Free The Incredible Melting Man by Phil Smith Page A

bone-headed mould as the General. Sorry, they couldn’t spare any men, but if Doctor Nelson was really worried he’d get in touch with the lieutenant of police to see if he could find someone.
    Nelson put the phone down in a cold fury. It had not got through to the authorities what they were dealing with. The General’s last phone call to Houston had been quite sanguine. Just a slight hitch, nothing to delay the countdown, he’d reported.
    The doctor hadn’t been able to believe his ears. Any chance of them succeeding in convincing the authorities of the magnitude of the crisis and getting them to call off the launch rested with what they could come up with in the lab in the next few hours. They were even treating Perry’s death as a regrettable accident, unconnected with the programme. What sort of eloquence was required if the disembowelled remains of a two-star General couldn’t persuade them?
    He abandoned any notion of sleep and helped himself to a handful of stimulants. A couple of minutes later he was back in the lab with Loring.
    Loring was on the last stage of developing some more film of the living cells. The doctor didn’t have long to wait before he was again watching the astonishing voracity of the predatory cells.
    One cell was distinctly larger than the others and Loring’s camera had skilfully concentrated on tracing it. It hadn’t been easy because of its rapid movement and they kept losing it from the field of vision. They’d lost it for a number of frames when it suddenly reappeared. It provoked a cry from the two scientists.
    “Look!” shouted Loring. The cell had become stationary, drawing in its arms of questing cytoplasm until its shape was perfectly round. Then a dark line shot across the film. It continued on the next series of frames until it weakened and finally disappeared. The sequence ended with the cell collapsing in on itself, leaving only strands of shapeless protoplasm in the matrix.
    “Run it back,” demanded Nelson.
    They watched the dying seconds of the alien cell again. This time they stopped the film when the dark line appeared.
    “That’s the emission of the radioactive particle,” explained Loring. “Now watch.” He ran the film on a few frames. “It’s the signal for the cell to self-destruct.” They watched it implode again.
    “I could have sworn it was about to divide,” cried Loring excitedly. “Everything seemed ready until the emission. Then it collapsed.”
    “As if it had got the signal to abort at the last minute,” said Nelson.
    “As though things weren’t right, the structure wrong for reproduction.”
    They’d witnessed a combination of electrical and chemical energy that Ted Nelson would never have thought possible in a living thing. The mechanics of cellular change were obscurely enough understood, but this kind of sophistication was undreamt of. What on earth were they dealing with? To get some sort of insight, the success of the tissue cultures was imperative.
    They began their work, preparing the ideal conditions for the cells to germinate. They had to let the thing live and grow before they could discover a way to kill it. The lives of three more astronauts depended on it. The fourth seemed already beyond redemption.
    The last stroke of midnight fell heavily on the still air. Somewhere an owl shrieked. A farm dog barked nervously. Then the silence settled again like a fitful sleeper.
    Above the church spire where the black cross was etched against the sky the clouds lightened. The thin moon was struggling to shake off the blanket of darkness. Slowly the shadows awakened in the churchyard. Headstones poked grimly out of the black earth: sombre crosses, an obelisk, an earth-bound angel with a broken wing. Between them a bat made his flitting circuit of inspection.
    The moon had lost the battle with the clouds and disappeared.
    Pained breathing broke the stillness and a drunken thing lurched into the graveyard. He saw the broken angel and