A Handful of Darkness (2 page)

“A rug attacked him.” Hall grinned without amusement. “Now who’s crazy?”

“We’ll send a guard unit down.” She blinked. “Right away. But how—”

“Tell them to have their blasters ready. And better make that a general alarm to
everyone
.”

Hall placed four items on Commander Morrison’s desk: a microscope, a towel, a metal belt, and a small red and white rug.

She edged away nervously. “Major are you sure—?”

“They’re all right, now. That’s the strangest part. This towel. A few hours ago it tried to kill me. I got away by blasting it to particles. But here it is, back again. The way it always was. Harmless.”

Captain Taylor fingered the red and white rug warily. “That’s my rug. I brought it from Terra. My wife gave it to me. I—I trusted it completely.”

They all looked at each other.

“We blasted the rug, too,” Hall pointed out.

There was silence.

“Then what was it that attacked me?” Captain Taylor asked. “If it wasn’t this rug?”

“It looked like this rug,” Hall said slowly. “And what attacked me looked like this towel.”

Commander Morrison held the towel up to the light. “It’s just an ordinary towel! It couldn’t have attacked you.”

“Of course not,” Hall agreed. “We’ve put these objects through all the tests we can think of. They’re just what they’re supposed to be, all elements unchanged. Perfectly stable nonorganic objects. It’s impossible that
any
of these could have come to life and attacked us.”

“But something did,” Taylor said. “Something attacked me. And if it wasn’t this rug, what was it?”

Lieutenant Dodds felt around on the dresser for his gloves. He was in a hurry. The whole unit had been called to emergency assembly.

“Where did I—?” he murmured. “What the hell!”

For on the bed were two pairs of identical gloves, side by side.

Dodds frowned, scratching his head. How could it be? He owned only one pair. The others must be somebody else’s. Bob Wesley had been in the night before, playing cards. Maybe he had left them.

The vidscreen flashed again. “All personnel, report at once. All personnel, report at once. Emergency assembly of all personnel.”

“All right!” Dodds said impatiently. He grabbed up one of the pairs of gloves, sliding them on to his hands.

As soon as they were in place, the gloves carried his hands down to his waist. They clamped his fingers over the butt of his gun, lifting it from his holster.

“I’ll be damned,” Dodds said. The gloves brought the blast gun up, pointing it at his chest.

The fingers squeezed. There was a roar. Half of Dodds’ chest dissolved. What was left of him fell slowly to the floor, the mouth still open in amazement.

Corporal Tenner hurried across the ground towards the main building, as soon as he heard the wail of the emergency alarm.

At the entrance to the building he stopped to take off his metal-cleated boots. Then he frowned. By the door were two safety mats instead of one.

Well, it didn’t matter. They were both the same. He stepped on to one of the mats and waited. The surface of the mat sent a flow of high-frequency current through his feet and legs, killing any spores or seeds that might have clung to him while he was outside.

He passed on into the building.

A moment later Lieutenant Fulton hurried up to the door. He yanked off his hiking boots and stepped on to the first mat he saw.

The mat folded over his feet.

“Hey,” Fulton cried. “Let go!”

He tried to pull his feet loose, but the mat refused to let go.

Fulton became scared. He drew his gun, but he didn’t care to fire at his own feet.

“Help!” he shouted.

Two soldiers came running up. “What’s the matter, Lieutenant?”

“Get this damn thing off me.”

The soldiers began to laugh.

“It’s no joke,” Fulton said, his face suddenly white. “It’s breaking my feet! It’s—”

He began to scream. The soldiers grabbed frantically at the mat. Fulton fell, rolling and twisting, still screaming. At last the soldiers managed to get a corner of the mat loose from his feet.

Fulton’s feet were gone. Nothing but limp bone remained, already half-dissolved.

“Now we know,” Hall said grimly. “It’s a form of organic life.”

Commander Morrison turned to Corporal Tenner. “You saw two mats when you came into the building?”

“Yes, Commander. Two. I stepped on—on one of them. And came in.”

“You were lucky. You stepped on the right one.”

“We’ve got to be careful,” Hall said. “We’ve got to watch for duplicates. Apparently
it
, whatever it is, imitates objects it finds. Like a chameleon. Camouflage.”

“Two,” Stella Morrison murmured, looking at the two vases of flowers, one at each end of her desk. “It’s going to be hard to tell. Two towels, two vases, two chairs. There may be whole rows of things that are all right. All multiples legitimate except one.”

“That’s the trouble. I didn’t notice anything unusual. in the lab. There’s nothing odd about another microscope. It blended right in.”

The Commander drew away from the identical vases of flowers. “How about those? Maybe one is—whatever they are.”

“There’s two of a lot of things. Natural pairs. Two boots. Clothing. Furniture. I didn’t notice that extra chair in my room. Equipment. It’ll be impossible to be sure. And sometimes—”

The vidscreen lit. Vice-Commander Wood’s features formed.

“Stella, another casualty.”

“Who is it this time?”

“An officer dissolved. All but a few buttons and his blast pistol—Lieutenant Dodds.”

“That makes three,” Commander Morrison said.

“If it’s organic, there ought to be some way we can destroy it,” Hall muttered. “We’ve already blasted a few, apparently killed them. They can be hurt! But we don’t know how many more there are. We’ve destroyed five or six. Maybe it’s an infinitely divisible substance. Some kind of protoplasm.”

“And meanwhile—?”

“Meanwhile we’re all at its mercy. Or
their
mercy. It’s our lethal life form, all right. That explains why we found everything else harmless. Nothing could compete with a form like this. We have mimic forms of our own, of course. Insects, plants. And there’s the twisty slug On Venus. But nothing that goes this far.”

“It can be killed, though. You said so yourself. That means we have a chance.”

“If it can be found.” Hall looked around the room. Two walking-capes hung by the door. Had there been two a moment before?

He rubbed his forehead wearily. “We’ve got to try to find some sort of poison or corrosive agent, something that’ll destroy them wholesale. We can’t just sit and wait for them to attack us. We need something we can spray. That’s the way we got the twisty slugs.”

The Commander gazed past him, rigid.

He turned to follow her gaze. “What is it?”

“I never noticed two brief-cases in the corner over there. There was only one before—I think.” She shook her head in bewilderment. “How are we going to know? This business is getting me “You need a good stiff drink.”

She brightened. “That’s an idea. But—”

“But what?”

“I don’t want to touch anything. There’s no way to tell.” She fingered the blast gun at her waist. “I keep wanting to use it, on everything.”

“Panic reaction. Still, we are being picked off, one by one.”

Captain Unger got the emergency call over his headphones. He stopped work at once, gathered the specimens he had collected in his arms, and hurried back towards the bucket.

It was parked closer than he remembered. He stopped, puzzled.

There it was, the bright little cone-shaped car with its treads firmly planted in the soft soil, its door open.

Unger hurried up to it, carrying his specimens carefully. He opened the storage hatch in the back and lowered his armload. Then he went around to the front and slid in behind the controls.

He turned the switch. But the motor did not come on. That was strange. While he was trying to figure it out, he noticed something that gave him a start.

A few hundred feet away, among the trees was a second bucket, just like the one he was in. And that was where he remembered having parked his car. Of course, he was in the bucket. Somebody else had come looking for specimens, and this bucket belonged to him.

Unger started to get out again.

The door closed around him. The seat folded up over his head. The dashboard became plastic and oozed. He gasped—he was suffocating. He struggled to get out, flailing and twisting. There was wetness all around him, a bubbling, flowing wetness, warm like flesh.

“Glub.” His head was covered His body was covered. The bucket was turning to liquid. He tried to pull his hands free but they would not come.

And then the pain began. He was being dissolved. All at once he realized what the liquid was.

Acid. Digestive acid. He was in a stomach.

“Don’t look!” Gail Thomas cried.

“Why not?” Corporal Hendricks swam towards her, grinning.

“Why can’t I look?”

“Because I’m going to get out.”

The sun shone down on the lake. It glittered and danced on the water. All around huge moss-covered trees rose up, great silent columns among the flowering vines and bushes.

Gail climbed up on the bank, shaking water from her, throwing her hair back out of her eyes. The woods were silent. There was no sound except the lapping of the waves. They were a long way from the unit camp.

“When can I look?” Hendricks demanded, swimming around in a circle, his eyes shut.

“Soon.” Gail made her way into the trees, until she came to the place where she had left her uniform. She could feel the warm sun glowing against her bare shoulders and arms. Sitting down in the grass, she picked up her tunic and leggings.

She brushed the leaves and bits of tree bark from her tunic and began to pull it over her head.

In the water, Corporal Hendricks waited patiently, continuing in his circle. Time passed. There was no sound. He opened his eyes. Gail was nowhere in sight.

“Gail?” he called.

It was very quiet.

“Gail!”

No answer.

Corporal Hendricks swam rapidly to the bank. He pulled himself out of the water. One leap carried him to his own uniform, neatly piled at the edge. of the lake. He grabbed up his blaster.

“
Gail!
”

The woods were silent. There was no sound. He stood, looking around him, frowning. Gradually, a cold fear began to numb him, in spite of the warm sun.

“
Gail!
GAIL!”

And still there was only silence.

Commander Morrison was worried. “We’ve got to act,” she said. “We can’t wait. Ten lives lost already from thirty encounters. One-third is too high a percentage.”

Hall looked up from his work. “Anyhow, now we know what we’re up against. It’s a form of protoplasm, with infinite versatility.” He lifted the spray tank. “I think this will give us an idea of how many exist.”

“What’s that?”

“A compound of arsenic and hydrogen in gas form. Arsine.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

Hall locked his helmet into place. His voice came through the Commander’s earphones. “I’m going to release this throughout the lab. I think there are a lot of them in here, more than anywhere else.”

“Why here?”

“This is where all samples and specimens were originally brought, where the first one of them was encountered. I think they came in with the samples, or as the samples, and then infiltrated through the rest of the buildings.”

The Commander locked her own helmet into place. Her four guards did the same. “Arsine is fatal to human beings, isn’t it?”

Hall nodded. “We’ll have to be careful. We can use it in here for a limited test. but that’s about all.”

He adjusted the flow of oxygen inside his helmet.

“What’s your test supposed to prove?” she wanted to know.

“If it shows anything at all, it should give us an idea of how extensively they’ve infiltrated. We’ll know better what we’re up against. This may be more serious than we realize!

“How do you mean?” she asked, fixing her own oxygen flow.

“There are a hundred people in this unit on Planet Blue. As it stands now, the worst that can happen is that they’ll get all of us, one by one. But that’s nothing. Units of a hundred are lost every day of the week. It’s a risk whoever is first to land on a planet must take. In the final analysis, it’s relatively unimportant.”

“Compared to what?”

“If they
are
infinitely divisible, then we’re going to have to think twice about leaving here. It would be better to stay and get picked off one by one than to run the risk of carrying any of them back to the system.”

She looked at him. “Is that what you’re trying to find out—whether they’re infinitely divisible?”

“I’m trying to find out what we’re up against. Maybe there are only a few of them. Or maybe they’re everywhere.” He waved a hand around the laboratory. “Maybe half the things in this room are not what we think they are… It’s bad when they attack us. It would be worse if they didn’t.”

“Worse?” The Commander was puzzled.

“Their mimicry is perfect. Of inorganic objects, at least. I looked through one of them, Stella, when it was imitating my microscope. It enlarged, adjusted, reflected, just like a regular microscope. It’s a form of mimicry that surpasses anything we’ve ever imagined. It carries down below the surface, into the actual elements of the object imitated.”

“You mean one of them could slip back to Terra along with us? In the form of clothing or a piece of lab equipment?” She shuddered.

“We assume they’re some sort of protoplasm. Such malleability suggests a simple original form—and that suggests binary fission. If that’s so, then there may be no limit to their ability to reproduce. The dissolving properties make me think of the simple unicellular protozoa.”

“Do you think they’re intelligent?”

“I don’t know. I hope not.” Hall lifted the spray. “In any case, this should tell us their extent. And, to some degree, corroborate my notion that they’re basic enough to reproduce by simple division—the worst thing possible, from our standpoint.