Frozen Hell by Campbell John W

Author:Campbell, John W. [Campbell, John W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2019-03-31T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Dr. Copper rose wearily from the bunk and washed the hypodermic carefully. The little tinkles it made seemed loud in the packed room, now that Blairʼs gurgling laughter had finally quieted. Copper looked toward Garry and shook his head slowly. “Hopeless, I’m afraid. I don’t think we can ever convince him the Thing is dead now.”

Powell laughed uncertainly. “I’m not sure you can convince me. Oh, damn you, McReady.”

“McReady?” Commander Garry turned to look from Powell to McReady curiously.

“His nightmares,” Powell explained. “He told me about a nightmare he had at the Secondary Magnetic Station after finding that thing.”

“And that was… ?” Garry looked at McReady levelly.

The meteorologist cleared his throat and moved uneasily. “That the creature wasn’t dead, had a sort of enormously slowed existence, an existence that permitted it, none the less, to be vaguely aware of the passing of time, of our coming after endless years. I had a dream it could imitate things.”

“Well,” Copper grunted, “it can.”

“Don’t be an ass,” Powell snapped. “That’s not what’s bothering me. He said it could read minds, read thoughts and ideas and—mannerisms.”

“What’s so bad about that? It seems to be worrying you more than the thought of the joy we’re going to have with a madman in an Antarctic camp.” Copper nodded toward Blair’s sleeping form.

McReady’s face twisted in a grin. “You birds know damn well that Connant is Connant, because he not merely looks like Connant—which we’re beginning to believe the beast might be able to do—but he thinks like Connant, talks like Connant, moves himself around the way Connant does. And that takes more than merely a body that looks like him. That takes Connant’s own mind and thoughts and mannerisms. Therefore, though you know that the Thing might make itself look like Connant, you aren’t much bothered, because you know damn well it has a mind from another world, a totally unhuman mind, that couldn’t possibly react and think and talk like a man we know, and do it so well as to fool us for a moment. The idea of the creature imitating one of us is fascinating, but unreal because it is too completely unhuman to deceive us. It doesn’t have a human mind.”

“As I said before,” Powell repeated, looking steadily at McReady, “you can say the damnedest things at the damnedest times. Will you be so good as to finish that thought—one way or the other?”

Kinner, standing near Connant, suddenly moved down the length of the crowded room toward his familiar galley. He shook the ashes from the galley stove noisily.

“It would do it no good,” said Dr. Copper, softly as though thinking out loud, “to merely look like something it was trying to imitate; it would have to understand its feelings, its reactions. It is unhuman; it has powers of imitation beyond any conception of man. A good actor, by training himself, can imitate another man, another man’s mannerisms, well enough to fool most people. Of course, no actor could imitate so

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