The Incredible Melting Man (8 page)

Ted Nelson stared bleakly at the Buick as he digested this piece of information. The sublime irony was that they’d taken the most exhaustive precautions to sterilise all the machinery and equipment on the Mars mission to avoid any contamination of the planet by earth-born bacteria. But apart from routine medical checks there’d been nothing in their planning to guard against bringing anything back. All that care over a dead planet, and next to nothing for the living. It was monstrous folly.

His two-way radio interrupted his bitter reflections. It was Dick Loring. Would Nelson come down to the lab as soon as possible; there was something he should see.

He left a message for the General and got one of the policemen to run him back. He was anxious to be near Judy. She mustn’t be left alone after what had happened.

The sedative had only been a mild one and Judy had awoken to find the house empty. She was in a state of confusion because of the effects of the drug and had wandered sleepily downstairs.

She was sitting in the lounge staring vacantly at the window. The curtains were undrawn but the Venetian blinds were half closed, allowing thin bands of light to shine out into the garden. Her eyes followed the light but she saw nothing. She was thinking of Steve.

He somehow seemed to be the focus of their tragedy. She’d closed her mind to her mother. She knew something awful had happened but she couldn’t bring herself to look at it. Instead it was Steve who occupied her thoughts. Again she knew no details, only that he was desperately ill and that his illness had imperilled the future of the programme.

She wished she could have gone to him and comforted him, lying alone in an isolation ward fighting for his life. He was a guinea-pig to the rest of them, even to her husband: Ted couldn’t help that, it was his job. But what Steve most needed they couldn’t give him. She’d tried before the mission. She’d tried to provide some of the things he’d missed since his wife was killed: inviting him round for some of her home cooking, repairing his clothes, listening when the strain of the job was too much for him—all the feminine things that came so easily to her and made all the difference to a life. But now he was locked away from her while people like that absurd General Perry huffed and puffed about security. Poor Steve!

Poor Steve stood outside in the garden looking in at her.

Mars was like that, only it hadn’t lasted. He’d watched the small blue star that was Earth, with its smaller, paler twin locked next to it, and he’d felt like an outcast for a while. But then the sheer immensity of the gulf that separated them from Earth began to tell. It began to represent an abdication from humanity. He grew silent and withdrawn from the others. Away from the ship he began to break the rules and encourage the others to do the same. He began to drift further away, lost in his private world. For it was a megalomania that had afflicted him. Something he’d had no training for, no warning about. It was exposure to the vastness and emptiness that had brought it on. And it was exhilarating, like being the first of creation. Like being God.

There was nothing to engage the eye and mind in the monotony of the desert landscape. But up there in the deep blue twilight where the stars of the galaxy were strewn like a million flawless pearls. Ah! That was different.

His heart and mind were always drawn further into space. It was like standing on the sea-shore looking out at an island. You must go there. And when you’d arrived and there was another island beyond, again you couldn’t rest until you’d journeyed there. And so on, out to the furthermost islands of space. Earth dwindled to insignificance in the thirst for conquest. They were the first of a new species that had turned its back on Earth. He felt new affinities stirring.

That was how the misadventure had happened. They’d left the module that morning on routine exploration. As usual he’d separated from the others. He’d infected them with his indifference for sticking to the schedules. If the radio had been working it would have been different. But the umbilical cord with humanity had snapped. They took specimen bags and tools with them only for appearances.

He’d wandered up on to one of the few rock masses that rose out of the desert. It was only two or three hundred feet high, but it took him a step nearer the edge so that he could spend the day looking out into the cold void.

How long he’d been there he didn’t know. Time began not to matter. He’d seen a meteor drawn into the thin atmosphere of the planet and he followed the burning tail to its destruction. It had brought his gaze groundwards, and he suddenly became aware of a movement on the horizon. At first he thought it was a trick of the weak sunlight and as he stared the strain made him think it was his own eye, following the movement of its watery fluid. But it was growing quickly, as though the desert itself was being rolled up like a giant carpet.

It was a dust storm sweeping towards him at an incredible speed.

He panicked, driven by the fear of his nightmare when he’d lain in the module that first night and listened to the claws scraping on the hull. In giant gravity-free bounds he leapt down from the rocks, stumbling against their jagged surfaces, risking the precious skin of his space suit. But he could see the module nowhere and the storm was advancing in eerie silence across the red desert.

The exertion was causing his helmet to steam up and his vision to blur. A last despairing glance over his shoulder and the sky, his universe, was obliterated by a vast red cloud.

The outstretched fingers of the storm began to pluck at his suit, hungrily.

Judy gradually became aware of a movement behind the Venetian blinds. Someone outside was waving, strange clawing movements in the air as if trying to fend off an assailant. It must be Ted, she thought, trying to attract her attention. He’d forgotten his key.

She hurried to the front door. Through the frosted glass she made out a dark shape waiting to be let in. She fumbled with the key in her drowsy state, and the movements behind the glass became more and more frenzied.

She opened the door and it was the General. He wasn’t looking at her but was staring in horror beyond the door. A strange gasping sound came from the darkness. She stepped out to see what it was but the General pushed her back inside.

“Lock the door again, for God’s sake!” he shouted.

As the door slammed she heard a grunt of pain come from the General. A larger, darker shape had moved in front of the glass, a huge distended arm like a claw raised above its head. It brought it down again and again on the shape that was the General until the sounds of pain were silenced.

She dashed to the phone. Her fingers trembled so much she could hardly dial the number. Her husband answered.

“Something’s outside,” she gasped. “It’s got the General. I think it’s—”

Ted didn’t let her finish. “Lock yourself in the bathroom,” he cried. “I’m on my way.”

As she crept past the front door to the foot of the stairs, the sound of struggling had subsided. She listened. A strange slobbering sound came to her ears, punctuated by awful pained breathing.

She fled upstairs clutching her stomach in agony.

As the thing slaked its unquenchable thirst another storm raged in the cold twilight of the red planet. At its still centre something grew stronger and wiser, exulting in its new knowledge and the greater strength yet to come.

SEVEN

T
HE CELLS
swam through the solution with incredible speed. A tendril of cytoplasm stretched out in front like an arm, probing hungrily. It seemed to know where the red cells were by instinct, and when the snaking tendril touched a corpuscle, like lightning the body of the cell surrounded it. It was ingested in a moment. Before their eyes they watched the blood cell melt as the invisible enzymes attacked. Then the huge nucleus convulsed as it absorbed the new protoplasm. It had grown perceptibly and the alien cell was off again on its insatiable quest for more food.

“My God!” cried Ted Nelson as he watched the process Loring had filmed. “Are you sure you’ve got the speed right?”

Loring nodded. “Quite sure,” he replied calmly.

“But it’s incredible,” went on the doctor. “I’ve never seen anything as voracious. It’s frightening. You say it’s from the hand?”

Again Loring nodded, reaching for a plate.

“But this is even more remarkable,” he said. “I haven’t been able to film this, but I’m still trying. It’s on a couple of the photographic plates. Look.”

He handed the plate to his colleague. “Now what do you make of that?”

It was an electron microscope photograph of one of the cells. From the nucleus to the edge of the plate ran a straight line, dark and etched deep into the plate.

The doctor studied it carefully. Loring was sufficient of a skilled cytologist not to have allowed any foreign material on to his slides. The only other explanation was a defective plate. He quizzed his assistant about this.

“Chances of stray gamma radiation doing that are a million to one,” said Loring. The doctor interrupted him.

“Radiation?” he cried. “You mean this is the radiation we’ve been picking up and it’s coming from the nucleus of the alien cell?” He was aghast.

“Somehow the nucleus is emitting short wave radiation,” said Loring. “What kind of radiation, I don’t know. I’ve rushed a plate down to the High Energy Physics lab at Overton to be examined. We should know within a few hours; they’re working on it now.”

“But radiation’s going to damage living tissue,” argued the doctor. “A radioactive cell nucleus is an impossibility.”

“I’d have thought so until I saw this,” agreed Loring. “But this is a very special case. Look at the massive chromosome content. Imagine the extent of the genetic information contained there. There’s enough for a whole species, not just an individual.”

As they tried to absorb the implications of their discovery neither of them spoke. Only the remorseless ticking of the clock broke the silence of the lab.

“Another thing that’s been worrying me,” went on Loring eventually. “I must have examined hundreds of them and not one has started to divide. It’s as though they weren’t ready, either weren’t big enough, or the conditions in which they find themselves aren’t right for development.”

“Which is maybe why the hand was shed,” interrupted Nelson.

“Precisely,” agreed Loring. “That’s why I think we ought to help them.”

The assistant ignored the look of consternation that spread across the doctor’s tired face.

“It’s our only way of finding out what we’re dealing with,” Loring insisted. “I suggest we prepare a variety of media to try and cultivate what remain of the cells from the hand. If we use different human tissue we can have a control experiment which will tell us here in the lab what’s happening to Steve. Put bluntly, we’ll know what he’s turning into without ending up like Perry.”

The doctor grimaced. He’d had to deal with the appalling mess outside his front door. He hadn’t liked the bastard but he wouldn’t have wished such an end on his worst enemy. He’d done a spell as a young intern in an accident unit and he’d never seen anything like that—not in a year of Saturday nights. The body had been pulped like a ripe tomato and the insides sucked out. It had been encased in slime like a glistening placenta. Death had failed to smooth the furrows of terror on the untouched face.

Getting Judy past it all had been the worst. He’d had to cover her face, but the smell had betrayed him. She was safe now in one of the wards. He wished he could have said the same for their child. He wondered if there would ever be another time.

Loring interrupted his thoughts. “There’s something else I’d like to attempt, with your sanction. If this thing came from out there, in space, I think we should try to put it back. In other words, put some of the cultures in the simulation chambers. We could see what happens to the cells in the Martian atmosphere, and also in a deep space situation. OK?”

It was a good idea and Nelson said so. Dick Loring was a boon. He was proving indefatigable, much more use than himself. He’d taken more than enough and simply had to have an hour’s sleep. After the death of the General he’d had to take over co-ordinating the search until the OIC from Hale arrived. He blamed himself for losing Steve. He’d panicked when he’d heard Judy on the phone and dashed over to the house without alerting anyone else. They’d lost valuable minutes in rounding up the search party and again their quarry had disappeared into the night. Any more killings would be his responsibility alone.