The Killer Thing

Six

Manoeuvring in the high wind among the sand-sculpted mountains was impossible; the air was black with sand and the tornado funnels whirled and flung rocks from pebble size to massive boulders. Trace chose a high, broad-based, up thrusting shaft of granite and came to a stop. His back muscles ached, as did his arms. His eyes were burning as if the sand had blasted them too. He let his head drop to his arms and sat unmoving several minutes, hearing only the howling wind punctuated with explosive blasts of rocks hitting rocks.

How did the robot avoid the flying debris? Trace tried to visualise it being struck again and again, and still managing to stay upright and advancing. Had it learned to dodge them, to stay behind boulders when the winds rose?

It’s smart, Duncan, real smart. It can learn from experience. It has to be that it is continually learning. The rocks would cripple it otherwise.

Logic predicts the future on the basis of the past.

Yeah, but, listen, Dunc. It isn’t just using what it had been programmed to know. Don’t you see that? It is learning new things. And no one is here to programme them in. It’s doing it alone.

Trace lifted his head and stared at the controls. Wearily he pushed himself from the seat and made his way to the rear of the boat where the supplies were. The fever was returning, and with it, the queer lightheadedness that meant danger. What if he became delirious here? He held the capsules and wondered if he had taken one or two of them earlier. He couldn’t remember. He swallowed two of them this time, washing them down with a mouthful of water. Very carefully he returned the water bag and locked the unit; he put the key in the medical supply section. The wind was growing noisier minute by minute; it would reach its peak momentarily, and then start to lessen. He had to know where he was going and take off as soon as the wind died.

It would be pleasant to rest. Rest and get over the fever, regain his strength… A chill shook him and, frightened, he pulled out the map he had made of the planet. He had to go on. If he stayed where he was and died, the robot would find him in two days, be back at its own dinghy in another three.

He had said it so casually ― if he died there. He tasted the words, repeated them aloud. Not in space then? Not to be flung from a ship to drift endlessly through black space? Nor yet to be buried on one of the worlds where the fleet had landed and conquered? He laughed and the sound of his voice startled him. The wind had died down completely.

He stood up and gazed out of the port. How long had he been sitting there? It seemed less than minutes, but had been almost two hours. The chill returned, this time not on his skin, but deeper. He went back to the controls, and took off heading south, keeping to the edge of the mountain’s backbone, not flying out over the desert this time. The robot wouldn’t go out there anyway. The manoeuvre simply wasted time and fuel. His mind seemed very clear then; the capsules had fought the fever down again. He would find a good place to dig in, and then he would eat and rest through the hot part of the day. In the evening he would start his search for the hidden dinghy. It seemed so simple now. He remembered his thoughts of dying and he smiled grimly. Not yet. Not here. For three months the man and the machine had been tied together; not for nothing, he told himself fiercely. Not for nothing!

He had been with Lar when Duncan found him. And he had left Lar in order to chase the metal monster. He refused to think of her. Later, when he had time to recall the nuances of her voice, the shades of meaning behind each motion she made, the way the shifting light caught the sparkle of her eyes, and then hid it… Grimly he stared at the finder scope, the crosshairs approaching his approximate destination. He had returned to the southern edge of the mountain range. He slowed and gained altitude, searching the ground below for the right place, for the spot where he had landed the dinghy for the first time.

From up there he could see the shadows too well. Deep, black, long, still, distorted monoliths, towers, and peaks. The shadows changed the land, making it look new to his eyes, unfamiliar. He climbed higher and slowed still more. None of it looked like the spot he remembered. It was the same as all the rest, and yet different. Three miles south the mountains ended, with a streamer of disconnected rocks and boulders showing through the sand, and then the start of the endless ripples of low hills. The mountain was only fourteen miles wide at this point.

It was there, somewhere beneath him that he had brought the boat down in the first place, with Duncan dying at his side.

We’ll find a better place later, Duncan. Now all I want is to land and get you fixed up. Duncan? You awake?

Sure, Trace.

What happened to Duncan’s voice? It was as if he was speaking through a foot of gauze. Trace headed straight down, braking sharply, to land at the foot of a black cliff that rose over two hundred feet above them. He turned to Duncan who was the colour of wet putty.

Okay, boy. Now we see what we can do about…

Don’t touch me, Trace. I’m broken inside…

Blood on his lips, frothy, mixed with air… His lungs?

I’ll rig up an oxygen tent, Dune. Breathe easier then until the ship gets here. Matter of only a few days. We’re in the shade, plenty of food, water. You’re going to be all right, Dune. Take it easy, okay?

Forget it, Trace. Fix the boat… Make sure the thing died…

I will, Duncan. Later, after I finish the tent.

He used the plastic, fitting it tightly with a strap around Duncan’s waist, securing it under the foam seat, with the oxygen hose entering from underneath near Duncan’s shoulder. Duncan didn’t move; his eyes were bright with pain, the whispering voice thick, almost unrecognisable.

The sun heated the rocks, and they radiated. The sand threw heat from itself. The interior of the dinghy became hotter, and the air conditioner failed to relieve it. Trace bathed Duncan in cool water, injected him with pain controllers. Duncan’s laboured breathing eased after the injection and his eyes stopped their restless roving. Trace left him and repaired the hole in the dinghy, six inches in diameter, with neat edges. He mended the hole with the sun on his back, and when he re-entered the dinghy his suit was drenched, as if he had been swimming. Duncan was hot and dry, and asleep. He bathed him again, leaning low to catch the whispered voice:

Save it, Trace. You’ll need it. The oxygen too.

Duncan hadn’t opened his eyes. His face was different.

He appeared to be younger; lines were easing out of his face, the relaxing effects of the drug. He looked almost happy.

Make sure it died, Trace. Please!

Sure, Dunc, sure. Sleep now, pal.

Outside again, Duncan asleep inside. The black cliff over his head, the sun low, making the shadows grow along the ground. He walked around the cliff and found that he could clamber up it to a ledge that would afford him a good view of the surrounding land. He had to stop to rest many times, and the shadows continued to grow, striping the land now. Black, white, black… On the ledge he rested once more, and then began studying the land, sorry that he hadn’t waited until the following day when there would be no shadows, knowing also that he wouldn’t have been able to climb the cliff under the hot sun. He stared until his eyes ached, and then he saw it.

It was impossible that it could have survived the landing, but it was there. The boat was badly damaged. Trace was several miles away from the robot at work on the craft, but he could see dents and a long gash in the side of the lifeboat. He could see the tools in the robot’s waldoes.

Had he signalled to it? He didn’t think so. But somehow it sensed his watching presence, from the three or four miles distance. It turned the dome of its head. The lowering sun reflected on the metal as it turned, flashed green from one of the slits. The robot and the man faced one another for several seconds, too far apart for either to hurt the other, and the robot flicked off. Then the dinghy vanished. Trace remained for another moment, too stunned to move, and he felt the icy touch of fear. He slipped, slid, and fell back down the cliff the way he had gone up it, and raced back to the dinghy.

It’s there, Dunc! It knows we are here! It blinked out, Duncan! Just like that, it blinked out. The dinghy too. There, and then gone. It’s got something new, a shield to hide behind. We have to get out of here, Dunc, before it comes.

He took off, straight up, and headed north, the start of his long flight. He flew less than a hundred miles, afraid for Duncan’s sake to continue longer. When he landed the wind was high, getting higher.

It’s a hellhole, Duncan. Sand and heat and now wind storms. And the robot. We’ll have to keep out of its path, try to find a way to get close enough to it to finish it off. Damn, I wish we had some artillery…

Duncan didn’t answer him, and he bathed the unconscious man again. This time Duncan didn’t rouse at the touch of the cool water. The wind increased and the air inside the craft chilled with the coming of night. Duncan didn’t stir.

It’s a logic box, that’s all. A logic box. But we don’t know what’s been programmed into it. We’ll have to take it for granted that its first order of business will be to kill us. It has strong self-preservation goals, and we are a threat to its being. So we’ll have to assume that we’ve become the hunted now. How about that, Duncan? After hunting it for three months, now we’ve found it, and it’s the hunter. Duncan?

Only the wind answered him. The wind died and the night was eerily quiet, then the wind was born again, and with its next interlude of quiet the sun was there. Trace continued to talk to Duncan throughout the night. Several times, when the fever rose, he bathed him. Duncan died when the sun was directly overhead and there were no shadows on the ground.

Numbly Trace carried him from the ship to the edge of the desert, half a mile away, and there he scooped out a shallow grave and placed Duncan in it. He covered him with sand and built a cairn of rocks over the grave, and as he made his way back to the dinghy, a laser touched the grave, melted the rocks, glazed the sand around the rocks, found Duncan and played over his body until it no longer existed. Trace was turning for a last look before stepping around a granite slab, when he saw the rising puff of steam and smoke, and the cherry glow of rocks. The cherry trail followed his path, reddening rocks and sand as it passed over them. Trace darted behind the granite and raced to his lifeboat. His fingers touched the controls in flashing movements, and his eyes saw the indicators and dials without conscious thought. He kept the boat low, close to the ground, dodging in and out of the bases of the cliffs and chimneys of rock, and after a mile, he raised the nose of the craft and headed north again.

The robot had taken eighteen hours to cross the ninety miles he had put between them. Its laser had reached out two miles to disintegrate Duncan. It had registered on his radiation detector at a distance of four miles. It had turned from its purpose of repairing the dinghy to that of destroying the men who had followed it to the planet.

I’ll learn it, Duncan. I know it can’t get close enough to fire at me before the alarm will be triggered. I’ll find out what makes it tick, and I’ll beat it yet. It’ll pay, Dunc. I promise you, it’ll pay…

But that had been three weeks ago, and there had been too many cliffs and basalt ledges since then. They all looked alike: dark, defiant, braving the wind and the sands that blasted and crumbled them inch by inch into oblivion. That one? Or that? This end of the mountain range was mostly basalt and grey granite, the very core of the mountains. There was a pattern below him, and he made a turn, studying it closer. A drop-off, deeper than the surrounding land, several hundred feet deeper, encircled by cliffs. It might afford more protection from the flying rocks when the wind came. He studied it, lower yet, and saw that there were ways in and out of the sheltered valley, among the rocks that ringed it. The other dinghy had to be within an area with a ten-mile diameter. Later when the shadows stretched out the other way, from west to east, he would look for the basalt cliff again. The morning shadows changed it, throwing into relief different parts of it, parts that he hadn’t been able to see the other time, hiding those places that he might have been able to recognise. A circle with a ten-mile diameter… He would find the dinghy. He landed in the sheltered valley after one last look at the land above the depression.

This time his base was a sunken area of a thousand yards long and nearly that wide. The heavy stones formed towers and stilleto-like peaks that surrounded the valley in an irregular circle, with steep drop-offs and vertical approaches. The inside walls were very smooth. Trace landed the dinghy on the sheltered side of a pale grey granite boulder that was egg-shaped, with gleaming bands of white quartzite ringing it. It looked like the spring eggs some of the colonists decorated before the growing season of each year. For a moment the vision of fields clad in greenery swam before his eyes, but it was gone quickly.

Resting for a few moments before going outside to inspect his newest base, he remembered the cultivated lands of Mellic. The gentle land, Lar had called it. Her people loved the land and its yield, and they treated it with tenderness and understanding. It had been the burning of the land itself that made them give in to the invaders, not their own deaths, or the thought of continuing the war into an indefinite future, but the spoliation of the land itself. Lar had tried to explain it to him that first time when he had been recuperating:

“We are part of the land, we belong to it, not it to us. The demonstration area, twenty-five miles square, all burned down to the bedrock, mortally wounded by your beams, it will never live again. If we choose to die defending ourselves, that is our right, but the land? It is not ours to decide. The land is God’s, and we must not let that which is His be killed.”

“This god of yours, why doesn’t he intervene in your behalf?”

“The affairs of man are not His affairs. Why should they be? Man must find his own way on the lands he is given. When we pray for help, it is not to our God that we address such prayers.”

“Who else will answer them?”

“There are those who answer such prayers. You will meet them…”

He had called her superstitious and ignorant, and she had smiled at his words. In the end, he knew that she had been neither. The Outsiders had answered the prayers of her people.

Another time she had said of them, “Some say they were the original settlers of the whole galaxy, that they left colonies on each world where no intelligent race dwelled. I don’t know if that is true.”

Trace stirred after several minutes of quiet rest. The fever would return, he knew, and with it the hours of apathy. He had too much to do to give in to apathy when he was able to be up getting things done. He had too much to do to waste precious hours thinking of a girl he had seen only for three brief periods in his life, a girl who was alien, moreover, with alien ways and alien gods.

You think of them as animals, humanoid sometimes, but not like us! They are not like us, not people at all. Never forget that.

Yes, sir, Captain Tracy.

You can’t afford to hate them, or like them, or even think of them at all. You think of the land and the mines and the minerals and drugs, and whatever else is there that the World Group needs. If they cooperate, fine, no one gets hurt. If they don’t… We take the honey from the bees, and the wool from sheep, and the silk from spiders. We take the things we need from the animals that make those things possible.

Yes, sir, Captain Tracy!

He found the key to the food and water storage unit, and brought out the tubes of food, and the water bag. He didn’t want to eat. The food was repulsive, hated by all the fleet. He ate only half a tube of a mixture of meat and vegetable concentrate, and then took his time over the small allowance of water. The sun was rising higher, a white glare of sky that marched over the still land. He thought about the robot on its way south, rolling under the white sky, and he wondered where it had been since he had seen it in Dr. Vianti’s laboratory. Five years ago the war with Mellic had started and ended; five years ago he had seen the robot on Ramses, and since then he had seen other battles, other places. Where had it been? Who had perfected it after the army took it away from the crazy little Dr. Vianti?