The Killer Thing

Eleven

Later the shrieks of the wind caused him to stir, but there was no comprehension on his face, no awareness in his eyes and he simply hauled himself to the seat-bed and collapsed. Still later, when all was quiet again, he got up and drank, sparingly, remembering that he had to conserve the water, not questioning why. He slept through the morning wind storm.

He awakened hungry. For a long moment the thought of the wasted day nagged him, but he shrugged it away. He had needed the rest more than anything else. His body was still sore, but without the intensity of the day before, and he could use his arm now. A spreading discoloration covered his entire shoulder, but the scrape was healing over, as were the various cuts and scratches that seemed to be all over him. He was a healthy animal; his body had needed time and had taken it, and now he was nearly as well as ever. There was no more fever that morning. Exertion probably would bring it back again; it would be even worse the next time, but he had a day or several days of grace before then, several days in which to do the things he had to do.

He ate a tube of fruit mixture, and after it a high-protein compound that was labelled ‘Meat’. It tasted mellow, and had a tendency to line his tongue and mouth, but it left him feeling stronger, ready to start the day’s work. It was too hot to go out yet; it didn’t matter, there were things to do inside the dinghy ― his suit to be repaired, a map to be made so he wouldn’t get lost again and have to run the gauntlet of flying debris. He had to set up his warning system, just in case the robot managed to get to him before he expected it. He felt a start of surprise that two of his six days were already gone. He could expect three more full days, and company on the fourth. He had less than two quarts of water left.

He could leave as soon as the wind died down the next morning, find a piece of shade somewhere for the three hours of midday, and resume his search when the shadows started to form. He considered the plan and accepted it reluctantly.

He didn’t like travelling far from the dinghy… What if the fever returned? What if the robot arrived while he was gone? He knew he was groping for excuses, and he forced himself to stop. He would walk for three hours, rest in the shade for three more, search again and return to the valley before the evening winds made it impossible. That decided, he knew he would not go beyond the valley until the next morning; he would keep this afternoon free to explore it, examine the various entrances to it, and see if plugging them would be possible. If they were all as well concealed as the chimney the dinghy was in, he had nothing to worry about; the robot would not be able to get to him directly, but would have to burn down the walls of the cliffs themselves.

Suddenly he cursed himself for a fool. He could take the dinghy out for the search, cover the entire area in one day, using the radiation detector. Excitement buoyed him. He would find the other dinghy tomorrow. He couldn’t miss it in so limited an area. Once he had the trail of radiation to follow, it would lead him directly to the place where the shield concealed the other lifeboat. Then he would have water, fuel, oxygen.

He would refuel his own dinghy, take the water and oxygen, destroy the other dinghy. He laughed in relief at the simplicity of his plan and its infallibility. A map first, then he would go out, start the hunt that afternoon, perhaps even complete the search before evening.

The automatic camera had been on when he hovered over the valley looking for the area where he first had seen the robot; he took the photographs out and spread them flat, joining them to each other to make a composite picture of an area of twenty-five square miles. If only he had mapped it on landing. There had seemed to be no need then; he had known the relief ship would map the entire planet as a matter of routine. He studied the area he had to cover, put the copier on it and awaited for the composite photograph to emerge. If only he had brought weapons…

Analysis shows no water, no life of any type…

Okay, dump the armaments and take extra water from the other dinghies, might as well be comfortable down there.

Sure, Trace… This one’s hit, no water… Three extra bags, that’s about it…

The ship shuddered violently as more of the controls went out, and Trace pulled the final switch, cutting off the engines completely. Only the lights from the dinghy were there; the patrol ship was ghostly in the pale light coming from the little craft.

Let’s get out.

Aye, aye, Trace. About time…

Look, Dunc! There it goes! The robot’s dinghy.

A shooting star, a fire trail, streaking downward out of control towards the planet…

Good thing. We’ll have plenty of time to hunt for the slag. Let’s go.

Trace shook himself free of the voices and the vivid recall. The photograph was finished. He marked his position in the centre of it, and began drawing lines, his search pattern. When he was done, he grunted with satisfaction: he would cover the entire area in two trips, one this afternoon, one in the morning. By noon the following day he would have the other dinghy, or at least be able to go directly to it. There would be the problem of the shield, but he would think about that after he located it.

He thought about his figures; the fuel ratio for travelling close to the surface of the planet compared to returning to orbit was on the order of one to three, which meant that the fuel that would have taken him back the two hundred and fifty miles to the orbiting ship, would on the planet take him seven hundred and fifty miles; of that distance he had already gone four hundred and thirty-six miles, actually slightly more than that. He had enough fuel left to fly no more than three hundred miles. The rings he had drawn around his camp site were one and a half miles apart. There was a total of two hundred and fifty miles to be covered. With luck he could hope to come across the radiation trail early before reaching the outer rings, but he might not. After finding the trail there would be the fuel used in backtracking it to the landing area of the other dinghy, another ten miles more or less…

He eased the dinghy out of the chimney; the sun was still high and there were few shadows on the ground as yet ― only a darkening on one side of the rocks with bases that looked slightly out of proportion to the rising masses. He climbed to only twenty feet over the topmost peak of the surrounding cliffs, and he went due north to start his first lap, one and a half miles from his hideaway. The slower his speed, the less efficient his motors were, but that couldn’t be helped; he had to travel slowly enough to study the land below him.

His detectors could pick up the radiation from a distance of four miles, but that became almost meaningless as he considered the terrain below him. The rocks were massive here with narrow gorges between them that twisted in sharp angles, now and then opening to a trail-like clearing of nearly fifty feet, again narrowing to two or three feet. Any of the pinnacles would serve to damp the trail of radiation. From his vantage point he could see how well concealed his valley actually was from the ground approaches; also, he could see that there were only two other entrances to it, with a third that had become choked with rocks. It would be easily fortified if he failed to find and enter the other dinghy.

He finished the first turn and headed out another mile and a half, the ground unchanging below, with the cliffs, peaks, obelisks all the same, the same tumbled masses of rocks that had cracked and flaked off, now lying in heaps of rubble. There was the start of a plateau, a high mesa that was windswept clean, level, with stair-like approaches to it. He slowed even more to study it carefully, knowing that his fuel was being consumed faster each time he decelerated. The mesa was of granite, not the black basalt he was searching for. He went on, picking up speed again. He finished the second sweep around the valley. His radiation system continued quiet.

The heat was building up in the dinghy; inside his suit he was perspiring heavily, and he was starting to have a peculiar optical illusion: the land seemed to hunch itself up into the jagged peaks, then abruptly the ground would change and there seemed to be sudden, deep holes with precipitous sides and black slides that led to the centre. The effect was dizzying and for ten or fifteen minutes he kept his attention on his controls, relying solely on the radiation alarm. He welcomed the mesa, when he approached it again, as he would have a familiar sight back on Venus, or even on Earth which he hadn’t seen since his twentieth birthday. The mesa seemed to go on for miles, flat, sheered off neatly. The third lap had been covered. The shadows were now pronounced, as sharp and cruel as the rocks that cast them, and on each north and south sweep, the sun shone straight in the dinghy, and he was forced to close the ports and depend wholly on his screen. Viewing the savage land through the screen seemed merely to remove it further from reality, to make it easier to succumb to the changing ground as it rose in mountain peaks and then fell in craters and crevices.

He had gone less than four miles around the next lap when the radiation alarm sounded, bringing him up with a start of excitement and fear. It became silent almost immediately and desperately he turned, circling back to where he had picked up the beep. He set the controls to follow it, flying as low as he could around the peaks, around the mesa for almost a mile, and then climbing over it, zigzagging back and forth, detouring only when there was a mass of rocks too steep for the robot to have navigated. Suddenly there were two lines on the screen, the trail was being crossed by another; the robot had crossed its own path. He hesitated momentarily, then decided to stick with the first trail. He went to the edge of the ten-mile circle he had drawn, continued three miles beyond, then turned back, retracing the hot path to the intersection. His dinghy was recording his route, marking the trail of radiation for him. If he had to leave it unfinished that day, there would be the next; he would be able to start again exactly where he left off. He followed the second trail for another eight miles, taking it to the edge of the outermost circle, then turned back on it to follow it the other way. The shadows were lengthening fast, and he knew he had no more than another half-hour before he would be forced to return to the valley. The path was crossed again, and then again, and he fought back the waves of doubt that passed through him.

If all the land continued to be so crisscrossed with the trails, it might become impossible to follow any of them…

He would have to return and go on foot, groping with his hands to discover the invisible dinghy. Finally he knew that he had to turn back. In minutes the wind would start to blow; the shadows were black stripes over the land now, and the white spaces were grey. He didn’t want to be out when the white spaces were gone, when the black shadows claimed all of the land. It was only nine miles back to the camp site in a straight line. The wind was a thin, distant shrilling when he circled the valley and dropped slowly to the floor, and then crept back to the safety of the chimney.

He was rigid with tension when he turned off the engines. He was able to relax only with great effort. To have come so close to locating the dinghy, and then to have failed. He checked his fuel consumption: he had flown a total of one hundred and thirty-four miles; there would be approximately that many miles left to him to fly before the fuel became dangerously low, too low to leave the valley again.

He stripped off his sodden suit and wiped his body thoroughly with a treated square of soft material that at first felt cool against his skin, but too soon became hot and sticky with his sweat. He was running out of squares. God, how he stank! He threw the cloth pieces into the disposer and tried not to think of all the water he had used on Duncan. He thought longingly of a swim, or a cool shower, or a plunge in a sudsy bath. When he had finished trying to clean himself, there was little else he could do. His stiffness had returned along with the soreness of his muscles, and the assorted aches and pains where rocks and sand had cut and bruised him. His head ached from the strain of watching the sharply etched land streak by as he had flown over it. He looked at the aerial map he had made, crisscrossed with the hot trail; he put it aside. He couldn’t stop the feeling of motion the map gave him. He sat again on the edge of the seat-bed and he put his head down in the palms of his hands. If only there were something he could be doing.

Waiting was harder than physical activity, harder than daring the tornado winds, harder than trudging out under the burning sky. Why weren’t they trained in aloneness? Why was each man so carefully guarded from being alone, from the time he first arrived on Venus until the time of his death? Always in twos, or in groups, or squadrons, or battalions ― never alone. He must have had hours alone when he was a child. He could remember none. There had been the apartment, one of four hundred in the complex, with a giant nursery that housed seven hundred pre-school children of two to four years, and after that had come the school, and the dormitory at night, and the playgrounds alive with youngsters, teeming with them as a drop of water from a pond teems under a microscope. Then Venus and another dormitory… Never alone. He could hear the screaming of the wind as if it were far removed from him, and he wished almost that he had parked the dinghy out under an overhang after all. Inside the chimney even the wind chose to leave him with his isolation.

He should eat again. Then he could write letters, or bring the log up to date… or study the maps and make plans… With a start of surprise he considered the log: he had forgotten it for days. It would require hours to complete and up-date. He felt cheerful when he pulled it out and began glancing through it. He opened it to the entry of the day after Duncan’s death and burial, the start of his lone game of hide and seek with the robot. He shuddered, remembering the beam playing on the shallow grave, then flowing along the ground towards him. How long ago had it been? He couldn’t remember. He tried counting back, but the days blurred and ran together. Later, after he ate, he would work on the log. Later he would be able to remember what happened each day. There was the day that he had gone out on to the desert, hoping to lure the monster out on the sands, hoping it would sink, be mired, incapacitated…

And another day that he had walked to the edge of the desert and it had found him, and again the beam had turned rocks red, melted them. He couldn’t remember if that day had been before or after the day that he had gone out in the dinghy landing in the sand only to be covered over when the winds blew that night. It hadn’t followed him. When he returned to the shelter of the mountain ridge, it had been there, waiting. Why hadn’t it gone out after him? He gnawed his knuckles. Why had he left it so far behind? If it came now and mixed a new trail with the old ones, he wouldn’t be able to count on his detection system to tell the old from the new. It could sneak up on him, catch him unaware, unprepared, and then the beam would flow along the ground, melting what it touched, searching, always searching for him. Why didn’t it simply repair its own dinghy and get the hell out? It could afford to leave him alone; he was not a threat to it now. All he was was one weak, sick man, no threat to anything or anyone…

Why do you have to declare war and demand control of whole planets? Why can’t you simply trade for what you want and need? Why do you have to burn and destroy and kill first?

Lar couldn’t understand. He smiled at her helplessly. He had found her sitting at the river-bank, a book across her legs, her eyes half closed as she stared at the light patterns on ripples of water where the river swirled around a sand bar. He tried to explain it to her, but she cut him short.

You don’t even know why, do you? You have been told that this is the way it is to be, and you have accepted that unquestioningly. What kind of a threat was Mellic to your people? It was five thousand years since our last war on Mellic itself; we had forgotten how to wage war. The thought of killing another being sickened us. How did we threaten you and your people? You could have acquired the land you needed for a base, to further your space explorations. You didn’t have to conquer the entire planet and bring about its ruin as you did. You wonder why you are hated wherever you go? Do you really wonder?

We have gambled everything on continued growth.

You refuse to curb any of your appetites.

That isn’t it! Any organism needs to grow, or die…

You bred yourselves off your original planet, and now you spread through the galaxy like a disease…

We don’t hate any of the peoples we have found. We try to arrange peaceful alignments with them…

You don’t hate them because you have been taught that they are not people. How could one hate inoffensive animals, or peaceful birds? Why don’t you allow yourself the luxury of thinking? You should take one week, go alone into the woods, or up the mountain, and do nothing but think, Have they ever left you alone long enough to think? Look at me! I am a person! Just as you are a person. I am not simply a barrier to your world’s expansionistic dreams. I am a human being who bleeds and hurts. I lie awake at night and remember the quality of peace as it was, my brothers, my father, all alive and happy, now dead, burned out of existence, as if they never had lived. Did they threaten you? My father made lloyars. Like your violins, to make music, to free the mind of its earthly concerns and allow it to approach heaven… My brothers… a poet and a surgeon, threats to spur plans for eternal expansion? Can you look at me and honestly say you believe me to be less than human?

Lar, I am sorry…

No! Don’t tell me that! You can’t be sorry until you have suffered as we have. Not until you have felt alone as we have, alone and helpless. Not until you can know that the villages you have disintegrated with your beams contained people, real human beings who died in terror and pain… and alone.

“Stop! Stop! I won’t listen to you!” Trace shouted, jerking himself upright from the seat-bed, glaring wildly about the tiny dinghy as if he expected to see others inside it with him. His hand trembled when he touched it to his eyes. He had seen her! He had felt the breeze from the river, smelled the strange smells of the mosses, the ferns with their pungent sweet odours, the violet and blue flowers that bowed over the water. He had felt the impatience with her that he had been unable to conceal as she mouthed platitudes based on ignorance of the realities of the galaxy. It had been real! Something had happened to time itself, placing him back there again, living it over again…

He clutched his head in his hands and squeezed hard, thankful for the answering pain. A dream. He had dozed, dreamed. He listened to the wind, subsiding now, and knew that he had to eat. The thought of the tubes disgusted him, but he needed the strength they alone could give him now. Then he would go over his maps and plan for the next morning, and after that sleep. Perhaps it would end with the next morning. He would find the other dinghy, get through the screen somehow and take its water and fuel, boobytrap it, and then blast off for the orbiting ship, out of range of the inhuman killer that was inexorably closing in on him. He shivered when he thought of it out in the wind, never stopping, keeping steadily on his trail no matter how devious he tried to make it.

A logic box, Trace. That’s all it is; a logic box. It can’t think anything new or original, can’t feel anything, has to do what it’s been told to do, in the ways it’s been taught to do them. Someone taught it to kill. That’s all it knows, to kill.

Who, Trace wondered, had been its teacher after Venus and the carnage it left behind it there? Who had given it the invisibility shield, and in the name of heaven why? Especially why. Didn’t he realise what he was doing when he gave it that? Had he been so blind, so selfishly determined to try it out that he never even considered what he was doing? Had someone purposely made it invincible and then turned it out to kill whoever and whatever got in its path? Who had hated mankind enough to do that?