“Dorcie!” he shouted. “It’s Denny. Don’t do this. Let me out!” There was total, black-velvet silence.
He turned away from the door and cast about wildly, his breath pluming in the gelid air. The hammer he had taken from the workshop was lying on the floor. He picked it up in stiffened hands, went to the nearest window, and struck it with all his force. The head of the hammer rebounded from the toughened glass without marking it in any way. Hobart tried again and this time the hammer spun from his grasp and fell behind him. He dropped to his knees and was going after the tool that represented his hope of salvation when a silent voice – perhaps that of his superego, perhaps of the wise, worldly, and dispassionate Denny Hobart he had always hoped to become – spoke to him, commanding his attention. He listened for a moment and rose to his feet, smiling apologetically with one hand on his forehead, then gathered up the screwdrivers and went to the true source of his peril – the flanged and louvred mass of the refrigeration plant.
The main side panel was held in place by six spring-loaded screws requiring only a half-turn each. Using his two-handed technique, Hobart was able to remove the screws in a matter of seconds and to lift the sheet of metal out of his way, exposing the machinery itself. The type and its operating principle were unfamiliar to him, but he had no difficulty in identifying a thermostat which had a slide control on a scale running from –40° to +30°. Centigrade, which meant the system could double up as a heater. Grunting with relief, he reached for the control, then jerked his hand back as the entire thermostat housing became enveloped in a thick coating of frost. The white crystalline layer continued to thicken and exhibit patterns, diamond petals furling out on diamond petals with bewildering rapidity, until quite suddenly the thermostat was locked inside a shell of ice.
Hobart gaped at it, dumbfounded, then raised his head to look around the room. Most of the elaborate, jewelled rosettes of the frost animals had disappeared from the walls and ceiling. He looked back at the refrigeration machinery and saw that no part of it had been affected by the encrustation except the control he had been about to operate. Hugging himself to ease the growing pain in his chest, Hobart rocked backward and forward as he tried to make sense of what was happening. The only conclusion he could reach was that somehow, by some process he could not even begin to understand, the alien beings had divined his intention. Switching off the refrigeration would save his life, but as a consequence the frost animals would be destroyed – the temperature in the room had never been allowed to rise above –20°. Centigrade in the decades of its existence – and it appeared they had taken preventive action.
Questions began to clamour in his mind. Had he, Denny Hobart, accidentally made the first intellectual contact with an extraterrestrial race? Had no xenologist researcher thought of testing for motivation by threatening a frost animal with death? Or, unknown to him, had progress been made in that field during his eighteen years of absence in space?
The stabbing sensation in his lungs grew worse and he realized that, at this stage, questions and answers were without relevance. His very life was at stake – and there were more ways than one of stopping a machine. He turned to reach for the fallen hammer and in that moment became aware of another phenomenon, one of silent but flurried movement. The shelves he had removed from the storage unit were still leaning against the nearest wall, and all over their sloping surfaces a number of frost animals were forming, fading away to nothingness and reforming in a kind of regimented dance, creating fantastic, shifting, geometrical designs.
Wondering why he was squandering the short time left to him, Hobart rose painfully to his feet and approached the shelves. The activity of the beautiful enigmatic beings reached a frenzied climax, dazzling his eyes.
I can learn from you, he thought, numbly, as though his brain cells were turning to ice. The same lesson that old man Langer learned. Rigid bodies make rigid minds make rigid thinking…
He watched his hands reach out like servomechanisms, the blue-knuckled fingers crooking in preparation, and in that moment the frost animals vanished from the shelf he was about to touch. Hobart dug his nails under the top edge of the plank’s silvery laminate and slowly peeled it downward, revealing the core material, which appeared to be a red semitransparent plastic, variegated here and there by whitish spots and areas of blue and black and brown.
Thunderous seconds passed before his mind came to grips with the mosaic of lines and charnel-house colours, imposing a pattern on them, letting him know he was looking at a longitudinal section cut through a human body. He turned away, retching, and went back to the refrigeration plant.
“I’m sorry,” he said aloud. “You’ve given me what I wanted, but I’m not going to die. Not in this century. Not in the next…”
He knelt at the machine, grasped a slim feed pipe, and tugged on it with what remained of his strength. The pipe began to bend, but in that instant his breath was cut off. He fell sideways to the floor in the grip of a searing coldness unlike anything he could have imagined as the frost animals attacked, suffocating him beneath a mask of sparkling ice.
Investigator Shimming paused for a moment, nuzzling his chin down on to his chest. He remained in that attitude for a short time – perhaps coping with gastric explosions, perhaps ordering his thoughts – then activated the recorder in his desk.
“It is now obvious,” he said, settling back in his chair, “that having unlawfully killed Wolf Craven, Colonel Langer placed the body of the deceased in an oblong box, filled the box up with water and put it in the refrigerated room he used as an extraterrestrial menagerie. Forensic reports will reveal whether or not he added any chemicals to the water to accelerate the freezing process. As soon as the contents of the box had frozen solid he took a cutting implement – almost certainly a valency saw, which is quick in operation and generates no heat – and sliced the resultant block into longitudinal planks about three centimetres in thickness. An engineering consultant from the University of Montana has already confirmed that ordinary ice has quite good structural properties below a certain temperature, and in this case we are talking about ice which was reinforced with bone and strips of clothing.
“Colonel Langer then covered the planks with metallic laminate, to disguise their nature, and used them to build the shelf unit I referred to earlier in this report. Evidence suggests that this work was begun on the night of 12 May, 2113, while the party was still in progress, and was completed late the following day – by which time Dennis Hobart had already departed on the Langer Willow. Having disposed of Craven’s body in a manner he was confident would escape detection, Colonel Langer went to the office of the public prosecutor and made a deposition in which he attached the blame for Craven’s death to Hobart.
“I have not been able to establish any motive for his desire to incriminate Hobart, and am of the opinion that Hobart was chosen fortuitously, simply because he had been seen arguing with the deceased. That concludes my interim report on this case.”
Shimming switched off the recorder, surveyed the drab green walls of his office, then allowed his gaze to settle on Hobart, who was sitting opposite him. “As you’ll have gathered, I’m letting you off the hook,” he said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody so lucky.”
“Lucky!” Pain caused Hobart’s face to twist spasmodically beneath the surgical dressings and he fell silent, wishing he had not reacted so violently.
“That’s what I said. You’re alive when you ought to be dead, and you’re getting your job back. The Langers didn’t have to reinstate you.”