The Incredible Melting Man (4 page)

The computer had brought the module down right at the centre of a dust storm. It was a freakish piece of ill luck, yet nothing seemed to be damaged apart from the radio. Contact with mission control was dead. Their outside cameras showed nothing, and through the windows all they could see were the swirling clouds of red dust. All they could do was to sit tight and wait for the storm to pass. Their schedule told them to rest before beginning their exploration, so they settled down to an uneasy sleep.

His mind was crammed with indelible images of their journey. The long weeks in space where the jewels of the galaxy hung and burned with a still radiance; watching the earth shrink from a crystal ball of aquamarine swept with dazzling white cloud, to just another star. That had been the most frightening thing, and at the same time the most exhilarating. It was like saying goodbye to your humanity, leaving behind the comfortable normal proportions of everyday perceptions and taking on the vision of gods. Out in space you rubbed shoulders with infinity, you thought in terms of light years, saw quite clearly beyond the galaxy. There was nowhere to shrink away and contemplate your own littleness, the universe shone in through your window always. For out there, time was always. You soon stopped thinking in terms of days in that endless night. They were being swept along in the huge circle of universal time where beginning and end met beyond the reaches of human thought, beyond God. Because God didn’t exist in the void, only the unfaltering logic of cold physics, laws set in motion by Chance to run inexorably. Chance that brought stars to collide and men to set foot on alien worlds. Chance that brought them down now, right in the eye of the red storm.

He slept only fitfully. The sound of the sand being whipped against the hull of the module never left his consciousness. It was like tiny claws scraping, tentatively exploring the strange arrival from space. And when it had found out what they were, the scratching grew more urgent, more determined. It was scratching to be let in.

When the sound did stop it seemed only moments before he was being roused by his colleagues. Outside it was the high noon of the Martian day. Under the shrunken sun the desert shone like copper. Miles of glowing plains etched with startling clarity against the deep purple skyline. Above, faint wisps of paler blue streaked the tenuous atmosphere from which the weak daylight had failed to lodge the steadily burning stars.

They had completed their perilous journey through the stars and a silent empty world stood waiting for them. They were like actors in an empty theatre with no one to applaud their wild act of heroism. Only as they looked out into the silent red desert and watched the motionless stars above did they become aware that the whole universe held its breath at their temerity.

As well as the broken radio contact there was another problem. The radiation level within the module had mysteriously risen. It was not dangerous, but it was significant. And it appeared to be coming from the air lock on the escape hatch.

They decided to postpone the walk until the mystery was cleared up. The radiation shield could have been damaged in the storm, or by a meteorite on their journey from earth. The radiation must be coming from the planet’s surface. The unmanned probes hadn’t shown any dangers, but then they hadn’t landed in a dust storm.

Steve took a Geiger counter over to the hatch and the clicks increased. Their suits were stored in the airlock, so he was unable to take the precaution of putting one on. Still, the level was low. He unscrewed the hatch and swung open the door. He pushed the counter inside the airlock and listened as the clicks intensified. He closed the door again. They’d come forty million miles to be met by a wall of radiation that was preventing them from setting foot on the planet.

Steve decided he’d got to take a risk and grab a suit. A short burst of radiation wasn’t going to do any permanent harm, and he was convinced it wasn’t a strong dose. Again he opened the door, this time stepping inside. As he reached for a suit he became aware of a red stain on the inside of the hull, just where the escape hatch was hinged.

As he watched it, it spread slowly, like blood. He reached out to touch it and it felt warm and sticky. He drew back his hand in alarm.

He stood at the edge of the wood, glistening in the sunlight. His smeared face contorted with fear as he fell to the ground and began rubbing his decomposing hand furiously against the grass. The loose flesh slid off, leaving a trail of slime.

In his private frenzy he seemed to have forgotten the little girl running away across the field like a tiny blue doll.

FOUR

“H
IS BODY
’
S
become the host for some sort of parasite, that much is clear. What the parasite is, I shudder to think.”

Ted Nelson handed the plate to his assistant.

“I’ve ringed the alien cells,” he went on. “And these other plates show details of their nuclear structure. The incredible thing is, they’re germ cells.”

Loring whistled under his breath. “You mean his body has become invaded by eggs?”

“Basically, that’s it,” nodded the doctor gravely. “Out there his body became infected—or fertilised, if the notion isn’t too revolting—and cellular multiplication is already taking place. With the added complication that it’s his own cells that are providing the protoplasmic material for the thing to develop.”

“But what sort of thing?” asked Loring. “What in God’s name is it?”

The doctor handed him another plate. “Here’s the blueprint,” he said pointing to the detailed magnification of the nucleus. “Just look at that.”

Loring was staggered. “But the chromosome content,” he gasped. “It’s massive. There must be ten times more than in a human cell. What the hell is it?” he repeated.

Nelson thought deeply. “I’d be tempted to say, something ten times more complicated than we are, but it’s not so straightforward. There’s something physiologically improbable about any parasitic species behaving in such a way. You see, Steve’s not going to last much longer the way these cells are developing.”

“Unless he continues to kill,” added Loring bleakly.

Their worried silence was broken by the sound of the telephone. Neither was anxious to answer it. It was Loring who reached for the receiver. His brow contracted as he took the message.

“It’s bad,” he said as he replaced the receiver. “They’ve found the body of a fisherman, badly mutilated. It sounds like him again.”

Nelson looked sick, staring blankly at the plate before him.

“General Perry’s not going to be pleased either,” went on Loring. “It wasn’t the search party that found him, but a couple of kids. They went straight to the police. They knew we had a search party in the area and they’ve put two and two together. There’s a lieutenant in reception waiting to see you.”

“That’s all we needed,” groaned Nelson, “Come on, we’d better go and see the worst.”

“And let’s hope it is the worst and there’s not more to come,” he muttered to himself as they left the lab.

The fisherman’s corpse was in an appalling state. Even Loring felt sick. The head had been torn off and the neck gnawed down to the shoulder-blades. His clothes were in shreds and the wounds gaped through, deep bites into the fleshy parts of the body which glistened with mucus.

“Why is he so bloody strong if the tissues are degenerating?” whispered Loring.

Nelson bit his lip and didn’t speak. He drew the lieutenant aside and did his best to invent a plausible story. It was a psychopathic patient that they’d had under observation in the lab. He’d gone berserk and escaped with some surgical instruments.

It was a poor effort and the look on the policeman’s face reflected the fact. Nevertheless he was mercifully in agreement about not letting the story out and panicking the neighbourhood. Fortunately there were few houses in the area and it wouldn’t be too difficult to alert the occupants to the need for keeping their doors locked. Extra police would be drafted in at the disposal of the research centre staff.

Nelson thanked the lieutenant and hurried towards a group from the search party that had just arrived. He was angry.

“What the hell have you lot been doing?” he stormed. “This needn’t have happened if you’d worked faster. Why haven’t you caught him?”

The man in charge protested about the difficulties of covering such overgrown terrain. Also he’d had a good start on them. Nelson knew this to be true, but he had to vent his fear and frustration on someone. Perry would be due in an hour. They simply had to have him by then.

“Where have you been concentrating?” he demanded.

The leader pointed towards the wood. “There are plenty of positive readings over there,” he said.

Nelson grabbed a Geiger counter. “Right. What are we waiting for?” he announced. “When we reach the edge, fan out and we’ll try to sweep the whole length of the wood.”

It had grown extremely hot. The heat rose from the tarmacked surface of the airstrip, distorting the horizon. The windsock hung limp and motionless.

Doctor Nelson glanced mechanically at his watch, put his head down and marched towards the wood. He must be in there if they’d got readings. Probably exhausted, or even dead. The thought rang hollow as the image of the mutilated fisherman crept into his mind. His strength had become superhuman. No one could pull off a man’s head.

He shuddered. He’d entered the wood and the sweat on his face and body seemed to have chilled instantly. The nearest other member of the party was a hundred yards away and disappearing into a spur of trees. He switched the counter on and swept it in an arc in front of his advancing step. His movements were impeded by the undergrowth, and the effort of keeping his arms outstretched was making him sweat again.

He’d spent ten minutes fruitlessly searching without getting a sound out of the counter when he stopped to rest against a tree trunk. What the hell was he up to, searching for a man with a Geiger counter? A friend. He’d begun to think of Steve as some errant specimen, not as a colleague with whom he’d worked for five years in preparation for the mission. Five years as his doctor and psychiatrist. There wasn’t anything he didn’t know about Steve. He’d spent months observing and recording his reactions in the space simulator, logging his minutest response to the deprivations of space travel. They’d worked together on the design of the biotechnical apparatus for the experiments. For the last weeks before take-off they’d spent much of their spare time together discussing their worries and fears about the mission. Steve had been the mission as far as he was concerned.

Yes, that was the trouble. He’d thought of him as the human apparatus of the mission all along. That’s what spacemen were, you couldn’t afford to have them different. He’d deceived himself all along thinking that he really knew Steve, as a friend. Steve’s real mind, the warm, fragile, fallible thing that most people responded to as the essence of the person they knew and loved, he didn’t know that. Unconsciously he’d done his best to keep that out of their relationship. It was unnecessary and a hindrance in the working relationship he’d sought. For the mission they’d been looking for disciplined machinery that wouldn’t go wrong, and his job had been to help to train that machine. Now it had gone wrong, and the very area where the most havoc was being wrought, the mind, Steve’s mind, was a dark corridor. As dark and inscrutable as the thing that had infected it, out there in deepest space.

Ted Nelson felt sick with fear and guilt for the man who’d been his protégé, the leader of his mission. What could he do now for Steve’s cleft mind? It was a mind trained to the highest mental discipline, prepared for every crisis that technology could throw at him—rocket failure, support system malfunction, they’d been ready for it all. But this! The insidious invasion of his mind by the naked impulses of a predatory animal, his brain programmed by the craving of the alien cells to that of a murderous dinosaur. They could never have foreseen this.

Yet the guilt gnawed. Perhaps they could have prepared them . . . Perhaps they could have treated them more like men and less like machines, so they’d have been less vulnerable. Perhaps more love—?

The doctor fought back the emotion that rose to his throat. He switched on the machine again and stepped further into the wood. Suddenly the Geiger counter began to click.

He probed the moist humus of the forest floor with the machine. The rate of the clicks began to pick up and he slowly edged forward into the shadows where the trees were densest. He was on a track Steve had taken pretty recently.

As the wood began to darken a new fear grew. Supposing Steve couldn’t recognise him? Supposing he was the next victim? Steve had known the nurse, long before the mission. She was the fat jolly one all three of them used to joke with. But it hadn’t stopped him. Nelson pushed the fear to the back of his mind. Steve needed him desperately. He couldn’t let him down now.

The clicks were coming fast now, increasing all the time. The radiation was rising from a dark clump of holly bushes tucked beneath the trunks of the larger pines which climbed up to block out the sky light.