Dead Sea (65 page)

George smelled something rank that made his eyes water. The air was thin and dry, rarified like gas in a vacuum tube. It was hard to breathe, but then, maybe it was just panic on his part. His throat felt tight, constricted to a pinhole now. He was smelling something like rotting fish. But other odors, too, hot and acrid smells.

They stepped through the doorway, flashlights and lanterns held before them, weapons at the ready. The first thing they saw was some sort of machine on the floor of what might have been a machine shop once. It sat on a crude frame of welded bars that housed a large oval disk of shiny metal. Above that was something like the scope from a hunting rifle, though three feet in length. Connected to the disk by two-foot rods at either end were two large, circular mirrors set upright … at least things that looked like mirrors. The entire contraption was making a low, humming sound. Charged particles of luminous blue danced across those mirrors, then faded.

Looking at it, George could not say what it was. But it appeared as if that scope-device was lined up dead center of those off-set mirrors. And what could the point of that be?

The machine thrummed again and George could feel the deck vibrating beneath him. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end. Static electricity crackled in the air and there was a sudden, gagging stench of burnt ozone and fused wiring. Then the machine made a funny whining sound and a transparent pencil-thin beam of light like a laser beam came out of the back end of the scope and struck the rear mirror. The mirror was suddenly suffused with white light, making a sharp sound like rustling cellophane. It glowed and reflected a series of prismatic beams at the front mirror which broke them up into a blue beam of light like a searchlight, directing that blue radiance at the bulkhead. You could see that blue energy crawling, rippling, making the bulkhead beneath seem insubstantial.

Then the scope cut out again.

“What the hell is that?” George said.

And maybe somebody would have answered him, but that’s when they saw that they were not alone with the machine. There was something else in that room and it was not a man. What it was … they couldn’t say at first, it was so utterly alien in appearance. It looked at first like an elongated lizard squatting on its hands and knees, but it was no lizard. It was not anything that anyone had ever seen before. It rose up off the floor, a corded and rawboned thing made of rubbery blue-green flesh. It did not have legs as such, but something like a tripod of stout and boneless limbs ending not in feet but in pads like those of a treefrog.

“Oh my God,” Elizabeth said.

“Keep away from it,” Cushing said, as if that needed saying.

It had the general body shape of a pond hydra — cylindrical and up-curving like a banana, but hunched and contorted, set atop that tripod of legs that looked more like pythons than legs. It moved back a step and those spade-feet made wet, sucking sounds as they were pulled from the metal deckplates. It stood there, tall as a man, a nightmare sculpted from wrinkled, convoluted flesh with a bony head full of hollows and draws like an irregular, knobby cone pressed flat on top. From which, there was a nest of coiling blue-black tendrils, each as thick as a man’s thumb. They could have been some kind of alien hair, but they looked more like bloated worms looking for blood to suck.

“What the fuck is that?” Saks demanded to know.

“I think … I think it’s the thing that made that machine.”

It had three blue-green leathery arms ending in whipping clusters of root-like tentacles that might have been called fingers on some distant world. From throat to legs, there were a series of short, blunt, hollow tubes running down its underside. They looked like sheared-off sections of garden hose … but greasy, horribly-alive, twitching. They could have been organs of speech or reproduction for all anyone could say.

And that was the crazy thing about this horror: you couldn’t make sense of it. You couldn’t look at it and say, yes, it’s invertebrate. Yes, it’s a worm or a snake or an insect. There was no possible frame of reference for this thing on earth. Its anatomy was completely alien, its evolutionary biology unguessable.

Now George knew where that revolting, dead fish smell was coming from. But closer like this, it wasn’t exactly the smell of dead fish. Like that, but sharper, higher, with an almost gagging chemical smell mixed in.

Everything about the creature inspired revulsion. And the worse part was that it had a face. If you wanted to call it that. A fissured, wizened sort of face with a triangular arrangement of close-set eyes, each pink as strawberry milk, glistening and oozing with mucus … all three of them. And each about the size of a tennis ball. But those eyes, they soon saw, were not pink. Not really. There was only a membrane of pink skin over them. Like drapes opening, the membranes pulled away in tandem, slitting open in the center and revealing eyes that were red as rubies. The membranes did not pull back all the way … just enough so that the eyes looked pink with a luminous and jellied red slit in them.

And those eyes … they sucked the spirit right out of you.

What was to be done?

What really was to be done?

They watched it and it watched them, checkmate.

There was a pair of short, powerful-looking tentacles at its mouth. One to either side like they might have been used in feeding. They were a bright, cobalt blue with pink undersides, tiny razored suckers set into them. The creature stood there, rubbing those tentacles together with a slippery sound like a man stroking his chin, thinking what to do, what to do.

George watched it, noticing now that it was making a sort of shallow, gasping sound and as it did so, those tubes on its underside inflated, then deflated. Sure, it was
breathing.
That’s what those things were. Aspirators of some type. Probably not anything like human lungs at all, but more like the book lungs of a spider or maybe the gills of a fish. Organs of respiration that separated breathable gases from the toxic ones. And in this place, George knew, that could have been oxygen … but with all the rotting weed out there, it could have been methane, too. Maybe a little of both with some nitrogen mixed in.

Nobody had made any threatening moves on it yet and it had not done a thing to provoke any. But it was coming. If not from the thing itself, then from the people gathered there. You could almost smell it in the air: a hot, seething intolerance for this creature. And you could see it on the faces of those gathered there: an atavistic, marrow-deep race hatred that was involuntary and automatic. This thing did not belong. It was spidery and evil and obscene. It was offensive to the human condition. You wanted to crush it. To kick it. To stomp it. It was an abomination that disgusted you in ways you could not comprehend … so it had to die. It had to be purged. It was simply too different to be allowed to live.

No, none of them were truly aware at a conscious level of what they were truly feeling, but it was there. A race memory, an inherited predisposition that was acid in their bellies and electricity in their veins. That communal need to destroy, to kill, to rend for the good of the tribe.
Slay the beast, kill the monster, protect the hive …

And everyone was suddenly very aware of the weapons in their white-knuckled fists, how their muscles bunched and their nerve endings jangled. Those weapons needed to be put to use.

“Let’s kill it,” Saks said and you had to expect it to come from him first. “Ugly cock-sucker, let’s put it down.”

And everyone there seemed more than willing to let that happen. They were like the same animal with the same bones and claws and teeth. The same wide, predatory eyes.

But Cushing said, “Now take it easy. Just take it easy. It … it must be intelligent. To build something like that.”

Menhaus felt his mouth begin to speak: “You … you know what it is, don’t you?
Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Saks said, his voice hollow-sounding.

“That flying saucer … that ship in the weeds … that’s where it came from.”

Cushing didn’t even bother inquiring about that one, he just said, “It’s smarter than we are … it might be able to help us, to get us out of here …”

George just stood there, feeling numb and stupid. His body was thick and ungainly like he was stuffed with wet rags or had been shot up with Thorazine. If the thing had moved suddenly, he knew, it would have had him. There was just no way he could have hoped to evade it. Maybe this was from fear and maybe it was the result of that thing looking at him and into him. And he wondered if that wasn’t it … because with those alien eyes burning into his head like arc lights, he had a mad desire to draw a razor over his wrists.

Those eyes were bad.

Nothing on earth had eyes like that.

Glaring and hateful and insectile. And this was only accentuated by its mouth which was little more than an oval, puckered hole set off to the side … like the mouth of an old man without his teeth in. The total effect was that of a wicked, evil alien face.

It stood there, watching them, not directly threatening, but infinitely repulsive. Maybe it
was
intelligent, but it had no right to be so. Not in the thinking of anyone looking at it. The idea of this slinking nightmare being intelligent was like the idea of an intellectual spider or centipede … appalling.

Fabrini took a step towards that weird machine and the thing tensed. Those tubes running down its belly shuddered. Something like black saliva ran from them and when it struck the deck plating, it sizzled like butter on a hot griddle.

“I don’t recommend pissing it off,” Cushing said.

George had to stay his hand now from bringing up that .45 and putting a few rounds into it. Maybe more than a few.

Yes, he was thinking, it
is
intelligent. You can see that. But it’s the wrong kind of intelligence. It’s not
our
kind, but a profane, blasphemous sort of intelligence. Cold and cruel and arrogant. Looking at it, he was struck by its unflinching superiority, its …
arrogance.
Because, yes, it was arrogant. You could see that. It hated them. It hated them with the warped, inborn bigotry and aversion that its entire race felt for lower orders of life.

“We should try communicating with it,” Cushing said. “So it can understand we mean it no harm.”

And George almost burst out in hysterical laughter. Cushing suddenly reminded him of that dumb scientist in
The Thing from Another World,
the old 1950s sci-fi/horror flick. The one that tries to reason with the hulking, blood-sucking vegetable man from Mars and gets swatted aside by the bastard for his trouble. This scenario was too much like that.
Mean it no harm?
That was a good one, because George did want to harm it and he knew that, if there weren’t so many of his kind around, that hideous Martian or whatever in the fuck it was, would have killed him without a second thought.

Because George was getting a strong vibe from this thing.

Looking at that pissed-off face and those glaring, hating eyes, he was understanding this creature. Yes, it was intelligent and methodical … but so was a cruel little boy who pulled the wings off of flies and lit the tails of cats on fire. The intelligence of this thing was like that — tyrannical, sadistic, and maybe more than a little fanatical. That’s why it had started when Fabrini took a step too close to its machine. Because it had built it and inferior things like men had no right to touch it. Men were nothing but mice to it, shit-eating apes that belonged in cages with dirty straw. Something to be gawked at or laughed over, but certainly not equals.
So don’t be touching my machine, you stupid rutting ape.

“So, go ahead, Cushing,” Saks said, badly wanting to hack the thing to bits, “try talking to that fucking puke. Go ahead. Take us to your leader, you ugly shit.”

Cushing opened his mouth, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

It always looked real easy in those old movies, but the reality of such a situation was a little different. This thing was such an angry, grotesque creature that talking to it, trying to reason with it would have been like trying to reason with a spider when you were caught in its web.
Don’t sink your fangs in me, okay? Don’t suck my blood out and cocoon me up … can we agree on that?

Yeah, it was ridiculous, George knew.

Maybe this thing had harnessed the power of the stars and the secrets of life and death, but there was no hope of communicating with it. Yes, its intellect was vastly superior, but cold and unreasoning. It had a mindless, stupid hatred for any but its own kind. You couldn’t barter with such a creature. It got its hands … or tentacles … on you, most you could hope for was to be dropped into a jar of preservative and labeled or maybe dissected alive. And if it was in a particularly dark mood — it was — then maybe it would yank out your nerve ganglia and prod it with a knife, study your agony with an icy, alien detachment.

Fabrini said, “Fuck this. Let’s get out of here. I can’t handle that prick looking at me like that … looks like it wants to suck my eyeballs out of my head.”

And George was thinking,
why don’t we just get it over with? We’re going to kill it and we know it, so let’s just do it already.

“Let’s just go,” Elizabeth said, the last sane voice to be heard.

For now the men were moving. Slowly, but moving all the same. And the thing was aware of it, but maybe uncertain as to what to do about it. The men were forming sort of a loose ring around it and its machine. A nauseating, sour stench came off of it and George wondered if it was afraid. If it sensed what was about to happen. It must have felt like a modern man being ringed in by Pliocene apes. So vastly far above them, yet no match for their numbers and brute strength.

It started to move with a writhing, fluid motion. Wiry muscle flexing with a smooth, serpentine grace under that rubbery flesh that was seamed and sinewy like old pine bark or driftwood. Those tubes on its belly began to undulate, pissing more of that black juice to the deck where it steamed and sizzled. The tentacles at its mouth drew back and apart like the pincers of an ant. And its face … dear God, that wrinkled, bony face positively leered. The membranes of the eyes pulled completely back, exposing the glistening red jewels of those eyes themselves.