Killdozer!

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “That’s right.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then the machine murdered him.”

  Chub, with remarkable patience, asked, “What did you mean the day Peebles was killed when you said that something had queered the Seven up there on the mesa?”

  Tom said furiously, “I meant what I said. You guys are set to crucify me for this and I can’t stop you. Well, listen. Something’s got into that Seven. I don’t know what it is and I don’t think I ever will know. I thought that after she smashed herself up that it was finished with. I had an idea that when we had her torn down and helpless we should have left her that way. I was dead right but it’s too late now. She’s killed Rivera and she’s killed Dennis and she sure had something to do with killing Peebles. And my idea is that she won’t stop as long as there’s a human being alive on this island.”

  “Whaddaya know!” said Chub.

  “Sure, Tom sure,” said Kelly quietly. “That tractor is out to get us. But don’t worry; we’ll catch it and tear it down. Just don’t you worry about it any more; it’ll be all right.”

  “That’s right, Tom,” said Harris. “You just take it easy around camp for a couple of days till you feel better. Chub and the rest of us will handle things for you. You had too much sun.”

  “You’re a swell bunch of fellows,” gritted Tom, with the deepest sarcasm. “You want to live,” he shouted, “git out there and throw that maverick bulldozer!”

  “That maverick bulldozer is at the bottom of the swamp where you put it,” growled Chub. His head lowered and he started to move in. “Sure we want to live. The best way to do that is to put you where you can’t kill anybody else. Get him!”

  He leaped. Tom straightened him with his left and crossed with his right. Chub went down, tripping Harris. Al Knowles scuttled to a toolbox and dipped out a fourteen-inch crescent wrench. He circled around, keeping out of trouble, trying to look useful. Tom loosened a haymaker at Kelly, whose head seemed to withdraw like a turtle’s; it whistled over, throwing Tom badly off balance. Harris, still on his knees, tackled Tom’s legs; Chub hit him in the small of the back with a meaty shoulder, and Tom went flat on his face. Al Knowles, holding the wrench in both hands, swept it up and back like a baseball bat; at the top of its swing Kelly reached over, snatched it out of his hands and tapped Tom delicately behind the ear with it. Tom went limp.

  It was late, but nobody seemed to feel like sleeping. They sat around the pressure lantern, talking idly. Chub and Kelly played an inconsequential game of casino, forgetting to pick up their points; Harris paced up and down like a man in a cell, and Al Knowles was squinched up close to the light, his eyes wide and watching, watching—

  “I need a drink,” said Harris. “Tens,” said one of the casino players.

  Al Knowles said, “We shoulda killed him. We oughta kill him now.”

  “There’s been too much killin’ already,” said Chub. “Shut up, you.” And to Kelly, “With big casino,” sweeping up cards.

  Kelly caught his wrist and grinned. “Big casino’s ten of diamonds, not the ten of hearts. Remember?”

  “Oh.”

  “How long before the blacktopping crew will be here?” quavered Al Knowles.

  “Twelve days,” said Harris. “And they better bring some likker.”

  “Hey, you guys.”

  They fell silent.

  “Hey!”

  “It’s Tom,” said Kelly. “Building sixes, Chub.”

  “I’m gonna go kick his ribs in,” said Knowles, not moving.

  “I heard that,” said the voice from the darkness. “If I wasn’t hogtied—”

  “We know what you’d do,” said Chub. “How much proof do you think we need?”

  “Chub, you don’t have to do any more to him!” It was Kelly, flinging his cards down and getting up. “Tom, you want water?”

  “Yes.”

  “Siddown, siddown,” said Chub.

  “Let him lay there and bleed,” Al Knowles said.

  “Nuts!” Kelly went and filled a cup and brought it to Tom. The big Georgian was tied thoroughly, wrists together, taut rope between elbow and elbow behind his back, so that his hands were immovable over his solar plexus. His knees and ankles were bound as well, although Knowles’ little idea of a short rope between ankles and throat hadn’t been used.

  “Thanks, Kelly.” Tom drank greedily, Kelly holding his head. “Goes good.” He drank more. “What hit me?”

  “One of the boys. ’bout the time you said the cat was haunted.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Tom rolled his head and blinked with pain.

  “Any sense asking you if you blame us?”

  “Kelly, does somebody else have to get killed before you guys wake up?”

  “None of us figure there will be any more killin’—now.”

  The rest of the men drifted up. “He willing to talk sense?” Chub wanted to know.

  Al Knowles laughed, “Hyuk! hyuk! Don’t he look dangerous now.”

  Harris said suddenly, “Al, I’m gonna hafta tape your mouth with the skin off your neck.”

  “Am I the kind of guy that makes up ghost stories?”

  “Never have that I know of, Tom.” Harris kneeled down beside him. “Never killed anyone before, either.”

  “Oh, get away from me. Get away,” said Tom tiredly.

  “Get up and make us,” jeered Al.

  Harris got up and backhanded him across the mouth. Al squeaked, took three steps backward and tripped over a drum of grease. “I told you,” said Harris almost plaintively. “I told you, Al.”

  Tom stopped the bumble of comment. “Shut up!” he hissed. “SHUT UP!” he roared.

  They shut.

  “Chub,” said Tom, rapidly, evenly. “What did you say I did with that Seven?”

  “Buried it in the swamp.”

  “Yeh. Listen.”

  “Listen at what?”

  “Be quiet and listen!”

  So they listened. It was another still, windless night, with a thin crescent of moon showing nothing true in the black and muffled silver landscape. The smallest whisper of surf drifted up from the beach, and from far off to the right, where the swamp was, a scandalized frog croaked protest at the manhandling of his mudhole. But the sound that crept down, freezing their bones, came from the bluff behind their camp.

  It was the unmistakable staccato of a starting engine.

  “The Seven!”

  “ ’At’s right, Chub,” said Tom.

  ‘Wh-who’s crankin’ her up?”

  “Are we all here?”

  “All but Peebles and Dennis and Rivera,” said Tom.

  “It’s Dennis’ ghost,” moaned Al.

  Chub snapped, “Shut up, lamebrain.”

  “She’s shifted to Diesel,” said Kelly, listening.

  “She’ll be here in a minute,” said Tom. “Y’know, fellas, we can’t all be crazy, but you’re about to have a time convincin’ yourself of it.”

  “You like this, doncha?”

  “Some ways. Rivera used to call that machine Daisy Etta, ’Cause she’s de siete in Spig. Daisy Etta, she wants her a man.”

  “Tom,” said Harris. “I wish you’d stop that chatterin’. You make me nervous.”

  “I got to do somethin’. I can’t run,” Tom drawled.

  “We’re going to have a look,” said Chub. “If there’s nobody on that cat, we’ll turn you loose.”

  “Mighty white of you. Reckon you’ll get back before she does?”

  “We’ll get back. Harris, come with me. We’ll get one of the pan tractors. They can outrun a Seven. Kelly, take Al and get the other one.”

  “Dennis’ machine has a flat tire on the pan,” said Al’s quivering voice.

  “Pull the pin and cut the cables, then! Git!” Kelly and Al Knowles ran off.

  “Good huntin’, Chub.”

  Chub went to him, bent over. “I think I’m goin’ to have to apologize to you, Tom.”

  “No you ain
’t. I’d a done the same. Get along now, if you think you got to. But hurry back,”

  “I got to. An’ I’ll hurry back.”

  Harris said, “Don’t go ’way, boy.” Tom returned the grin, and they were gone. But they didn’t hurry back. They didn’t come back at all.

  It was Kelly who came pounding back, with Al Knowles on his heels, a half hour later. “Al—gimme your knife.”

  He went to work on the ropes. His face was drawn.

  “I could see some of it,” whispered Tom. “Chub and Harris?”

  Kelly nodded. “There wasn’t nobody on the Seven like you said.” He said it as if there was nothing else in his mind, as if the most rigid self-control was keeping him from saying it over and over.

  “I could see the lights,” said Tom. “A tractor angling up the hill. Pretty soon another, crossing it, lighting up the whole slope.”

  “We heard it idling up there somewhere,” Kelly said. “Olive-drab paint—couldn’t see it.”

  “I saw the pan tractor turn over—oh, four, five times down the hill. It stopped, lights still burning. Then something hit it and rolled it again. That sure blacked it out. What turned it over first?”

  “The Seven. Hanging up there just at the brow of the bluff. Waited until Chub and Harris were about to pass, sixty, seventy feet below. Tipped over the edge and rolled down on them with her clutches on. Must’ve been going thirty miles an hour when she hit. Broadside. They never had a chance. Followed the pan as it rolled down the hill and when it stopped booted it again.”

  “Want me to rub yo’ ankles?” asked Al.

  “You! Get outa my sight!”

  “Aw, Tom—” whimpered Al.

  “Skip it, Tom,” said Kelly. “There ain’t enough of us left to carry on that way. Al, you mind your manners from here on out, hear?”

  “Ah jes’ wanted to tell y’all. I knew you weren’t lyin’ ’bout Dennis, Tom, if only I’d stopped to think. I recollect when Dennis said he’d take that tractuh out … ’membah, Kelly?… He went an’ got the crank and walked around to th’ side of th’ machine and stuck it in th’ hole. It was barely in theah befo’ the startin’ engine kicked off. “Whadda ya know!” he says t’me. “She started by herse’f! I nevah pulled that handle!” And I said, “She sho’ rarin’ to go!’ ”

  “You pick a fine time to ‘recollec’ something,” gritted Tom. “C’mon—let’s get out of here.”

  “Where to?”

  “What do you know that a Seven can’t move or get up on?”

  “That’s a large order. A big rock, maybe.”

  “Ain’t nothing that big around here,” said Tom.

  Kelly thought a minute, then snapped his fingers. “Up on the top of my last cut with the shovel,” he said. “It’s fourteen feet if it’s an inch. I was pullin’ out small rock an’ topsoil, and Chub told me to drop back and dip out marl from a pocket there. I sumped in back of the original cut and took out a whole mess o’ marl. That left a big neck of earth sticking thirty feet or so out of the cliff. The narrowest part is only about four feet wide. If Daisy Etta tries to get us from the top, she’ll straddle the neck and hang herself. If she tries to get us from below, she can’t get traction to climb; it’s too loose and too steep.”

  “And what happens if she builds herself a ramp?”

  “We’ll be gone from there.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Al agitated for the choice of a Dumptor because of its speed, but was howled down. Tom wanted something that could not get a flat tire and that would need something really powerful to turn it over. They took the two-cycle pan tractor with the bulldozer blade that had been Dennis’ machine and crept out into the darkness.

  It was nearly six hours later that Daisy Etta came and woke them up. Night was receding before a paleness in the east, and a fresh ocean breeze had sprung up. Kelly had taken the first lookout and Al the second, letting Tom rest the night out. And Tom was far too tired to argue the arrangement. Al had immediately fallen asleep on his watch, but fear had such a sure, cold hold on his vitals that the first faint growl of the big Diesel engine snapped him erect. He tottered on the edge of the tall neck of earth that they slept on and squeaked as he scrabbled to get his balance.

  “What’s giving?” asked Kelly, instantly wide awake.

  “It’s coming,” blubbered Al. “Oh my, oh my—”

  Kelly stood up and stared into the fresh, dark dawn. The motor boomed hollowly, in a peculiar way heard twice at the same time as it was thrown to them and echoed back by the bluffs under and around them.

  “It’s coming and what are we goin’ to do?” chanted Al. “What is going to happen?”

  “My head is going to fall off,” said Tom sleepily. He rolled to a sitting position, holding the brutalized member between his hands. “If that egg behind my ear hatches, it’ll come out a full-sized jack-hammer.” He looked at Kelly. “Where is she?”

  “Don’t rightly know,” said Kelly. “Somewhere down around the camp.”

  “Probably pickin’ up our scent.”

  “Figure it can do that?”

  “I figure it can do anything,” said Tom. “Al, stop your moanin’.”

  The sun slipped its scarlet edge into the thin slot between sea and sky, and rosy light gave each rock and tree a shape and a shadow. Kelly’s gaze swept back and forth, back and forth, until, minutes later, he saw movement.

  “There she is!”

  “Where?”

  “Down by the grease rack.”

  Tom rose and stared. “What’s she doin’?”

  After an interval Kelly said, “She’s workin’. Diggin’ a swale in front of the fuel drums.”

  “You don’t say. Don’t tell me she’s goin’ to give herself a grease job.”

  “She don’t need it. She was completely greased and new oil put in the crankcase after we set her up. But she might need fuel.”

  “Not more’n half a tank.”

  “Well, maybe she figures she’s got a lot of work to do today.” As Kelly said this Al began to blubber. They ignored him.

  The fuel drums were piled in a pyramid at the edge of the camp, in forty-four-gallon drums piled on their sides. The Seven was moving back and forth in front of them, close up, making pass after pass, gouging earth up and wasting it out past the pile. She soon had a huge pit scooped out, about fourteen feet wide, six feet deep and thirty feet long, right at the very edge of the pile of drums.

  “What you reckon she’s playin’ at?”

  “Search me. She seems to want fuel, but I don’t … look at that! She stopped in the hole;… turnin’ … smashing the top corner of the moldboard into one of the drums on the bottom!’

  Tom scraped the stubble on his jaw with his nails. “An’ you wonder how much that critter can do! Why, she’s got the whole thing figured out. She knows if she tried to punch a hole in a fuel drum that she’d only kick it around. If she did knock a hole in it, how’s she going to lift it? She’s not equipped to handle hose, so … see? Look at her now! She just get herself lower than the bottom drum on the pile, and punches a hole. She can do that then, with the whole weight of the pile holding it down. Then she backs her tank under the stream of fuel runnin’ out!”

  “How’d she get the cap off?”

  Tom snorted and told them how the radiator cap had come off its hinges as he vaulted over the hood the day Rivera was hurt.

  “You know,” he said after a moment’s thought, “if she knew as much then as she does now, I’d be snoozin’ beside Rivera and Peebles. She just didn’t know her way around then. She run herself like she’d never run before. She’s learned plenty since.”

  “She has,” said Kelly, “and here’s where she uses it on us. She’s headed this way.”

  She was. Straight out across the roughed-out runway she came, grinding along over the dew-sprinkled earth, yesterday’s dust swirling up from under her tracks. Crossing the shoulder line, she took the tougher ground skillfully, angling up over the o
ccasional swags in the earth, by-passing stones, riding free and fast and easily. It was the first time Tom had actually seen her clearly running without an operator, and his flesh crept as he watched. The machine was unnatural, her outline somehow unreal and dreamlike purely through the lack of the small silhouette of a man in the saddle. She looked hulked, compact, dangerous.

  “What are we gonna do?” wailed Al Knowles.

  “We’re gonna sit and wait,” said Kelly, “and you’re gonna shut your trap. We won’t know for five minutes yet whether she’s going to go after us from down below or from up here.”

  “If you want to leave,” said Tom gently, “go right ahead.” Al sat down.

  Kelly looked ruminatively down at his beloved power shovel, sitting squat and unlovely in the cut below them and away to their right. “How do you reckon she’d stand up against the dipper stick?”

  “If it ever came to a rough-and-tumble,” said Tom, “I’d say it would be just too bad for Daisy Etta. But she wouldn’t fight. There’s no way you could get the shovel within punchin’ range; Daisy’d just stand there and laugh at you.”

  “I can’t see her now,” whined Al.

  Tom looked. “She’s taken the bluff. She’s going to try it from up here. I move we sit tight and see if she’s foolish enough to try to walk out here over that narrow neck. If she does, she’ll drop on her belly with one truck on each side. Probably turn herself over trying to dig out.”

  The wait then was interminable. Back over the hill they could hear the laboring motor; twice they heard the machine stop momentarily to shift gears. Once they looked at each other hopefully as the sound rose to a series of bellowing roars, as if she were backing and filling; then they realized that she was trying to take some particularly steep part of the bank and having trouble getting traction. But she made it; the motor revved up as she made the brow of the hill, and she shifted into fourth gear and came lumbering out into the open. She lurched up to the edge of the cut, stopped, throttled down, dropped her blade on the ground and stood there idling. Al Knowles backed away to the very edge of the tongue of earth they stood on, his eyes practically on stalks.

  “O.K.—put up or shut up,” Kelly called across harshly.