The Killer Thing

One

There was the desert, glittering white sand that shifted like talcum when touched, cottony white sky, a quarter of it glaring with the white heat of the sun. There was no wind, no movement anywhere; not a grain of the powdery sand stirred. It looked like a blanket of white wool interwoven with silver threads in a random pattern, a blanket tossed down carelessly so that it rippled in smooth hills, all rising diagonally in a series. The cover stretched endlessly, hiding the rocky land under it from the gaze of the man; and where his vision failed, the bleached wood merged with the white cotton and the world was enclosed, as if he stood on the inside of a flattened sphere. Behind him and in the distance, between him and the desert, naked rocks thrust from the burned ground as barren as the view before him.

The rocks were basalts, granites, quartzites. Nothing as soft and weather vulnerable as sandstone existed above ground surface, but no weather stirred the air now, no wind blew. It would blow later, when the sun started to sink and the ground radiated away some of the heat load of the long day; it would blow for five or six hours then, exchanging heat for cool air, thin columns of tornado-like wind rising from the superheated ground to the high, thin atmosphere, to fall back through masses of hot air, whirling them about, starting new funnels. With the dawn the winds would have spent themselves, having established some sort of uneasy equilibrium; the sun-rise would start the winds again, shafts of heat stirring the night-cooled air more and more violently until all the atmosphere was superheated once more, and the violence subsided, becoming a gentle, steady breeze that died to nothing, as if the wind were anxious to amend the damage inflicted during the night, smooth back the tortured sands that had been whipped and tossed, and leave them in graceful rows of safely rounded dunes.

The man knew he could not remain that far from his base very long; his need to get away from it had been overpowering, however, and this day he had given in to the need. He lifted his pack, bending under its weight, his lungs and heart straining with the added burden, and he started to retrace his steps to his camp, keeping always in the shadows of the rocks. He was a big man, over six feet tall, well muscled, and young at thirty-two. But the air was thin. He did not have the added burden of oxygen tanks on this planet, but as his lungs strained for air he wondered if it wouldn’t be worth carrying them. Then he remembered they were empty. His suit was highly reflective, white, topped with a helmet that was wired and equipped to do things he couldn’t do without. He had turned up the audio so that if the killer robot moved within three miles of him he would be able to hear it. And he had adjusted the transparent face piece so that he could look out at the glaring world without risking “snowblindness”. In doing this he had cut down his visual field; he could not see the depths of the shadows cast by the grotesquely shaped rocks, and he could not see as far as his eyes unaided would have been able to, but neither would he go blind. As far as the killer robot was concerned, it would make no difference if he were blind or not.

His camp was the dinghy that had brought him from his ship, now in stationary orbit, invisible through the glare of the sun, but showing as a pearl drop of light late in the day when the sun started its descent. The dinghy was wedged between two mammoth columns of basalt three miles away. Every day he changed his camp, skimming the dinghy as close to the surface of the planet as he could, not settling for a new location less than fifty miles from the last. He had fuel remaining to move three more times only, reserving enough to take him back to the orbiting ship. The killer robot, obviously gravely damaged, was advancing at the rate of only five miles an hour, but even that reduced speed was much faster than the man could travel by foot, struggling against both heat and thin atmosphere.

He stopped in his march and listened. Something had clanged against a rock to his left. He flattened himself against the rock and didn’t move for the next ten minutes; there was no further sound. Cautiously then he moved away from the rock, around it, into the shadow of the next one. An energy beam cut through the granite above him, turning it cherry red, then white, and finally vaporising it. The man clung to his base. He was sheltered from a direct line of fire, surrounded as he was by the shafts that remained of ancient hills and mountains. Maybe the thing was trying to crush him with falling rocks.

No! He closed his eyes then, too tight, feeling pain in them.

It can’t do anything that requires imagination, remember that, Trace. It’s got a computer for a brain; it’s been programmed to kill with the laser, and the fusion shells, and that’s all.

You were wrong, boy! Didn’t you hear me telling you it blinked out? Just like that, out! Gone! It’s got something new, boy, a screen it can hide behind.

The voice had been there, in his ears, but it was gone now; everything was gone. The silence was complete, excluded even his own breathing and heart-beat. How used to hearing ourselves we get. I miss it. It couldn’t move so quietly that he wouldn’t hear it, even if he never saw it again. Not with its metal over the bare rocks, not with the radioactive trail it left behind it. The radiation alarm hadn’t sounded this time. Was the thing learning to stalk him, keeping the dense, radiation-damping rocks between itself and the man it hunted?

Two miles was its limit of fire; it must have been waiting quietly for him to blunder within that range. That meant it had to be somewhere even with him, or in front of him… He had heard it to his left; he was certain now that that was what he had heard, some slight shifting it made preparatory to firing. He began to squirm along the ground to his right, keeping close to the base of the rocks, dragging his pack after him. It fired once more, the beam falling short, still playing around the column he had left. After he had gone a quarter of a mile, he got to his feet cautiously at the foot of a basalt group that was sixty feet across, and twice as high. His camp was still thirty minutes away. He wondered if the thing had found it. He shouldn’t have risked leaving it, adding to the original mistake by not taking into account his own weakness, the enervating effects of too much sun, too little oxygen. But the killer robot shouldn’t have followed him this far so soon, either. Was it learning to cope with the uneven ground? Was it working on repairing its speed control?

He stopped his thoughts and listened instead to the voices:

The shell hit us, Trace, knocked out the secondary control-room.

Stan, Morris…?

They’re all dead. You still have a fix on it? Yeah, still closing, but pressure is going fast. We’ll have to abandon…

What’s it doing now?

Our hit must have bollixed the controls; it’s starting to spin.

They watched the ship they had chased for over three months, fixed on it so that it couldn’t shake them, entering warp sector after sector on its tail, always closing in, but not close enough to shoot it down, and now they knew that they had closed the gap enough. Trace’s fingers started towards the fire control and then drew back. A red light was flashing belligerently, and three green lights had flicked off. He turned to Duncan. Ready the dinghy.

It’s ready. It’s still firing. Looks like a random pattern.

The ship tumbled end over end, towards the planet, and every time it was in a position to fire the fusion shells, its automatic system fired a barrage. The patrol ship, limping now with its rear section gone, its protective screen damaged and ineffective, couldn’t manoeuvre, and aboard her the men could only wait.

It’s going to fire every damn shell in the ship.

Wouldn’t you?

They couldn’t fire back, nor could they change position except by using the main braking rockets, which were still green in the major control panel. The lights over the manoeuvring controls had gone out with the hit. Two more lights started to blink red and the ship shuddered once. There was an acrid smell of smouldering insulation.

We have to damp it. Pressure going faster. Check pressure hit.

Okay.

We’ll put her in stationary orbit and turn everything off. Communications gone. Didn’t get to finish the message… Not enough oxygen to wait up here for a rescue. Looks like we sit it out planet-side. Good thing we got our fix before the hit.

The ship shuddered again and a whole row of lights flashed red. A second hit…

Trace shook his head violently, clearing away the distant, yet distinct voices, forcing out the scenes that played whenever he forgot to look away. He stumbled on towards the dinghy, his legs aching with his exertion, his whole body sagging now, exhausted by the heat and the effort of getting enough oxygen from the thin air on this planet. Before he approached the dinghy, he patrolled a circle around it, looking for tracks of the robot, his radiation detector turned on high, because the thing had got hot along with its ship, and it was still radiating furiously. No radiation escaped its screen, but the ground it touched got hot. Searching for tracks was automatic, done without any real hope of finding any in the sand that lay between the rocks. The few times he had found visual tracks had only added to his bewilderment, until he realised the robot had several different means of travel; it had wheels, and treads, and something else—spherical, something that left one broad three-foot swath of crushed rocks and packed sand behind it. Trace refused to allow himself to think what it would be like if it had been able to regain its ability to travel as fast as the treads indicated it should. Tracks usually registered only through the clicking voice of the radiation detector. This time it remained quiet.

The thing hadn’t been there. The area was clean. Trace went directly to the dinghy and locked himself in. Before he removed his helmet, he adjusted the detectors inside the small craft, and then he undressed. The temperature inside the dinghy was 108, almost fifteen degrees cooler than outside, and although Trace was perspiring profusely, the dried air took the moisture as it formed. His skin felt crusty with salt and dirt. The dinghy was a two-seater, the two reclining seats side by side, a foot apart before the abbreviated control panel. There was room enough behind the seats only for the emergency stores needed by a two-man scout team—medical supplies, emergency rations, lights, and the all-weather suits. There had been extra oxygen tanks, but Trace had tossed them out to make more room, after he had exhausted them. When the dinghy had landed it was with a hole he could put his fist through, and with Duncan unconscious, his chest smashed by a meteorite.

Don’t do it, Trace. You’ll need it.

Duncan’s whisper. His voice was still in the dinghy, as if it had penetrated every wall to seep out slowly over the coming weeks, a little at a time, always whispering.

The plastic Trace had used for his oxygen tent was still draped over the right-hand seat, Duncan’s seat, and it gleamed black-red where it touched the cushion and was held to it by static electricity.

Trace ate sparingly, not regretful of the need to conserve his stocks. The heat took his sweat, his appetite, his energy. He wished the dinghy had a water converter, and thought longingly of the disabled converter on the mother ship hanging over the world of sands and rocks.

After he ate, there was nothing to do. He would move soon, but not yet, not until the thing got closer, not until it was nearly night-time, so the robot wouldn’t track him down during the long night and find him asleep. It moved towards him unceasingly now that there were only the two of them, and the attack of that noon had been the fourth one so far in the three-week-old hunt. Another week and a half to go before Trace could expect relief, another week and a half of playing hide-and-seek with the killer robot. He stared at the screen that showed his own trail, and there was nothing but the rocks and the sand. The shadows were growing now, and soon he would be in a nightmare world of black monoliths that rose dizzily, crookedly into the white sky, and black lines that striped the white sand among the feet of the rocks. This was the bad time—waiting for the wind when the stripes were obscured by blowing sand—the silent, unmoving time of the long shadows that were nowhere grey, but were unyielding black against white.

Duncan’s whisper came to him again, and he cocked his head to listen.

It can’t get off the planet now, Trace, but no one else knows it’s here. You have to stay alive and tell them, Trace. There’s no one else now. The message didn’t get through in time, cut off after the fix was reported. That’s all they know. They’ll find the ship up there, and they’ll search for the dinghy, but they won’t be looking for the killer. Tell them, Trace. Tell them.

“Sure, Duncan,” Trace said out loud, in a normal conversational tone, looking about for him. He shook himself and stood up, fear standing out in the form of small beads of cold sweat about his mouth and nose. He made coffee then and drank it black and hot, and only once looked at the striped world showing itself on the screen.

It was being alone that made it bad, he told himself, sipping a second cup of coffee. He couldn’t remember ever being alone before in his life. The crews of the patrol were always six or eight men, and the dinghies carried two or more. No one went out in space alone, and when your partner slept, you could still hear his breathing. Even if you couldn’t hear him, you always knew he was there. It made a difference, knowing another man was there. He caught himself listening too hard, and he pulled out the log he had been keeping and started to fill it in for that day. His mind wandered from it again and again; in the end he wrote nothing. He re-examined his calculations instead.

He had enough oxygen to last four days on the ship in orbit after he left the planet, and he had enough fuel to move one hundred and fifty miles, a thirty-hour trip for the robot. Even counting the time it would take for the robot to locate him after the moves, he had no more than forty hours of comparative safety remaining to him on the ground. He could not leave the planet for at least a week. So far he had been lucky, had dared remain after he knew his location had been spotted by the thing’s sensors. He had been able to rely on his sound system to warn him when the thing was getting near enough to fire. The robot always found him. No matter what damage the hit they had scored on it, or the crash landing had done, its sensors were working well enough for it to keep finding him. He had no way of knowing what functions had been repaired, had no way of knowing what functions had been built into it. One by one, as they were manifested, he wrote them down, but each new ability was a surprise and a threat.

He didn’t dare leave the planet any sooner than he had to, because the robot could repair its own dinghy. He had caught it busy at the repair job the first day of their enforced stay on the planet.

Standing high on a ridge cut out on a basalt cliff, he had seen the thing for the first time. It was ten feet high, with a barrel-like chest and retractable waldoes, then wielding tools. The dinghy had left the crippled, falling ship like a shot, plunging straight down towards the planet, glowing red then white as it plummeted. Trace and Duncan had watched it, certain that the robot killer had burned up with it. They didn’t see it land, and not until Trace saw the metal monster repairing it did he consider that the robot might have survived such a landing. It had sensed him before he was close enough to fire at it with the small hand gun he carried, and the robot had blinked out. A second later the dinghy was gone too. Somehow the robot had brought the little dinghy to ground without an explosion, and it was repairing the craft. It had already made operational a force field that was new, that curved light and caused invisibility.

Watching it before it blinked out, Trace had wondered at the reports claiming invulnerability for the machine, but then, knowing it was there, that it had a laser that could vaporise metal and rocks in half a minute or less, he had felt fear. He had run. Three weeks later, he was still running.

He was listening again, and this time there was an external sound; the small craft was being pelted with sand, and the wind was starting to whistle among the rocks. A dismal, faint sound now, it would howl and screech and scream maniacally later. It was time to leave this spot for another, fifty miles away. He took his seat at the controls, and just before he left the ground, he heard the radiation detector start warning him in a staccato voice. It was coming.

I can’t find the dinghy… It’s deflecting the radiation downward, into the ground. None of it’s escaping…

Destroy the dinghy and then hide, Trace. No other way.

Can’t find it.

Keep it too busy to go back and fix the dinghy. Keep it after you, too busy to go back…