The Incredible Melting Man (9 page)

He left Loring to prepare the culture dishes and put his head into the room where Judy was sleeping. She looked peaceful enough and the nurse at her bedside gave an encouraging nod. She still didn’t know about her mother.

He turned and left. He was halfway down the corridor to his office when the thought struck him with a shudder. Why wasn’t she protected? His blood ran cold at the thought of the stupid oversight. It was criminally neglectful after what had happened. He hadn’t thought to spare a single soldier or policeman to guard the centre and Steve was probably somewhere in the complex. People must be protected. None of them was safe, himself included.

He was in touch with the OIC immediately. The man was cast in the same bone-headed mould as the General. Sorry, they couldn’t spare any men, but if Doctor Nelson was really worried he’d get in touch with the lieutenant of police to see if he could find someone.

Nelson put the phone down in a cold fury. It had not got through to the authorities what they were dealing with. The General’s last phone call to Houston had been quite sanguine. Just a slight hitch, nothing to delay the countdown, he’d reported.

The doctor hadn’t been able to believe his ears. Any chance of them succeeding in convincing the authorities of the magnitude of the crisis and getting them to call off the launch rested with what they could come up with in the lab in the next few hours. They were even treating Perry’s death as a regrettable accident, unconnected with the programme. What sort of eloquence was required if the disembowelled remains of a two-star General couldn’t persuade them?

He abandoned any notion of sleep and helped himself to a handful of stimulants. A couple of minutes later he was back in the lab with Loring.

Loring was on the last stage of developing some more film of the living cells. The doctor didn’t have long to wait before he was again watching the astonishing voracity of the predatory cells.

One cell was distinctly larger than the others and Loring’s camera had skilfully concentrated on tracing it. It hadn’t been easy because of its rapid movement and they kept losing it from the field of vision. They’d lost it for a number of frames when it suddenly reappeared. It provoked a cry from the two scientists.

“Look!” shouted Loring. The cell had become stationary, drawing in its arms of questing cytoplasm until its shape was perfectly round. Then a dark line shot across the film. It continued on the next series of frames until it weakened and finally disappeared. The sequence ended with the cell collapsing in on itself, leaving only strands of shapeless protoplasm in the matrix.

“Run it back,” demanded Nelson.

They watched the dying seconds of the alien cell again. This time they stopped the film when the dark line appeared.

“That’s the emission of the radioactive particle,” explained Loring. “Now watch.” He ran the film on a few frames. “It’s the signal for the cell to self-destruct.” They watched it implode again.

“I could have sworn it was about to divide,” cried Loring excitedly. “Everything seemed ready until the emission. Then it collapsed.”

“As if it had got the signal to abort at the last minute,” said Nelson.

“As though things weren’t right, the structure wrong for reproduction.”

They’d witnessed a combination of electrical and chemical energy that Ted Nelson would never have thought possible in a living thing. The mechanics of cellular change were obscurely enough understood, but this kind of sophistication was undreamt of. What on earth were they dealing with? To get some sort of insight, the success of the tissue cultures was imperative.

They began their work, preparing the ideal conditions for the cells to germinate. They had to let the thing live and grow before they could discover a way to kill it. The lives of three more astronauts depended on it. The fourth seemed already beyond redemption.

The last stroke of midnight fell heavily on the still air. Somewhere an owl shrieked. A farm dog barked nervously. Then the silence settled again like a fitful sleeper.

Above the church spire where the black cross was etched against the sky the clouds lightened. The thin moon was struggling to shake off the blanket of darkness. Slowly the shadows awakened in the churchyard. Headstones poked grimly out of the black earth: sombre crosses, an obelisk, an earth-bound angel with a broken wing. Between them a bat made his flitting circuit of inspection.

The moon had lost the battle with the clouds and disappeared.

Pained breathing broke the stillness and a drunken thing lurched into the graveyard. He saw the broken angel and stumbled towards it. He was breathing like a man who’d swallowed petrol.

He rested against the marble flank of the angel and stared up at the spire. The moon broke free and came out to watch him, watch one of the sky children.

The thing raised his cruel claw towards the black cross and shook it. He wept molten tears which glistened on his wrecked face in the pale moonlight.

It was a signal for the sky to clear. Beyond the cross the pagan constellations ranked and infinity came out to taunt his poor mortality.

His lipless mouth hung open and his sunken eyes grew round with wonderment. A deep longing stirred in his heart. The awful claw was again raised, but this time like a child he tried to pick the stars as if they were white flowers.

From his burning throat a word struggled to form. “Mi—Mine.”

But he was only to be allowed a brief glimpse of his new inheritance. More clouds were spreading through the sky, blotting out the stars, his stars. A film of blood smeared his eyes and the red mist grew. Panic welled inside his breast and he answered it in the only way he could, in the way the clamouring cells had taught him. He lunged at the human figure beside him, gouging at the hard flesh till the blood ran warm, his own blood.

He struggled there with his agony in the churchyard until he fell exhausted to the ground, clutching the black marble head of the broken angel.

The dust storm seethed around him like a plague of locusts. The distant sun shrank to a red ball and was blotted out. The red desert collapsed around him, swallowing him into the dark depths of her dry throat.

He covered his head to still the crescendo of drumming as the thousands of tiny claws explored the strange form of the visitor to their planet. Locked in his suit he felt the mounting panic of claustrophobia. It was as if the fine dust had seeped into his life-support system and instead of breathing air he was breathing the burning sand of Mars.

He tried to pluck off his helmet, wrestling with the screws, and when they wouldn’t move, tugging, like a man trying to pull off his own head. He was suffocating, and like a drowning swimmer he kicked and threshed. But the distant voice of his reason, of his training as an astronaut, called out to him to be still. Not to panic. And with a terrible effort of will he unlocked his cramped muscles, regulated his breathing. Slowly he fought back against the madness which had seized him, and he relaxed.

The storm was still, but when he tried to open his eyes he thought he’d been struck by blindness. A huge red blot obscured his vision.

Again he felt the tide of panic rising within him, and again he had to push it down. The sand had blocked the air supply and his brain had been starved of oxygen. He’d suffered a retinal haemorrhage. The possibilities flashed before his mind, and his reason rejected them all. He stared again straight before him. The blot was still there.

Then it dawned on him with cold horror. There was something stuck to his face mask, and it was looking in at him.

He tried to strike it off with his hand, brush it off. But he couldn’t move his arm, it felt like lead. He steeled himself to look on it.

However hard he tried it was just out of focus, too close to the eye for his straining ciliary muscles to accommodate. But he could tell that it was moving, within itself, like the molecular movement of a liquid excites the tiniest particles suspended there. It was a jelly pulsing with life.

As he stared, straining to read some message in the random movements, vivid pictures began to flash before his mind.

He saw the mauve sky and the distant sun, a faint blue star with an attendant moon, the new configuration of the sky he’d so recently learnt to recognise.

Phobos hung there too, pale and haggard on the horizon.

But there were clouds moving steadily across the sky, and as the light began to grow they thickened, white and substantial like clouds on earth. And beneath them where the red desert had stood were green fields and woods full of rich trees. A silver river wound through the fields, its banks thick with flowers. Overhead the perfumed air was filled with birdsong.

Then, out of the woods came a huge beast. Its hard sleek flanks glinted like polished steel and its red eyes burned hungrily. It raised itself up on to its hind legs, threw back its massive head and sniffed the air. Wet black nostrils dilated and quivered. Then they stiffened. It had smelt warm flesh.

The jaws flashed open and a bellow of triumph burst from its glistening throat. In the field the grazing creatures heard it and stirred uneasily. Some tried to run but their short fat legs weren’t made for rapid movement. The rest huddled together for protection, small hearts pulsing under the warm brown fur. They waited for death like priests.

The huge predator struck in a fury of aggression, slashing wildly with its murderous talons and scattering the warm brown things about the field. Killing for killing’s sake in a festival of destruction. And when it had clawed the life out of everything that moved, leaving its print of slaver it sated itself on the warm flesh, unzipping the wet fur to lap the blood, its cruel red eyes rolling in ecstasy.

Time unfolded and the huge beast was there again, clawing the sky at the edge of the forest. This time men crept towards it through the grass, their bodies decked with skins, wicked javelins gleaming in their raised hands. They stalked the beast, fanning out to surround it as it towered above them in its vast stupidity.

Then the spears flew, piercing the armoured hide until the blood splashed in rivers down its massive hulk and it fell to its knees threshing the air wildly in its agony and howling in rage. One of the men ran forward and plunged his spear in its hot throat and stood as the blood gouted over him. And the others laughed with glee and followed suit, bathing in the hot red blood and rubbing it over their bodies.

Time passed again and the background constellations changed with the barely perceptible jerk of a faulty film. Now the green fields had given way to a sea of red mud. Men crawled about it like brown grubs, burrowing into the ground where spiked engines of war protruded menacingly. Suddenly the sky erupted with gunfire, shells whined and exploded in an upheaval of mud and men. Ranks of the scurrying termites closed in on one another and were engulfed in fire and black smoke. When the smoke cleared they were gone and the scene was still. The red mud had grown redder.

Again there was change. The mud had disappeared, so had the trees. A clean white apron of concrete stretched as far as the eye could see. Geometric shapes rested on it: tall rectangles with edges as sharp and straight as razor blades, huge spheres honeycombed with octagonal windows which shone with hard yellow light. A latticework of steel lines bore rapidly moving cylinders shuttling to and fro between the buildings. Overhead the glittering lights melted into an orange glow.

Into the orange glow sailed a silver ship moving swiftly and silently. For a moment it hovered high over the centre of the geometrical city. Then it released a shining metal object and disappeared at incredible speed towards the horizon.

The object seemed to hang in the sky, glinting in the sunlight. Then it dropped remorselessly towards the earth.

When it struck, the city dissolved in a searing molten ball. A huge plume rose into the sky drawing the melted fragments with it, sucking the blazing atmosphere upwards into space. The living envelope of the planet was pierced and the contaminated dust rushed in to fill the vacuum. Life mushroomed skywards and was tossed to waste in the inhospitable corners of the solar system. Only the red cloud returned to pay its respects and scatter dust over the grave of the city.

Slowly his vision cleared, and the barren Martian landscape resumed its sharp focus. The sun was sinking towards the horizon, casting shadows along the boulder-strewn ground and into the jagged mouths of the craters. He could move his arm again and he drew his hand over his face-mask and inspected his gloves. Tiny red flecks of the brittle lichen-like material stuck to the silver coating.

He rose to his feet but stumbled as one leg refused to support him. It felt dead. He bent to inspect it and saw that a panel of his suit had been torn. Inside, the calf of his leg was numb with cold. He glanced nervously again at the declining sun. The temperature must be well below freezing already. If he didn’t find the module soon he’d lose the leg with frostbite.

He rubbed the limb in a bid to restore the circulation. He must have torn the suit scrambling down the rocks. He’d have been dead now if it hadn’t been for the separately insulated panels. He sighed with relief as he began to feel the life return to the limb. In a moment he was back on his feet and jogging in loping bounds across the desert.

The dust storm had disappeared without trace. He wondered for the first time whether it had caught the others. What would they make of his vision? Was it a vision or simply a nightmare generated by his own panic? Or was he suffering from space sickness and developing hallucinations?

His leg was feeling painful, as though it was in contact with freezing metal which was drawing the heat out of the rest of his body. He was becoming rapidly exhausted. He hadn’t eaten all day and energy loss under reduced gravitation could be deceptively high when movement seemed so simple.

He was moving at walking speed now, not much faster than a quick stroll on Earth. His leg was burning. He thought of it blackening and cracking. It would have to be amputated aboard ship if it was frostbitten; they couldn’t wait until they got back to Earth, it might develop gangrene.

He was morbidly wondering what tools they’d use when he caught a glimpse of the metal hull of the module glinting in the rays of the dying sun. It gave him new energy and he broke into a stumbling trot. The other two were standing outside looking for him and when they saw him they came running.

They helped him aboard and peeled off his suit in the airlock. Mike who acted as crew doctor examined the leg once they were back in the living quarters.

“You’re still bleeding,” he announced.

Where the suit had been torn a patch of red was seeping down his calf.

Steve automatically touched it, then drew back his hand in sudden revulsion. It was sticky, quite unlike blood.

“Wipe it off!” he screamed. “And throw it outside. It’s growing on me!”