I must get medical aid to her quickly, before that trance could deepen, before it could endanger her life.
Going up in the jacket-lift to the sick bay I kept visualizing Ned Dawson’s face. Dawson was a strong-jawed, competent physician with years of experience behind him and I was sure he would know what to do.
He was usually in the sick bay attending to the many little sprains and bruises the men brought in with them from the crust. There was a flicker of violet light as the jacket-lift hummed to a stop. I stepped out and raced down a cold-lighted passageway to the “drug shop,” my breath coming fast.
On meta-glass chairs amidst a faint odor of antiseptics two men sat frozen, but I thought they were asleep. I went straight through the waiting space with scarcely a glance at them, and burst into the sick bay unannounced.
Dawson was there all right, but he was bent nearly double, frozen in the act of applying a gauze bandage to the badly cut ankle of a miner who stood contemplating his navel like a schizophrene, his head sunken on his chest.
For an instant I just stood there gasping, too stunned to realize that I was staring at a physician who could no longer heal. It wasn’t until I went up to him and discovered that his body was cold and his face a frozen mask that my brain started to soak up horror.
I went reeling out into the passageway like a drunken man and tried to locate the commander, and found him at last in the control room with his body glinting in light-silvered dust.
He was standing before one of the Lyra’s translucent windows staring out upon the steamy Mercurian landscape, his arms folded on his chest. When I touched him he swayed and when I looked into his eyes I perceived that the pupils were set in a fixed stare, and covered with a dull, grayish film.
Murphy was standing beside him. The Irishman had evidently come in for orders and stiffened to immobility with a pipe in his mouth and a slightly provoked look on his face, as though my stupidity still riled him.
A nightmare unreality lengthened the minutes which followed into unevenly-spaced eternities filled with a steadily mounting dread. In the more crowded parts of the ship frozen men clustered in little queues. Every member of the atomotor crew stood frozen at his post. The starboard watch looked like statues carved in bronze and in the chain locker room were three crewmen whose muscular contortions conveyed an illusion of motion as they tugged at windlasses which had ceased to turn.
My palms were wet and I was trembling in every limb when I completed my inspection of the ship. It was especially bad going back in the jacket-lift to the commander’s cabin. In the dark fore-hold I had glimpsed obscure, rigid shadows which had unnerved me more than all the frozen, brittle men illumed by cold light in the crew spaces fore and aft.
When I stepped from the jacket-lift a voice said: “They only seem brittle, Rawley. Actually they are still soft and flabby, like all the inhabitants of the third planet.”
It was a telepathic voice, but I didn’t know that. I thought it was a human voice speaking close to my ear. Appalled, I swung about.
The frog was peering around a bend in the passageway, its stalked eyes pointing toward the lift. I fought a desire to scream as it leapt agilely toward me. It seemed to be grinning up at me. Its wet, yellowish lips were split in a grimace which gave it the appearance of being convulsed with mirth.
“Why are you trembling, Rawley?” it said. “Surely you expected to find intelligent life on at least one of the planets.”
“You mean you are—”
“Intelligent, yes. So intelligent that you seem very primitive to us. It is a hindrance, in a way. Too wide a gulf.”
“Then you did this,” I choked. “You—you froze every man on this ship.”
“Froze? Oh, I see what you mean. It is unfortunate that I am compelled to use your mental concepts to think with. You are giving my thoughts a verbal twist peculiar to yourself. You see, Rawley, I can correlate your fugitive reactions to a given phenomenon with everything experienced by you from the day of your birth. By simply tuning in on your thoughts I can get your—your slant. Not merely your thought images, Rawley, but all the little twists and turns of your familiar speech. Fortunately you have telepathic powers, too. Somewhat rudimentary, but adequate.”
The frog’s eyes quivered. “Don’t glare at me, Rawley. I have no intention of harming you.”
“You harmed her,” I groaned.
“I harmed—Oh, I see. The girl, eh? We propagate by fission, so we’ve been spared all that. I didn’t harm her, Rawley. All I did was diminish her mass. I had to do that to warm myself.
“Rawley, I was almost gone. I can stand a little cold, but that liquid air—”
“You did what to her?”
“Diminished her mass. Now keep your shirt on, Rawley. I need the glow to warm me. Needed it badly. For real warmth there’s nothing like the radiant energies imprisoned in kalium. The bodies of terrestrials are ideal sources of heat in all respects; not only because they contain kalium, but because the other elements of which they are composed are among the easiest to tap.
“No harm done, you understand. I can radiate back subatomic particles at any time. All I did was squeeze out the radiations in a soft, glutinous mass. You don’t have to bombard atoms or surround them with water-jackets to strip them, Rawley. With a little patience you can squeeze out their energies the way you squeeze toothpaste from a tube.
“My body has soaked up a fine, tingling warmth from all those frozen terrestrials. They are mere atomic husks now, but perfectly preserved and restorable at any time.”
I scarcely heard it. Something was happening to the ship. Beneath my feet
