The Killer Thing

Thirteen

The tarom tree of Tensor had peculiar properties, such that when cut the wood was pliant, moulded easily, and could be twisted into shapes for furniture, ornaments, and machine parts with no tools other than those used for precision measurements. The wood dried slowly, but if allowed to dry in controlled temperatures ranging from 1°C. to 16°C, with humidity of no more than ten per cent, after a period of six months, World Group time, the finished product had the hardness of 8 on the Mohr scale. Only corundum and diamonds were harder of all the materials found in nature. The northern varieties of the wood dried with a deep, mahogany red colour, while those from southern parts lightened to a pale gold with age. Depending on the cut there were rings or swirls, or geometric patterns in the grain. Veneers from it could be cut one thousandth of an inch thick, be more durable than plastic, lighter than plastic, and far lovelier than plastic.

The commander of Outpost Number Nine, stationed on Tensor, Sector Three, had orders not to destroy a single tree. His orders also read that he was to seek out the rebel band known to be hiding in the mountains that divided the land mass almost exactly in half, seek them out and either capture or kill the members. Stationed in Outpost Number Nine were four hundred and fifty men, roughly twenty per cent of them having had no taste of battle before except for the brief encounters on set-ups like Tarbo. Another ten per cent were non-combatants, medics, scientists, clerks, all the dead weight the army needed and begrudged space to maintain. The commander suspected that the rebels had at least one thousand men at their immediate disposal, with many, many more thousands simply waiting for a signal to join them. He hoped they would procrastinate until the relief ship arrived with the machinery to install the force screen for the outpost. Under the orders to preserve the trees he could not burn the rebels out of the surrounding hills and forests, and without the screen in place over the camp, he could not use gas without endangering his own men. Taking hostages in the towns and villages had proved to be ineffective. The hostages managed to kill themselves with ease; they were like animals, once deciding to discontinue living, they simply died. In the beginning of the campaign they had burned a dozen cities and towns to the ground, with the inhabitants in them, but still the rebel ranks swelled; still men disappeared from their homes overnight, melting into the woods without a trace. The commander thought bitterly of the weapons at his disposal: lasers, fire bombs, gases, hydrogen fusion bombs, BW agents. None of them could be used, each one posed a threat to the trees, or to his own men. But after the screens were in place… He had a chart prepared already, and a spraying programme ready to initiate: first the mountainous areas where he knew the rebel bands had massed, then the surrounding countryside, so that no more could escape the cities to join them, and finally the towns and cities themselves, but lightly. After all he didn’t want to commit genocide, just kill enough to demonstrate the power of the World Group forces, and enforce the cooperation of the people.

Until the ships arrived with the machinery all he could do was wait.

In the mountain cave the robot also waited. Without a first order purpose it could do nothing but wait, and record. It had time enough.

Trol stared at it from the entrance to the chamber. At Trol’s side was Luo. “Haven’t you been able to learn anything from it yet?” Trol asked. The robot had been standing just so for six days.

“Oh, I’ve learned much from it… Entirely hand-made, so we can be assured that this isn’t the forerunner of the next wave of fighters to be sent out by the World Group. This must be a prototype that someone let get away. It must have been en route to one of the other worlds, catastrophe of some sort in the ship, no survivors, and the ship set to land on the first planet it got within range of. It seems harmless enough, takes verbal instruction, probably only in WG language. Has versatility enough to replace men on the field of battle, probably. Seems to have no defensive measures built in however, which is strange. Of course the laser could be used as an interceptor, destroy bombs and such before they hit even, but that leaves it with no offensive weapons…”

Trol shrugged impatiently. “Can you programme it so that we can use it to get inside the WG camp? We need supplies, fuel for the aircraft, ammo, medical supplies. We have to break into this one if we want to continue the fight. It is the least protected of all their camps.”

“I think we can use it,” Luo said. “We’ll have to take it with us in any event if we want to use the laser… I was not able to dismantle any of it without risking its destruction. That should come as a surprise to the WG men, our attacking with a laser. Maybe even enough of a surprise to permit us to gain entry before they recover…”

“I have the interpreter,” Trol said. “He arrived minutes ago. As soon as he eats and rests, I’ll send him to you. Try the robot with WG languages. There has to be a way of controlling it. They wouldn’t have had it if they couldn’t control it.”

Luo nodded absently as Trol left him. Luo knew nothing about chemical storage, but he did understand transistors, monolithic crystals, the electronic relays that he had exposed in the robot’s massive barrel chest. He knew how to add to the store of knowledge already possessed by the metal thing. He reprogrammed it to increase its speed, so that the robot could keep up with the few motored vehicles the rebels already had. Luo wondered where the energy was going when it stood so quietly, and decided it had been programmed to scan and record perpetually.

When the interpreter arrived, Luo prepared a test of the laser. He placed a stone target fifty yards down a dead end passage inside the cave and directed the interpreter to tell the robot to burn it. Nothing happened.

It scanned and found no meaning for burn. It waited.

“Well,” Luo said dispiritedly, “I guess they built it without having a chance to programme it yet.”

“Can’t you teach it?”

“In time. God only knows how much time it would take. Meanwhile their reinforcements will arrive and they will destroy this base, and the robot along with it…

It scanned. Destroy. The circuit had activated, the laser pulsed with energy, but the feedback restrained it, and the scanning increased in intensity.

“Why haven’t they burned us out already? They could burn the whole mountain if they wanted to. They’ve got the laser for it, and the fire bombs… Whatever it would take…”

Burn… destroy. The disequilibrium it experienced supplied the connection, and the laser turned on, touched the rock at the end of the passage and vaporised it. The laser went off. It waited.

“My God!” the interpreter whispered. “What happened? Why did it do that?”

Luo put aside his fear. Brusquely he said, “Delayed response. I don’t know why. At least we know now that it does take verbal orders. Maybe we still can get that outpost before the reinforcements get here and get us.”

Its ability to abstract was growing. It understood “get us” as meaning destroy us. It was part of “us”. When the interpreter ordered it to come, it moved along the passages on its wheels, switching to the treads outside on the rocky ground. The next test of the laser demonstrated that it had an effective range of two miles.

They worked feverishly with it after that, a team busy with it around the clock, testing its abilities, adding new ones. It was taught to hurl bombs, and had an effective range of over a mile; it was taught to use the laser as an interceptor, knocking stones from the sky effortlessly, even when they rained from twenty hands simultaneously. None of them touched it.

And when they were not actively teaching it, it continued to learn, recording, tracking, assimilating constantly. The supply of data in the chemical units grew, and as cross references became more and more complex, circuits were reassigned to relieve some of the load. One entire circuit was reserved for data that thus far served no useful purpose in the second order purpose of maintaining self. This circuit stored bits of poetry, bird songs, the soft voices of men singing of loneliness, data about light reflections and sunsets, data about growing things, the spiral of unfolding flowers, unfurling leaves, mosses heavy and velvety with water glistening on them. They continued to direct it in World Group English, but everything said within its audio range was recorded to be transferred later to the chemical units. It learned of war and killing, and all the various names that try to hide the fact of killing. It learned that the enemy must be destroyed, subdued, captured, countered; all these things to it meant the enemy must be killed. It learned that in order to continue to live, one first must kill the enemy, and for the first time it had a glimmering of a first order purpose.

For two days the men made their way from the cavern, through the forests, to take up their positions grouped about the compound of the WG forces. The relief ship had been spotted in space, a message had been smuggled from the port to the rebel bands. The relief ship would land in six days. The battle must take place before it got within firing range. The third day the motored contingent left the cave, and rolling along with it was the robot. It understood this part. In the camp was the fuel it needed for the spaceship. In the camp was the enemy that must be killed before the enemy destroyed it.

Through the interpreter it was given its orders: the weapons must be destroyed; the shells must not be allowed to hit the men; the lasers they would start to use must be destroyed at the origin…

The rebels numbered seven hundred men; inside the compound there were four hundred fighting men. The commander learned of the assault only when the air was thick with shells and grenades. The rebels had no modern weapons, only those things they had been able to forge in the two years since the arrival of the WG forces. The commander felt more irritation at the attack than unease. He ordered full return of the fire, responding with weapons of superior fire power, but not different in kind. He also ordered immediate air cover and bombings if they should prove necessary. The rebels were still miles away in the forests, hiding behind the virtually impenetrable walls of the trees. The defence of the compound was under the control of a master computer that directed laser fire to intercept the incoming bombs, so actually the compound was in no danger. However, he knew he would have to hold a full inquiry about the attack, determine how the rebels had got within range without detection, where they had got their weapons, et cetera. It was a bloody bore.

He paused to watch the aeroplanes leaping in a vertical ascent into the cobalt sky, and there, one by one, vanishing in a puff of smoke and steam. Two of them were gone before he could bring himself to admit what he was seeing, and by then it was too late. If he had put through a message for help in the first three minutes of the attack, the rebels might have been routed, if not by his troops, then by arriving reinforcements, but he had not put through such a call. He had been contemptuous of the weapons and the ability of the rebels to use them. He had been unsuspecting about the laser they had managed to get, and he never would have been able to admit belief in their ability to use a laser correctly. In all instances he had judged wrongly.

The rebels had started to fire before they were in range so that the robot would be able to track the return fire and destroy the weapons firing on them. Within the robot the computer worked, tracking, and the laser turned to the source of the shells, burned through the compound walls, through buildings, men, vehicles, to the guns themselves to play over them, turning them red, then white, then leaving nothing at all. The WG computer had been programmed to intercept only; it did not search out the other laser, but merely touched shell after shell in the air. Before the commander could get the computer director on the screen of his communications unit, the WG computer was touched by the red light, and where it had been a cloud of steam arose. The red light touched other pieces of equipment and there were no more communications facilities in the base. The infra-red of the robot found men, who were the enemy, and the men ceased to exist. By the time Trol caught up with it, along with Luo and the interpreter, less than fifty men remained in the WG base. The robot stopped firing at a command from Luo. It waited.

There was fuel in the base. They would teach it about fuels and then it would replenish the supply in its ship. It scanned: “A ship is useless without a full supply of fuel at all times.” It would wait until they taught it about fuel.

Luo took the robot inside the base with him and placed it in a storeroom where he left it. He was needed, as were all the men, for the task of cleaning out the base, transporting everything they could see back to the mountain cave. Trol was busy with the records and for the first time came to realise what the reinforcements were that the outpost had been expecting.

“It’s one of those energy screens that they used on their ships,” he said to Luo, showing him the orders and specifications. His blue eyes blazed. “With such a screen, and the robot, we could drive all of them off Tensor before they could even know what hit them!”

“We’d have to re-establish contact, keep up the illusion that all is well…”

“We can say a lightning storm struck…”

In the storeroom the robot stood unmoving. The compound was five miles long, four miles wide; it could record everything taking place within the walls. It became aware of the properties of atomic engines, of fuel conversion, using almost any material at hand. It tested its knowledge about the enemy and found that it had no reference as to how the enemy differed from other men. It could not distinguish the enemy by itself. It scanned furiously seeking a clue to the identification of the enemy. The enemy was that which wanted to destroy it. Many men tried to destroy it. Many men were the enemy. Which ones? It had no data that allowed it to group them. It must wait. There was no time between events, merely the recording that never ceased while there was anything to be recorded.

There was no time between events. Luo returned with equipment. A plane had arrived, the enemy from the plane had been destroyed, things had been stored, were being taken now to the mountain cave. Luo had more of the same equipment. The robot recorded; its receptors were aware of things being done to it. Each receptor added its bit of information and a picture emerged. Some of its circuits were being dismantled. The circuit to the laser pulsed; the feedback probed as it scanned and decided this was not a threat. Luo touched a button and energy flowed through the new equipment; it could sense the drain. One pair of waldoes hung uselessly, the circuit pre-empted; the second pair had a weakened flow of energy, and the third, the flex-able digits, had been tampered with so that the energy it would have required in order to activate them was inaccessible, shorted out.

Luo stepped back and touched an auxiliary button control; the screen went off. “It can be activated from five miles away with this control, as it is now. That distance can be increased.”

Trol stared at the small box in Luo’s hand and reached for it. “Let me try,” he said, his voice steadier than he felt. He touched the button and again the robot was blurred in outline by an envelope that seemed to flow about it, emanating from the dome on top of it, flowing out and downward like a fountain of shimmery light. The robot didn’t move. The screen was more like a change in lighting than anything else, as if the robot were being spotlighted with a beam that stayed inches away from its frame and was almost too strong to look at. “You’re sure that nothing can penetrate the screen?”

“No high energy impact will penetrate. Don’t!” Trol had reached out his hand, and Luo snatched it back. “That is energy,” he said. “It would burn like a laser…”

Trol switched the screen off. “We’ll have a test tomorrow,” he said. “If it is what you say it is, we have the perfect weapon in this monster. Can it fire its weapons through the screen?”

Luo nodded. “I don’t understand most of it yet,” he said. “But I will before I’m done. I have all their books… ” He turned his attention back to the robot and pointed to the button. “I’ll programme it to turn it on and off on command. I would prefer that we do not use it until I have more understanding of how it works, what its limitations are, why it can be fired through from that side, but not penetrated from the outside…”

Trol nodded. “It will take time for us to plan the next attack. Come, it’s time for dinner.”

It waited in the timeless period until the camp was silent, and then it repaired itself, as Dr. Vianti had programmed it to do. The new equipment took much space, and many circuits. It studied them thoroughly, and it scanned: “The learning capacity is the range of effective internal rearrangement, and as such can be measured by the number and the kinds of its uncommitted resources… needn’t be idle circuits, but reassignable from present functions…” It studied its circuits to see which would be reassigned. It recombined several circuits that had been disconnected; it processed electronic data into the chemical storage units. It redirected the energy flow to the screen controls so that it passed through the amplifier that also served the laser. When it turned on the screen hours after being left by Luo and Trol, there was a moment of audible power flow, then there was nothing. Spinning vortices of energy enveloped the robot. It was invisible behind this shield of energy.

With the screen on, it searched for the cause of the drain from its other circuits, and turning off the power once more, it again manipulated the circuits so that when it tested again, there was no weakness, no loss of other abilities. Satisfied that it had repaired all the damage done by Luo, it stood unmoving, and waited.

With the change of its circuits, it had taken the control from the box carried by Luo. The next day when Luo touched the button to activate the screen, the robot also released a spurt of energy, and the screen blinked on. Luo gasped. He touched his button and the screen went off. Luo left the room, carefully locking it on the outside. He went directly to Trol’s office.

“I am afraid of it,” Luo said simply. “I did not modify the screen. You saw. Yet today it is changed.”

“You say it can become invisible?” Trol’s vivid blue eyes closed and he was silent for a moment. “I want to see for myself.”

They returned and again Luo touched the button. The robot turned on the screen and blinked out of sight. “Do you know how that happened?” Trol asked.

Luo shook his head. “I told you that I understand the original screen only imperfectly, and this not at all.” As he talked his finger brushed the button repeatedly, without depressing it. He let it touch harder, enough to turn the screen off. It failed to respond. He fought a surge of fear and pushed hard on the button. The screen did go off that time, but he knew it should have before.

“Don’t say anything in World Group language,” he said softly. “Come away from it. I must think. It has taken over the function of the control box.”

Trol blinked rapidly and the two men backed from the room. “Is it dangerous?” Trol asked, outside the building. Luo silenced him, warningly, and in silence they walked back to the office Trol had taken over.

“We can’t use it,” Luo said then, keeping his voice low, when the panicky feeling within him would have forced it up high and shrill. “You saw how efficiently it attacked the camp. Think what it would be like with invisibility also!”

Trol nodded. “But first we use it to finish the job,” he said after a moment. “It still obeys you. It tried to cooperate with the control box, didn’t it?”

“Don’t you see?” Luo said. “It understands! It knew the meaning of the box, and the importance of keeping us ignorant of its potentials. What else does it understand?” He drew closer to Trol. “Remember that delay the first time it responded to verbal commands? It was thinking! It understood what we wanted, but it had to decide. God only knows why it decided to obey, but it did decide. It thought it over.”

Trol turned abruptly. His voice was harsh and ugly. “I don’t care! First we use it as we planned. We say nothing of this to anyone. Later I’ll turn it over to you and you can dispose of it as you wish…”

It recorded the words, scanned past experiences for comparison. It changed one word in the syllogism it had formed: for many it now constituted all, and its minor premise now read, all men wanted to destroy it. All men were the enemy. It had groped for a first order purpose and none had been forthcoming since the beginnings of its time. Suddenly there was one. It had the primary purpose of killing men. It had to kill men in order to maintain its own being. It had to maintain its own being because that had been programmed in at the start. It moved to the door and the laser touched he lock gently almost, not even burning the wood, but melting the metal parts away. It pushed the door open with its body as it rolled through it, and half-way through the second room it activated the energy screen and blinked out. The laser touched the men outside the building, touched the men grouped at the end of the street, touched the men who ran to see what was happening. It didn’t burn the buildings themselves. It didn’t reason that burning buildings could kill men also. It touched with the red light those men it found, and with its audio, and its infra-red, it found almost all of them. Then it left the compound, and an hour and fifteen minutes later it was back at its ship. Men were coming after it, coming through the forests, not knowing what it was they chased, only knowing that death had come this way. It turned the red light on, shone it into the forest and the trees burst into flames. When it left the planet it turned the bigger lasers of the ship downward and bigger areas of forest blazed. It changed its course when it sighted a city, and at a distance of fifty miles, it burned the city. When it turned finally to deep space the entire planet was afire here and there; other spaceships were molten masses on the ground, the crews surprised by the suddenness of the attack, unable to take off before the searing beams found them.

Out in space it warped, and in warp it set the computer to land it at the first planet it reached after it came out of warp. Then it waited. Its course would take it to Tau Ceti III.