The Incredible Melting Man (6 page)

When the car stopped the General didn’t wait to be shown to the doctor’s office. He led the way himself, his heels clicking imperiously on the tiled floor. He’d said nothing since they’d shaken hands and Ted’s trepidation was mounting.

As soon as the office door was closed the General swung round to confront him.

“Well?” he barked. “Where is he?”

“I’m afraid we still haven’t found him,” stammered the doctor. “At least, not all of him,” he added bitterly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” demanded the General venomously.

The doctor explained about the hand.

“When did you find it?” asked the General sharply.

“Just over an hour ago in the wood beyond the airstrip. We’ve still got it surrounded.”

For the first time the General relaxed. “Then he’ll be dead now,” he said coolly. “We don’t need to worry about him any more.”

Ted Nelson disguised his disgust at this piece of ruthlessness. “I’m afraid the hand’s probably only been shed, as a failure,” he replied. “The organism’s probably at work on other tissue. Next time it could be more successful.”

The iron disdain came back into the General’s voice. “Organism?” he snarled. “What organism? What are you trying to say, Nelson?”

“Only that Doctor Loring and I believe that Steve West’s body has been invaded by an alien life form. That it’s experimenting on him just as we might experiment with tissue culture, finding the right conditions for breeding. While it does so it’s able to control his behaviour. That’s why he keeps killing: to ensure new supplies of protoplasmic material for the host to survive and grow.”

“Keeps killing?” exploded the General. “You mean he’s killed again?”

Ted almost enjoyed the panic this revelation produced in this bullying parody of a militarist. That he could welcome Steve’s death was contemptible.

“How many men have you got surrounding the wood?” demanded the General after listening grimly to the story of the discovery of the fisherman’s body.

Ted explained how every available man on the base was involved in the hunt as well as the ones the police had brought in. The General glanced at his watch, then glowered darkly out of the window at the sky.

“We must fly more men in from Hale, at once. Armed. And we want as many searchlights as possible, it’ll be dark in a couple of hours. Time is running out.”

“Time?” repeated Nelson in surprise. “You can’t be intending to go ahead with the launch?”

The General’s stocky frame stiffened even more. The hard pale eyes betrayed no feeling.

“The launch is to go ahead. Nothing will be allowed to interfere with it.”

Ted Nelson was aghast. “But at least delay it until we’ve had a chance to develop a serum. We can’t send anyone else up there until we’re sure they’re immune. It would amount to murder, knowing what we know.”

“What
who
knows, Nelson?” challenged the General. “What you’ve told me is all conjecture. And pretty fantastical conjecture at that. We’ve sent five unmanned probes to Mars and we know for certain the planet’s as dead as a dodo. Now you come up with this ridiculous theory of alien life forms. It’s minerals not Martians we’re looking for up there, Doctor Nelson. As well as a hell of a lot of international prestige, there’s also billions of dollars of unclaimed mineral rights at stake in this programme. That’s before we start to list the military advantages.” He jabbed a short, thick finger at him. “Are you asking me to give up all that and postpone Prometheus Two because of some spaceman who’s flipped his lid because he couldn’t stand up to the strain of a few months in space? Well?”

“The other two died,” pointed out the doctor coldly. “I watched them.”

“Yes,” retorted the General. “And have you found out what they died of yet? When you come up with something definite, some complaint we’ve all heard of, then you can expect me to take some notice. But you can’t expect me to tell the President the mission’s been cancelled because some boffin has got a crazy notion about little green men carrying out experiments on our astronauts.”

He raised a fat hand, interrupting the doctor’s protests. “Now, Nelson, if we can get on with the business of catching this man.” He glanced critically round the room. “This will be the operation centre. Tell your staff I’ll be taking over here. And before you leave see that I’m sent a map of the area. And I want a field telephone installed. Who’s in charge out there in the wood?”

Nelson mentioned the name of one of his senior assistants.

“Right,” ordered the General. “Get him relieved and have him sent here for briefing. You’d better get back to your lab.”

The General picked up the phone and began barking instructions at the office staff. The army had taken over.

Ted turned wearily on his heels and made his way quietly back to the lab.

It was a more chastened General Perry who joined him in the lab an hour later. The sun was setting, inflaming the whole western horizon.

“We lost the son of a bitch,” he swore bitterly. “God knows how, but he somehow slipped through the net.”

He stared gloomily out of the window. “He’s going to be out there all night on the rampage if we don’t get a break soon and spot him.” He looked over Ted Nelson’s shoulder at the slides he was examining. “Any luck yourself, Doc?”

Nelson shook his head. “No, but I’m hopeful. The hand we found contained a number of living cells. Loring’s busy at the moment preparing some cultures. We may be on the way to finding out more about the cells that have invaded West’s body.”

The phone rang and the General grabbed the receiver. His brusque manner evaporated and he began to ooze charm. Eventually he handed the receiver over to Ted.

“It’s your wife, Doctor Nelson,” he said in a more friendly voice.

Judy wanted to know what time he’d be back for dinner. And he hadn’t forgotten that her mother and Harold were coming, had he?

He had and he groaned at the prospect. He was dog tired and didn’t want to be bothered with a couple of middle-aged lovebirds. It was bad enough having to cope with Perry.

Was the General coming for dinner? Judy asked brightly. Ted passed on the invitation and again groaned inwardly at the readiness with which it was accepted.

Before she rang off she again mentioned her mother. She was rather worried about them. They were late and it was unlike them. Nothing could have happened to them in that old car of theirs, could it?

Ted did his best to settle her mind. He felt sure there was some perfectly harmless reason for them to be delayed and she wasn’t to worry.

He put down the phone and became conscious of his headache again. As if he hadn’t enough to worry about with Steve loose, without having to get worked up about a couple of star-struck sixty-year-olds.

The wounded sun sank behind the horizon, splashing the sky with crimson. Livid streaks of yellow lit the west and overhead the darkness gathered. Stars were already boring tiny glittering holes in the blue-black bowl of the sky.

Somewhere the red planet crept invisibly towards the horizon and the borrowed light of the dying sun.

An owl slid noiselessly through the thickening light, powered by the silent gnawing of hunger. Hidden birds fluttered and shuffled uneasily as they settled to roost in the lemon trees. A dog barked a sharp warning and growled fretfully.

Slowly, a pale moon edged its way into the sky, a furtive witness to the night’s events. Two eyes watched it anxiously. The fire of the dead sun glowed there, fuelled by the unquenchable thirst that beat up from within and burst in choking waves on the ragged edges of his mouth.

The eyes continued to stare, unblinking because the lids had melted away. Only the broken memories stirred, locked in the fevered chamber behind the dying eyes.

The barren desert lay all before them, red dust stretching as far as the mauve horizon where the galaxies spun and mocked. It was a bleak inheritance for the sky children.

They argued amongst themselves about who was to step down first. There seemed to be no point in standing on ceremony with radio contact dead and the formalities of earth so far away. It was a joy to pit their bodies against gravity again, flex their muscles against solid rock. Too long they’d floated like jellies in the weightlessness of space. And the air, though niggardly and thin, stretched about them boundlessly, so that they felt like creatures with an environment at last and not just specimens corked up in a jar.

They danced and played like children, leaping high into the air, hugging one another in congratulations, as much as their space-suits would allow. And when they’d tired of rediscovering the joy of their bodies, they stood in silence while their minds went out to the tiny blue star on the horizon that was their home.

They’d begun their collection of rock and mineral samples right away, working in the cold Martian silence, waving often at each other when the pressure of loneliness or fear threatened to overwhelm them. The satellite Deimos was always above them, glinting palely like a jagged skull in the dark blue sky.

The most exciting discovery of all had come to welcome them. The strange red substance that had seemed to spread when they opened the airlock appeared to be some form of dormant life. When they’d opened the hatch and the Martian air had entered the lock it had been stifled and had hardened like crisp red lichen. The incredible suggestion that it was waiting only for the right conditions, the ones they’d brought with them, occupied all their thoughts. It had ceased to become radioactive the moment it had hardened, and traces were found outside on the hull of the module which Steve carefully scraped off and stored in a vacuum flask.

The failure of the radio was a complete mystery. They’d had the equipment to pieces and could find nothing wrong with it. It was obviously working at short range because they were getting audio data from the computer in the ship orbiting above the planet’s surface. But contact with mission control was broken. For all that Earth knew, they might be dead. The world would have to wait until they carried their discovery back with them.

On the first night the storm returned. They lay in their sleeping quarters listening to the sand scratching away at the hull. It was unnerving. By day the planet had been so still, vast tracts of uninhabited desert, nothing to break the progress of the eye to the distant horizon except the occasional outcrop of rock. Now, out of nothing, came the wind, scuttling along the dry floor like an army of dessicated claws and running all over the outside of the ship, exploring. It brought tension, and bad dreams.

He dreamt he’d awakened with a burning thirst. He’d been caught in the sandstorm and nothing he could do could prevent the choking sand getting into his nose and mouth. He reached for a flask of water, put it to his lips and to his horror watched a red fluid creep down the neck into his mouth. He was paralysed and could do nothing as the viscid slime seeped into his throat. It cauterised his insides like concentrated acid and he screamed like a man consumed by fire. His whole body had begun to melt.

The thing squirmed in agony there in the lemon grove. The gaunt eyes rolled in terror at the stain in the sky and with his one distended hand he clawed at his throat, trying to beat out the fire within. Like a man trying to learn to use a calliper he waved the dripping stump that had been the other hand pathetically over his eyes trying to drive away the image that burnt there. And in the dark amongst the bitter fruits the mutant cells shrieked to be fed.

“Come on,” coaxed an elderly female voice. “It’s quite safe. No one’ll see us.”

It had been Helen’s idea and she ordered Harold to stop the old Buick at the roadside.

“We’ll just nip over the fence and grab a few. She can make a lemon meringue pie. She’ll love that.”

Harold peered anxiously down the road into the darkness. It was different when you were a kid, but when you’re nearly seventy. Imagine what the judge would say!

“If you have to give her a present, why can’t we buy her some candy at a drugstore?” he protested. “There’s bound to be one open somewhere.”

“Judy shouldn’t eat candy while she’s pregnant,” insisted the woman. “Lemons will do her good.” She nudged her boyfriend and pinched his arm. “And stolen lemons will taste good. Stolen things always do.”