet, the weather was not that of a Temperate Zone spring day. They started down the communication tunnel, the combined storeroom and passageway under the surface. Crates and boxes formed its walls, some empty, some still full. Gasoline and canned food, instrument cards, and best boot-grease. Tooth brushes and dehydrated carrots, canned beer, and spare parts for recording hygrometers. Crates, boxes, and snow blocks. The roofing was a strip of waterproof paper over chicken wire laid on wooden slats. The inevitable antarctic drift covered it in a thick blanket. And the wire, the slats, and the crates were coated with magnificent ice-jewels that sparkled in the light of McReady’s pressure lamp; ice crystals, perfect flat hexagons, some of them two inches across, all similar yet none identical.

  The packed snow floor rose and fell irregularly. Ahead, the Ad Building door opened momentarily and closed again. The others were streaming into camp. Other corridors under the snow joined theirs; they passed the entrance to the Radio building, and the tunnel strung with insulated cables that lead off in majestic isolation to the power plant nearly a quarter of a mile away. Another quarter of a mile in the opposite direction lay the magnetic observatory.

  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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “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.”