“No,” Blair shook his head. The scalpel he had been fumbling in his bony fingers dropped; he bent to pick it up, so that his face was hidden as he spoke. “It would become the population of the world.”
“Become—populate the world? Does it reproduce asexually?”
Blair shook his head and gulped. “It’s—it doesn’t have to. It weighed 85 pounds. Charnauk weighed about 90. It would have become Charnauk, and had 85 pounds left, to become—oh, Jack for instance, or Chinook. It can imitate anything—that is, become anything. If it had reached the Antarctic Sea, it would have become a seal, maybe two seals. They might have attacked a killer whale, and become either killers, or a herd of seals. Or maybe it would have caught an albatross, or a skua gull, and flown to South America.”
Norris cursed softly. “And every time it digested something, and imitated it—”
“It would have had its original bulk left, to start again,” Blair finished. “Nothing would kill it. It has no natural enemies, because it becomes whatever it wants to. If a killer whale attacked it, it would become a killer whale. If it was an albatross, and an eagle attacked it, it would become an eagle. Lord, it might become a female eagle. Go back—build a nest and lay eggs!”
“Are you sure that thing from hell is dead?” Dr. Copper asked softly.
“Yes, thank Heaven,” the little biologist gasped. “After they drove the dogs off, I stood there poking Bar’s electrocution thing into it for five minutes. It’s dead and—cooked.”
“Then we can only give thanks that this is Antarctica, where there is not one, single, solitary, living thing for it to imitate, except these animals in camp.”
“Us,” Blair giggled. “It can imitate us. Dogs can’t make 400 miles to the sea; there’s no food. There aren’t any skua gulls to imitate at this season. There aren’t any penguins this far inland. There’s nothing that can reach the sea from this point—except us. We’ve got brains. We can do it. Don’t you see—it’s got to imitate us—it’s got to be one of us—that’s the only way it can fly an airplane—fly a plane for two hours, and rule—be—all Earth’s inhabitants. A world for the taking—if it imitates us!
“It didn’t know yet. It hadn’t had a chance to learn. It was rushed—hurried—took the thing nearest its own size. Look—I’m Pandora! I opened the box! And the only hope that can come out is—that nothing can come out. You didn’t see me. I did it. I fixed it. I smashed every magneto. Not a plane can fly. Nothing can fly.” Blair giggled and lay down on the floor crying.
Chief Pilot Van Wall made a dive for the door. His feet were fading echoes in the corridors as Dr. Copper bent unhurriedly over the little man on the floor. From his office at the end of the room he brought something, and injected a solution into Blair’s arm. “He might come out of it when he wakes up,” he sighed, rising. McReady helped him lift the biologist onto a near-by bunk. “It all depends on whether we can convince him that thing is dead.”
Van Wall ducked into the shack brushing his heavy blond beard absently. “I didn’t think a biologist would do a thing like that up thoroughly. He missed the spares in the second cache. It’s all right I smashed them.”
Commander Garry nodded. “I was wondering about the radio.”
Dr. Copper snorted. “You don’t think it can leak out on a radio wave, do you? You’d have five rescue attempts in the next three months if you stop the broadcasts. The thing to do is talk loud and not make a sound. Now I wonder—”
McReady looked speculatively at the doctor. “It might be like an infectious disease. Everything that drank any of its blood—”
Copper shook his head. “Blair missed something. Imitate it may, but it has, to a certain extent, its own body-chemistry, its own metabolism. If it didn’t, it would become a dog—and be a dog and nothing more. It has to be an imitation dog. Therefore you can detect it by serum tests. And its chemistry, since it comes from another world, must be so wholly, radically different that a few cells, such as gained by drops of blood, would be treated as disease germs by the dog, or human body.”
“Blood—would one of those imitations bleed?” Norris demanded.
“Surely. Nothing mystic about blood. Muscle is about 90 per cent water; blood differs only in having a couple per cent more water, and less connective tissue. They’d bleed all right,” Copper assured him.
Blair sat up in his bunk suddenly. “Connant—where’s Connant?”
The physicist moved over toward the little biologist. “Here I am. What do you want?”
“Are you?” giggled Blair. He lapsed back into the bunk contorted with silent laughter.
Connant looked at him blankly. “Huh? Am I what?”
“Are you there?” Blair burst into gales of laughter. “Are you Connant? The beast wanted to be a man—not a dog—”
VII
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 Blair’s 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.”
Norris laughed uncertainly. “I’m not sure you can convince me. Oh, damn you, McReady.”
“McReady?” Commander Garry turned to look from Norris to McReady curiously.
“The nightmares,” Norris explained. “He had a theory about the nightmares we had at the Secondary Station after finding that thing.”
“And that was?” Garry looked at McReady levelly.
Norris answered for him, jerkily, 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,” Norris snapped. “That’s not what’s bothering me. In the dream 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 mad man in an Antarctic camp.” Copper nodded toward Blair’s sleeping form.
McReady shook his great head slowly. “You know that Connant is Connant, because he not merely looks like Connant—which we’re beginning to believe that beast might be able to do—but he thinks like Connant, talks like Connant, moves himself around as Connant does. 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 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,” Norris 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, the scar-faced expedition cook, had been standing near Connant. Suddenly he 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 reaction. 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 perfectly as to deceive men who had been living with the imitated one in the complete lack of privacy of an Antarctic camp. That would take a super-human skill.”
“Oh, you’ve got the bug too?” Norris cursed softly.
Connant, standing alone at one end of the room, looked about him wildly, his face white. A gentle eddying of the men had crowded them slowly down toward the other end of the room, so that he stood quite alone. “My God, will you two Jeremiahs shut up?” Connant’s voice shook. “What am I? Some kind of a microscopic specimen you’re dissecting? Some unpleasant worm you’re discussing in the third person?”
McReady looked up at him; his slowly twisting hands stopped for a moment. “Having a lovely time. Wish you were here. Signed: Everybody.
