Frozen Hell

by John W. Campbell Jr.

  “Suppose,” asked McReady, “it had had lots of time?”

  “Then it would have been a dog. The other dogs would have accepted it. We would have accepted it. I don’t think anything could have distinguished it, not microscope, nor X-ray, nor any other means. This is a member of a supremely intelligent race, a race that has learned the deepest secrets of biology and turned them to its use.”

  “What was it planning to do?” Barclay looked at the humped tarpaulin.

  Blair grinned unpleasantly. His lips twitched with suppressed nervousness. “Take over the world, I imagine.”

  “Take over the world! Just it, all by itself?” Connant gasped. “Set itself up as a lone dictator?”

  “No.” Blair shook his head. The scalpel he had been fumbling in his fingers dropped; he bent to pick it up, so that his face was hidden as he spoke. “It would become the population of the world.”

  “Become—populate the world? Does it reproduce asexually?”

  Blair shook his head and gulped. “It’s—it doesn’t have to. It weighed 85 pounds. Charnauk weighed about 90. It would have become Charnauk and had 85 pound left to become—oh Jack, for instance, or Chinook. It can imitate anything—that is, become anything. If it had reached the Antarctic Sea, it would have become a seal, maybe two seals. They might have attacked a killer whale, and become either killers, or a herd of seals. Or maybe it would have caught an albatross, or a skua gull, and flown to South America.’

  Powell cursed softly. “And every time it digested something, and imitated it—”

  “It would have had its original bulk left, to start again.” Blair finished. “Nothing would kill it. It has no natural enemies, because it becomes whatever it wants to. If a killer whale attacked it, it would become a killer whale. If it was an albatross and an eagle attacked, it would become an eagle. God, it might become a female eagle. Go back—build a nest—lay eggs!”

  “Are you sure that Thing from hell is dead?” Dr. Copper asked softly.

  “Yes, thank God,” the little biologist gasped. “After they drove the dogs off, I stood there poking Bar’s electrocution thing into it for five minutes. It’s dead and—cooked.”

  “Then we can only give thanks that this is Antarctica, where there is not one single, solitary living thing for it to imitate, except these animals in camp.’

  “Us,” Blair giggled. “It can imitate us. Dogs can’t make 400 miles to the sea; there’s no food. There aren’t any skua gulls to imitate at this season. There aren’t any penguins this far inland. There’s nothing that can reach the sea from this point—except us. We’ve got brains—we can do it. Don’t you see—it’s got to imitate us—its got to be one of us—that’s the only way it can fly an airplane—fly a plane for two hours, and rule—all Earth’s inhabitants. A world for the taking—if it imitates us!

  “It didn’t know yet. It hadn’t had a chance to learn. It was rushed—hurried—took the thing nearest its own size. Look—I’m Pandora! I opened the box! And the only hope that can come out is that nothing can come out. You didn’t see me. I did it. I fixed it. I smashed every magneto. Not a plane can fly. Nothing can fly.” Blair giggled and lay down on the floor crying.

  Chief Pilot Van Wall made a dive for the door. His feet were fading echoes in the corridors as Dr. Copper bent unhurriedly over the little man on the floor. Then from his office at the end of the room Copper brought a needle and injected a solution into Blair’s arm.

  “He may come out of it when he wakes up,” he said with a sigh, rising. McReady helped him lift the biologist onto a nearby bunk. “It all depends on whether we can convince him that Thing is dead.”

  Van Wall ducked into the shack, brushing his hands absently. “I didn’t think a biologist could do a thing like that up thoroughly. He missed the spares in the second cache. It’s all right, I smashed them.”

  Commander Garry nodded, “I was wondering about radio.”

  Dr. Copper snorted, “You don’t think it can leak out on a radio wave, do you? You’d have five rescue attempts in the next three months if you stop the broadcasts. The thing to do is talk loud and not make a sound. Now I wonder—”

  McReady looked speculatively at the doctor. “It might be like an infectious disease. Everything that drank any of its blood—?”

  Copper shook his head. “Blair missed something. Imitate it may, but it has, to a certain extent, its own body chemistry, its own metabolism. If it didn’t, it would become a dog—and be a dog and nothing more. It has to be an imitation dog. Therefore you can detect it by serum tests. And its chemistry, since it comes from another world, must be so wholly, radically different, that a few cells, such as gained by drops of blood, would be treated as disease germs by a dog, or a human body.”

  “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—”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  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 crowde
d 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.”

  Connant nodded bitterly. “I’m human. Hurry that test, for God’s sake. Your eyes—God, I wish you could see your eyes—”

  * * * *

  Commander Garry watched anxiously as Clark held the big brown Alaskan husky, while Copper began the injection treatment. The dog was not anxious to cooperate. The needle was painful, and already he’d experienced considerable needle work that morning. Five stitches held closed a slash that ran from his shoulder across the ribs half way down his body. One long fang was broken off short; the missing part was to be found half-buried in the shoulder bone of the monstrous thing on the table in the Ad Building.

  “How long will that take?” Garry asked, pressing his arm gently. It was sore from the prick of the needle Dr. Copper had used to withdraw blood.

  Copper shrugged. “I don’t know, to be frank. I know the general method. I’ve used it on rabbits, but I haven’t experimented with dogs. They’re big, clumsy animals to work with; naturally, rabbits are preferable. In civilized places you can buy a stock of human-immune rabbits from suppliers, and not many investigators take the trouble to prepare their own.”

  “What do they want with them back there?” Clark asked.

  “Criminology is one large field. A says he didn’t murder B, but that the blood on his shirt came from killing a chicken. The State makes a test, then it’s up to A to explain how it is the blood reacts on human-immune rabbits, but not on chicken-immunes.”

  “What are we going to do with Blair in the meantime?” Garry asked wearily. “Its all right to let him sleep where he is for a while, but when he wakes up—”

  “Barclay and Benning are fitting some bolts on the door of Cosmos House,” Copper replied grimly. “Connantʼs acting like a gentleman. I think perhaps the way the other men look at him makes him rather want privacy. God knows heretofore we’ve all of us individually prayed for a little privacy.”

  Clark laughed brittlely. “Not any more, thank you. The more the merrier.”

  “Blair,” Copper went on, “will also have to have privacy—and locks. He’s going to have a pretty definite plan in mind when he wakes up. Ever hear the old story of how to stop hoof-and-mouth disease in cattle?”

  Clark and Garry shook their heads silently.

  “If there isn’t any hoof-and-mouth disease, there won’t be any hoof-and-mouth disease,” Copper explained. “You get rid of it by killing every animal that exhibits it, and every animal that’s been near a diseased animal. Blair’s a biologist and knows that story. He’s afraid of this Thing we loosed. The answer is probably pretty clear in his mind now. Kill everybody and everything in this camp before a skua-gull or a wandering albatross chances out this way and—catches the disease.”

  Clark’s lips curled in a twisted grin. “Sounds logical to me. If things get too bad—maybe we’d better let Blair get loose. It would save us committing suicide. We might also make something of a vow that if things get bad, we see that that does happen.”

  Copper laughed softly. “The last man alive in Big Magnet—wouldn’t be a
man,” he pointed out. “Somebody’s got to kill those—creatures that don’t desire to kill themselves, you know. We don’t have enough thermite to do it all at once, and the decanite explosive wouldn’t help much. I have an idea that even small pieces of one of those beings would be self-sufficient.”

  “If,” said Garry thoughtfully, “they can modify their protoplasm at will, won’t they simply modify themselves to birds and fly away? They can read all about birds and imitate their structure without even meeting them. Or imitate, perhaps, birds of their home planet.”

  Copper shook his head and helped Clark to free the dog. “Men studied birds for centuries, trying to learn how to make a machine to fly like them. He never did do the trick. His final success came when he broke away entirely and tried new methods. Knowing the general idea, and knowing the detailed structure of wing and bone and nerve-tissue, is something far, far different. And as for other-world birds, perhaps, in fact very probably, the atmospheric conditions here are so vastly different that their birds couldn’t fly. Perhaps, even, the being came from a planet like Mars with such a thin atmosphere that there were no birds.”

  Barclay came into the building, trailing a length of airplane control cable. “It’s finished, Doc. Cosmos House can’t be opened from the inside. Now where do we put Blair?”

  Copper looked toward Garry. “There isn’t any biology building. I don’t know where we can isolate him.”

  “How about East Cache?” Garry said after a moment’s thought. “Will Blair be able to look after himself—or need attention?”