The Thing (11 page)

Part of the wooden kennel floor began to burn crisply, something mewed and screeched and clawed at the back wall, too big to fit through the dog door.

"We're on fire!" Childs shouted worriedly.

"Don't let up," Macready ordered him. He was firing the shotgun repeatedly into the flames.

Garry joined the firing and emptied his Magnum into the back of the kennel, then spoke calmly as he reloaded a third time. "Extinguishers," he told the men gathered behind him.

Macready had run out of shells. He stood next to Childs, keeping the twin hoses from getting underfoot. His expression bordered on the demonic.

"That's it, that's it! Don't let up, Childs. Burn the sucker, burn it!"

The mechanic held the stream of flame steady as he moved slowly toward the back wall. The hissing continued to fill the kennel, more distinct now since the surviving dogs had fled.

Outside in the corridor the rest of the crew was chasing smoldering dogs, spraying them with chemical fire retardant. The smell of burning fur filled the air. Dogs and men choked on smoke and chemicals. Norris led a couple of the crew into the kennel, where they began spraying the floor to keep the flames from spreading.

Alter a brief eternity the screeching and howling began to fade. There was a last lingering hiss. Then it was silent, except for the steady roar of the torch.

Macready was standing next to the mechanic, hammering on his shoulder with a fist, his eyes wild. "That's it, man. Burn it back to hell, burn it . . ."

Childs turned off the torch. His voice was subdued. "That's it, man. It's done. It's over."

Macready stared up at him, breathing hard, his fist still poised to strike. Childs grabbed the pilot's arm and squeezed. "It's
over
, Mac." He put the torch down and walked around the pilot. A body was sitting there, leaning up against the wall of the kennel.

"Hey, Clark." Childs stared into the handler's face. Clark's eyes were open, staring, but the man did nothing to acknowledge Childs's presence. The mechanic turned and shouted anxiously toward the corridor. "Hey, somebody go get Doc Copper. Fast!"

Garry was standing alongside him. He bent over, shining a flashlight into that handler's face. "Shock, looks like."

Childs rose, then turned to gaze back to the corner where he'd played the torch. "He's got company . . ."

That morning the recreation room slowly filled with exhausted men. Their faces showed the effects of worry and little sleep. There wasn't much conversation, none of it the usual light bantering, and none of it very loud. They conversed in urgent whispers and pointed toward the middle of the room.

Blair stared silently at the badly burned corpses on the central table. There were two unfortunate dogs there, and something else.

The bodies were connected together like Siamese twins, bound in an inextricable embrace that had nothing to do with love. One animal wore the remnant of Clark's bandage and was otherwise easily identifiable as their Norwegian visitor. It was much larger than its companion, bigger than any husky had a right to be, and there were aspects of it that were anything but doglike.

From hips to chest the main torso was cracked like old plaster and peeling back at the edges. It looked as though something had blown up inside the animal's gut and was trying to force itself outward.

Odd appendages, a peculiar kind of organic cording, were wrapped around both bodies and connected to the flesh of each. They were uncomfortably like those protruding from the body of the deformed Norwegian that Copper, Blair, and Fuchs had been dissecting.

Clark sat in a chair against the far wall. His eyes were still glassy, but Copper had administered a relaxant and the dog handler was beginning to emerge from shock. Nauls stood next to him, talking slowly and patiently, trying to comfort his friend.

Childs stood nearby and sucked on a joint, trying to relax and failing. There was no pleasure in the smoke, not this morning. His eyes were fixed on the floor. When he'd torched the thing that lay on the table back there in the kennel it had let out a terrible scream, and he couldn't get that inhuman wail out of his head.

The burned and battered corpses of two other dogs lay on the floor in the middle of the room, close to the table with its gruesome burden. At least, they looked like dogs. Blair turned his attention from them back to the travesty of life on the table. His face showed growing concern.

He turned and walked over to a wall intercom, and pushed the button connecting the rec room to the infirmary. "Fuchs?"

The reply was slow in coming. "Yeah. That you, Blair?"

"Yes. How's it coming?"

The assistant biologist turned and looked over toward the surgery table. Three more dogs lay on it. All were sedated and badly cut up. But they were still alive.

"Slowly. I'm no vet."

"Neither's Clark." Blair looked across the room to where the handler was still sitting dazedly in his chair. "He's still not in any shape to help."

"I know." The younger man chewed on his lower lip. "I'm doing the best I can for them."

"Okay. See you."

"Yeah. Hey, you figure anything out yet?"

"Not yet. Bye."

"Bye yourself." Fuchs moved away from the intercom and started unwrapping new bandages. One of the dogs on the table whined at him.

"Easy, boy. We'll get you fixed up as fast as we can. I'll do your leg in a minute." He started toward the table.

Nauls was patting Clark on the shoulder and smiling, trying to raise the other man's spirits. "Hey, it's okay now, man. It's dead. It's over." He gestured toward the card table. "You see? There's nothing to worry about any more."

Clark's head turned slowly and he bestowed a dreamy grin on the cook. "I know. Childs killed it. I saw. Last night, wasn't it?"

Nauls let out a relieved breath. "That's right, man. You got it." If Clark's time sense had returned that was a sure sign he was going to be okay. At least, that's what Copper had said. He fervently hoped so. He liked the handler. He wasn't snobbish, like some of the scientists.

Nauls looked over at the senior biologist. "What happened to those dogs, Blair?" He indicated the card table and its distorted shapes.

The scientist looked back at him, then at the table again. "You tell me, Nauls. You tell me."

The little work cubicle was filled with filing boxes full of three-by-five cards, tapes, small tools, and open plastic crates filled with pieces of rock. Norris sat at the single small desk. A light hung over him, its flexible metal neck bent at a convenient angle, giving it the look of a steel cobra. It shone brightly on the maps the geophysicist was sorting through. Some of the notations on the maps were in Norwegian, some in English.

Eventually he found the chart he was hunting for and placed it above one of the Norwegian maps. He used a black marking pen to make identical notations on both.

"Here," he announced confidentially. "This is where they were spending most of their time. I cross-checked with their notes. You can figure out the months where they've been written out. They used numeric notation most of the time, though." He continued to make little arrowheads and dots on the maps."

Macready stopped looking over Norris's shoulder and turned at a sound. Bennings poked his head into the room.

"Well?" Macready asked him.

"Pretty nasty out, Mac. Thirty-five knots."

"Any chance it'll let up?"

"Hard to say. I wouldn't count on it. There's one good thing, though."

"What's that?"

"Not much snow in suspension right now. It's pretty clear, and you shouldn't have any icing problems. But it's not what I'd call recreational flying weather."

Macready turned to glance over Norris's shoulder again. "Screw it. I'm going up anyway. I'll take Palmer as a backup, just in case we run into any trouble." His eyes were concentrated on the lower of the two maps, the one with the English markings.

"You sure we can find that place, Norris?"

The geophysicist nodded reassuringly and rose from his chair. "The coordinates are the same on both maps. We'll find it, all right." He started rolling the maps together and turned out the cobra light.

Garry entered the rec room, glanced momentarily at the still stunned Clark and the attentive Nauls, then walked over to join Blair in gazing down at the interlocked animal forms. The station manager wore a clean shirt and had just shaved. The Magnum rested in the holster at his belt, cleaned and reloaded.

"What have you figured out, Blair?"

"Other than a slow way of going nuts, not much." He picked at the fragments of bandage still attached to one bulging leg. "It sure as hell wasn't anything new that got in from outside." He looked over toward Clark. "I'm sure the kennel was locked when Clark found it. We checked the outside dog door. It was still latched from the inside.

"It had to be the new dog. The Norwegian dog."

Garry looked doubtful, and angry. "I just can't comprehend any of this. It was
just
a dog."

A sharp, derisive laugh sounded from the other side of the room. There was no humor in Childs's voice. "Wasn't no dog, chief. I don't have to have no degree to figure that out."

"That tape Macready showed us earlier this morning," Blair murmured softly.

"Couldn't make much out of it myself."

"I've asked him to try and locate the site where they were working," the biologist went on. "Where that peculiar oval in the ice was, where the explosion broke their video camera. He's taking Palmer with him. Norris volunteered to go along. Okay with you?"

"Sure, if you think it's advisable."

"I'm damned if I can think of anything else to advise."

"You think there's a connection?"

"Maybe." He turned to stare back down at the table and the enigma it held. "Anyhow, like I said, I don't have any other bright ideas. You?"

The station manager tried to make sense of the insane happenings, but could only shake his head dolefully.

The wind flailed the white desert. The chopper bounced and dipped and only experience and determination kept the men inside her from doing the same.

Macready fought the controls as they rode the currents, trying to stay as close to the ground as possible so that they wouldn't miss anything, while still leaving enough leeway for evasive action in the event the craft was caught by a downdraft. It was hard work and you couldn't relax for a minute.

The storm had passed quickly, but the crystal-clear air was deceptive. The only difference so far as Macready was concerned was that when there was no blowing snow or ice you could have the pleasure of seeing where you were most likely to crash.

Palmer occupied the copilot's seat while Norris peered over their shoulders from behind. The geophysicist was pointing at the plastic map taped to the flight console.

"One of their sites should be directly over here. The one we're after is a few hundred yards farther south."

"I know." Macready leaned on the controls and the copter heeled over to starboard. A high, even-topped white wall loomed directly ahead.

Norris regarded it professionally. The symmetry of the formation hinted that more than normal mountain-building activity might be responsible for its formation. The wall might mark the location of a minor fault line, or a lava tunnel. Or there might not be any stone present at all if it was a fossil pressure ridge of pure ice.

The copter rose and they soared over the wall. On the other side a flat glacial plain stretched toward distant high mountains.

Instantly visible as soon as they cleared the ridge and marking the center of the white plain like a giant ink spot was an enormous blackened crater.

The lab was full of dead dogs. They lay in a macabre row, each carefully tagged on one leg. Clark had eventually recovered his senses sufficiently to assist in the unpleasant work, but the pain finally became too much for him and he had to flee the room. Each of the dead animals had a name, each had been a close friend.

Fuchs was preparing new slides, which Blair studied under the microscope. Two cells were visible through the eyepiece. They were active, neither quiescent nor dead. One looked quite normal. Its companion looked anything but.

At the moment the two were joined together by a thin stream of protoplasm. Material from the larger cell, which was long and thin, flowed into the smaller, spherical cell. As it did so the smaller cell swelled visibly, until the cell wall fractured in three places. Immediately the smaller cell assumed a flattened shape like the other and three new streams of material began to flow outward from its interior. Neither cell appeared to have lost any mass.

Blair pulled away from the eyepiece and frowned as he checked his watch. It was running in stopwatch mode. He turned it off. The resulting readout was very puzzling.

Macready bounced the copter a couple of times as he set it down, but neither ship nor passengers showed ill effects. The steady hum of the rotors slowed to a stop. He pulled down his snow goggles and stepped out onto the ice. Norris and Palmer were right behind him

It was a short walk to the fringe of the crater. Macready paused to kick aside a gnarled chunk of gray metal. The impact reduced it to splintery fragments. Another piece was so big they had to walk around it.

The massive hole was more than fifteen feet deep. Considerably more. The bottom of the crater was lined with charred, blackened metal. Everything was gray or black. The metal fragments were lusterless, dull as antimony but smooth all the same. Macready didn't know what to make of a polished surface that was nonreflective.

The ice around the rim was as smooth as glass and only recently rouged over with freshly blown snow. What hadn't been blasted away or vaporized had melted.

The outline of the hole suggested that it had contained a large sphere. Macready met Norris's eyes and said nothing. Only Palmer made no pretense of concealing his awe.

"Wow. Whatever it was, it was
big
."

"Look at this." Macready moved to his left and picked something off the ice. His companions gathered around.

"Recognize it?" he asked them. Palmer shook his head, but Norris nodded quickly.