The dogs had fallen back when Barclay reached the corridor bend, fallen back before a furious monstrosity that glared from baleful red eyes, mewing in trapped hatred. The dogs were a semi-circle of red-dipped muzzles, with a fringe of glistening white teeth, whining with a vicious eagerness that near matched the fury of the red eyes. McReady stood confidently alert at the corridor bend, the gustily muttering torch held loose and ready for action in his hands. He stepped aside without moving his eyes from the beast as Barclay came up. There was a slight, tight smile on his lean bronzed face.
Dutton’s voice called down the corridor, and Barclay stepped forward. The cable was taped to the long handle of a snow-shovel, the two conductors split and held 18 inches apart by a scrap of lumber lashed at right angles across the far end of the handle. Bare copper conductors, charged with 220 volts, glinted in the light of pressure lamps. The Thing mewed and dodged. McReady advanced at Barclay’s side. The dogs beyond sensed the plan with the almost telepathic intelligence of trained huskies. Their whining grew shriller, softer, their mincing steps carried them nearer. Abruptly a huge, night-black Alaskan leapt onto the trapped Thing. It turned squalling, saber-clawed feet slashing.
Barclay leapt forward and jabbed. A weird, shrill scream rose and choked out. The smell of burnt flesh in the corridor intensified; greasy smoke curled up. The echoing pound of the gas-electric dynamo down the corridor became a slogging thud.
The red eyes clouded over in a stiffening, jerking travesty of a face. Arm-like, leg-like members quivered and jerked. The dogs leapt forward, and Barclay yanked back his shovel-handled weapon. The Thing on the snow did not move as gleaming teeth ripped it open.
Garry looked about the crowded room. Thirty-two men, some tensed nervously, standing against the wall, some uneasily relaxed, some sitting, most perforce standing, as intimate as sardines. Thirty-two, plus the five engaged in sewing up wounded dogs made thirty-seven, the total personnel.
Garry started speaking. “All right, I guess we’re here. Some of you—three or four at most—saw what happened. All of you have seen that Thing on the table, and can get a general idea. Anyone hasn’t, I’ll lift—” his hand strayed to the tarpaulin bulking over the Thing on the table. There was an acrid odor of singed flesh seeping out of it. The men stirred restlessly, hasty denials.
“It looks rather as though Charnauk isn’t going to lead any more teams,” Garry went on. “Blair wants to get at it and make some more detailed examination. We want to know what happened, and make sure right now that it is permanently, totally dead. Right?”
Connant grinned. “Anybody that doesn’t can sit up with it tonight.”
“All right then, Blair, what can you say about it? What in God’s name was it?” Garry turned to the little biologist.
“I wonder if we ever saw its natural form.” Blair looked at the covered mass. “It may have been imitating the beings that built that ship—but I don’t think it was. I think that was its true form. Those of us who were up near the bend saw the Thing in action; the corpse on the table is the result. When it got loose, apparently, it started looking around. Antarctica is still as frozen as it was those ages ago when the creature first saw it—and froze. From my observations while it was thawing out, and the bits of tissue I cut and hardened then, I think it was native to a hotter planet than Earth. It couldn’t, in its natural form, stand the temperature. There is no life form on Earth that can live in Antarctica during the winter, but the best compromise is the dog. It found the dogs and somehow got near enough to Charnauk to get him. The others smelled it—or heard it, I don’t know. Anyway, they went wild and broke chains and attacked it before it was finished. The Thing we found was part Charnauk, queerly only half-dead, part Charnauk half digested by the jellylike protoplasm of that creature, and part the remains of the Thing we originally found, sort of melted down to its basic protoplasm.
“When the dogs attacked it, it turned into the best fighting thing it could think of—some otherworld beast apparently.”
“Turned,” snapped Garry. “How?”
“Every living thing is made up of jelly—protoplasm—and minute, submicroscopic things called nuclei, which control the bulk, the protoplasm. This Thing was just a modification of that same world-wide plan of Nature, cells made up of protoplasm, controlled by infinitely tinier nuclei. You physicists might compare it—an individual cell of any living thing—with an atom; the bulk of the atom, the space-filling part, is made up of the electron orbits, but the character of the thing is determined by the atomic nucleus.
“This isn’t wildly beyond what we already know. It’s just a modification we haven’t seen before. It’s as natural, as logical, as any other manifestation of life, and it obeys exactly the same laws. The cells are made of protoplasm, their character determined by the nucleus.
“Only in this creature, the cell-nuclei can control those cells at will. It digested Charnauk, and as it digested him, it studied every cell of his tissue and shaped its own cells to imitate them exactly. Parts of it—parts that had time to finish changing—are dog-cells. But they don’t have dog-cell nuclei.” Blair lifted a fraction of the tarpaulin. A dog’s torn leg with stiff grey fur protruded. “That, for instance, isn’t dog at all; it’s imitation. Some parts I’m uncertain about; the nucleus was hiding itself, covering up with a dog-cell imitation nucleus. In time, not even a microscope would have shown the difference.”
“Suppose,” asked McReady, “it had had lots of time?”
“Then it would have been a dog. The other dogs would have accepted it. We would have accepted it. I don’t think anything could have distinguished it, not microscope, nor X-ray, nor any other means. This is a member of a supremely intelligent race, a race that has learned the deepest secrets of biology and turned them to its use.”
“What was it planning to do?” Barclay looked at the humped tarpaulin.
Blair grinned unpleasantly. His lips twitched with suppressed nervousness. “Take over the world, I imagine.”
“Take over the world! Just it, all by itself?” Connant gasped. “Set itself up as a lone dictator?”
“No.” Blair shook his head. The scalpel he had been fumbling in his 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 pound 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.’
Powell 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 would become an eagle. God, it might become a female eagle. Go back—build a nest—lay eggs!”
“Are you sure that Thing from hell is dead?” Dr. Copper asked softly.
“Yes, thank God,” 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.”