A Handful of Darkness Read Online Free

one of them could slip back to Terra along with us? In the form of clothing or a piece of lab equipment?” She shuddered.
    “We assume they’re some sort of protoplasm. Such malleability suggests a simple original form—and that suggests binary fission. If that’s so, then there may be no limit to their ability to reproduce. The dissolving properties make me think of the simple unicellular protozoa.”
    “Do you think they’re intelligent?”
    “I don’t know. I hope not.” Hall lifted the spray. “In any case, this should tell us their extent. And, to some degree, corroborate my notion that they’re basic enough to reproduce by simple division—the worst thing possible, from our standpoint.
    “Here goes,” Hall said.
    He held the spray tightly against him, depressed the trigger, aimed the nozzle slowly around the lab. The Commander and the four guards stood silently behind him. Nothing moved. The sun shone in through the windows, reflecting from the culture dishes and equipment.
    After a moment he let the trigger up again.
    “I didn’t see anything,” Commander Morrison said. “Are you sure you did anything?”
    “Arsine is colourless. But don’t loosen your helmet. It’s fatal. And don’t move.”
    They stood waiting.
    For a time nothing happened. Then—
    “Good God!” Commander Morrison exclaimed.
    At the far end of the lab a slide cabinet wavered suddenly. It oozed, buckling and pitching. It lost its shape completely—a homogeneous jelly-like mass perched on top of the table. Abruptly it flowed down the side of the table on to the floor, wobbling as it went.
    “Over there! “
    A bunsen burner melted and flowed along beside it. All around the room objects were in motion. A great glass retort folded up into itself and settled down into a blob. A rack of test tubes, a shelf of chemicals…
    “Look out!” Hall cried, stepping back.
    A huge bell jar dropped with a soggy splash in front of him. It was a single large cell, all right. He could dimly make out the nucleus, the cell wall, the hard vacuoles suspended in the cytoplasm.
    Pipettes, tongs, a mortar, all were flowing now. Half the equipment in the room was in motion. They had imitated almost everything there was to imitate. For every microscope there was a mimic. For every tube and jar and bottle and flask…
    One of the guards had his blaster out. Hall knocked it down. “Don’t fire! Arsine is inflammable. Let’s get out of here. We know what we wanted to know.”
    They pushed the laboratory door open quickly and made their way out into the corridor. Hall slammed the door behind them, bolting it tightly.
    “It is bad, then?” Commander Morrison asked.
    “We haven’t got a chance. The arsine disturbed them; enough of it might even kill them. But we haven’t got that much arsine. And, if we could flood the planet, we wouldn’t be able to use our blasters.”
    “Suppose we left the planet.”
    “We can’t take the chance of carrying them back to the system.”
    “If we stay here we’ll be absorbed, dissolved, one by one,” the Commander protested.
    “We could have arsine brought in. Or some other poison that might destroy them. But it would destroy most of the life on the planet along with them. There wouldn’t be much left.”
    “Then we’ll have to destroy all life-forms! If there’s no other way of doing it we’ve got to burn the planet clean. Even if there wouldn’t be a thing left but a dead world.”
    They looked at each other.
    “I’m going to call the System Monitor,” Commander Morrison said. “I’m going to get the unit off here, out of danger—all that are left, at least. That poor girl by the lake…” She shuddered. “After everyone’s out of here, we can work out the best way of cleaning up this planet.”
    “You’ll run the risk of carrying one of them back to Terra?”
    “Can they imitate us? Can they imitate living creatures? Higher life-forms?”.
    “Apparently not. They seem to be limited to