Campbell, John W Jr - Who Goes There

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Who Goes There?

Chapter 1

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 burnt 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 lifesmell. 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.

Blair, the little bald-pated biologist of the expedition, twitched nervously

at the wrappings, exposed clear, dark ice beneath and then pulling the

tarpaulin back

into place restlessly. His little bird-like motions of suppressed eagerness

danced his shadow across the fringe of stiff, graying hair around his naked

skull a

comical halo about the shadow's head.

Commander Garry brushed aside the lax legs of a suit of underwear, and stepped

toward the table. Slowly his eyes traced around the rings of men sardined into

the

Administration Building. His tall, stiff body straightened finally, and he

nodded. "Thirty-seven, all here." His voice was low, yet carried the clear

authority of

the commander by nature, as well as by title.

"You know the outline of the story back of that find of the Secondary Pole

Expedition. I have been conferring with Second-in-Command McReady, and Norris,

well as Blair and Dr. Copper. There is a difference of opinion, and because it

involves the entire group, it is only just that the entire Expedition

personnel

act on it.

"I am going to ask McReady to give you the details of the story, because each

of you has been too busy with his own work to follow closely the endeavors of

the

others. McReady?"

Moving from the smoke-blued background, McReady was a figure from some

forgotten myth, a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked. Six-feet-

four inches he

stood as he halted beside the table, and, with a characteristic glance upward

to assure himself of room under the low ceiling beams, straightened. His

rough,

clashingly orange windproof jacket he still had on, yet with his huge frame it

did

not seem misplaced. Even here, four feet beneath the drift-wind that droned

across the Antartic waste above the ceiling, the cold of the frozen continent

leaked in,

and gave meaning to the harshness of the man. And he was bronze-his great red-

bronze beard, the heavy hair that matched it. The gnarled, corded hands

gripping,

relaxing, gripping and relaxing on the table planks were bronze. Even the

deep-sunken eyes beneath heavy brows were bronzed.

Age-resisting endurance of the metal spoke in the cragged heavy outlines of

his face, and the mellow tones of the heavy voice. "Norris and Blair agree on

one

thing; that animal we found was not -terrestrial -in origin. Norris fears

there may be danger in that; Blair says there is none.

"But I'll go back to how, and why, we found it. To all that was known before

we came here, it appeared that this point was exactly over the South Magnetic

Pole of

the Earth. The compass does point straight down here, as you all know. The

more delicate instruments of the physicists, instruments especially designed

for this

expedition and its study of the magnetic pole, detected a secondary effect, a

secondary, less powerful magnetic influence about 80 miles southwest of here.

"The Secondary Magnetic Expedition went out to investigate it. There is no

need for details. We found it, but it was not the huge meteorite or magnetic

mountain

Norris had expected to find. Iron ore is magnetic, of course; iron more so -

and certain special steels even more magnetic. From the surface indications,

the

secondary pole we found was small, so small that the magnetic effect it had

was preposterous. No magnetic material conceivable could have that effect.

Soundings

throught the ice indicated it was within one hundred feet of the glacier

surface.

"I think you should know the structure of the place. There is a broad plateau,

a level sweep that runs more than 150 miles due south from the Secondary

station,

Van Wall says. He didn't have time or fuel to fly farther, but it was running

smoothly due south then. Right there, where that buried thing was, there is an

ice-drowned mountian ridge, a granite wall of unshakeable strength that has

damned back the ice creeping from the south.

"And four hundred miles due south is the South Polar Plateau. You have asked

me at various times why it gets warmer here when the wind rises, and most of

you know.

As a meteorologist I'd have staked my word that no wind could blow at -70

degrees -that no more than a 5 mile wind could blow at -50, without causing

warming due

to friction with the ground, snow and ice, and the air itself.

"We camped there on the lip of that ice-drowned mountain range for twelve

days. We dug our camp into the blue ice that formed the surface, and escaped

most of it.

But for twelve consecutive days the wind blew at 45 miles an hour. It went as

high as 48, and fell to 41 at times. The temperature was -63 degrees. It rose

to -60

and fell to -68. It was meteorologically impossible, and it went on

uninterruptedly for twelve days and twelve nights.

"Somewhere to the south, the frozen air of the South Polar Plateau slides down

from that 18, 000-foot bowl, down a mountain pass, over a glacier, and starts

north. There must be a funneling mountain chain that directs it, and sweeps it

away for four hundred miles to hit that bald plateau where we found the

secondary

pole, and 350 miles farther north reaches the Antartic Ocean.

"It's been frozen there ever since Antartica froze twenty million years ago.

There has never been a thaw there.

"Twenty million years ago Antartica was beginning to freeze. We've

investigated, thought and built speculations. What we believe happened was

about like this.

"Something came down out of space, a ship. We saw it there in the blue ice, a

thing like a submarine without a conning tower or directive vanes, 280 feet

long

and 45 feet in diameter at its thickest.

"Eh, Van Wall? Space? Yes, but I'll explain that better later." McReady's

steady

voice went on.

"It came down fromspace, 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 Antartica was still freezing it,

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 the 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 41,

and the temperature never rose above -60. Then, the wind must have been

stronger. And

there was drift falling in a solid sheet. The 'thing' was lost completely in

ten paces." He paused for a moment, the deep, steady voice giving way to the

the drone

of wind overhead, and the uneasy, malicious gurgling in the pipe of the galley

stove.

Drift -a drift-wind was sweeping by overhead. Right now the snow picked up by

the mumbling wind fled in level, blinding lines across the face of the buried

camp. 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

Antartica.

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.

"And the drift-wind then was probably more impenetrable than we know."

McReady's voice snapped Kinner's mind back. Back to welcome, dank warmth of

the Ad Building.

"The passenger of the ship wasn't prepared either, it appears. It froze within

ten feet of the ship.

"We dug down to find the ship, and our tunnel happened to find the frozen -

animal. Barclay's axe ice-axe struck its skull.

"When we saw what it was, Barclay went back to the tractor, started the fire

up and when the steam pressure built, sent a call for Blair and Dr. Copper.

Barclay

himself was sick then. Stayed sick for three days, as a matter of fact.

"When Blair and Copper came, we cut out the animal in a block of ice, as you

see, wrapped it and loaded it on the tractor for return here. We wanted to get

into

that ship.

"We reached the side and found the metal was something we didn't know. Our

beryllium-bronze, non-magnetic tools wouldn't touch it. Barclay had some tool-

steel on the tractor, and that wouldn't scratch it either. We made reasonable

tests -even tried some acid from the batteries with no results.

"They must have had a passivating process to make magnesium metal resist acid

that way, and the alloy must have been at least 95 per cent magnesium. But we

had no

way of guessing that, so when we spotted the barely opened lock door, we cut

around it. There was clear, hard ice inside the lock, where we couldn't reach

it.

Through the little crack we could look in and see that only metal and tools

were in there, so we decided to loosen the ice with a bomb.

"We had decanite bombs and thermite. Thermite is the ice-softener; decanite

might have shattered valuable things, where the thermite's heat would just

loosen the

ice. Dr. Copper, Norris and I placed a 25-pound thermite bomb, wired it, and

took the connector up the tunnel to the surface, where Blair had the steam

tractor

waiting. A hundred yards the other side of that granite wall we set off the

thermite bomb.

"The magnesium metal of the ship caught, of course. The glow of the bomb

flared and died, then it began to flare again. We ran back to the tractor, and

gradually

the glare built up. From where we were we could see the whole ice-field

illuminated from beneath with an unbearable light; the ship's shadow was a

great,

dark cone reaching off towards the north, where the twilight was just about

gone. For a moment it lasted, and we counted three other shadow things that

might have

been other -passengers -frozen there. Then the ice was crashing down and

against the ship.

"That's why I told you about that place. The wind sweeping down from the Pole

was at our backs. Steam and hydrogen flame were torn away in white ice-fog;

the

flaming heat under the ice there was yanked away toward the Antartic Ocean

before it touched us. Otherwise we wouldn't have come back, even with the

shelter of that

granite ridge that stopped the light.

"Somehow in the blinding inferno we could see great hunched things, black

bulks glowing, even so. They shed even the furious incandescence of the

magnesium for a

time. Those must have been the engines, we knew. Secrets going in a blazing

glory -secrets that might have given Man the planets. Mysterious things that

could lift

and hurl that ship -and had soaked in the force of the Earth's magnetic field.

I saw Norris' mouth move, and ducked. I couldn't hear him.

"Insulation -something -gave way. All Earth's field they'd soaked up twenty

million years before broke loose. The aurora in the sky licked down, and the

whole

plateau there was bathed in cold fire that blanketed vision. The ice-axe in my

hand got red hot, and hissed on the ice. Metal buttons on my clothes burned

into

me. And a flash of electric blue seared upward from beyond the granite wall.

"Then the walls of ice crashed down on it. For an instant it squealed the way

dry-ice does when it's pressed between metal.

"We were blind and groping in the dark for hours while our eyes recovered. We

found every coil within a mile was fused rubbish, the dynamo and every radio

set,

the earphones and speakers. If we hadn't had the steam tractor, we wouldn't

have gotten over to the Secondary Camp.

"Van Wall flew in from Big Magnet at sun-up, as you know. We came home as soon

as possible. That is the history of -that." McReady's great bronze beard

gestured

toward the thing on the table.

Chapter 2

Blair stirred uneasily, his little, bony fingers wriggling under the harsh

light. Little brown freckles on his knuckles slid back and forth as the

tendons under the

skin twitched. He pulled aside a bit of tarpaulin and looked impatiently at

the dark ice-bound thing inside.

McReady's big body straightened somewhat. He'd ridden the rocking, jarring

steam tractory forty miles that day, pushing on to Big Magnet here. Even his

calm will

had been pressed by the anxiety to mix again with humans. It was alone and

quiet out there in Secondary Camp, where a wolf-wind howled down from the

Pole. Wolf-wind

howling in his sleep -winds droning and the clear, blue ice, with a bronze

ice-ax buried in its skull.

The giant meteorologist spoke again. "The problem is this. Blair wants to

examine the thing. Thaw it out and make micro slides of its tissues and so

forth. Norris

doesn't believe that is safe, and Blair does. Dr. Copper agrees pretty much

with Blair. Norris is a physicist, of course, not a biologist. But he makes a

point I

think we should all hear. Blair has described the microscopic life-forms

biologist find living, even in this cold and inhospitable place. They freeze

every winter,

and thaw every summer -for three months -and live.

"The point Norris makes is -they thaw, and live again. There must have been

microscopic life associated with this creature. There is with every living

thing

we know. And Norris is afraid that we may release a plague -some germ disease

unknown to Earth -if we thaw those microscopic things that have been frozen

there

for twenty million years.

"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 those frozen mammoths they find in

Siberia. Organized, highly developed life-forms can't stand that treatemnt.

"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."

Vance Norris moved angrily. He was comparatively short in this gathering of

big men, some five-feet-eight, and his stocky, powerful build tended to make

him seem

shorter. 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.

He was decided on his point now, and he lashed out in its defense with a

characterstic quick, clipped flow of words. "Different chemistry be damned.

That

thing may be dead -or, by God, it may not -but I don't like it. Damn it,

Blair, let them see the monstrosity you are petting over there. Let them see

the foul

thing and decide for themselves whether they want that thing thawed out in

this camp.

"Thawed out, by the way. That's got to be thawed out in one of the shacks

tonight, if it is thawed out. Somebody -whos's watchman tonight? Magnetic -oh,

connant.

Cosmic rays tonight. Well, you get to sit up with that twenty-million-year-old

mummy of his.

"Unwrap it, Blair. How the hell can they tell what they are buying if they

can't see it? It may have a different chemistry. I don't know what else it

has, but I

know it has something I don't want. If you can judge by the look on its face -

it isn't human so maybe you can't -it was annoyed when it froze. Annoyed, in

fact,

is just about as close an approximation of the way it felt as crazy, mad,

insane hatred. Neither one touches the subject.

"How the hell can these birds tell what they are voting on? They haven't seen

those three red eyes, and that blue hair like crawling worms. Crawling -damn,

it's crawling there in the ice right now!

"Nothing Earth ever spawned had the unutterable sublimation of devastating

wrath that this thing let loose in its face when it looked around this frozen

desolation

twenty million years ago. Mad? It was mad clear through -searing, blistering

mad!

"Hell, I've had bad dreams ever since I looked at those three red eyes.

Nightmares. Dreaming the thing thawed out and came to life -that it wasn't

dead,

or even wholly unconscious all those twenty million years, but just slowed,

waiting -waiting. You'll dream, too, while that damned thing that Earth

wouldn't

want is dripping, dripping in the Cosmos House tonight.

"And, Connant," Norris whipped toward the cosmic ray specialist, "won't you

have fun sitting up all night in the quiet. Wind whining above -and that thing

dripping -." He stopped for a moment, and looked around.

"I know. That's not science. But this is, it's psychology. You'll have

nightmares for a year to come. Every night since I looked at that thing I've

had 'em. That's

why I hate it -sure I do -and don't want it around. Put it back where it came

from and let it freeze for another twenty million years. I had some swell

nightmares -that it wasn't made like we are -which is obvious -but of a

different kind of flesh that it can really control. That it can change its

shape,

and look like a man -and wait to kill and eat -"

That's not a logical argument. I know it isn't. The thing isn't Earth-logic

anyway.

"Maybe it has an alien body-chemistry, and maybe its bugs do have a different

body-chemistry. A germ might not stand that, but, Blair and Copper, how about

virus? That's just an enzyme molecule, you've said. That wouldn't need

anything but a protein molecule of any body to work on.

"And how are you so sure that, of the million varieties of microscopic life it

may have, none of them are dangerous? How about diseases like hydrophobia -

rabies -that

attack any warm-blooded creature, whatever its body-chemistry may be? And

parrot fever? Have you a body like a parrot, Blair? And plain rot -gangrene -

necrosis,

do you want? That isn't choosy about body-chemistry!"

Blair looked up from his puttering long enough to meet Norris' angry, gray

eyes for an instant. "So far the only thing you have said this thing gave off

that was

catching was dreams. I'll go so far as to admit that." An impish, slightly

malignant grin crossed the little man's seamed face. "I had some, too. So.

It's

dream-infectious. No doubt an exceedingly dangerous malady.

"So far as your other things go, you have a badly mistake idea about viruses.

In the first place, nobody has shown that the enyzyme-molecule theory, and

that

alone, explains them. And in the second place, when you catch tobacco mosaic

wheat rust, let me know. A wheat plant is a lot nearer your body-chemistry

than this other-world creature is.

"And your rabies is limited, strictly limited. You can't get it from, nor give

it to, a wheat plant or a fish -which is a collateral descendant of a common

ancestor of yours. Which this, Norris, is not." Blair nodded pleasantly toward

the tarpaulined bulk on the table.

"Well, thaw the damned thing in a tub of formalin if you must thaw it. I've

suggested that -"

"And I've said there would be no sense in it. You can't compromise. Why did

you and Commander Garry come down here to study magnetism? Why weren't you

content to

stay at home? There's magnetic force enough in New York. I could no more study

the life this thing once had from a formalin-pickled sample than you could get

the

information you wanted back in New York. And -if this one is so treated, never

in all time to come can there be a duplicate! The race it came from must have

passed

away in the twenty million years it lay frozen, so that even if it came from

Mars, then we'd never find its like. And -the ship is gone.

"There's only one way to do this -and that is the best possible way. It must

be thawed slowly, carefully, and not in formalin."

Commander Garry stood forward again, and Norris stepped back muttering

angrily. "I think Blair is right, gentlemen. What do you say?"

Connant grunted. "It sounds right to us, I think -only perhaps he ought to

stand watch over it whie it's thawing." He grinned ruefully, brushing a stray

lock of

ripe-cherry hair back from his forehead. "Swell idea, in fact -if he sits up

with his jolly little corpse."

Garry smiled slightly. A general chuckle of agreement rippled over the group.

"I should think any ghost it may have had would have starved to death if it

hung

around here that long, Connant," Garry suggested. "And you look capable of

taking care of it. 'Ironman' Connant ought to be able to take out that thing.

I-"

Eagerly Blair was stripping back the ropes. A single throw of the tarpaulin

revealed the thing. The ice had melted somewhat in the 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 writhing, loathsome nest of

worms, blue,

mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow -Van

Wall, six feet and 200 pounds of ice-nerved pilot, gave a queer, strangled

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WhoGoesThere?Chapter1Theplacestank.Aqueer,mingledstenchthatonlytheiceburiedcabinsofanAntarcticcampknow,compoundedofreekinghumansweat,andtheheavy,fishoilstenchofmeltedsealblubber.Anovertoneoflinimentcombatedthemustysmellofsweat-and-snow-drenchedfurs.Theacridodorofburntcookingfat,andtheanimal,not-unpl...

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