The Killer Thing

by Kate Wilhelm

  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?

  Twelve

  There was no time. There was only now, and all else was data to be scanned indiscriminately with no temporal reference, as before and after. There was no future to be considered, anticipated, or feared. There was no future. Only the ever present now. It was going no place, to do nothing. It had no directive other than to maintain itself. It had no need for food, for heat, for radiation shielding. It had discarded those things from the fleet ship that was still accelerating at maximum speed away from Venus and the Solar System. Behind it in space a trail of unnecessary items marked its path: seats, beds, cloth
ing, pressure suits, food, everything that was not stored away within something else, everything that could be picked up and taken to the airlock to be released.

  It scanned: “…survival itself might depend on your being able to dismantle any part of the ship and reassemble it.” A bit of data, picked up and recorded from a drill several miles away from the laboratory. Survival meant understanding the ship, being able to break it down and rebuild it. It began breaking it down, first the control board itself, studying the wiring, tracing circuits, deciphering coded information. It rebuilt the control board and moved on to the analogue computer. It learned to feed it questions, learned the range of its ability to answer. It moved on to the construction of the ship itself, the walls, floor, furnishings…

  There was no time. There was endless time. There was time enough to work through the ship, inch by inch, and learn each part, break down each part and rebuild it. After this was done, it scanned again: “You have to be able to go into warp sector immediately with no warning. Nothing can touch you in warp. It could mean the difference between a hit and a miss.”

  Survival meant learning about warp. It returned to the computer and fed more questions into it, and it learned about warp. The ship had been in space for months, perhaps longer, long enough to warp. It fed the information back to the computer and fixed a course, and went into warp sector. It didn’t matter where it came out because it had nowhere to go. It warped again, and still again, learning about warp sectors.

  The ship got dangerously radioactive; a human would have died almost immediately in it. The robot didn’t mind; it would not be hurt by radiation. It learned about the atomic drive. It decontaminated the ship as much as the ship could be decontaminated.

  With the conclusion of each lesson, overheard on Venus, recorded faithfully, it learned more about the ship and how to operate and navigate it. There were gaps in its education, classes had been held beyond its range of hearing. It knew nothing about refuelling. It knew nothing about the shield that would envelop the ship, absorb energy, or deflect it away at right angles. It came across references to these and other matters about which it knew nothing, and found them incomprehensible, it could only deduce from premises programmed into it, and there were pieces of data that had not been given it.

  It came across the translation computer and this was within its range of capabilities. It was a self-modifying communications network. It learned the intricate web of references and cross references, and transferred them to itself, and modified one whole circuit in order to translate data from spoken language to binary digital code. With the new understanding of language it again scanned its own chemical and electronic storage units, and everything that had been said within range of its audio receptors became clear to it. Still it had no primary order to carry out; it could initiate no action other than that which became necessary in order to continue to function. It passed within range of planetary systems and kept going.

  Only after enough time had elapsed for its fuel to become nearly exhausted did it consider landing. Scanning taught it that a ship is helpless without fuel, that to be in space without fuel is to die. It could not permit its own destruction. It had to land on a planet. Its third set of waldoes with the flexible, digit-like endings touched the board of the computer lightly, dancing over the keys, feeding to it the information concerning spatial and temporal co-ordinates, and velocity, and it answered with a spatial location and took over the guidance of the ship in order to land it on the planet of Tensor. The landing would be made in three Earth weeks. The robot did not move again in the minutes, or days, or eternity that the landing took. For it there were no intervals between events, and the next event of which it was aware was that of landing.

  On Tensor, in a cave half-way up a heavily wooded hill, the rebel band led by Trol Han esTol watched the descent with troubled faces.

  “Why isn’t it firing at us?” one of them asked, a lightly bearded youth clad in leather shorts. His feet were bound in the same dark-stained leather which wound up his legs to his knees. He was bare above the waist, his chest heavy and already downy.

  One of the older men shushed him, and they were all silent as they continued to watch. The ship landed fifteen miles from them, on the edge of a plain backed up by the deep woods. Minutes later the radio clicked and hummed and the radio engineer tuned it. The observer in the lower reaches of the wood was reporting.

  “No one has emerged as yet,” the metallic voice said. “It maintained a radio silence throughout the descent. Landing normal.”

  Trol motioned for the radio engineer to acknowledge and stalked away into the recesses of the cave where his council was waiting for his decision concerning the strange ship, and the planned attack on the WG outpost on the far side of the meadow, over a hundred miles to the west.

  Trol was an immense man, thick-chested, heavily-muscled, as were most of his people, with shocks of crisp, curling hair tumbling about his face like golden corn husks. His body was covered with the golden hair, and he had a luxurious, flamboyant beard. From the forest of golden hair his eyes sparkled a deep blue. He too wore the brown leggings and shoes, and the shorts. When he entered the council room, deep in the cave, the other members stood to greet him with looks of inquiry.

  “It has landed,” he said simply, motioning for them to be seated. There were fifty-seven men in the room. He took his place at the head of a table where six other men were already sitting down again. The other men crouched, or sat, on the floor. The room was very warm. It had started as a natural cave chamber, and then had been cut out more and more during the past two years since the rebels had chosen it for their headquarters. On the high ceiling, seventy feet above them, a fairy garden of crystals gleamed, snowy helectites curved gracefully, and at the far end of the room where the cave was still active, the beginnings of a drapery of rosy travertine showed as a scroll-like edging of no more than two inches, translucent so that the light coming through it was tinged with red-gold. The walls of the cavern had been carved away on two sides to enlarge the chamber, but the other two sides were covered with gypsum flower formations that picked up and reflected the flickering lights like prisms. The room was lighted with lamps burning a tallow-like organic substance. The flames were steady except for an occasional flicker, and they were white, with blue umbras.

  “Our watchers will keep us informed about the ship,” Trol said, his voice quiet, but carrying to every corner of the room. “If, as we suspect, it is a crippled fleet ship, it may be that there are no live men within it, in which case we simply will take it. If there are men, we must capture them for interrogation. It seems very unlikely that there are men inside. If we were to be attacked, there would be ground transports, or aircraft. That is a deep space fleet ship. They wouldn’t use it for a ground attack.”

  He paused, but there were no questions as yet. “Let the debate continue, then,” he said and sat down. He looked at the speaker who had been interrupted by the appearance of the fleet ship. Fedo elArm was debating the position that the rebels should wait for the appearance of the Outsiders, and enlist their aid in the struggle against the World Group armies. It was not a popular position, but perhaps a wise one. Trol’s face showed nothing as he watched and listened to the speaker, but he was hearing only a fraction of the words that were ringing out in the cavern, echoing against the rock walls with emotion and force. The decision would rest on him; everyone knew that. His decision would not be questioned once made. He glanced at the other six men at the long table, his personal advisers, each showing a face as impassive as his own, each beset by the same doubts.

  He listened for a moment to Fedo. “…unless provoked. Of course, it isn’t easy, or comfortable, to see their soldiers strutting down our streets, taking our women, our material possessions, but the alternative is planet-wide slaughter…”

  Trol turned his thoughts inward again. It had been slaughter in the beginning, when the World Group forces made their appearance and demanded landing space. The T
ensor scientists had been delighted; the politicians wary. The politicians had been right in this instance. The demand for land was met; the WG people demanded taxes and trade privileges, and finally the deportation of teachers, scientists, leaders in every field, and the right to establish World Group schools. War flared, briefly, bloodily, and the peace that followed was not a real peace, but a lull during which the rebels had grouped themselves in the mountains, steeling themselves against the reports of reprisals.

  Elt al Trin rose to speak then. “I remind you, gentlemen, of the parable of the ashtris and the lantric. The lantric in his wanderings came into the valley where the ashtris had lived peacefully since time immemorial. The lantric blundered into their nests, killing great numbers of them, and the ashtris held a meeting. What should we do? they cried. Look at how big the lantric is. We cannot hope to subdue an enemy so powerful. Let us move away until he tires of this valley and leaves it again. Even as they spoke thus, the lantric stepped on the nursery and destroyed thousands of their young, and then on the passageways that led to the communal dwellings, so that many thousands more were trapped and doomed to die from suffocation. One of the ashtris rose then and shouted, Let us all together meet this lantric. We number millions to his one. That is all that we have to fight with, our vast numbers. So they gathered, and in the dawn they swarmed over the lantric, blinding him with their bodies, piercing his tough skin with their pincers, chewing their way into his heart, and by the dusk the lantric lay dead among them.”