Kenneth Robeson - The Avenger 05 by The Frosted Death

Author:The Frosted Death [Death, The Frosted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-02-20T15:00:15+00:00

The tarpaper shack was a temporary factory. In it were about ten workmen, and in it a product was being efficiently, rapidly manufactured and stored twenty-four hours a day. But the characteristics of the workmen, and the nature of the product, differentiated this from all other factories, whatsoever.

There were twelve long benches, in rows in the low shed. At ten of them stood a man each. But they didn’t look like humans. Their appearance made you believe, suddenly, in zombies?or living dead.

Their eyes were dull and seemed almost incapable of sight. Their faces were vacant and pallid, and indicated that the brains behind them were certainly incapable of thought. Their hands moved like the tentacles of automatons; and like automatons they never slackened their movements. Minute after minute they made the same moves, without slackening pace, and almost, it seemed, without looking.

The moves made by them were bizarre in the extreme.

Before each was a long, shallow tray which was half filled with chopped meat. Over the meat was growing, with incredible rapidity, the white mold. Beside each pan was a smaller tray. In these trays were piled little glass capsules about as large as the tip of a man’s thumb.

The robotlike workers were filling these capsules with the mold.

With a small instrument much like a tiny teaspoon, white mold was skimmed from a bit of the chopped meat, and packed in a glass container. Then the little glass capsule was sealed with a drop of collodion. After that it was set aside, to be taken to a rack that covered one whole wall. In that rack was tray after tray of the capsules. Unguessable thousands of them, with the swift-growing white stuff reproducing itself endlessly and fantastically in the meat trays?to be made into still more death pellets incased by glass.

A curious thing was to be noted. The glass capsules freshly packed looked as if they were filled with snow. The capsules that had been packed for several hours or more, seemed, instead of fine snow, to have silver-gray dust in them.

That was because the mold, deprived of food and forced into suspended animation in the capsules, shriveled into dormant spores just waiting to be released again?in the vicinity of meat?or flesh.

“It is good,” said the sub captain, staring with bleak eyes at the thousands of capsules in the rack. “How long has it taken to produce these?”

“Two days,” said Veshnir, face never looking more kindly and benevolent than then.

“Five days more should be sufficient,” the captain said. “By then we should have twice enough for our needs. It is very, very good?”

He stopped abruptly and stared into a corner he had seen for the first time. One of the twelve long tables had hidden it before.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.