telescope.
The pyrotechnics had lost perhaps a third of their power.
The door was still cold and hard under my hand.
As the light show proceeded toward a final flourish, visibility
declined, but even in the slowly deepening gloom, I could see the
Hodgson thing rolling off its side, lying facedown on the floor, and
then struggling to get to its hands and knees.
If I’d correctly interpreted the gruesome sight I’d glimpsed through the
faceplate, hundreds or even thousands of individual creatures infested
the pressure suit, flesh-eating multitudes that constituted a nest or
hive. A colony of beetles might operate under a sophisticated structure
of divisional labor, maintain a high degree of social order, and work
together to survive and prosper, but even if Hodgson’s skeleton remained
to provide an armature, I couldn’t believe that the colony would be able
to form itself into a manlike shape and function with such superb
coordination, interlocked form, and strength that it could walk around
in a spacesuit, climb steps, and drive heavy machinery.
The Hodgson thing rose to its feet.
“Nasty, ” Bobby murmured.
Under the flat of my damp palm, I felt a short-lived vibration pass
through the vault door. More peculiar than a vibration. More pronounced.
It was a faint, undulant … tremor. The door didn’t simply hum with it,
the steel quivered briefly, for a second or two, as though it were not
steel at all, as though it were gelatin, and then it became solid and
seemingly impregnable once more.
The thing in the pressure suit swayed like a toddler unsure of its
balance. It slid its left foot forward, hesitated, and dragged its right
foot after the left. The scraping of its boots against the glassy floor
produced only a whispery sound.
Left foot, right foot.
Coming toward us.
Perhaps more of Hodgson survived than just his skeleton. Maybe the
colony had not completely devoured the man, had not even killed him, but
had bored into him, nestling deep into his flesh and bones, into his
heart and liver and brain, establishing a hideous symbiotic relationship
with his body, while taking firm control of his nervous system from the
brain to the thinnest efferent fiber.
As the fireworks in the walls darkened into amber and umber and blood
red, the Hodgson thing slid its left foot forward, hesitated, then
dragged its right. The old Imhotep two-step, invented by Boris Karloff
in 1932.
Under my hand, the vault door quivered again and suddenly turned mushy.
I gasped when a painful coldness, sharper than needles, pierced my right
hand, as if I had plunged it into something considerably more frigid
than ice water. From wrist to fingertips, I appeared to be one with the
vault door. Although the egg-room light was rapidly fading, I could see
that the steel had become semitransparent, like a lazy whirlpool,
circular currents were turning within it. And in the gray substance of
the vault door were the paler gray shapes of my fingers.
Startled, I yanked my hand out of the door and had no sooner extracted it
than the steel regained its solidity.
I remembered how the door had first been visible only out of the corner
of my eye, not when I looked directly. It had acquired substance by
degrees, and it was likely to dematerialize not in a wink but in
installments.
Bobby must have seen what had happened, because he took a step backward,
as though the steel might suddenly become a whirling vortex and suck him
out of this place into oblivion.
If I hadn’t extracted my hand in time, would it have broken off at the
joining point, leaving me with a neatly severed but spurting stump?
I didn’t need to know the answer. Let it be a question for the ages.
The chill had left my hand the instant that I’d withdrawn it from the
door, but I was still gasping, and between each convulsive breath, I
heard myself repeating the same four-letter word, as if I had been
stricken by a terminal case of Tourette’s syndrome and would spend the
rest of my life unable to stop shouting this single obscenity.
Advancing through dim bloody light and legions of leaping shadows, like