“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—its got to be one of us—that’s the only way it can fly an airplane—fly a plane for two hours, and rule—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. Then from his office at the end of the room Copper brought a needle and injected a solution into Blair’s arm.
“He may come out of it when he wakes up,” he said with a sigh, rising. McReady helped him lift the biologist onto a nearby bunk. “It all depends on whether we can convince him that Thing is dead.”
Van Wall ducked into the shack, brushing his hands absently. “I didn’t think a biologist could 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 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 a dog, or a human body.”
“Blood—would one of those imitations bleed?” Powell demanded.
“Sure, nothing mystic about blood,” Copper assured him. “Muscle is about 90% water. Blood differs only having a couple percent more water and less connective tissue. They’d bleed, all right.
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—”
CHAPTER FIVE
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 Blairʼs 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.”
Powell laughed uncertainly. “I’m not sure you can convince me. Oh, damn you, McReady.”
“McReady?” Commander Garry turned to look from Powell to McReady curiously.
“His nightmares,” Powell explained. “He told me about a nightmare he had at the Secondary Magnetic Station after finding that thing.”
“And that was… ?” Garry looked at McReady levelly.
The meteorologist cleared his throat and moved 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,” Powell snapped. “That’s not what’s bothering me. He said 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 madman in an Antarctic camp.” Copper nodded toward Blair’s sleeping form.
McReady’s face twisted in a grin. “You birds know damn well that Connant is Connant, because he not merely looks like Connant—which we’re beginning to believe the beast might be able to do—but he thinks like Connant, talks like Connant, moves himself around the way Connant does. And 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 damn well 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,” Powell 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, standing near Connant, suddenly 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 reactions. 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 superhuman skill.”
“Oh, you’ve got the bug too.” Powell 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 Jeremiah’s 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. Connant, if you think you’re having a hell of a time, just move over on the other end for a while. You’ve got one thing we haven’t; you know what the answer is. I’ll tell you this, right now you’re the most feared and respected man in Big Magnet.”
“Christ, I wish you could see your eyes,” Connant gasped. “Stop staring, will you! What the hell are you going to do?”