The Killer Thing

Sixteen

Trace awakened slowly, painfully. He didn’t want to wake up again. He wanted to return to the void which sleep had brought this time, a void with no thoughts, no pains, no thirst. A groan escaped his lips when he moved and slowly he dragged himself from the seat-bed and stood up. He looked down at himself with disgust and loathing.

His body was filthy with sweat, dust, sand, dried blood…

He was gaunt and bony. Fever, work, heat and worry had carved away his flesh until little was left but leather-like skin stretched over sharp bones.

He knew he was feverish that morning, probably had been slightly feverish ever since arriving in this hell. Thank god for the anti-fever capsules. There was a tic on the side of his face when he reached for a tube of the food, and he felt a wave of nausea pass through him. He had to take it; it contained some moisture and his water was down to less than a cupful. He took out the water bag and stared at it regretfully: less than half a cup actually. He sat down with half of the water, and a tube of fruit mixture and two of the anti-fever capsules. His mouth felt caked inside, hard and sore with deep cracks on the outside. His tongue was swollen, filling his entire mouth. He touched water to his tongue, took his time with the first scant spoonful. It hurt his throat going down. Something had happened to him. He couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything long enough to think it through. It took more water to get the capsules down, and his throat burned all the way down. At the first taste of the pasty fruit, he put it aside. He could not take that now. He looked at it for a long time and finally tried again, this time managing two swallows of it. He finished his water then and could have wept for more.

He had to inspect the passage he had worked on. Without thinking of anything, he got into his suit, left the audio on full this time, left the lights on in the dinghy itself, and he went outside. His feet seemed not to be making contact with the ground as he crossed the valley floor, and he felt that the short trip either took only an instant, or was endless. He felt that it was important to decide which, but even as he wondered about it, he forgot how he was trying to apply the time scale. When he got to the entrance of the passage, he forgot why he was there. He turned to go back to the dinghy, hesitated, and for no real reason went instead into the passageway between the cliffs. A barrier stopped him and he gaped at it with surprise. He couldn’t remember it at all. It was made of sand and rocks, was over his head, stretching from one wall to the other. Unsteadily he climbed over a rock or two to get a higher viewpoint, and from there he could see that the barrier appeared to stretch out the rest of the length of the passageway. He remembered working on it then, but dimly, as if that were an incident from ages past, from another lifetime. He decided to rest in the shade of the cliff and he sat down and again time was meaningless to him.

The medication moved through his system sluggishly; until the stimulants contained in it reached his brain, he sat unmoving in the shade. He sat without thought until very slowly patterns started to form again and he knew this was the fifth day, that on the following day he could expect the arrival of the robot. He got up and when he looked again at the sand and stone barriers, he knew they would prevent entry through this passage into his valley. Concentrating on his movements he left the passage and went to the one that remained. It was even broader, with only two narrow spots in it. It was a straight cut most of the way through the granite cliff, fairly steep but not so steep that the robot could not manage it. He followed it to the end, coming to one turn of about 100 degrees after two more gentle curves. The grade at the turn was steeper than it had been both below and above that spot. Trace stared at it for several seconds, turned and studied the passage behind him, and then clambered up to the top and outside. He examined the passage from the top. He could see that it went down into the valley, although he couldn’t see past the turn. The robot would know this was an entrance. If he could block it there where it curved…

Whatever he planned to do, he knew he had to do it that morning and afternoon. Time was running out on him, and there was the problem of the recurring fever attacks. But what difference if he did block it from the valley? It could only be temporary. Once it knew that he was in the valley, the robot could get in. His pitiful barricade would bar it no more than a wall of loosely stacked children’s blocks would bar an adult from a room. He slumped to the ground again and looked out at the world beyond his valley. The sun was nearly overhead already, but would not reach into the passage for half an hour or longer, would not shine directly into it longer than another half-hour before the other wall provided shade again. He could remain in it working… “For what?” His voice was a croak, hoarse from dryness, from screaming in the night hours. His throat rasped and hurt when he spoke. There had been the slight chance that he might find the other dinghy in the five or six days that he had gained by returning to this end of the mountains. The gamble had been lost. The robot was able to control the screen from a distance. He knew he could not enter the dinghy as long as the screen was effective. If he could trap the robot, force it to turn off the screen… He laughed wildly. The laughter stopped abruptly and he stared again at the passage. Had this been what he had worked for all along without realising it? He could build a trap, a trap using what he had: wind, sand, rock, and the natural pitch of the passage…

From where he was at the outer end of the passage he could not see past the turn; from here it appeared that the floor of the passage itself sloped fairly evenly, a little steep, but not dangerously so, until there was a sudden dropping away of the floor over a twenty-foot stretch immediately before the twist in the passage. Seeing the change in grade he could brace for it, be prepared for it… If it were concealed under loose sand, it would make a trap. The passage was heavily strewn with rock and boulders, both above and below the turn. If the robot were mired in sand there, it might be possible to bombard it with the rocks. It might be damaged by the sand itself, lose its balance and be unable to rise again.

If it got that close to him, he had to have something ready for it, something to slow it down. Otherwise it would enter the valley and kill him and the whole flight and fight would have been for nothing, only a delay of the inevitable. Trace knew he could not give up after fighting so hard. He started to build another wall of rocks.

He brought rocks from the valley floor and one by one hauled them up the passageway and laid them down until he had enough to start piling them. The barrier would have to be four feet high where it was hidden from the outside by the turn. When the wind blew the sand, it would dump it over the fence on the other side, where, hopefully, it would be levelled out and give the impression of being the floor itself. The passage was three hundred feet long and contained many tons of loose rocks and boulders, many more tons of sand. The hours passed; the sun blazed down into the narrow cut between the massive cliffs, and then started to descend, leaving the cut to deep shadow.

Trace worked deliberately, not thinking about the work he was doing, not thinking about the agony of his body as he lifted rocks, staggered with them up the passage and dropped them by the growing wall. He didn’t ask himself why he didn’t use the rocks nearer at hand, why he returned the two hundred and forty feet to the valley floor for his supply each time. The world swam in a red haze before his eyes and he did not find it strange. There were murmurs in his ears, words, phrases, snatches of song and music, and he did not find them incongruent. Somewhere between the valley and the turn in the passage he began speaking; when he opened his mouth to utter the words, one of the cracks started to bleed and the trickle of blood oozed from his lip, rolled crookedly down his chin and out of sight down his neck.

“You can’t count on the men being able to kill unless they are taught to kill. An early figure given was on the order of sixty per cent who never fired directly at the enemy… The enemy is always the objective, never a man, or a group of men, or a town of people. It’s a platoon, or the target, or the objective. You can shoot anything at an objective. An objective doesn’t die, it is merely met and taken. You don’t hate the enemy, men. You can’t afford to hate the enemy because hatred involves the emotions and a man with emotions driving him is not a man to be trusted in war. You all measured up; those who didn’t measure up were mustered out of the army.”

He heard the words as if from a great distance, unaware that he was saying them. How do I know they all measured up? he asked, questioning the voice that seemed so unrelated to him.

Because they’ve all been to Tarbo.

He dropped a rock and stood still for a long time, and he was not seeing the glaring red world of rocks and desert, but the soft misty forests of Tarbo, and he saw all of it. That was where they were sorted. Those who could and did kill from those who couldn’t or didn’t. Some were assigned to the Fleet. Some of them never left Tarbo. He saw again the smoking revolver in Brunce’s hand, saw the spreading blood on Gene Connor’s shoulder, in the back. Fishing in stocked waters, Gene had said. He had guessed. Those who knew the truth about Tarbo didn’t leave it.

A gust of wind drove a handful of sand against Trace’s face mask and he jerked. He shook his head hard and pulled away from the wall of the passage that was supporting him. He didn’t know how long he had been leaning against it. He could see into the valley; it was striped black and white with phantom sand figures rising, swirling, falling. Without looking at the wall he had been building, he left the passage and crossed the valley floor, his head bowed against the driving sand and wind, his shoulders slumped in defeat. He knew the heat and wind and sand were beating him after all. He didn’t care any longer. Inside his dinghy he pulled off his suit and fell down on the seat-bed. There was no water. He could not even take any more of the anti-fever capsules. He could only wait, and hope for sleep.

You’re army, Trace. Forget her.

“Shut up, Duncan! I wanted you to stay with me and you wouldn’t, now just shut up!”

We need the reinforcement of others of our own kind, trained men as we have been trained, murderers, just as we are murderers. Or else we might start to think. Can’t have that, old man. Just do, never think. Who said that? His father? He stared wildly about the dinghy. What was his father doing in it? He hadn’t seen him since… when? He didn’t know. Seventh birthday? Sixth? A convenience, dear, that’s all.

They were gone. He turned to the other seat-bed and said in his croaking voice, “I tried to save you, Duncan, you know that.”

But only because you were afraid to be alone, Trace. Afraid to think…

“You went there too, Duncan. We all did. Part of the training. We weren’t responsible for it…”

Sure, Trace. Sure. Forget it. Forget her. Not human, even. You know what they’re good for.

There was no let-up. His body twitched now and then and the only sounds that he made were groans and indecipherable mutterings, but there was no quiet. The winds howled through the valley and he didn’t hear them.

On the other side of the valley the wind hurled tons of sand through the passageway. Much of it was blown straight through, high over the meagre wall of stone. Some of it was caught by the wall, and in turn served as a trap for more of the sand. A mound of it grew. When the wind passed its most furious peak and gentled again, the top of the mound was levelled. The black still night settled over the planet, but there was no quiet in the dinghy until exhaustion dragged Trace from the clamouring voices, shutting them out finally so he could sleep. It was dawn, and in the dawn the winds returned. Sand was added to the accumulation in the passage, mounded again, this time ten feet high, and then levelled once more, and the new level was only seven feet, flush with the ground beyond the passage at the far end of it, the end through which the robot would try to gain entry.

The sound of the radiation alarm woke Trace. It was coming! His eyes were bright with fever and his hand trembled when he adjusted the screen to focus in on the target. It was still four miles from him, but coming steadily. His mouth was partially open; he couldn’t close it. He touched his tongue and found it hot and dry, swollen. He was dying. Shaking violently, he started the engines of the dinghy. He would die, but not under the beam of the laser, not from the robot. He eased the dinghy to the mouth of the chimney and stopped it again, without turning off the engine immediately. He would wait until the robot started to enter the valley, and then he would leave it, go as far as his fuel would take him, and die alone. He felt eager to be off, to get started on that, his last retreat.

He watched its progress on his screen, sometimes seeing it singly, sometimes seeing an infinite regression of screens, each with the moving speck of light, stretching out endlessly before him, and he waited. He shook now and again, heaving spasms that left him gasping. “Come on,” he coaxed it. “Come on!” It circled the valley, like a sniffing dog circling a lake to find where its quarry had entered the water. It found the blocked passage and tried it, and was turned back by the sand that filled the narrow cut from wall to wall. It continued its circle. It came to the next passage and hesitated a second. Trace saw the passage through its eyes then: an apparent floor that was fairly level, dotted with rocks and boulders, no different from the rest of the hellish terrain.

It rolled into the passage, its wheels finding traction on the rock base covered with sand. The dot of light moved on the screen. Trace drew in a long, painful breath and held it. The robot moved slowly; having learned that one passage was blocked, it was alert for blockage in this one. Behind it the sand was flattened, small rocks were crushed, glinting new cuts to the sun. Nothing was there to be seen except the trail of crushed rocks and packed sand. The trail grew longer, at a maddeningly slow pace. The sand under its wheels deepened somewhat and it stopped again. It moved forward once more, using the treads now. The sound of rocks being ground to powder was the only sound to be heard. It was as if a shadow passed over the ground, and when it moved on there was new sand where there had been rocks. From both sides of the trail it made, sand trickled in to fill the depressions its treads left. It was unbalanced by the abrupt drop concealed with sand, and for a moment it hung, braking, but under the treads the slithery sand shifted and it was further unbalanced. Behind it where sand trickled into one of the ruts it had left, a rounded rock followed the sand and gravity pulled it, keeping it in the smooth track. It hit the robot from behind, lodging under the tread. Another rock followed, and then another. The robot hung unmoving then; its eight tons against the unsettled sand proved too much, and it slipped four feet before it could make an effort to stop itself. The sudden surge of its weight on the sand pressing against the loosely piled rock wall was more than the wall could bear. It gave way and there was a crash of rocks and sand pouring through the break, as water pours through a broken dam. The robot toppled when the sand shifted from under it. With a thunderous crash, it hit the ground where the grade was steepest. It rolled, and over and around it fell an avalanche of rocks and sand, sweeping up everything in its path. Rocks struck the walls, were dashed back, hit the robot’s screen, and penetrated it. The force shield protected it from high energy impact of any sort, but the rocks were of low energy yield and they hit the robot, as did the sand. In the first ten seconds after its fall the screen controls and the remote control for the dinghy’s screen were inactivated; in the next ten seconds one of the flexible, handlike waldoes was torn loose. It withdrew all other appendages and closed all its apertures, but sand had entered and damage was done.

The robot weighed eight tons. Its crashing fall and roll tore loose boulders from the cliffs themselves. Rocks that the wind had deposited in the passage were loosened and tumbled after the robot. When it stopped rolling it was under a mountain, twenty-five to thirty tons of sand, another thirty-five to fifty tons of rocks and boulders.

Trace stared at the hill of rocks and sand, awed by what he had done. As he watched, the hill stirred, shifted, a rock rolled down from it, then several more, and a spot of brightness appeared near the top. The robot’s laser was still working. It was burning its way out.

It reminded Trace of a nightmare in which no matter how far or how fast he ran, everytime he looked over his shoulder the devil was still there, the same distance, still grinning in anticipation. He watched the red spot until it vanished. The laser had cut through. The robot would widen the opening, dislodging or burning rocks to free itself, and then they would be back where they had started. He watched, but the hole didn’t grow. The robot couldn’t move. The laser happened to be pointing in that direction when it was turned on, but it could not direct the beam to another spot. Trace laughed. His lips cracked more and bled, and it hurt his throat, but he laughed until he was weak and the laughter had turned to sobbing. It passed and he looked again at the hole made by the laser. It had grown slightly. Perhaps it had a range of freedom of an inch or so, back and forth one inch, or two at the most. He took off then in the dinghy as the stabbing laser bit another eighth of an inch away. The top opening grew to almost two inches in length.

Trace landed on the cliff over the passage, and cautiously he eased to the edge to look down on the mountain that was the robot’s burial mound. The cherry glow showed first on one end of the two-inch cut, then on the other. Trace backed away and looked about him. The top of the cliff was covered with stones, rocks from pea size to boulders as big as houses. He grinned and cried out with pain when his lip split further. Water. He could find the dinghy now with the screen turned off, and then he would finish burying the robot.

He almost crashed his dinghy when he landed only twenty feet from the other one, now out in the open and visible. He was crying deep in his throat when his trembling hands opened the emergency stores unit and found the water bags there. Enough water to last him for a month, two months. He drank deeply and in a minute he was sick, vomiting all of it up again. He sipped a mouthful then and let it trickle down. His throat was swollen, almost shut. He was shivering uncontrollably. Much of the water ran down his chin, ran out of his stiff mouth, spilled even before he could get it near his lips. This time the small amount he allowed himself stayed down, and he took another mouthful, and then another.

After he had drunk he loaded the water and the fuel from the robot’s dinghy into his own, and then he returned to the cliff and the robot. He had to stay near it, keep it covered. When the winds started he would return to his chimney and stay there in the shelter. During the night, when the wind was gone, he would light the robot with his spotlights, keep it covered at all times. During the day he would stay on the cliff and it would keep him busy just finding stones he could roll to the edge and push over. He worried about keeping it all done. It was a two-man job, and he was alone. It did not occur to him to leave now, to return to his orbiting ship and wait there for relief. He had trapped it, and he would hold it for them, would direct their fusion bombs to it himself. He looked down at it and saw that the hole was three inches long, first one end of the line turning red, then the other end, as the laser swept back and forth steadily without pause.