The Thing (13 page)

Clark slid lower in his chair and turned the magazine he was looking at sideways. A bottom page flipped down. "Jesus," he breathed reverently, "why would those guys ever want to leave Norway?"

A snicking noise grew steadily louder out in the corridor. Nauls grabbed a door and swung himself into the room, his skates skidding to a sharp stop. He shook the crumpled-up long johns at the befuddled crew like a declaration of war.

"Which one of you ugly muthers has been tossing his dirty underwear into my clean garbage bin?" He threw the offending garment across the room. It settled like a blanket over Macready's wooden chessmen.

"I want my kitchen
clean
," the cook railed at them. "Germ free. You schmucks better knock it off. Next time I find something like that in my kitchen I'll bake it into your next supper!"

Without giving anyone a chance to reply he whirled and skated off down the hall. Macready leaned forward and gingerly plucked the oddly torn underwear off his chessboard, rolling it up into a ball. Childs ignored the brief, noisy intrusion and resumed his pacing, uninterested either in the long johns or Nauls's complaint. It had been a poor joke at best and it wasn't
his
underwear.

"So come on now, Macready. Let's try it one more time. The Norwegian dudes come by, find him and dig him up . . ."

Macready threw the ball of cloth across the room. It landed cleanly in a small trash can. He smiled inwardly. He preferred basketball to chess, but it's tough to set up a court in Antarctica.

Not that he hadn't tried. If you could move your arms at all in summer weather, you discovered that the ball didn't dribble too well on snow. Beneath the thin layer of snow was ice, which made for a more exciting but far more lethal game. Chess was safer. He rubbed his leg where he'd broken it last year while trying to make a simple lay up.

"Yeah," he absently told the attentive Childs, "they dig him up and cart him back to their base. He gets thawed out, wakes up, and scares the shit out of them. And they get into one hell of a brawl."

"Okay, okay, right! " Childs jumped enthusiastically on the last part of the pilot's explanation. He wore an expression of triumph. "Now you just tell me one thing, Mac. One thing. How's this mutherfucker wake up after thousands of years of making like a side of frozen beef, huh? Tell me that."

The mechanic's intensity annoyed Macready almost as much as the persistent inconsistencies in his theory. "I don't know how. What am I, Einstein? He does it because he's different than we are. Because he's a space guy. Because he likes being frozen for a hundred thousand years. Maybe he'd just finished piloting for a couple of hundred thousand and he stopped to take a little nap. What do you want from me, anyway? Go ask Blair. He's got the brains. Me, I'm just a flyboy."

Childs turned and spoke brusquely to the senior biologist. "Okay, Blair, what about it? You buy any of this?"

Blair was staring straight ahead, but he was seeing something other than the far wall. Something insubstantial. He was talking to himself, but just loud enough so that everyone else could understand his words.

"It was here . . . got to that dog . . . it was here in this camp. That's why they were chasing it . . . that's why they were acting nuts. Not shooting at Macready and Norris . . . just trying to hit the dog . . . didn't care whether they hit anyone else or not . . . just the dog, just get the dog . . ."

It was suddenly very quiet in the rec room. Blair's monologue had quietly overwhelmed all other conversation. Even Clark had looked up from his magazine.

"So," Garry finally said from his seat near the pub, "so what? It's over with, done."

Blair turned to him, said nothing. He didn't have to. His expression was eloquent enough.

"Well," Bennings said edgily, "isn't it?"

Blair rose from his seat. His eyes seemed to come back to the room, but his voice was still subdued. "All of you come with me. Everybody. I've got something to show you, and a few things to say."

They filed slowly out of the recreation room, talking softly among themselves.

"And I mean everybody," Blair announced from the doorway. "Somebody get a hold of Nauls. Dinner can wait."

As they entered the lab the biologist methodically flipped on each of the several light switches. Then he moved to the center study table and pulled away the sheet covering its contents. Some of the men crowded around. A few took chairs. They'd already seen the two bodies on the table.

The two intertwined dogs were no prettier the second time around then they'd been the first. Cold radiated from them. They'd been kept in the lab freezer until only a few minutes ago. Despite the cold and Blair's treatments they were already beginning to smell.

"Whatever that Norwegian dog was, it . . . it was capable of duplicating itself," Blair told them solemnly. "Not to mention changing its form. Our visitor," and he pointed at the larger mass resting on the left side of the table, "wasn't a dog anymore.

"When it attacked our animal, whatever had taken possession of it began to try and link up." He indicated the tendon-like structures wrapped tightly around both corpses. "I believe those structures to be part of the duplicating takeover process.

"When I speak of 'taking possession' of another dog I mean in the biological sense. Technically, there's nothing mysterious or supernatural about the process. The methodology is purely mechanical.

"We can only theorize at this point as to the details. I don't have nearly the facilities to do more than that. What I believe happens during the takeover process is that the original thing injects a certain quantity of its own DNA into the cells of the animal it wishes to control." He held up a gooey dog leg that had been part of the Norwegian animal

"For instance, this isn't dog at all. It
looks
like dog, but the cell structure bears no resemblance to normal canine cellular architecture. The cell walls, as in the original creature," and he waved with the leg, a gruesome baton, "are incredibly flexible. Controlled by the patterns in the DNA, they can conform to any pattern the creature wishes, provided it can obtain a DNA 'blueprint' to copy. In this case, dog DNA. Get me a good electron miscroscope and in a few hours I won't be guessing at that, I'll be proving it.

"The critical requirement is DNA to copy. Apparently the thing's incapable of duplicating a living creature out of nothing. It needs the control information contained in a subject's nuclear material to merge with. Fortunately, we got to it before it had time to finish."

"Finish what?" Nauls muttered.

Blair indicated the remains of the camp's sled dog. "Finish taking control of our animal." His hand rested on the furry skull. "The merging activity which occurs among the cells of the brain is particularly rapid and insidious. Like I said, I don't really have the right equipment here for this kind of work, but from what I've seen so far, brain tissue from that animal," and he indicated the bloated corpse of the Norwegian dog, "contains some of the damnedest synaptic connections any biologist ever imagined. Combinations and linkages that haven't got shit to do with canine evolution.

"So you see, in addition to taking control of existing cell structures and patterns, the original creature is also able to create new ones to its own requirements."

Copper frowned down at the table. "A body is only designed to support so much cellular material. If the invasion by this creature creates new matter in addition to taking over existing structures, how does the body's life support system cope with the extra load?"

Blair's voice remained even, tutorial. "As you say, the body is only designed to keep so much organic material alive and functioning. Portions of this dog's brain, for example, have been blocked off by new structures. The flow of oxygenated blood has been redirected."

"In other words," Copper said quietly, "part of its brain has been turned off?"

Blair nodded. "Certain cerebral regions were dead before this animal died, having been supplanted in importance by new activity elsewhere."

"What regions were kill . . . were turned off?"

"Difficult to say. There was massive parasitic invasion. Some of those which control portions of the memory, intelligence, and in particular individuality. Hard to tell with a dog, of course, be it dead or alive." He turned his gaze back to the interlocked bodies.

"I think the whole process would have taken about an hour. Maybe more. I've no way of knowing for certain, of course. There's nothing comparable in the literature. I'm extrapolating as best I can from what little we've been able to find out."

"And when that hour was up?" Garry asked pointedly.

The biologist looked over at him. "The conduits supplying connective material . . . these tendon things . . . would vanish and you'd have two normal-looking dogs again. Only they wouldn't be normal anymore, and they'd be dogs only in appearance."

"I'll buy that," agreed Palmer fervently. "That thing in the ice the Norwegians dug up sure weren't no dog."

"Of course not." Blair tried to control his impatience. These men are not scientists, he reminded himself, except for Bennings, Norris, and Fuchs. "If nothing else, the size of the missing portion of the excavated ice block points to a much larger creature.

"How much larger we've no way of knowing. As I've said, the altered cell structure is remarkably flexible. It's capable of a good deal of expansion or contraction."

"What do you think happened?" Garry asked him.

The biologist considered the question carefully. "Whenever the original thing was thawed out, revived . . . well, it was certainly disoriented. If its memory was intact, it must have realized it couldn't survive for long in our atmosphere in its orginal state. Being the incredibly adaptive creature that it is, it tried to become something that could"

Once again he indicated the recumbent mass on the table.

"Before the Norwegians killed it, it somehow got to this dog."

"What do you mean, 'got' to the dog?" Clark asked.

Blair tried to be patient. "I've tried to make this simple. That may be impossible. This thing was a life form that was able to take control of any creature it got a hold of, cell for cell, neuron for neuron. The concept is staggering. The closest terrestrial analog I can think of is the lichen, which is not really an individual creature but an association of two very different kinds of life, algae and fungi.

"But this is much more complex and complete, and it's certainly not in the least symbiotic. The invading thing acts like a true parasite, taking complete control of the host for its own advantage. There's no mutual assistance, insofar as I've been able to determine. I . . . I don't pretend to completely understand all the ramifications myself."

"You're saying," Childs broke in, pointing skeptically at the Norwegian intruder on the table, "that big mother in the ice those guys chipped out became that dog?"

Blair nodded. "And there was no reason for it to stop there. As we can see here, it tried to take control of one of our dogs as well. I don't see what its limits would be. It could have become as many dogs as it wanted to, without surrendering control of its original host body. It doesn't take much organic material to alter DNA, though I'm not sure about the other large-scale changes.

"One cell is enough. The DNA pattern of the new host is irrevocably altered. And so on and so on, each animal it takes over becoming a duplicate of the original thing."

"You been into Childs's weed, Blair?" Norris muttered.

Blair's fist slammed onto the table. "Look, I know it's hard to accept! I know it's difficult to picture an enemy you can't see. But if that stuff gets into your system, in about an hour—"

"It takes you over," Fuchs finished for him.

"It's more than that, more than you becoming a part of it. The 'you' is gone, wiped out, shunted aside permanently by a new set of cellular instructions. It retains only what it needs of the original, the way it used the memory patterns of the Norwegian dog to make certain it acted in a recognizably doglike manner."

"It licked my hand," Norris murmured, "as it was being chased by those guys in the helicopter. It came right up to me and licked my hand and whined for help."

Blair nodded. "Sure it did. It keeps anything useful. This organism is highly efficient, not wasteful. And it's clever. Much too clever for my liking."

"So what's the problem?" Garry wanted to know. He indicated the two bodies lying unthreateningly on the table. "The torch crisped it pretty good."

The biologist turned to stare down at the canine forms. "There's still some cell activity. Clinically speaking, it's nor entirely dead yet . . ."

Clark jumped backward and stumbled over a waste can. The reaction from the rest of the men was similar if not as extreme.

"Take it easy," Blair told them, hiding the glimmerings of a smile.

"You said one cell was enough to take control," Norris murmured, his eyes on the suddenly malignant corpses.

"To imprint a pattern, yes," Blair admitted, "but not to initiate the takeover procedure. That requires a much greater quantity of protoplasmic material. The tendon structures which seem so important to the process, for one thing. They're composed of millions of cells." But the men shuffled uneasily, still uncertain, still fearful.

"Look." Blair tried to reassure them. "If there were any kind of danger d'you think I'd be standing here running my hands over the thing?" The men relaxed slightly. Blair looked down at the two bodies. "As far as I'm concerned, however, any cell activity, however minimal, is too much."

"What do you recommend?" Garry asked him.

Blair glanced at his assistant. They'd discussed the possibilities previously, when Blair had detected the minimal remaining cell activity. Still, Fuchs's eyes widened when he saw in his superior's expression which choice had been made.

"You can't. You can't do this!" Fuchs was screaming into the night.

It was very dark outside. The wind had let up and there was no snow in the air to obscure the vision of the heavily bundled-up men trudging out of the compound. Their purpose was equally clear.