The Incredible Melting Man (13 page)

To judge from the hum of electric power that arose out of the shadows, the room was full of equipment. As he listened to the murmur he became conscious of an urgent clicking sound. It was coming from a bench in the centre of the room where he could discern some sort of faint light burning. As his eyes became more receptive he made his way towards it. Under a glass cover something was glowing with an eerie red phosphorescence. The rapid clicking was being emitted by a meter nearby.

The contents were a seething mass of activity: a red jelly that boiled and swirled with animation. There could be no question that it was not alive; nothing was there to excite it, no heat or instruments, just the pulsating jelly on top of some thin strips of red meat. Around the edges of the meat was a secretion of the transparent fluid he’d just seen on the corpse of the General. The thought struck him with a macabre revulsion. It was the General! They were feeding bits of the General to some superactive bacteria. They were growing things on him! What a story!

The meter continued to rattle out its message. It was obviously some sort of warning device judging from the way the needle kept lurching into the red. But there was something repulsively fascinating about the contents of the dish that held him there. He could swear it was growing, like an angry swelling. Yes, it was angry and inflamed like an infected wound, gathering like a boil. Only you could see the elements that made up the fulminating jelly: tiny red blurred eyes, seeking, questing. He felt sure they were conscious of him, sure they were stirring in a delirious expectation. Hungrily.

He bent closer to get a better look at the squirming grains, the eyes of the jelly, and they suddenly grew still, for a split second they poised and focused. Then they leapt out at him.

He recoiled. The red jelly hit the glass cover of the dish and hung there trembling. Then, slowly its own weight dislodged it and it fell back heavily like treacle into the bottom of the dish. It immediately resumed its urgent activity, hungrily probing the surface of the red meat.

The needle on the meter danced in wild applause.

Footsteps outside the door disturbed him and he looked round in panic for a place to hide. As the light from the corridor spread into the room he ducked under a bench by the wall and held his breath.

The strip lighting flickered and the lab was flooded in a blaze of white light. Loring appeared in the door and stood listening.

“Good God!” he cried. “What’s going on?”

Zimwell’s heart froze. They’d found him.

But the footsteps moved hastily towards the centre bench. They were followed by others.

“My God! Look at that meter!” cried Loring. “It’s reaching a dangerous level.”

“I thought as much,” said Doctor Nelson. “I told you about the arm.” There was a pause as he studied the contents of the dish. “And there’s the same phosphorescence. He can’t last much longer.”

“Surely Steve couldn’t have reached such a level of radiation?” said Loring.

“No, but it’s only a question of time,” replied the doctor gravely. “There’ll be some natural resistance to the invasion from his body, and that’s what’s slowing the process up.” He pointed at the seething dish. “But where there’s no natural resistance, you can begin to see how rapidly it takes over.”

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Loring.

“Put it in the radiation chamber where it can’t do any harm,” said the doctor, reaching for the dish. As his hand settled round the cover, the jelly spat up at him.

“Did you see that?” he cried, withdrawing his hand in alarm.

“Try it again,” urged Loring.

The doctor gradually brought his hand nearer the dish. As his fingers settled on it the jelly stiffened like an alerted spider, then struck savagely at the glass. He could feel the impact lift the lid.

“It can see you,” exclaimed Loring. “How else does it do it?”

Nelson was baffled. “Unless it’s something to do with the radiation. Just as a bat will emit high frequency sound waves to sense objects, maybe this is using a similar method, using even shorter wavelengths.”

He didn’t commit himself any further but watched Loring. He’d anticipated his reasoning and picked up a long glass rod. He drew the end over the glass a number of times but the jelly took no notice.

“Some signal,” said Loring. “Subtle enough to distinguish between food and non-food.”

He had a sudden idea. “Shall we try a rat?”

He was back in a moment with a laboratory rat which he deftly dropped on top of the dish. It sat there exploring the air with twitching snout. Once more the jelly ignored the bait. Only when he went to pick up the rat did it react. Again the lid jumped with the impact, this time more forcibly. It was getting hungrier. The red meat had disappeared to transparent jelly.

“It can tell when the food’s suitable, when it’s human tissue that’s alive,” concluded Loring.

Nelson fell into a thoughtful silence. “How much longer will we have to wait for the results of the plates from the HEP lab at Overton?” he demanded. “We need to know more about this radiation. I’ve a feeling it’s going to be crucial to our understanding of the cell’s real nature.”

Loring said he was expecting to hear from them at any time. “Meanwhile,” he asked, “don’t you think it’s time we put this somewhere safe?”

The increased chatter of the Geiger counter seemed to confirm his suggestion. Nelson pressed the flat of his hand firmly on the lid and picked up the dish. The jelly went wild, transforming the glass to a child’s paper weight where the snowstorm was of blood.

“Better feed it before you put it away,” said Loring with an effort at humour. “Don’t want it getting hungry and coming looking for one of us.”

“Yes,” agreed Nelson reluctantly. “I suppose so. Only I wish it would hurry up and take on some composite structure. We still don’t know what we’re up against.”

“Except something bloody hungry,” said Loring rapidly pulling his fingers out of the way as a tendril of jelly shot out to greet the gobbet of human meat that he dropped into the dish.

“Down, Fido!” he jested nervously, swiftly replacing the lid.

They watched as the jelly began to ingest the flesh, drawing its glutinous body possessively over the food like a predator licking the still warm carcass of its prey, kissing it fondly with spittle before devouring it.

“Naked aggression,” exclaimed Nelson as he watched the red tentacles lap round the meat and dissolve it into a glistening liquid. “The raw purity of survival. It may have shocked Darwin’s contemporaries who liked to think of themselves as civilised, but this is the real essence of life. Not Beethoven, not the American Constitution, nor the space race. Beauty, civilisation, peace, they’re Man chasing dreams because he hasn’t got the stomach to face up to this.”

He pointed at the glass. Carried away by his rhetoric he didn’t notice how close his finger was until the jelly leapt up at him, rattling the glass.

“Look at it, Loring,” he said with distaste. “That’s us as we really are, under all our clothes and customs. And we’d forgotten because we haven’t had to fight like that since we crawled out of the primordial swamp. Take a good look. It’s what Steve and the others faced when they got up there. And it’s what they’ve brought back. It’s totally inimical to human life, and if we give it half a chance it will destroy us all.”

He brought his bare knuckles down on the bench with a crash. “This is what we’re up against, and I’ve got less than five hours to make those bone-heads at Houston see it.”

He removed the pullulating cells to a lead-lined chamber over by the wall and the Geiger counter was silent.

“Get on to Overton again,” he told Loring. “Tell them to hurry. We don’t want a detailed analysis, an educated guess will do.”

He turned sharply towards the door.

“I’ll give them one last chance to listen to me and call off the countdown. Otherwise I’m prepared to blow the gaff on the whole thing.”

TEN

T
HE ORANGE
glow of the night sky blanched the stars. Heavy plumes of cloud rose from the giant spools of the cooling towers to obscure the moon. It was the stillest part of the night, when the earth swings into the coldest reaches of space and halts nervously, drawing in her breath for the journey back into light. It was a time when the earth renews long-lost affinities with her dark past, recalling the lifeless planetary aeons before matter learnt to crawl and hunt and eat.

The man-made clouds hung over the power plant, trapping the sodium lights in an orange haze that cut off the night and made a twilight artificial world of concrete towers and steel gantries where spotlights burned and steam spouted. It was an unearthly ship gliding through the black waters of the surrounding darkness.

A scream pierced the stillness. Out of the night came a trembling roar of sound that grew with the seconds. White eyes bored through the night and a body that lashed and twitched as it weaved its way in pursuit scattered light across the dark earth. A train swung into the orange twilight of the power plant and hit the points with a volley of noise like gunfire. It threaded its way through the flanks of parked freight-liners with a hollow roar before bursting free with a triumphant shriek and disappearing into the distance. The silence returned like a clenched fist.

The thing cowered close to the earth whimpering softly to itself. Slowly the eyes lifted again to the sky and fear crept back into them.

Behind it the hunt was closing in. Not far away searchlights probed the shadows and men’s voices shouted instructions. It was a hunted thing now and knew it. A son of Cain. Outlawed.

But a worse fear lay ahead. The orange haze rose like a storm to meet him, and the heat inside him beat against the fear and drove him towards it. That was where his new loyalties lay, his new being. His humanity had dripped away in the seared flesh, in the blood of those he’d murdered. A choking sob wracked his burning body and he bled hot tears for his loss, for his human soul, for his precious stars that had all gone out leaving him with nothing but the bitter choking dust of the hot red desert.

He raised the endless stumps to his purblind eyes and wept for his hands. Soft flowers once that could touch and caress, speak and pray. But they’d turned against him, scratched and clawed their way into the warm hearts of fellow men and spilt the sweet joy of life. He wept for his eyes that Columbus-like had surveyed the uncharted seas of space and been blinded by the magnificence of a million suns. Now they were blinded by blood and their own corruption, running with the stinking pus of his monstrous degradation. Above all he wept for the love that had once lived in his own heart but had now curdled to violent rage and hatred.

He howled at the sky and cursed the fate that had made him the bearer of the first seeds of destruction.

Someone had heard his cry and was beckoning him.

In a cutting at the side of the track the two hobos had made a fire. It had burnt low and the red embers lit their flushed and swollen faces. Three empty spirit bottles lay strewn on the ground in front of them. The fourth hung from the limp grip of one of the hobos who stared sightlessly into the dying fire. The other had been trying to prepare a meal. A blackened pan tilted precariously over the fire causing the hot embers to hiss as the contents of beans and sausages leaked down the edge and sent spurts of steam into the cold air.

The one looking after the meal had lurched drunkenly to his feet and was waving at the figure in the shadows, beckoning almost pleadingly for him to come and share their fire. When the figure didn’t move he sat down heavily.

“Aw right then,” he slurred. “We’ll keep our bloody hospitality.”

He waved his arm in the direction of the whisky bottle but his companion took no notice, continuing to stare drunkenly at the fire. With a grunt he levered himself on to his knees and crawled round to retrieve the bottle. In the process he knelt on a hot ember and rolled over on to his side letting out a shriek of pain. He lay on the ground rubbing his leg, then fell to staring morosely up at the sky.

Nothing stirred but for the occasional hiss and bubble of the slowly dripping pan.

“Wha’ d’you reckon they’ll find up there, Johnny?” he suddenly demanded.

Johnny wasn’t listening. The booze had numbed his brain.

“I’ll tell you what they’ll find,” went on the hobo, ignoring his friend’s muteness. “They’ll find damn all, ’cos there’s damn all there to find.”

He waved his arm dismissively at the heavens and fell back on to the ground with the effort.

“ ’sall a waste of money,” he shouted, “ ’cos there’s nothing there. Nothing anywhere. We’re the only goddam creatures in the whole of the universe.” He lurched drunkenly to his feet. “And we’re drunk!” he roared and collapsed again to the ground helpless with laughter.

There was a noise from the shadows. It sounded like heavy asthmatic breathing. The hobo heard it and sat up.

“Hoho!” he cried. “So you’ve heard we’ve got some booze, eh? I knew that’d bring you. Booze allus brings ’em.” He subsided into chortlings of mirth at his own shrewd grasp of human nature.

“Come on! he called. “Come on, you’re welcome. Come an’ ’ave something to eat.”

But nothing moved in the shadows and the hobo became absorbed in stirring the food in the pan with a twig. More of the beans toppled into the fire with a noisy hiss.

“And what d’you suppose ’appened to the other three?” he suddenly asked mysteriously.

The question was lost on the night air as the hobo wrestled the bottle from the hand of his mute companion. He took a long swig and lurched round the fire until he was at the same side as their invisible guest was lurking. He held out the bottle as bait.

“You might as well come out,” he said in a stage whisper. “We know you’re there.”

He shook the contents of the bottle. “It’ll warm your insides.”

Again nothing stirred in the shadows, only the pained breathing could be heard.

The hobo’s voice hardened with impatience.

“You can’t frighten us, you know,” he called. “We’ve nothing to lose.” He turned back towards the smouldering fire, throwing a parting shot.