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

"Well, thaw the damned thing in a tub of formalin if you must thaw it. I've suggested that -"
"And I've said there would be no sense in it. You can't compromise. Why did you and Commander Garry come down here to study magnetism? Why weren't you content to
stay at home? There's magnetic force enough in New York. I could no more study the life this thing once had from a formalin-pickled sample than you could get the
information you wanted back in New York. And -if this one is so treated, never in all time to come can there be a duplicate! The race it came from must have passed
away in the twenty million years it lay frozen, so that even if it came from Mars, then we'd never find its like. And -the ship is gone.


"There's only one way to do this -and that is the best possible way. It must be thawed slowly, carefully, and not in formalin."
Commander Garry stood forward again, and Norris stepped back muttering angrily. "I think Blair is right, gentlemen. What do you say?"
Connant grunted. "It sounds right to us, I think -only perhaps he ought to stand watch over it whie it's thawing." He grinned ruefully, brushing a stray lock of
ripe-cherry hair back from his forehead. "Swell idea, in fact -if he sits up with his jolly little corpse."


Garry smiled slightly. A general chuckle of agreement rippled over the group. "I should think any ghost it may have had would have starved to death if it hung
around here that long, Connant," Garry suggested. "And you look capable of taking care of it. 'Ironman' Connant ought to be able to take out that thing. I-"


Eagerly Blair was stripping back the ropes. A single throw of the tarpaulin revealed the thing. The ice had melted somewhat in the of the room, and it was
clear and blue as thick, good glass. It shone wet and sleek under the harsh light of the unshielded globe above.


The room stiffened abruptly. It was face up there on the plain, greasy planks of the table. The broken half of the bronze ice-ax was still buried in the queer
skull. Three mad, hate-filled eyes blazed up with a living fire, bright as fresh-spilled blood, from a face ringed with writhing, loathsome nest of worms, blue,
mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow -Van


Wall, six feet and 200 pounds of ice-nerved pilot, gave a queer, strangled gasp and butted, stumbled his way out to the corridor. Half the company broke for
the doors. The others stumbled away from the table.


McReady stood at one end of the table watching them, his great body planted solid on his powerful legs. Norris from the opposite end glowered at the thing with
smouldering hate. Outside the door, Garry was talking with half a dozen of the men at once.


Blair had a tack hammer. The ice that cased the thing schluffed crisply under its steel claw as it peeled from the thing it had cased for twenty million years -
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Chapter 3
"I know you don't like the thing, Connant, but it just has to be thawed out right. You say leave it as it is till we get back to civilization. All right, I'll admit
your argument that we could do a better and more complete job there is sound. But -how are we going to get across the Line? We have to take this through one
temperate zone, the equatorial zone, and half way through the other temperate zone before we get it to New York. You don't want to sit with it one night, but you
suggest, then that I hang its corpse in the freezer with the beef?" Blair looked up from his cautious chipping, his bald, freckled skull nodding triumphantly.


Kinner, the stocky, scar-faced cook, saved Connant the trouble of answering. "Hey, you listen, mister. You put that thing in the box with the meat, and by all gods
there ever were, I'll put you in to keep it company. You birds have brought everything movable in this camp onto my mess here already, and I had to stand for
that. But you go putting things like that in my meat box or even my meat cache here, and you cook your own damn grub."