"Campbell, John W Jr - Who Goes There" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

a low, soft humming and a clink and clank of tools, the very sounds somehow bearing a message of frantic haste.


McReady's face paled. "Lord help us if that thing has-". He grabbed Barclay's shoulder, and made snipping motions with his fingers, pointing toward the lacing
of control-cables that held the door.


Barclay drew the wire-cutters from his pocket, and kneeled soundlessly at the door. The snap and twang of cut wires made an unbearable racket in the utter quiet
of the Antarctic hush. There was only that strange, sweetly soft hum from within the shack, and the queerly, hecticly clipped clicking and rattling of tools to
drown their noises.


McReady peered through a crack in the door. His breath sucked in huskily and his great fingers clamped cruelly on Barclay's shoulder. The meteorologist backed
down. "It isn't," he explained very softly, "Blair. It's kneeling on something on the bunk -something that keeps lifting. Whatever it's working on is a thing like
a knapsack -and it lifts."


"All at once," Barclay said grimly. "No. Norris, hang back, and get that iron of yours out. It may have -weapons."


Together, Barclays powerful body and McReady's giant strength struck the door. Inside, the bunk jammed against the door, screeched madly and crackled into
kindling. The door flung down from broken hinges, the patched lumber of the doorpost dropping inward.


Like a blue-rubber ball, a Thing bounced up. One of its four tentacle-like arms looped out like a striking snake. In a seven-tentacled hand, a six-inch pencil of
winking, shining metal glinted and swung upward to face them. Its line-thin lips twitched back from snake-fangs in a grin of hate, red eyes blazing.


Norris' revolver thundered in the confined space. The hate-washed face twitched in agony, the looping tentacle snatched back. The silvery thing in its hand a smashed
ruin of metal, the seven-tentacled hand became a mass of mangled flesh oozing greenish-yellow ichor. The revolver thundered three times more. Dark holes drilled
each of the three eyes before Norris hurled the empty weapon against its face.


The Thing screamed in feral hate, a lashing tentacle wiping at blinded eyes. For a moment it crawled on the floor, savage tentacles lashing out, the body twitching.
Then it staggered up again, blinded eyes working, boiling hideously, the crushed flesh sloughing away in sodden gobbets.


Barclay lurched to his feet and dove forward with an ice-axe. The flat of the weighty thing crushed against the side of the head. Again the unkillable monster
went down. The tentacles lashed out, and suddenly Barclay fell to his feet in the grip of a living, livid rope. The Thing dissolved as he held it, a white-hot band
that ate into the flesh of his hands like living fire. Frantically he tore the stuff from him, held his hands where they could not be reached. The blind Thing
felt and ripped at the tough, heavy, windproof cloth, seeking flesh -flesh it could convert -The


huge blow-torch McReady had brought coughed solemnly. Abruptly it rumbled disapproval thoatily. Then it laughed gurglingly, and thrust out a blue-white,
three-foot tongue. The Thing on the floor shrieked, flailed out blindly with tentacles that writhed and withered in the bubbling wrath of the blow-torch. It
crawled and turned on the floor, it shrieked and hobbled madly, but always McReady
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held the blow-torch on the face, the dead eyes burning and bubbling uselessly. Frantically the Thing crawled and howled.