by Jerry
1923
THE THING FROM—“OUTSIDE”
George Allen England
THEY sat about their camp-fire, that little party of Americans retreating southward from Hudson Bay before the on-coming menace of the great cold. Sat there, stolid under the awe of the North, under the uneasiness that the day’s trek had laid upon their souls. The three men smoked.
The two women huddled close to each other. Fireglow picked their faces from the gloom of night among the dwarf firs. A splashing murmur told of the Albany River’s haste to escape from the wilderness, and reach the Bay.
“I don’t see what there was in a mere circular print on a rock-ledge to make our guides desert,” said Professor Thorburn. His voice was as dry as his whole personality. “Most extraordinary.”
“They knew what it was, all right,” answered Jandron, geologist of the party. “So do I.”
He rubbed his cropped mustache. His eyes glinted grayly. I’ve seen prints like that before. That was on the Labrador. And I’ve seen things happen, where they were.”
“Something surely happened to our guides, before they’d got a mile into the bush,” put in the Professor’s wife; while Vivian, her sister, gazed into the fire that revealed her as a beauty, not to be spoiled even by a tam and a rough-knit sweater. “Men don’t shoot wildly, and scream like that, unless—”
“They’re all three dead now, anyhow,” put in Jandron. “So they’re out of harm’s way. While we—well, we’re two hundred and fifty wicked miles from the C.P.R. rails.”
“Forget it, Jandy!” said Marr, the journalist. “We’re just suffering from an attack of nerves, that’s all. Give me a fill of ’baccy. Thanks. We’ll all be better in the morning. Ho-hum! Now, speaking of spooks and such—”
He launched into an account of how he had once exposed a fraudulent spiritualist, thus proving—to his own satisfaction—that nothing existed beyond the scope of mankind’s everyday life. But nobody gave him much heed. And silence fell upon the little night-encampment in the wilds; a silence that was ominous.
Pale, cold stars watched down from spaces infinitely far beyond man’s trivial world.
Next day, stopping for chow on a ledge miles upstream, Jandron discovered another of the prints. He cautiously summoned the other two men. They examined the print, while the women-folk were busy by the fire. A harmless thing the marking seemed; only a ring about four inches in diameter, a kind of cup-shaped depression with a raised center. A sort of glaze coated it, as if the granite had been fused by heat.
Jandron knelt, a well-knit figure in bright mackinaw and canvas leggings, and with a shaking finger explored the smooth curve of the print in the rock. His brows contracted as he studied it.
“We’d better get along out of this as quick as we can,” said he in an unnatural voice. “You’ve got your wife to protect, Thorburn, and I,—well, I’ve got Vivian. And—”
“You have?” nipped Marr. The light of an evil jealously gleamed in his heavy-lidded look. “What you need is an alienist.”
“Really, Jandron,” the Professor admonished, “you mustn’t let your imagination run away with you.”
“I suppose it’s imagination that keeps this print cold!” the geologist retorted. His breath made faint, swirling coils of vapor above it.
“Nothing but a pot-hole,” judged Thorburn, bending his spare, angular body to examine the print. The Professor’s vitality all seemed centered in his big-bulged skull that sheltered a marvellous thinking machine. Now he put his lean hand to the base of his brain, rubbing the back of his head as if it ached. Then, under what seemed some powerful compulsion, he ran his bony finger around the print in the rode.
“By Jove, but it is cold!” he admitted. “And looks as if it had been stamped right out of the stone. Extraordinary!”
“Dissolved out, you mean,” corrected the geologist. “By cold.”
The journalist laughed mockingly.
“Wait till I write this up!” he sneered. “ ‘Noted Geologist Declares Frigid Ghost Dissolves Granite!’ ”
Jandron ignored him. He fetched a little water from the river and poured it into the print.
“Ice!” ejaculated the Professor. “Solid ice!”
“Frozen in a second,” added Jandron, while Marr frankly stared. “And it’ll never melt, either. I tell you, I’ve seen some of these rings before; and every time, horrible things have happened. Incredible things! Something burned this ring out of the stone—burned it out with the cold interstellar space. Something that can import cold as a permanent quality of matter. Something that can kill matter, and totally remove it.”
“Of course that’s all sheer poppycock,” the journalist tried to laugh, but his brain felt numb.
“This something, this Thing,” continued Jandron, “is a Thing that can’t be killed by bullets. It’s what caught our guides on the barrens, as they ran away—poor fools!”
A shadow fell across the print in the rock. Mrs. Thorburn had come up, was standing there. She had overheard a little of what Jandron had been saying.
“Nonsense!” she tried to exclaim, but she was shivering so she could hardly speak.
That night, after a long afternoon of paddling and portaging—laboring against inhibitions like those in a nightmare—they camped on shelving rocks that slanted to the river.
“After all,” said the Professor, when supper was done, “we mustn’t get into a panic. I know extraordinary things are reported from the wilderness, and more than one man has come out, raving. But we, by Jove! with our superior brains—we aren’t going to let Nature play us any tricks!”
“And of course,” added his wife, her arm about Vivian, “everything in the universe is a natural force. There’s really no super-natural, at all.”
“Admitted,” Jandron replied. “But how about things outside the universe?”
“And they call you a scientist?” gibed Marr; but the Professor leaned forward, his brows knit. “Hm!” he grunted. A little silence fell.
“You don’t mean, really,” asked Vivian, “that you think there’s life and intelligence—Outside?” Jandron looked at the girl. Her beauty, haloed with ruddy gold from the firelight, was a pain to him as he answered:
“Yes, I do. And dangerous life, too. I know what I’ve seen, in the North Country. I know what I’ve seen!”
Silence again, save for the crepitation of the flames, the fall of an ember, the murmur of the current. Darkness narrowed the wilderness to just that circle of flickering light ringed by the forest and the river, brooded over by the pale stars.
“Of course you can’t expect a scientific man to take you seriously,” commented the Professor.
“I know what I’ve seen! I tell you there’s Something entirely outside man’s knowledge.”
“Poor fellow!” scoffed the journalist; but even as he spoke his hand pressed his forehead.
“There are Things at work,” Jandron affirmed, with dogged persistence. He lighted his pipe with a blazing twig. Its flame revealed his face drawn, lined. “Things. Things that reckon with us no more than we do with ants. Less, perhaps.”
The flame of the twig died. Night stood closer, watching.
“Suppose there are?” the girl asked. “What’s that got to do with these prints in the rock?”
“They,” answered Jandron, “are marks left by one of those Things. Footprints, maybe. That Thing is near us, here and now!”
Marr’s laugh broke a long stillness.
“And you,” he exclaimed, “with an A.M. and a B.S. to write after your name.”
“If you knew more,” retorted Jandron, “you’d know a devilish sight less. It’s only ignorance that’s cock-sure.”
“But,” dogmatized the Professor, “no scientist of any standing has ever admitted any outside interference with this planet.”
“No, and for thousands of years nobody ever admitted that the world was round, either. What I’ve seen, I know.”
“Well, what have you seen?
” asked Mrs. Thorburn, shivering.
“You’ll excuse me, please, for not going into that just now.”
“You mean,” the Professor demanded, dryly, “if the—hm!—this suppositious Thing wants to—?”
“It’ll do any infernal thing it takes a fancy to, yes! If it happens to want us—”
“But what could Things like that want of us? Why should They come here, at all?”
“Oh, for various reasons. For inanimate objects, at times, and then again for living beings. They’ve come here lots of times, I tell you,” Jandron asserted with strange irritation, “and got what They wanted, and then gone away to—Somewhere. If one of Them happens to want us, for any reason, It will take us, that’s all. If It doesn’t want us, It will ignore us, as we’d ignore gorillas in Africa if we were looking for gold. But if it was gorilla-fur we wanted, that would be different for the gorillas, wouldn’t it?”
“What in the world,” asked Vivian, “could a—well, a Thing from Outside want of us?”
“What do men want, say, of guinea-pigs? Men experiment with ’em, of course. Superior beings use inferior, for their own ends. To assume that man is the supreme product of evolution is gross self-conceit. Might not some superior Thing want to experiment with human beings?
“But how?” demanded Marr.
“The human brain is the most highly-organized form of matter known to this planet. Suppose, now—”
“Nonsense!” interrupted the Professor. “All hands to the sleeping-bags, and no more of this. I’ve got a wretched headache. Let’s anchor in Blanket Bay!”
He, and both the women, turned in. Jandron and Marr sat a while longer by the fire. They kept plenty of wood piled on it, too, for an unnatural chill transfixed the night-air. The fire burned strangely blue, with greenish flicks of flame.
At length, after vast acerbities of disagreement, the geologist and the newspaperman sought their sleeping-bags. The fire was a comfort. Not that a fire could avail a pin’s weight against a Thing from interstellar space, but subjectively it was a comfort. The instincts of a million years, centering around protection by fire, cannot be obliterated.
After a time—worn out by a day of nerve-strain and of battling with swift currents, of flight from Something invisible, intangible—they all slept.
The depths of space, star-sprinkled, hung above them with vastness immeasurable, cold beyond all understanding of the human mind.
Jandron woke first, in a red dawn.
He blinked at the fire, as he crawled from his sleeping-bag. The fire was dead; and yet it had not burned out. Much wood remained unconsumed, charred over, as if some gigantic extinguisher had in the night been lowered over it.
“Hmmm!” growled Jandron. He glanced about him, on the ledge. “Prints, too. I might have known!”
He aroused Marr. Despite all the jouralist’s mocking hostility, Jandron felt more in common with this man of his own age than with the Professor, who was close on sixty.
“Look here, now!” said he. “It has been all around here. See? It put out our fire—maybe the fire annoyed It, some way—and It walked round us, everywhere.” His gray eyes smouldered. “I guess, by gad, you’ve got to admit facts, now!”
The journalist could only shiver and stare.
“Lord, what a head I’ve got on me, this morning!” he chattered. He rubbed his forehead with a shaking hand, and started for the river. Most of his assurance had vanished. He looked badly done up.
“Well, what say?” demanded Jandron. “See these fresh prints?”
“Damn the prints!” retorted Marr, and fell to grumbling some unintelligible thing. He washed unsteadily, and remained crouching at the river’s lip, inert, numbed.
Jandron, despite a gnawing at the base of his, brain, carefully examined the ledge. He found prints scattered everywhere, and some even on the river-bottom near the shore. Wherever water had collected in the prints on the rock, it had frozen hard. Each print in the river-bed, too, was white with ice. Ice that the rushing current could not melt.
“Well, by gad!” he exclaimed. He lighted his pipe and tried to think. Horribly afraid—yes, he felt horribly afraid, but determined. Presently, as a little power of concentration came back, he noticed that all the prints were in straight lines, each mark about two feet from the next.
“It was observing us while we slept,” said Jandron.
“What nonsense are you talking, eh?” demanded Marr. His dark, heavy face sagged. “Fire, now, and grub!”
He got up and shuffled unsteadily away from the river. Then he stopped with a jerk, staring.
“Look! Look a’ that axe!” he gulped, pointing.
Jandron picked up the axe, by the handle, taking good care not to touch the steel. The blade was white-furred with frost. And deep into it, punching out part of the edge, one of the prints was stamped.
“This metal,” said he, “is clean gone. It’s been absorbed. The Thing doesn’t recognize any difference in materials. Water and steel and rock are all the same to It.
“You’re crazy!” snarled the journalist. “How could a Thing travel on one leg, hopping along, making marks like that?”
“It could roll, if it was disk-shaped. And—”
A cry from the Professor turned them. Thorburn was stumbling toward them, hands out and tremulous.
“My wife—!” he choked.
Vivian was kneeling beside her sister, frightened, dazed.
“Something’s happened!” stammered the Professor. “Here—come here—!”
Mrs. Thorburn was beyond any power of theirs, to help. She was still breathing; but her respirations were stertorous, and a complete paralysis had stricken her. Her eyes, half-open and expressionless, showed pupils startlingly dilated. No resources of the party’s drug-kit produced the slightest effect on the woman.
The next half-hour was a confused panic, breaking camp, getting Mrs. Thorburn into a canoe, and leaving that accursed place, with a furious energy of terror that could no longer reason. Up-stream, ever up against the swirl of the current the party fought, driven by horror. With no thought of food or drink, paying no heed to landmarks, lashed forward only by the mad desire to be gone, the three men and the girl flung every ounce of their energy into the paddles. Their panting breath mingled with the sound of swirling eddies. A mist-blurred sun brooded over the northern wilds. Unheeded, hosts of black-flies sang high-pitched keenings all about the fugitives. On either hand the forest waited, watched.
Only after two hours of sweating toil had brought exhaustion did they stop, in the shelter of a cove where black waters circled, foam-flecked. There they found the Professor’s wife—she was dead.
Nothing remained to do but bury her. At first Thorburn would not hear of it. Like a madman he insisted that through all hazards he would fetch the body out. But no—impossible. So, after a terrible time, he yielded.
In spite of her grief, Vivian was admirable. She understood what must be done. It was her voice that said the prayers; her hand that—lacking flowers—laid the fir boughs on the cairn. The Professor was dazed past doing anything, saying anything.
Toward mid-afternoon, the party landed again, many miles up-river. Necessity forced them to eat. Fire would not burn. Every time they lighted it, it smouldered and went out with a heavy, greasy smoke. The fugitives ate cold food and drank water, then shoved off in two canoes and once more fled.
In the third canoe, hauled to the edge of the forest, lay all the rock-specimens, data and curios, scientific instruments. The party kept only Marr’s diary, a compass, supplies, fire-arms and medicine-kit.
“We can find the things we’ve left—sometime,” said Jandron, noting the place well. “Sometime—after It has gone.”
“And bring the body out,” added Thorburn. Tears, for the first time, wet his eyes. Vivian said nothing. Marr tried to light his pipe. He seemed to forget that nothing, not even tobacco, would burn now.
Vivian and Jandron occupied one canoe. The other carried the Prof
essor and Marr. Thus the power of the two canoes was about the same. They kept well together, up-stream.
The fugitives paddled and portaged with a dumb, desperate energy. Toward evening they struck into what they believed to be the Mamattawan. A mile up this, as the blurred sun faded beyond a wilderness of ominous silence, they camped. Here they made determined efforts to kindle fire. Not even alcohol from the drug-kit would start it. Cold, they mumbled a little food; cold, they huddled into their sleeping-bags, there to lie with darkness leaden on their fear. After a long time, up over a world void of all sound save the river-flow, slid an amber moon notched by the ragged tops of the conifers. Even the wail of a timber-wolf would have come as welcome relief; but no wolf howled.
Silence and night enfolded them. And everywhere they felt that It was watching.
Foolishly enough, as a man will do foolish things in a crisis, Jandron laid his revolver outside his sleeping-bag, in easy reach. His thought—blurred by a strange, drawing headache—was:
“If It touches Vivian, I’ll shoot!”
He realized the complete absurdity of trying to shoot a visitant from interstellar space; from the Fourth Dimension, maybe. But Jandron’s ideas seemed tangled. Nothing would come right. He lay there, absorbed in a kind of waking nightmare. Now and then, rising on an elbow, he hearkened; all in vain. Nothing so much as stirred.
His thought drifted to better days, when all had been health, sanity, optimism; when nothing except jealousy of Marr, as concerned Vivian, had troubled him. Days when the sizzle of the frying-pan over friendly coals had made friendly wilderness music; when the wind and the northern star, the whirr of the reel, the whispering vortex of the paddle in clear water had all been things of joy. Yes, and when a certain happy moment had, through some word or look of the girl, seemed to promise his heart’s desire. But now—
“Damn it, I’ll save her, anyhow!” he swore with savage intensity, knowing all the while that what was to be, would be, unmitigably. Do ants, by any waving of antenna, stay the down-crushing foot of man?
Next morning, and the next, no sign of the Thing appeared. Hope revived that possibly It might have flitted away elsewhere; back, perhaps, to outer space. Many were the miles the urging paddles spurned behind. The fugitives calculated that a week more would bring them to the railroad. Fire burned again. Hot food and drink helped, wonderfully. But where were the fish?
