Frozen Hell

by John W. Campbell Jr.

  “It had other things to think about,” McReady assured him. “When I left it, it was a glowing coal. What was it doing?”

  Barclay laughed shortly. “Wise boys, we are. Smash magnetos, so planes won’t work. Rip the boiler tubing out of the tractors. And leave that Thing alone for a week in this shack, alone and undisturbed.”

  McReady looked in at the shack more carefully. The air, despite the ripped door, was hot and humid. On a table at the far end of the room rested a mass of coiled wires and small magnets, glass tubes and radio tubes. At the center, a block of rough stone rested. From the center of the block came the light that flooded the place, the fiercely blue light bluer than the glare of an electric arc, and from it came the sweetly soft hum. Off to one side was another mechanism of crystal glass, blown with an incredible neatness and delicacy, metal plates and a queer, shimmery sphere of insubstantiality.

  “What is that?” McReady moved nearer.

  Barclay grunted. “Leave it for Vane and Norris. But I can guess pretty well that’s atomic power. That stuff to the left—that’s a neat little thing for doing what we’ve been trying to do with 100-ton cyclotrons and so forth. It separates neutrons from heavy water, which he was getting from the surrounding ice.”

  “Where did he get all—oh. Of course. A monster couldn’t be locked in—or out. He’s been through the apparatus caches.” McReady stared at the apparatus. “God, what minds that race must have—”

  “The shimmery sphere—I think it’s a sphere of pure force. Neutrons can pass through any matter, and he wanted a supply, a reservoir of neutrons. Just project neutrons against silica—calcium—beryllium—almost anything, and the atomic energy is released. That thing is the atomic generator.”

  Powell tucked a thermometer into his coat. “It’s 120° in here now, despite the open door. Our clothes have kept the heat out to an extent, but I’m sweating now.”

  Barclay nodded. “The light’s cold. I found that. But it gives off heat to warm the place through that coil. He had all the power in the world, he could keep it warm and pleasant, as his race thought of warmth and pleasantness. Did you notice the light, the color of it?”

  McReady nodded. “Beyond the stars is the answer. From beyond the stars, from a hotter planet that circled a brighter, bluer sun they came.” McReady glanced out the door toward the blasted, smoke-stained trail that flopped and wandered blindly off across the drift. “There won’t be any more coming, I guess. Sheer accident it landed here. What in God’s name did it do all that for?” He nodded toward the apparatus.

  Barclay laughed softly. “Did you notice what it was working on when we came? Look.” He pointed toward the ceiling of the shack.

  Like a knapsack made of flattened coffee-tins, with dangling cloth straps and leather belts, the mechanism clung to the ceiling. A tiny, glaring heart of supernal flame burned in it, yet burned through the ceiling’s wood without scorching it. Barclay walked over to it, grasped two of the dangling straps in his hands, and pulled it down by an effort. He strapped it about his body. A slight jump carried him in a weirdly slow arc across the room.

  “Anti-gravity,” said Powell softly.”

  “Anti-gravity,” Barclay nodded. “Yeah, we had ’em stopped, with no planes, and no birds. The birds hadn’t come—but they had coffee-tins and radio parts, and glass and the machine shop at night. And a week—a whole week all to itself. America in a single jump—with anti-gravity powered by the atomic energy of matter.

  “We had ’em stopped. Another half hour—it was just tightening these straps on the device so it could wear it—another half hour, and we’d have stayed in Antarctica, and shot down any moving thing that came from the rest of the world.”

  “The Albatross—” Powell said softly. “Do you suppose—”

  “With this thing almost finished—with that death weapon it held in its hand?”

  “No, by the grace of God, who evidently does hear very well, even down here, and the margin of half an hour, we keep our world, and the planets of the system too. Anti-gravity, you know, and atomic power. Because They came from another sun, a star beyond the stars, They came from a world with a bluer sun.”

  PREVIEW OF THE SEQUEL

  What follows is a preview of the next work to feature the Thing (or, in this case, Things). It’s a novel-length book with a tentative working title of The Things from Another World (assuming we can get the rights to use it!) which is, of course, a nod to the Howard Hawks film, The Thing from Another World. It is an attempt to build upon John W. Campbell’s world and creations, while remaining 100% true to the source material—in this case, both the novella “Who Goes There?” and Frozen Hell.

  I hope you enjoy the beginning of the story and will return when the full work is finished.

  —John Gregory Betancourt

  Author of the sequel

  PROLOGUE

  The Pentagon

  Arlington, Virginia

  General Artemis Wu bellowed for his secretary. But instead of Lieutenant Kirby, Colonel Bloch entered his office, shut the door, and quietly approached his desk. Bloch, with his beak of a nose and watery brown eyes that seemed to look through rather than at you, had never impressed the general as anything more than a pencil-pusher, the tiniest of cogs in the U.S. military machine. He was the sort of bland little career officer who rose slowly but steadily through the ranks, competent at every level but no more than that.

  “Sir,” Bloch said. His face remained stony.

  “I assume from your presence here,” said Wu, gazing at him over the black frames of his glasses, “that you are responsible for this?” He thumped a stack of papers with a blunt index finger.

  Typed on thin, age-yellowed paper, with a rusting staple in one corner, the report—dated October 29, 1938, and bearing the faded rubber-stamp marks of a dozen government agencies, plus a bright red CLASSIFIED across the top—clearly had been written by someone either crazy, on drugs, or both. A UFO buried in the ice in Antarctica…conveniently blown up, so no evidence remained? A telepathic monster that could absorb—and assume the shape of—any creature it encountered…also conveniently destroyed? Ridiculous.

  “If you will allow me to explain—”

  “Explain what? How LSD made it to a military base in Antarctica? How some wise-ass wannabe sci-fi writer put his wet dreams down in a report for a lark? I’m less than a year from retirement, Colonel. I don’t have time for games.” He threw the report at Bloch, who caught it. “Get out.”

  “They found a second one, sir.”

  Wu paused. “A second what?”

  “Spaceship. In Antarctica. In the ice.” Col. Bloch stepped forward and held out a manilla folder. “The details are in here. I wanted you to see the original report first, to prepare you for this one.”

  The general snorted, but accepted the new folder. Could it be real? Bloch had never struck him as the least bit imaginative. And his secretary, Kirby, didn’t have the balls to prank him.

  Wu adjusted his glasses, opened the folder, and studied the satellite photograph on top. Antarctica, clearly. It had a geological map overlay, and an area two hundred miles east of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station had been circled in red. He flipped forward. More photographs. A dark shape deep in the ice, estimated—according to notations in the corner—at 148 feet long and 51 feet at its widest. Sonar imaging showed a featureless oval. Thermal imaging showed nothing—the object was as cold as the surrounding glacier. Then came charts with technical calculations that he couldn’t follow. A report on a core sample of the ice around the vessel finished up, dating it back almost 19 million years.

  “If this is some kind of joke—” Wu began.

  “No, sir. Never.” Bloch actually sounded offended.

  General Wu took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. A year from retirement, and this had to fall into his lap. For now, he had to assume the report was true. And if it wasn’t, God help Bloch, Kirby, and everyone else involved.

  “How many peo
ple have seen this new report?” he asked.

  “Eight, sir. Three on my staff, four on the survey team. I am the eighth. You make nine.”

  Eight. Too many to keep a secret for long.

  “Has anything leaked out?”

  “Not yet, sir. The survey team first reported it as a meteorite. Now they’re not so sure. They are requesting confirmation from CalTech and NASA.”

  “A meteorite,” Wu said. That sounded plausible. “Get NASA to confirm it. Just a freak of nature.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The general held out his hand. “Give me that 1938 report again.”

  Bloch returned it to him, and Wu stuck it in the manilla folder with the new report. He’d go through them both again after lunch.

  “Why haven’t I seen that 1938 report before?” he asked. It should have been in the officers’ “funny file,” which got passed around at meetings and parties.

  “It was…misfiled, sir. Only came to light six months ago, during a records sweep under the Freedom of Information Act. It was a week short of being released…” His voice trailed off.

  The general snorted. It figured. Damned reporters were all trying to release everything under the Freedom of Information Act. Good thing it hadn’t gotten out. What a field day UFO nuts would have had. For once, luck was on their side.

  “How long does it take to get to Antarctica from here?” he mused.

  “I’m…not sure, sir. Three or four days, I would imagine. It’s high summer in Antarctica, so conditions are optimal for travel.”

  “Find out.” Wu studied his fingernails. “Arrange whatever transportation we need. I want to see this thing for myself. You will join me, along with every member of your staff who knows about it. This must be contained. And lock down that survey team. Get them on our payroll. I don’t want them communicating with anyone other than you and me…as a matter of national security. There should be enough money left in the discretionary expense fund to cover whatever it takes to buy their services.”

  “Sir.” Bloch saluted and hurried out.

  Antarctica.… Wu sighed and picked up the 1938 report. His wife would not be happy.

  But if it’s real…

  CHAPTER ONE

  Army Corps of Engineers

  Special Operations Base, Antarctica

  “I didn’t sign up for this,” groaned Pete Garvin, throwing down his pickaxe and twisting first left, then right to stretch out his back and shoulder muscles. “Three months of digging, and all I’ve got are pains where I didn’t know I had muscles.”

  “You and me both, brother,” said Clay Washington. A burly African-American, he had been—until three months ago—head of the Antarctic Geo-survey Team, as well as Garvin’s boss. They had both signed on with General Wu’s team, helping to dig down through the glacier toward their discovery—whatever it turned out to be. A meteor? A spaceship? A frozen dinosaur whale (one of the wilder theories)? One guess was as good as another at this point.

  He turned and gazed up the ice tunnel. Fifteen feet wide, ten feet high, with steel brace beams every six feet, it seemed to stretch to infinity, though he knew it only ran six-hundred feet to a switchback. The tunnel turned there, ran almost seven hundred more feet, and switchbacked again, before you finally reached the surface, with its semi-permanent buildings surrounding the tunnel mouth.

  Arc lights and space heaters set every thirty feet ran the entire length. Between the lights, heaters, and the heavy digging equipment a hundred feet farther down, the tunnel temperature sometimes soared to a toasty 30°, though mostly it lingered at 28°. A series of wall-mounted fans hummed like a swarm of killer bees, circulating the air but doing little to relieve the months-old stench of human sweat and motor oil and exhaust fumes.

  Pete sat on an outcropping of ice, sucking in huge gulps of air. For a minute he paused to watch men with jackhammers attacking the wall of ice at the end of the tunnel. Ice-dust and ice-chips flew. He and Clay had what the others called “easy work”—smoothing out the roughest parts of the walls so the mini-bulldozers and the golf carts could pass each other in the tunnel with comfortable safety.

  The glacial ice grew harder the deeper they penetrated. We’re measuring progress by the foot, he told himself. Even so, progress was steady.

  A string of curses erupted behind him. He glanced over his shoulder at the team of Army engineers, struggling to reinforce a set of steel girders that had begun to buckle. No one wanted the tunnel to collapse before they reached their goal.

  The clatter of the jackhammers abruptly ceased. Pete turned his attention back to the men who had been working on the wall. The mini-bulldozer roared to life, zipped over, and began scooping up debris. It would ferry everything up to the surface and dump it a hundred feet from camp.

  We must be getting close, Pete thought. He squinted at the rough wall of ice at the end of the tunnel. How much farther? The Army Corps of Engineers had designed a gently sloping down-ramp, and the team had turned the final corner two weeks ago. It should be smooth sailing the rest of the way.

  Excited shouts rose from the men by the bulldozer. The driver cut its motor and climbed down from the cab. Everyone gathered in a circle.

  Clay craned his neck. “I think they found something.”

  “Come on, let’s take a look.” Without waiting for a reply, Pete rose and trotted down the grade to where men now gathered in front of the bulldozer’s shovel. Finally something to break the monotony of digging.

  Clay fell in step beside him.

  “—better call the General,” Corporal Menendez was saying, as they joined the circle corps workers. She was in charge of this work shift. “He’s going to want to see it.”

  “He flew to the South Pole station this morning,” someone said.

  “Radio him. Hammond, take care of it.”

  “Yes, Corporal.” Hammond trotted over to a golf cart, got in, and zipped up the tunnel.

  Pete stared down at a broken-off blade of metal jutting from a chunk of ice as big as a man’s torso. Under the bright arc lights, the blade gleamed silver. One side curved at a mathematically precise angle. Part of something round?

  “That looks machined,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Menendez said. “Definitely machined.”

  Pete tried to visualize it whole. It might have been eight or ten feet across.

  “Give me your pick, Smitty,” Menendez said.

  Pete held his breath as Menendez knelt, accepted a hand-pick from one of the other engineers, and struck the block of ice as hard as she could—once, twice, a third time. Chips flew. Finally, with a sound like cracking knuckles, the block split in half.

  Menendez dug gloved fingers into the gap and flipped the two halves apart, revealing more of the blade. The curved section extended another foot, then ended in jagged, twisted metal. Using the pointed end of the hand-pick, she pried it loose.

  Standing, Menendez turned the blade over, examining it carefully,

  “Well?” Pete finally demanded.

  “I’ve seen damage like this in war zones. There must have been an explosion—a big one.” She looked up. “There’s probably wreckage all through the ice. But the weird thing…” She paused, swallowed hard. “The weird thing is, it feels like it doesn’t weigh anything at all. Look!”

  She dropped it—but instead of thudding to the ground, the metal settled slowly, like a feather drifting to earth. She picked it up and passed it to the next man, who repeated the experiment.

  So it went around the circle. Pete got it last, after Clay—and just like Menendez had said, it felt like it weighed nothing at all in his hands. But it was strong and hard and cold. He couldn’t bend it.

  He returned it to Menendez, who hefted it, then used the blade of her hand-pick to try to scratch it. Other than a blood-chilling scree-ee-ee, her efforts had no effect.

  “Not even a scratch,” she murmured.

  Silence fell. Everyone stared—at the corporal, at the broken blade of metal, at ea
ch other.

  Pete asked, feeling his heart skip a beat, “Is it man-made?”

  “Not…man,” said Menendez slowly. “This is nothing I’ve ever seen before. Like nothing on our planet.”

  Pete barely contained a whoop of triumph. Not a meteorite. Not a frozen giant whale. It had to be a spaceship!

  He slapped Clay on the back. “It’s real, man! We found aliens! We’re gonna be famous!”

  Then suddenly everyone was talking at once—babbling about aliens, spaceships, the piece of metal.

  “Quiet down, quiet down!” Menendez yelled. Silence fell like a switch had been thrown. “We don’t know anything at this point. It’s just a piece of metal—nothing else. Don’t get ahead of yourselves.”

  “Are there more pieces?” Pete asked.

  “There have to be,” Menendez said. “It must be part of a debris field.” She gestured at the wall. “Everyone—spread out and look.”

  Her men began unclipping flashlights from their belts. Pete remembered that he had one, too, and fumbled it out. The engineers pressed the lenses against the wall, playing the beams through the ice, casting weird shadows that bounced from fracture mark to fracture mark.

  “I’ve got something!” one man called.

  “Me too!” said another. “Looks like more metal.”

  “And here!” Clay shouted.

  Six inches into the wall, Pete’s beam came to rest on something large and dark. He squinted. What was it? Not metal. A strange, black, vaguely fuzzy outline of…something.

  He slid the beam up, around a shoulder-like curve, to what might have been a head…and then up and over to a single red eye, frozen open, that glared out at him from the depths of the ice.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

  Antarctica

  Welcome to Hell, Jason Cosgrove thought.

  A biting late-summer wind swept across the Antarctic Plain and hissed through the buildings of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. According to the pilot of the airplane that had just dropped him off, local temperature was a balmy 12° Fahrenheit. Jason already felt a chill penetrating his coat, sweatshirt, and T-shirt. Three layers weren’t nearly enough.