The Thing Read Online Free PDF Page A

"Records indicate there are six guys out at that Norwegian station. Two nuts from six guys leaves maybe four crawling around on their bellies praying for help. Antarctica's like the ocean, Mac. First law of the sea says you help a fellow mariner in trouble before you think of anything else."
    "I don't mind helping 'em," Macready insisted. "I just don't want to end up crawling around with them when we go down."
    Garry glared at him. "If you aren't ready to make an occasional risk flight in bad weather then why the hell did you volunteer for this post?"
    Macready smiled, rubbing a thumb and finger together. "Same reason a lot of us did. But I can't spend it if I'm dead."
    "Look, Macready, if you're going to keep on bitching, Palmer's already offered to take the doc up."
    Macready gaped at the station manager, incredulous. "What are you talking about? Palmer? He's had maybe two months training in those choppers! Fair weather training."
    "Four," Palmer corrected him defiantly from the rear of the pack. "A little blow doesn't bother me ."
    "Little blow." Macready shook his head. "Hell, when you get stoked, Palmer, the end of the world can't bother you. But maybe the doc isn't as interested in dying happy as you are, pothead."
    "So then you take him up and shut up," Palmer shot back.
    "Ahhhhh! " Macready made a rude gesture and turned to face Bennings. "What's it like out there, anyway? Forty-five knots?"
    "Sixteen," the meteorologist told him.
    "Yeah, and the horse you rode in on," Macready snapped. "Sixteen for how long? You can't tell, this time of year. In five minutes it could be fifty."
    Bennings nodded agreeably. "Possible."
    "So what do we do?" Copper halted next to the outside doorway. The roar of the wind penetrated even the double-thick, insulated barrier.
    "So you open the door," Macready growled, out of arguments, "unless you want to try and walk through it . . ."
    Childs was waiting for them, and gave Copper a hand up into the cockpit of the chopper. The doctor carefully secured his bag behind the seat. Outside the plexiglass bubble, blowing snow was already beginning to obscure their view.
    Macready slid in next to him and began flipping switches and examining readouts on the console. The one readout he didn't bother to check gave the current exterior temperature. Once it fell below zero, he no longer cared what it said. And since it was always below zero it was the one instrument in the choppers he could usually ignore.
    He tightened the sombrero's string beneath his chin. It hung outside his polar parka, incongruous against his back. Childs had thoughtfully activated the prewarm. Good mechanic, Childs. Macready trusted him. The engine had been heating up for thirty minutes. It ought to start.
    He hit the ignition. For a moment the reluctant rotors strained against fresh ice. Then they began to spin. The engine revved with comforting steadiness.
    "Hang on over there, doc," he told his passenger. "This isn't Disneyland."
    He pulled back on the controls. The chopper lifted, swung sideways for an instant, then began a steady climb into the sky. Macready held it steady, then sent it charging northeast over the white landscape. It slid into the wind, fighting the gale like a salmon returning upstream. Macready was too involved with the controls to consider throwing up. He couldn't. Not in front of the unruffled Copper.
    The doctor relaxed back in his seat, rechecked his seat belt and shoulder harness, and studied the passing terrain. He appeared to be enjoying himself. Macready cursed him, but silently.
    Several pairs of eyes watched through temporarily defogged windows from the rec room as the helicopter shrank into the distance. Clark rested his palms against the glass as he stared. Between his skin and the outside were three layers of special thick glass and two intervening layers of warmed air. The glass was still cold to his touch.
    "Mac's really taken it up, huh?"
    Bennings was feeling his leg, having to force