Beyond the Ice Limit

44

DR. PATRICK BRAMBELL looked down at the dead body of Waingro, Sax’s lab assistant, lying on a gurney, still dressed and bloody from the tragedy that had occurred just a few minutes earlier in mission control. Dr. Sax stood beside him. Neither had been present at the disturbance. But the word was out, and the entire ship was in an uproar. Garza had demanded an immediate autopsy and a report on the worm, or tentacle, or whatever the abomination was that had slithered out of the man’s brain.

“Dear me,” muttered Sax, gazing at the body. “What a mess.”

But Brambell’s attention wasn’t on the body itself; it had been arrested by the worm-like thing. Security had brought it down sealed in a stainless-steel tray with a glass top. Brambell felt a shudder pass through him as he looked at it. Following the melee in the control room, it had almost escaped, but at the last minute someone had recovered sufficiently from shock to slam a trash can over it, trapping it.

And here it was: a gray worm-like creature, about the diameter of a pencil and six inches long. It was wriggling about in the container, methodically exploring every nook and corner, clearly looking for escape routes. The head of the organism appeared to have two glittering black eyes, and between them a round mouth with a single razor-sharp black tooth protruding, made, it appeared, of a substance that resembled obsidian or glass.

“Dr. Brambell?” Sax asked. “Shall we begin?” Her hair was tucked under a cap and she was in full scrubs, as was he. They had established a formal relationship, which Brambell liked. Sax was both a PhD and an MD, and Brambell felt a little undereducated around her. One thing was certain—she was a lot better suited for this task, academically and emotionally, than his own lily-livered medical assistant, Rogelio.

He glanced over the large tray standing between them, neatly arranged with autopsy tools: #22 scalpels, skull chisels, rib cutters, forceps, scissors, Hagedorn needles, a long knife, and the obligatory Stryker saw.

Brambell did a visual inspection of the body. The video camera was running. He spoke his observations aloud, describing the head wound, the ingress and egress of the round, the state of the brain, and various other factors.

“Cut away the clothing, if you please, Dr. Sax?”

Sax began slicing off the clothes, putting them aside. Except for the mess that had been made of the head, the body was clean and in good shape. Brambell adjusted the overhead operating light.

“There’s something odd here,” Sax said. “With the nose.”

Brambell took an otoscope, switched it on, and looked inside the nasal cavity. “What’s this? It’s some kind of injury.”

He handed the otoscope to Sax. She took a look. “I think this is where the, ah, worm must have entered. Look—the nasal septum is damaged and the cribriform plate of the ethmoid bone has been pierced. Drilled through, almost. The hole is the same diameter as the worm.”

Brambell took the instrument back, examined the nose more closely, and then—quite unconsciously—glanced in the direction of the worm.

“Uh-oh,” he said.

The creature had stopped exploring the container. It seemed to have settled down, its “head”—for want of a better term—in one corner of the stainless-steel box. He heard a faint scritching noise.

Pulling down his glasses, Brambell peered closer. The thing was using its tooth to scrape away at the stainless-steel wall of its container. It looked at first like a hopeless task—what tooth could cut steel?—but then he could see that it was, indeed, scraping tiny curls of metal from the wall. Slowly, but surely, it was making a hole.

“Dear God,” said Sax, looking over his shoulder.

“Indeed.”

Without another word, Brambell grabbed the ship’s phone and called the prep lab that, for security purposes, was now housing all the other tentacle specimens—in stainless-steel cases.

He looked at Sax. “No answer.”

“The lab’s probably locked up. Call security.”

Brambell called security, told them to check on the specimens immediately—and to be careful. He hung up. “What now?”

They exchanged glances for a moment before Sax answered. “Let’s dissect this little bugger before it escapes. The cadaver can wait.”

“A most excellent suggestion.” Brambell tried not to think about what the silence in the prep lab might mean.

He picked up the container and carried it across the room to the dissection chamber, mightily glad as he did so that the retrofitting designers of the ship had thought to include this unusual hooded and sterile dissection stage. He raised the hood and placed the latched container inside. The thing was disturbed by being moved; it reared up and displayed its black tooth, its head swaying back and forth menacingly.

“It’s like a damn viper,” Sax said.

Brambell shut and locked the hood. The dissection chamber had two sleeves, which manipulated remote dissection tools. Having inserted his forearms into the sleeves, Brambell used the manipulators to unlatch the box. The thing lashed out immediately, striking at the manipulator but bouncing off. It struck again and then wriggled out of the box, slithering fast across the space until it hit the wall, and then began exploring it, pushing and probing once again with its tooth.

Despite his best efforts, Brambell felt his hands begin to tremble. He had to fix the thing to the dissection surface—and the sooner the better. It was slithering all over the place, constantly in motion. Using the manipulator, he picked up a heavy dissection pin, hovered over the worm; and then—when it came into target range—he brought it down with a sudden movement, stabbing the worm and pinning it to the soft plastic surface.

With a faint but hideous squeal, the thing began lashing about, striking the pin with its tooth again and again.

Breathing hard, Brambell stuck in another needle, and then another, and another, until the thing was pinned almost as if sewn to the plastic board, yet still wriggling frantically, its mouth opening and closing, the tooth sweeping toward the gleaming pins that held it in place.

“Bring over the stereozoom,” he said.

Sax wheeled over the microscope, used for fine dissection, and began to position it. She turned it on and an attached videoscreen popped to life, showing a blurry, magnified image of the worm. She adjusted both the focus and the zoom until the image was sharp and at the desired magnification.

“Amazing that it refuses to die,” murmured Brambell, fitting the eyepieces of the microscope to his face and inserting his hands again into the manipulators. He picked up a scalpel and positioned it at the posterior end of the pinned, but still frantically flexing, worm. He inserted the edge of the scalpel into the tip of the creature and began to make a lengthwise incision, opening it up from tail to head. The skin was hard, and it almost seemed to Brambell as if he were cutting through plastic. The creature made another squealing sound, louder this time. The cut exposed its insides, a grouping of bizarre internal organs—if they could even be called organs, given that they looked more like bundles of wires and translucent fiber optics, along with clusters of shiny black balls, like bunches of tiny grapes. The internal workings were, oddly, without color—a range of blacks, grays, and whites.

Still the creature struggled.

“Not dead yet,” murmured Sax.

Brambell fixed the open incision in place with another set of pins, then removed the initial pins. Now it was splayed open on the dissection table, the skin held open, which caused the inner organs to pop upward, ready for dissection. They quivered and flexed, the black threads or wires contracting and relaxing as the thing, still alive, fought against the dissection. Brambell felt faintly sick. It just wouldn’t die.

“May I look, Dr. Brambell?”

Brambell stepped away from the oculars with relief.

“It’s too perfect, too well arranged, to be biological. It looks like a machine—don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure I agree, Dr. Sax. It might just be a different mode of organization. The bioassays show the thing is carbon-silicon-oxygen instead of carbon-hydrogen-oxygen. This could very well be the product of carbon-silicon evolution.”

Brambell could see the ugly little brute was now trying to saw away at one of the metal pins with its tooth. “I think all those threads are the creature’s central nervous system,” he said. “Let’s follow them to the brain.”

“Good idea.”

With exquisite care, Brambell teased apart the sheaths and tissues covering the black and translucent threads, exposing them. Working his way forward, he saw they led to a cluster of black granules between the eyes, just behind the tooth—right where one might expect the brain to be.

“That must be it,” said Sax.

“Agreed.”

“Kill it, please.”

“With pleasure.”

Choosing a finer scalpel, Brambell inserted the gleaming tip into the cluster and made an incision. The reaction of the creature was sudden and dramatic: it made a sound like a high-pitched moan.

Brambell hesitated.

“Keep going, for God’s sake.”

He continued the incision, opening up the brain-like organ. Through the stereozoom, many complex structures could be seen. The creature gave one last piercing whistle, vibrated violently, then suddenly went still.

“Dead,” said Sax. “Finally.”

“Let’s hope so.”

He continued to dissect the tiny brain, removing slivers to be sectioned and examined with the scanning electron microscope; another sliver for biochemical analysis; others for various additional tests. Slowly, he worked through the brain until it was completely exposed.

Through the stereozoom it was obviously complex, spheres within spheres, connected by countless bundles of tiny thread-like wires—neurons?—and translucent tubes.

Silently, he continued the dissection of the head. The tooth, black and exceedingly sharp, was shaped like a small shark’s tooth; its root was attached to a massive bundle of wires that looked mechanical, and could contract or relax to control the motion of the tooth. The tooth obviously wasn’t made of silicon dioxide; SiO₂ would not cut steel like that. He felt confident it was a carbon allotrope, probably related to diamond.

The creature’s mouth led to nothing: no gullet, no digestive system, no stomach or anus. It just ended in another cluster of black and translucent threads. Maybe it was a machine—but if so, what a machine! Unlike anything created by humankind.

They worked rapidly but accurately, until they had dissected every visible organ and taken tissue samples for additional research. As with any dissection, the final product was a mess.

“Let us move on to the cadaver,” Brambell asked.

“Before we do that,” Sax said, “I would feel better if we put the remains of that thing in a blender and then incinerated it.”

“Capital idea.” Brambell chopped up the remains, put them in a small container, sealed it, removed it from the hood, dumped it in a bio blender, reduced it to gray mush, and then spatulated the mush into the small laboratory incinerator and turned it on. He heard the comforting sound of the flame popping to life, the gentle roar of the burner, the fan pumping the gaseous waste products out of the ship. It went on for a while, and then the unit indicated complete combustion had occurred.

“Shall we see what’s left?” asked Sax.

“Why not?” Brambell opened the door to the incinerator and pulled open the drawer. A small bead of deep blue was present in the bottom of the container; no ash, no grit, just a gleaming ball of glass.

“How curious,” said Sax, removing it with a pair of tweezers and holding it up to the light. “What a lovely color.” She put it in a test tube and sealed it, labeling it for future analysis. She turned. “Dr. Brambell, I believe a cadaver awaits.”

“Yes, indeed.”

As they turned back to the body on the gurney, the ship’s emergency public address system alarm went off, red lights flashing, a siren sounding. And then a voice sounded over the PA. Brambell was startled; this was the first time the emergency system had been employed.

“Attention: All personnel. Attention: All personnel. The specimens brought back on board from the organism appear to have escaped the prep lab. They may have calved into a number of smaller entities resembling small snakes, each with a single tooth. They are to be considered aggressive and extremely dangerous. All personnel are expected to remain on high alert. If you see such an organism, alert security and keep your distance. All personnel not engaged in essential business are instructed to meet on the hangar deck now—repeat, now—for further instructions.”

Without a word, Brambell picked up the long knife and began to make the Y-incision from the xiphoid process to the pubic bone. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re engaged in essential business.”

As if in response, the ship’s phone rang. Sax picked it up. “It’s Garza. He wants us on the hangar deck. Glinn is requesting a brief.”

Brambell laid down the long knife with regret. For now, at least, there would be no retreat into the comfort of the familiar.