The Best of John W. Campbell. (1/2)
Title: The Best of John W. Campbell.
Author: John W. Campbell.
Genre: Fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, alien fiction, short stories.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1937, 1938, 1939 (this collection 1973).
Summary: A collection of 5 short stories. In Double Minds (1937), two exiles from Earth are captured on Ganymede, and find themselves joining a civil revolt to free the planet of its brutal overseers. In Forgetfulness (1937), an expedition of aliens lands on earth to find a primitive settlement that has mostly forgotten the technologies that ran their now-abandoned cities, but when they decide to colonize the planet to study its secrets, they are shocked to discover the remaining humans had not quite forgotten everything. In Who Goes There? (1938), a group of researchers in a remote outpost in Antarctica have to contend with shape-shifting aliens, who are able to absorb and imitate all living things. (Only the stories 1-3 in this post, refer to PART 2 for stories 4-5).
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ "You do not understand. Ten years ago, the first Shaloor was made. He was a Lanoor, but he invented an operation, and tried it on a friend, then the friend did it to him. The brain is divided into two halves, only one of which ever works in thinking. If, however, a man is injured so the half he is using is destroyed, then the other half works. The Shaloor found out how to make both halves work at once. The brain is made up of thousands and thousands of individual cells, each one helping to think. When the Shaloor doubled the number of thinking cells that work, he became, not twice as brilliant, but over ten thousand times as keen-minded. With two factors, A and B, you can make only two combinations: AB and BA. With twice as many factors you can make far more than twice as many combinations.
"In ten short years the Shaloor overthrew our rulers, developed a new civilization. They invented the shleath, and a thousand new vegetables and new animal foods. They will be able to learn your secret shortly. Some say our rebellion may succeed."
♥ "Here, I'll make you sleep. Hypnotism."
"Can you? Say - that's right, you learned a lot of dope from those Marian records. Go ahead." Blake lay back thankfully. Ten seconds layer he realized his error. He was helplessly hypnotized, and already he recognized the flood of stranger thoughts pouring into his mind, otherworldly ideas. Penton was giving him knowledge of the Lanoorian language by the technique the Martians had developed ten thousand years ago: hypnotic teaching.
Blake was about to acquire a complete understanding of Lanoor, in about five minutes. Also, all the headaches that he would normally have had learning an language would be equally concentrated into one great-granddaddy of all headaches. He struggled to free his will-
♥ "Jupiter will rise in about two hours. When he comes up you won't need to be told, but you will need to be hidden," said Penton. "We appear to the local populace as inconspicuous as a pair of orangutans walking down Fifth Avenue arm in arm. And slightly less harmless. To them our build is the quintessence of horrible, brute strength.
"So when Jupiter's great bulk comes over the horizon, the reflected light is going to make us conspicuous, and not a sight to calm the nerves of nice, old Lanoorian ladies."
♥ "What" - he panted after a moment - "is the secret - of the wall - stop running - you fool - I'm winded."
"The air's too thin - to keep - it up," agreed Penton. In the darkness of a tiny alleyway they stopped. "The stuff I used was crotonaldehyde - an organic liquid - derivable from - alcohol. Works on the fact - that glass is not a true - solid."
Blake stared at him, panting.
"Yeah. Stone walls do - not a prison make - nor iron bars a cage. So what is it? That glass wall looked solid enough - it had me bluffed."
"Puffed, did you say? Glass is a liquid. Liquid got so cold it has turned stiff - past the gooey stage. Crotonaldehyde as the curious property of turning it solid. Long heating and cooling does it too, that's why kerosene lamp-chimneys used to get so fragile. Solid glass is extremely brittle and as strong as so much sand. When that stuff turned it solid it took all the strength out of it."
♥ "P'holkuun, can you start the rebellion?"
"Not until you can stop the shleath," answered the Lanoor firmly. "The rest of my people won't even talk rebellion until they are sure they won't be used for tidbits. You have never had a fifty-foot glob of jelly scrunch down on your best friend, and watched the expression of horror fade from his face because his face was dissolving out from under the expression."
♥ "They are waiting for you at the gate now with three shleath in hiding. Go back. You must try at some other time. The city has heard, and it is roaring with rebellion. The Shaloor are preparing to bring out the shleath as the crowd grows outside the palace. But go back. They are ready for you, and they have a new weapon."
P'holkuun looked at the new Lanoor recruit uneasily.
"Did you hear that, Earthman?" he asked Penton.
"Did you hear of the new weapon, Lanoor?" returned Penton. "Do you think they will ever know less than they know now? Be less ready to meet you with strange weapons? Do you think you can ever have a better chance than with the men who invented the weapons you fear? And know more about them than all the Shaloor on the planet? If ever in time you have had a breath of hope, you have it now. Come on before that breath expires."
♥ "P'holkuun, you said they couldn't see?" Penton asked softly. "What do you mean?"
"They can see. But they don't point right. They never drive, they never fly planes. They seldom write, or do experiments themselves. We do not understand fully. But there is something the matter with their eyes."
"Thank God for that," said Penton. "I think I know what it is. They've joined the two halves of the brain, and are far more brilliant than any creature has a right to be, but they pay for it. Only one half the brain does all the thinking. That's true enough. But both halves see, and both halves hear. Both halves help with moving the body about. Somehow, when they cross those two halves of the brain for greater keenness, they see double. They probably hear double, too. They can't coordinate arm and eye well. They forced themselves to learn to move a bit, but they can't make themselves see straight.
"They are more intelligent, no doubt of that, for they have more UV guns than we made. They figured out that unknown system to that extent in one week's time. But they not only see double, but by some psychological trick, they see the wrong image best! They missed us when we appeared suddenly. That Shakoor that tried to kill the shleath with the UV gun shot up all the court but for the spot where the creature was. They can't move quickly, and they can't see straight."
~~The Double Minds.
♥ Such it was. There was a race on this planet the men of Pareeth had found after six long years of space, six years of purring, humming atomic engines and echoing, gray steel fabric that carried and protected them. Harsh utility of giant girders and rubbery flooring, the snoring drone of forty quadrillion horse power of atomic engines. It was replaced now by the soft coolness of the grassy land; the curving steel of the girders gave way to the brown of arching trees; the stern ceiling of steel plates gave way to the vast, blue arch of a planet's atmosphere. Sounds died away in infinitudes where there was no steel to echo them back; the unending drone of the mighty engines had become breezes stirring, rustling leaves - an invitation to rest.
The race that lived here had long since found it such, it seemed.
♥ "The men you mentioned are coming. Each head of department, save Ron Thule. There will be no work for the astronomer."
"I will come, Shor Nun," called out the astronomer, softly. "I can sketch; I would be interested."
.."There is something for an astronomer in all this world, I think." He smiled at Ron Thule. "Are not climate and soils and atmospheres the province of astronomy, too?"
♥ Uneasiness settled on him when he was near this Seun, this descendant of a race that had been great ten millions of years before his own first sprang from the swamps. Cheated heir to a glory give million years lost.
♥ The city towered before him, five miles away across the gently rolling green swale. Titan city of a Titan race! The towers glowed with a sun-fired opalescence in the golden light of the sun. How long, great gods of this strange world, how long had they stood thus? Three thousand feet they rose from the level of age-sifted soil at their bases, three thousand feet of mighty mass, stupendous buildings of the giants long dead.
The strange little man from a strange little world circling a dim, forgotten star looked up at them, and they did not know, or care. He walked toward them, watched them climb into the blue of the sky. He crossed the broad green of the land, and they grew in their uncaring majesty.
Sheer, colossal mass, immeasurable weights and loading they were - and they seemed to float there on the grace of a line and a curve, half in the deep blue of the sky, half touching the warm, bright green of the land. They floated still on the strength of a dream dreamed by a man dead these millions of years. A brain had dreamed in terms of lines and curves and sweeping planes, and the brain had built in terms of opal crystal and vast masses. The mortal mind was buried under unknown ages, but an immortal idea had swept life into the dead masses it molded - they lived and fated still on the memory of a mighty glory. The glory of the race -
The race that lived in twenty-foot, rounded domes.
..The city flamed before him. Across ten - or was it twenty - thousand millenniums, the thought of the builders reached to this man of another race. A builder who thought and dreamed of a mighty future, marching on, on forever in the aisles of time. He must have looked from some high wind-swept balcony of the city to a star-sprinkled sky - and seen the argosies of space: mighty treasure ships that swept back to this remembered home, coming in from the legion worlds of space, from far stars and unknown, clustered suns; Titan ships, burdened with strange cargoes of unguessed things.
And the city peopled itself before him; the skies stirred in a moment's flash. It was the day of Rhth's glory then! Mile-long ships hovered in the blue, settling, slow, slow, home from worlds they'd circled. Familiar sights, familiar sounds, greeting their men again. Flashing darts of silver that twisted through mazes of the upper air, the soft, vast music of the mighty city. The builder lived, and looked out cross his dream-
But, perhaps, from his height in the looming towers he could see across the swelling ground to the low, rounded domes of his people, his far descendants seeking the friendly shelter of the shading trees-
♥ The land had built up slowly, age on age, till it was five hundred feet higher than the land the builder had seen.
But his dream was too well built for time to melt away. Slowly time was burying it, even as long since, time had buried him. The towers took no notice. They dreamed up to the blue of the skies and waited. They were patient; they had waited now a million, or was it ten million years? Some day, some year, the builders must return, dropping in their remembered argosies from the far, dim reaches of space, as they had once these ages gone. The towers waited; they were faithful to their trust. They had their memories, memories of a mighty age, when giants walked and worlds beyond the stars paid tribute to the city. Their builders would come again. Till then, naught bothered them in their silence.
But where the soft rains of a hundred thousand generations had drained from them, their infinite endurance softened to its gentle touch. Etched channels and rounded gutters, the mighty carvings dimming, rounding, their powerful features betrayed the slow effects. Perhaps - it had been so long - so long - even the city was forgetting what once it was. They had waited, these towers, for-
And the builders walked in the shade of the trees, and built rounded domes. And a new race of builders was come, a race the city did not notice in its age-long quiet. Ron Thule looked up to them and wondered if it were meant to be that his people should carry on the dream began so long ago.
Softened by the silence, voices from the expedition reached him. "- diamond won't scratch it, Shor Nun - more elastic than beryl steel. Tough-" That was Dee Lun, the metallurgist. He would learn that secret somehow. They would all learn. And Shor Nun, commander, executive, atomic engineer, would learn the secrets that their power plants must hold. The dream - the city's life - would go on!
♥ "Your people visited ours, once," said Ron Thule softly. "There are legends, the golden gods that came to Pareeth, bringing gifts of fire and the bow and the hammer. The myths have endured through two millions of our years - four and a half millions of yours. With fire and bow and hammer my people climbed to civilization. With atomic power they blasted themselves back to the swamps. Four times they climbed, discovered the secret of the atom, and blasted themselves back to the swamps. Yet all the changes could nor efface the thankfulness to the golden gods, who came when Pareeth was young."
.."The city builders went to see your race but once. They had meant to return, but before the return was made they had interfered in the history of another race, helping them. For their reward the city builders were attacked by their own weapons, by their own pupils. Never again have we disturbed another race."
♥ Slowly, Shor Nun walked toward the nearest of them, a slim, thirty-foot-long private ship, waiting through eternity for a forgotten land.
♥ "I was young then, and the city builders fascinated me. Their story is interesing and-"
"Interesting-" The thought seemed to echo in Ron Thule's mind. The story of the conquest of the universe, the story of achievement such as his race could only dream of yet. They had dreamed - and done! And that, to their descendants, that was - interesting. Interesting to this dark, strange labyrinth of branching corridors, and strange, hooded bulks. Production machinery, he knew, somehow, production machinery that forgotten workmen had hooded as they stepped away temporarily - for a year or two, perhaps, till the waning population should increase again and make new demands on it. Then great storerooms, bundled things that might be needed, spare parts, and stored records and deeds. Libraries of dull metal under gray dust. The unneeded efforts of a thousand generations, rooting in this quiet dark that he, Ron Thule, and his companions had disturbed with the moment's rush of atomic flame.
Then the tortuous corridor branched, joined others, became suddenly a great avenue descending into the power room, the heart of the city and all that it had meant. They waited still, the mighty engines the last of the builders had shut down as he left, waited to start again the work they had dropped for the moment, taking a well-earned rest. But they must have grown tired in that rest, that waiting for the resurgence of their masters. They glowed dimly under the thin blankets of grayed dust, reflecting the clear brilliance of the prying light.
♥ Seun of Rhth stepped over to him with a strange deliberation that yet was speed.
♥ "Don't look for the end of those busses, Drys Nol - it is not good. They knew all the universe, and the ends of it, long before they built this city. The things these men have forgotten embrace all the knowledge our race has, and a thousand thousand times more, and yet they have the ancient characteristics that made certain things possible to the city builders. I do not know what that thing may be, but my eyes had to follow it, and it went into another dimension. Seun, what is that thing?"
"The generator supplied the power for the city, and for the ships of the city, whenever they might be in space. In all the universe they could draw on the power of that generator, through that sorgan unit. That was the master unit; from it flowed the power of the generator, instantaneously, to any ship in all space, so long as its corresponding unit was tuned. It created a field rotating' - and the minds of his hearers refused the term - "which involves, as well, time.
"In the first revolution it made, the first day it was built, it circled to the ultimate end of time and the universe, and back to the day it was built. And in all that sweep, every sorgan unit turned to it must follow. The power that drove it died when the city was deserted, but it is still making the first revolution, which it made and completed in the first hundredth-of-a-second it existed.
"Because it circled to the end of time, it passed this moment in its wing, and every other moment that ever is to be. Were you to wipe it out with your mightiest atomic blast, it would not be disturbed, for it is in the next instant, as it was when it was built. And so it is at the end of time, unchanged. Nothing in space or time can alter that, for it has already been at the end of time. That is why it rotates still, and will rotate when this world dissolves, and the stars die out and scatter as dust in space. Only when the ultimate equality is established, when no more change is, or can be, will it be at rest - for then other things will be equal to it, because space, too, will be unchanged through time.
"Since, in its first swing, it turned to that time, and back to the day it was built, it radiated its power to the end of space and back. Anywhere, it might be drawn on, and was drawn on by the ships that sailed to other stars."
Ron Thule glanced very quickly toward and away from the sorgan unit. It rotated motionlessly, twinkling and winking in swift immobility. It was some ten feet in diameter, a round spheroid of rigidly fixed coils that slipped away and away in flashing speed. His eyes twisted and his thoughts seemed to freeze as he looked at it. Then he seemed to see beyond and through it, as though it were an infinite window, to ten thousand other immobile, swiftly spinning coils revolving in perfect harmony, and beyond them to strange stars and worlds beyond the suns - a thousand cities such as this on a thousand planets: the empire of the city builders!
And the dream faded - fades as that dream in stone and crystal and metal, everlasting reality, had faded in the softness of human tissue.
♥ It is ordered that in the event of the successful termination of the new colonizing expedition, such arrangements shall be made that the present, decadent inhabitants of the planet Rhth shall be allowed free and plentiful land; that they shall be in no way molested or attacked. It is the policy of this committee of Pareeth that this race shall be wards of the newly founded Rhth State, to be protected and in always aided in their life.
We feel, further, a deep obligation to this race in that the archæologist and anthropological reports clearly indicate that it was the race known to them as the city builders who first brought fire, the bow and the hammer to our race in mythological times. Once their race gave ours a foothold on the climb to civilization. It is our firm policy that these last, decadent members of that great race shall be given all protection, assistance and encouragement possible to tread again the climbing path.
♥ Ron Thule stood at the great, clear port light of the lock. Outside, Seun, in his softly glowing suit, floated a few feet from the ground. Abruptly, the great atomic engines of the Pareeth shrilled a chorus of ravening hate, and from the three great projectors the annihilating beams tore out, shrieking destruction through the air - and vanished. Seun stood at the junction of death, and his crystal glowed softly. Twelve floating ships screamed to the tortured shriek of overloaded atomics, and the planet below cursed back with quarter-mile-long tongues of lightning.
Somewhere, everywhere, the universe thrummed to a vast, crystalline note, and hummed softly. In that instant, the green meadowland of Rhth vanished; the eternal city dissolved into blackness. Only blackness, starless, lightless shone outside the lock port light. The soft, clear note of the crystal hummed and beat and surged. The atomic engine's cry died full-throated. An utter, paralyzed quiet descended on the ship, so that the cry of a child somewhere echoed and reverberated noisily down the steel corridors.
The crystal in Seun's hand beat and hummed its note. The blackness beyond the port became gray. One by one, six opalescent ships shifted into view in the blackness beyond, moving with a slow deliberation, as though forced by some infinite power into a certain, predetermined configuration. Like atoms in a crystal lattice they shifted, seemed to click into place and hold steady - nearly, geometrically arranged.
Then noise came back to the ship, sounds that crept in, afraid of themselves, grew courageous and clamored; pounding feet of men, and women's screams.
"We're out of space," gasped Shor Nun. "That crystal - that thing in his hand-"
"In a space of our own," said Ron Thule. "Wait till the note of the crystal dies down. It is weakening, weakening slowly, to us, but it will be gone, and then-"
..Shor Nun sobbed once. "That crystal - they had not lost the weapons of the city builders, Space of our own? No - it is like the sorgan: it rotates us to the end of time! This is the space we knew - when all time has died, and the stars are gone and the worlds are dust. This is the end of the nothingness. The city builders destroyed their enemies thus - by dumping them at the end of time and space. I know. They must have. And Seun had the ancient weapon. When the humming note of the crystal dies - the lingering force of translation -
"Then we shall die, too. Die in the death of death."
..Shor Nun stood silent. The ship thrummed and beat with the softening, dying note of the universe-distant crystal that held all the beginnings and the endings of time and space in a man's hand. The note was fading; very soft and sweet, it was. Throughout the ship the hysterical cry of voices had changed; it was softening with the thrum, softening, listening to the dying thread of infinitely sweet sound.
Shor Nun shrugged his shoulders, turned away. "It does not matter. The force is fading. Across ten million years the city builders have reached to protect their descendants."
♥ "What is - Seun? How has this happened? Do you know? You know what we were greeted by our friends - and they turned away from us.
"Six years have passed for us. They wanted to know what misfortune made us return at the end of a single year, for only one year has passed here on Pareeth. My son was born, there in space, and he has passed his fourth birthday. My daughter is two. Yet these things have not happened, for we were gone a single year. Seun has done it, but it cannot be; Seun, the decadent son of the city builders; Seun, who has forgotten the secrets of the ships that sailed beyond the stars and the building of the Titan Towers; Seun, whose people live in a tiny village sheltered from the rains and the sun by a few green trees.
"What are these people of Rhth?"
Ron Thule's voice was a whisper from the darkness. "I come from a far world, by what strange freak we will not say. I am a savage, a rising race that has not learned the secret of fire, nor bow, nor hammer. Tell me, Shor Nun, what is the nature of the two dry sticks I must rub, that fire may be born? Must they be hard, tough oak, or should one be a soft, resinous bit of pine? Tell me how I may make fire."
"Why - with matches or a heat ray - No, Ron Thule. Vague thoughts, meaningless ideas and unclear. I - I have forgotten the ten thousand generations of development. I cannot retreat to a level you, savage of an untrained world, would understand. I - I have forgotten."
"Then tell me, how I must hold the flint, and where must I press with a bit of deer horn that the chips shall fly small and even, so that the knife will be sharp and kill my prey for me? And how shall I run and wash and treat the wood of the bow, or the skin of the slain animal that I may have a coat that will not be stiff, but soft and pliable?"
"Those, too, I have forgotten. Those are unnecessary things. I cannot help you, savage. I would greet you, and show you the relics of our deserted past in museums. I might conduct you through ancient caves, where mighty rock walls defended my ancestors against the wild things they could not control.
"Yes, Ron Thule. I have forgotten the development."
♥ "My son was born in space, and is four. Yet we were gone but a single year from Pareeth." Shor Nun sighed.
"Our fleet took six years to cross the gulf of five light years. In thirty seconds, infinitely faster than light, Seun returned us, that there might be the minimum change in our racial history. Time is a function of the velocity of light, and five light years of distance is precisely equal to five years of time multiplied by the square root of minus one. When we traversed five light years of space in no appreciable time, we dropped back, also, through five years of time.
"You and I have spent eighteen years of effort in this exploration, Shor Nun - eighteen years of our manhood. By this hurling us back Seun has forever denied us the planets we earned by those long years of effort. But now he does not deny us wholly.
"They gave us this, and by it another sun, with other planets. This Seun gave not to me, as an astronomer; it is his gift to the race. Now it is beyond us ever to make another. And this which projects this space around us will cease to be, I think, on the day we land on those other planets of that other sun, where Seun will be to watch us - as he may be here now, to see that we understand his meanings."
~~Forgetfulness.
♥ The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combated the musty smell of sweat-and-snow-drenched furs. The acrid odor of burned cooking-fat, and the animal not-unpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air.
Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet, somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their associates - dogs, machines, and cooking - came another taint. It was a queer, neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of industry and life. And it was a life-smell. But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically onto the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the unshielded glare of the electric light.
♥ "It came down from space, driven and lifted by forces men haven't discovered yet, and somehow - perhaps something went wrong then - it tangled with Earth's magnetic field. It came south here, out of control probably, circling the magnetic pole. That's a savage country there; but when Antarctica was still freezing, it must have been a thousand times more savage. There must have been blizzard snow, as well as drift, new snow falling as the continent glaciated. The swirl there must have been particularly bad, the wind hurling a solid blanket of white over the lip of that now-buried mountain.
"The ship struck solid granite head-on, and cracked up. Not every one of the passengers in it was killed, but the ship must have been ruined, her driving mechanism locked. It tangled with Earth's field, Norris believes. No thing made by intelligent beings can tangle with the dead immensity of a planet's natural forces and survive.
"One of its passengers stepped out. The wind we saw there never fell below forty-one, and the temperature never rose above minus sixty. Then - the wind must have been stronger. And there was drift falling in a solid sheet. The thing was lost completely in ten paces."
..If a man stepped out of the tunnels that connected each of the camp buildings beneath the surface, he'd be lost in ten paces. Out there, the slim, black finger of the radio mast lifted 300 feet into the air, and at its peak was the clear night sky. A sky of thin, whining wind rushing steadily from beyond to another beyond under the licking, curling mantle of the aurora. And off north, the horizon flamed with queer, angry colors of the midnight twilight. That was spring 300 feet above Antarctica.
At the surface - it was white death. Death of a needle-fingered cold driven before the wind, sucking heat from any warm thing. Cold - and white mist of endless, everlasting drift, the fine, fine particles of licking snow that obscured all things.
Kinner, the little, scar-faced cook, winced. Five days ago he had stepped out to the surface to reach a cache of frozen beef. He had reached it, started back-and the drift-wind leapt out of the south. Cold, white death that streamed across the ground blinded him in twenty seconds. He stumbled on wildly in circles. It was half an hour before rope-guided men from below found him in the impenetrable murk.
It was easy for man - or thing - to get lost in ten paces.
♥ "Blair admits that such micro-life might retain the power of living. Such unorganized things as individual cells can retain life for unknown periods, when solidly frozen. The beast itself is as dead as those frozen mammoths they find in Siberia. Organized, highly developed life-forms can't stand that treatment.
"But micro-life could. Norris suggests that we may release some disease-form that man, never having met it before, will be utterly defenseless against.
"Blair's answer is that there may be such still-living germs, but that Norris has the case reversed. They are utterly non-immune to man. Our life-chemistry probably-"
"Probably!" The little biologist's head lifted in a quick, birdlike motion. The halo of gray hair about his bald head ruffled as though angry. "Heh. One look-"
"I know," McReady acknowledged. "The thing is not Earthly. It does not seem likely that it can have a life-chemistry sufficiently like ours to make cross-infection remotely possible. I would say that there is no danger."
McReady looked toward Dr. Copper. The physician shook his head slowly. "None whatever," he asserted confidently. "Man cannot infect or be infected by germs that live in such comparatively close relatives as the snakes. And they are, I assure you," his clean-shaven face grimaced uneasily, "much nearer to us than - that."
♥ His black hair was crisp and hard, like short, steel wires, and his eyes were the gray of fractured steel. If McReady was a man of bronze, Norris was all steel. His movements, his thoughts, his whole bearing had the quick, hard impulse of steel spring. His nerves were steel - hard, quick-acting - swift corroding.
♥ A single throw of the tarpaulin revealed the thing. The ice had melted somewhat in the heat of the room, and it was clear and blue as thick, good glass. It shone wet and sleek under the harsh light of the unshielded globe above.
The room stiffened abruptly. It was face up there on the plain, greasy planks of the table. The broken half of the bronze ice-ax was still buried in the queer skull. Three mad, hate-filled eyes blazed up with a living fire, bright as fresh-spilled blood, from a face ringed with a writhing, loathsome nest of worms, blue, mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow..
♥ "And just because it looks unlike men, you don't have to accuse it of being evil, or vicious or something. Maybe that expression on its face is its equivalent to a resignation to fate. White is the color of mourning to the Chinese. If men can have different customs, why can't a so-different race have different understandings of facial expressions?"
Connant laughed softly, mirthlessly. "Peaceful resignation! If that is the best it could do in the way of resignation, I should, exceedingly dislike seeing it when it was looking mad. That face was never designed to express peace. It just didn't have any philosophical thoughts like peace in its make-up.
"I know it's your pet - but be sane about it. That thing grew up on evil, adolesced slowly roasting alive the local equivalent of kittens, and amused itself through maturity on new and ingenious torture."
"You haven't the slightest right to say that," snapped Blair. "How do you know the first thing about the meaning of a facial expression inherently inhuman? It may well have no human equivalent whatever. That is just a different development of Nature, another example of Nature's wonderful adaptability. Growing on another, perhaps harsher world, it has different form and features. But it is just as much a legitimate child of Nature as you are. You are displaying the childish human weakness of hating the different. On its own world it would probably class you as a fish-belly, white monstrosity with an insufficient number of eyes and a fungoid body pal and bloated with gas.
"Just because its nature is different, you haven't any right to say it's necessarily evil."
Norris burst out a single, explosive, "Haw!" He looked down at the thing. "May be that things from other worlds don't have to be evil just because they're different. But that thing was! Child of Nature, eh? Well, it was a hell of an evil Nature."
"Aw, will you mugs cut crabbing at each other and get the damned thing off my table?" Kinner growled. "And put a canvas over it. It looks indecent."
♥ He gave up and yielded to curiosity, or nervousness. He lifted the pressure lamp from the desk and carried it over to the table in the corner. Then he returned to the stove and picked up the coal tongs. The beast had been thawing for nearly eighteen hours now. He poked at it with an unconscious caution; the flesh was no longer hard as armor plate, but had assumed a rubbery texture. It looked like wet, blue rubber glistening under droplets of water like little round jewels in the glare of the gasoline pressure lantern. Connant felt an unreasoning desire to pour the contents of the lamp's reservoir over the thing in its box and drop the cigarette into it. The three red eyes glared up at him sightlessly, the ruby eyeballs reflecting murky, smoky rays of light.
He realized vaguely that he had been looking at them for a very long time, even vaguely understood that they were no longer sightless. But it did not seem of importance, of no more importance than the labored, slow motion of the tentacular things that sprouted from the base of the scrawny, slowly pulsing neck.
Connant picked up the pressure lamp and returned to his chair. He sat down, staring at the pages of mathematics before him. The clucking of the counter was strangely less disturbing, the rustle of the coals in the stove no longer distracting.
The creak of the floorboards behind him didn't interrupt his thoughts as he went about his weekly report in an automatic manner, filling in columns of data and making brief, summarizing notes.
The creak of the floorboards sounded nearer.
♥ "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 four hundred 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 - it's got to be one of us - that's the only way it can fly an airplane - fly a plane for two hours, and rule - be - 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.
♥ "Ever hear the old story of how to stop hoof-and-mouth disease in cattle?
"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 the 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 coming in with the spring 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."
♥ "We humans must somehow have the greater numbers now. But-" he stopped.
McReady laughed shortly. "You're doing what Norris complained of in me. Leaving it hanging. 'But if one more is changed - that may shift the balance of power.' It doesn't fight. I don't think it ever fights. It must be a peaceable thing, in its own - inimitable - way. It never had to, because it always gained its end - otherwise."
Van Wall's mouth twisted in a sickly grin. "You're suggesting then, that perhaps it already has the greater numbers, but is just waiting - waiting, all of them - all of you, for all I know - waiting till I, the last human, drop my wariness in sleep. Mac, did you notice their eyes, all looking at us?"
♥ It was almost five minutes, five ages while the wind made the only sound, before McReady appeared at the door.
"We," he announced, "haven't got enough grief here already. Somebody's tried to help us out. Kinner has a knife in his throat, which was why he stopped singing, probably. We've got monsters, madmen and murderers. Any more 'M's' you can think of, Caldwell? If there are, we'll probably have 'em before long."
♥ McReady's great bronze beard ruffled in a grim smile. "This is satisfying, 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 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 Heaven, they're phony! Phony 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!"
♥ The tensity was released in that second. Whatever of hell the monsters may have had within them, the men in that instant matched it. Barclay had no chance to move his weapon as a score of men poured down on that thing that had seemed Dutton. It mewed, and spat, and tried to grow fangs - and was a hundred broken, torn pieces. Without knives, or any weapon save the brute-given strength of a staff of picked men, the thing was crushed, rent.
Slowly they picked themselves up, their eyes smouldering, very quiet in their emotions.
A curious wrinkling of their lips betrayed a species of nervousness.
Barclay went over with the electric weapon. Things smouldered and stank. The caustic acid Van Wall dropped on each spilled drop of blood gave off tickling, cough-provoking fumes.
McReady grinned, his deep-set eyes alight and dancing. "Maybe," he said softly, "I underrated man's abilities when I said nothing human could have the ferocity in the eyes of that thing we found. I wish we could have the opportunity to treat in a more befitting manner these things. Something with boiling oil, or melted lead in it, or maybe slow roasting in the power boiler."
~~Who Goes There?