Campbell, John W Jr - Who Goes There
VIP免费
2024-12-18
0
0
130.34KB
53 页
5.9玖币
侵权投诉
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,
as
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
1_
2
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
2_
3
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
3_
4
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.
4_
5
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
5_
6
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
a
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
or
6_
7
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
摘要：
展开>>
收起<<
WhoGoesThere?Chapter1Theplacestank.Aqueer,mingledstenchthatonlytheiceburiedcabinsofanAntarcticcampknow,compoundedofreekinghumansweat,andtheheavy,fishoilstenchofmeltedsealblubber.Anovertoneoflinimentcombatedthemustysmellofsweat-and-snow-drenchedfurs.Theacridodorofburntcookingfat,andtheanimal,not-unpl...
声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！
相关推荐
-
工程建设招标投标合同（附件）VIP免费
2024-11-15 10 -
工程建设招标投标合同（动员预付款银行保证书）VIP免费
2024-11-15 8 -
工程建设招标设标合同条件（第1部分）VIP免费
2024-11-15 9 -
工程建设招标设标合同合同条件（第3部分）VIP免费
2024-11-15 8 -
工程建设招标设标合同合同条件（第2部分）VIP免费
2024-11-15 9 -
工程建设监理委托合同VIP免费
2024-11-15 9 -
工程建设监理合同标准条件VIP免费
2024-11-15 5 -
工程技术资料目录VIP免费
2024-11-15 10 -
工程技术咨询服务合同VIP免费
2024-11-15 10 -
工程建设招标投标合同（投标邀请书）VIP免费
2024-11-15 31
分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：53 页
大小：130.34KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-12-18
作者详情
-
IMU2CLIP MULTIMODAL CONTRASTIVE LEARNING FOR IMU MOTION SENSORS FROM EGOCENTRIC VIDEOS AND TEXT NARRATIONS Seungwhan Moon Andrea Madotto Zhaojiang Lin Alireza Dirafzoon Aparajita Saraf5.9 玖币0人下载
-
Improving Visual-Semantic Embedding with Adaptive Pooling and Optimization Objective Zijian Zhang1 Chang Shu23 Ya Xiao1 Yuan Shen1 Di Zhu1 Jing Xiao25.9 玖币0人下载
渝公网安备50010702506394
