Free Who Goes There by John W. Campbell Page B

disappointment. “I suppose it’s another either-way-you-want-it.”
    “No,” said McReady steadily. “Look sharp and be careful. Come into the Ad Building. Barclay, bring your electrocutor. And somebody—Dutton—stand with Barclay to make sure he does it. Watch every neighbor, for by the hell these monsters came from, I’ve got something, and they know it. They’re going to get dangerous!”
    The group tensed abruptly. An air of crushing menace entered into every man’s body, sharply they looked at each other. More keenly than ever before—
is that man next to me an inhuman monster?
    “What is it?” Garry asked, as they stood again in the main room. “How long will it take?”
    “I don’t know exactly,” said McReady, his voice brittle with angry determination. “But I
know
it will work, and no two ways about it. It depends on a basic quality of the
monsters
, not on us.
‘Kinner”
just convinced me.” He stood heavy and solid in bronzed immobility, completely sure of himself again at last.
    “This,” said Barclay, hefting the wooden-handled weapon tipped with its two sharp-pointed, charged conductors, “is going to be rather necessary, I take it. Is the power plant assured?”
    Dutton nodded sharply. “The automatic stoker bin is full. The gas power plant is on stand-by. Van Wall and I set it for the movie operation—and we’ve checked it over rather carefully several times, you know. Anything those wires touch, dies,” he assured them grimly. “I know that.”
    Dr. Copper stirred vaguely in his bunk, rubbed his eyes with fumbling hand. He sat up slowly, blinked his eyes blurred with sleep and drugs, widened with an unutterable horror of drug-ridden nightmares. “Garry,” he mumbled, “Garry—listen. Selfish—from hell they came, and hellish shellfish—I mean self—Do I? What do I mean?” He sank back in his bunk and snored softly.
    McReady looked at him thoughtfully. “We’ll know presently.” He nodded slowly. “But selfish is what you mean, all right. You may have thought of that, half sleeping, dreaming there. I didn’t stop to think what dreams you might be having. But that’s all right. Selfish is the word. They must be, you see.” He turned to the men in the cabin, tense, silent men staring with wolfish eyes each at his neighbor. “Selfish, and as Doctor Copper said—
every part is a whole
. Every piece is self-sufficient, an animal in itself.
    “That, and one other thing, tell the story. There’s nothing mysterious about blood; it’s just as normal a body tissue as a piece of muscle, or a piece of liver. But it hasn’t so much connective tissue, though it has millions, billions of life cells.”
    McReady’s great bronze beard ruffled in a grim smile. “This is satisfying, in a way. I’m pretty sure we humans still outnumber you—others. Others standing here. And we have what you, your other-world race, evidently doesn’t. Not an imitated, but a bred-in-the-bone instinct, a driving, unquenchable fire that’s genuine. We’ll fight, fight with a ferocity you may attempt to imitate, but you’ll never equal! We’re human. We’re real. You’re imitations, false to the core of your every cell.”
    “All right. It’s a showdown now.
You
know. You, with your mind-reading. You’ve lifted the idea from my brain. You can’t do a thing about it.
    “Standing here—
    “Let it pass. Blood is tissue. They have to bleed; if they don’t bleed when cut, then by heaven, they’re phony from hell! If they bleed—then that blood, separated from them, is an individual—a
newly formed individual in its own right, just as they—split, all of them, from one original—are individuals!
    “Get it, Van? See the answer, Bar?”
    Van Wall laughed very softly. “The blood—the blood will not obey. It’s a new individual, with all the desire to protect its own life that the original—the main mass from which it was split—has. The
blood
will live—and try to crawl away