The Killer Thing Page 13

  There was fuel in the base. They would teach it about fuels and then it would replenish the supply in its ship. It scanned: “A ship is useless without a full supply of fuel at all times.” It would wait until they taught it about fuel.

  Luo took the robot inside the base with him and placed it in a storeroom where he left it. He was needed, as were all the men, for the task of cleaning out the base, transporting everything they could see back to the mountain cave. Trol was busy with the records and for the first time came to realise what the reinforcements were that the outpost had been expecting.

  “It’s one of those energy screens that they used on their ships,” he said to Luo, showing him the orders and specifications. His blue eyes blazed. “With such a screen, and the robot, we could drive all of them off Tensor before they could even know what hit them!”

  “We’d have to re-establish contact, keep up the illusion that all is well…”

  “We can say a lightning storm struck…”

  In the storeroom the robot stood unmoving. The compound was five miles long, four miles wide; it could record everything taking place within the walls. It became aware of the properties of atomic engines, of fuel conversion, using almost any material at hand. It tested its knowledge about the enemy and found that it had no reference as to how the enemy differed from other men. It could not distinguish the enemy by itself. It scanned furiously seeking a clue to the identification of the enemy. The enemy was that which wanted to destroy it. Many men tried to destroy it. Many men were the enemy. Which ones? It had no data that allowed it to group them. It must wait. There was no time between events, merely the recording that never ceased while there was anything to be recorded.

  There was no time between events. Luo returned with equipment. A plane had arrived, the enemy from the plane had been destroyed, things had been stored, were being taken now to the mountain cave. Luo had more of the same equipment. The robot recorded; its receptors were aware of things being done to it. Each receptor added its bit of information and a picture emerged. Some of its circuits were being dismantled. The circuit to the laser pulsed; the feedback probed as it scanned and decided this was not a threat. Luo touched a button and energy flowed through the new equipment; it could sense the drain. One pair of waldoes hung uselessly, the circuit pre-empted; the second pair had a weakened flow of energy, and the third, the flex-able digits, had been tampered with so that the energy it would have required in order to activate them was inaccessible, shorted out.

  Luo stepped back and touched an auxiliary button control; the screen went off. “It can be activated from five miles away with this control, as it is now. That distance can be increased.”

  Trol stared at the small box in Luo’s hand and reached for it. “Let me try,” he said, his voice steadier than he felt. He touched the button and again the robot was blurred in outline by an envelope that seemed to flow about it, emanating from the dome on top of it, flowing out and downward like a fountain of shimmery light. The robot didn’t move. The screen was more like a change in lighting than anything else, as if the robot were being spotlighted with a beam that stayed inches away from its frame and was almost too strong to look at. “You’re sure that nothing can penetrate the screen?”

  “No high energy impact will penetrate. Don’t!” Trol had reached out his hand, and Luo snatched it back. “That is energy,” he said. “It would burn like a laser…”

  Trol switched the screen off. “We’ll have a test tomorrow,” he said. “If it is what you say it is, we have the perfect weapon in this monster. Can it fire its weapons through the screen?”

  Luo nodded. “I don’t understand most of it yet,” he said. “But I will before I’m done. I have all their books… ” He turned his attention back to the robot and pointed to the button. “I’ll programme it to turn it on and off on command. I would prefer that we do not use it until I have more understanding of how it works, what its limitations are, why it can be fired through from that side, but not penetrated from the outside…”

  Trol nodded. “It will take time for us to plan the next attack. Come, it’s time for dinner.”

  It waited in the timeless period until the camp was silent, and then it repaired itself, as Dr. Vianti had programmed it to do. The new equipment took much space, and many circuits. It studied them thoroughly, and it scanned: “The learning capacity is the range of effective internal rearrangement, and as such can be measured by the number and the kinds of its uncommitted resources… needn’t be idle circuits, but reassignable from present functions…” It studied its circuits to see which would be reassigned. It recombined several circuits that had been disconnected; it processed electronic data into the chemical storage units. It redirected the energy flow to the screen controls so that it passed through the amplifier that also served the laser. When it turned on the screen hours after being left by Luo and Trol, there was a moment of audible power flow, then there was nothing. Spinning vortices of energy enveloped the robot. It was invisible behind this shield of energy.

  With the screen on, it searched for the cause of the drain from its other circuits, and turning off the power once more, it again manipulated the circuits so that when it tested again, there was no weakness, no loss of other abilities. Satisfied that it had repaired all the damage done by Luo, it stood unmoving, and waited.

  With the change of its circuits, it had taken the control from the box carried by Luo. The next day when Luo touched the button to activate the screen, the robot also released a spurt of energy, and the screen blinked on. Luo gasped. He touched his button and the screen went off. Luo left the room, carefully locking it on the outside. He went directly to Trol’s office.

  “I am afraid of it,” Luo said simply. “I did not modify the screen. You saw. Yet today it is changed.”

  “You say it can become invisible?” Trol’s vivid blue eyes closed and he was silent for a moment. “I want to see for myself.”

  They returned and again Luo touched the button. The robot turned on the screen and blinked out of sight. “Do you know how that happened?” Trol asked.

  Luo shook his head. “I told you that I understand the original screen only imperfectly, and this not at all.” As he talked his finger brushed the button repeatedly, without depressing it. He let it touch harder, enough to turn the screen off. It failed to respond. He fought a surge of fear and pushed hard on the button. The screen did go off that time, but he knew it should have before.

  “Don’t say anything in World Group language,” he said softly. “Come away from it. I must think. It has taken over the function of the control box.”

  Trol blinked rapidly and the two men backed from the room. “Is it dangerous?” Trol asked, outside the building. Luo silenced him, warningly, and in silence they walked back to the office Trol had taken over.

  “We can’t use it,” Luo said then, keeping his voice low, when the panicky feeling within him would have forced it up high and shrill. “You saw how efficiently it attacked the camp. Think what it would be like with invisibility also!”

  Trol nodded. “But first we use it to finish the job,” he said after a moment. “It still obeys you. It tried to cooperate with the control box, didn’t it?”

  “Don’t you see?” Luo said. “It understands! It knew the meaning of the box, and the importance of keeping us ignorant of its potentials. What else does it understand?” He drew closer to Trol. “Remember that delay the first time it responded to verbal commands? It was thinking! It understood what we wanted, but it had to decide. God only knows why it decided to obey, but it did decide. It thought it over.”

  Trol turned abruptly. His voice was harsh and ugly. “I don’t care! First we use it as we planned. We say nothing of this to anyone. Later I’ll turn it over to you and you can dispose of it as you wish…”

  It recorded the words, scanned past experiences for comparison. It changed one word in the syllogism it had formed: for many it now constituted all, and its minor premise now read, all
men wanted to destroy it. All men were the enemy. It had groped for a first order purpose and none had been forthcoming since the beginnings of its time. Suddenly there was one. It had the primary purpose of killing men. It had to kill men in order to maintain its own being. It had to maintain its own being because that had been programmed in at the start. It moved to the door and the laser touched he lock gently almost, not even burning the wood, but melting the metal parts away. It pushed the door open with its body as it rolled through it, and half-way through the second room it activated the energy screen and blinked out. The laser touched the men outside the building, touched the men grouped at the end of the street, touched the men who ran to see what was happening. It didn’t burn the buildings themselves. It didn’t reason that burning buildings could kill men also. It touched with the red light those men it found, and with its audio, and its infra-red, it found almost all of them. Then it left the compound, and an hour and fifteen minutes later it was back at its ship. Men were coming after it, coming through the forests, not knowing what it was they chased, only knowing that death had come this way. It turned the red light on, shone it into the forest and the trees burst into flames. When it left the planet it turned the bigger lasers of the ship downward and bigger areas of forest blazed. It changed its course when it sighted a city, and at a distance of fifty miles, it burned the city. When it turned finally to deep space the entire planet was afire here and there; other spaceships were molten masses on the ground, the crews surprised by the suddenness of the attack, unable to take off before the searing beams found them.

  Out in space it warped, and in warp it set the computer to land it at the first planet it reached after it came out of warp. Then it waited. Its course would take it to Tau Ceti III.

  Fourteen

  Trace was swimming upward in a funnel that was a lustreless black, whose sides he could not touch, although he knew they were around him. Looking back through the darkness of it, he knew it swelled larger and larger behind him, that at the base its dimensions were of such enormity that it was virtually boundless, but still was a funnel. It was solid black, but he knew there were colour streaks through it, even though he could not see them: streaks of green, of blue, gold, pink… He was afraid to stop because once stopped he forgot how to proceed again. He was so tired that he knew he would have to stop shortly. Stopping meant tumbling back downwards past the vast spaces he had covered with his strenuous efforts. Ahead of him in the blackness he knew there was the apex; he could sense how the funnel narrowed until it would squeeze and elongate him. He knew it would hurt. He flinched from the anticipated pain, and still struggled upward towards it. He felt that he was as large as the funnel itself, that he stretched endlessly to fill in the space, and that gradually he was being forced into a narrowing cone of consciousness. He lost awareness of the smooth, black sides of the funnel, and it was more frightening not to know its limits than it had been to feel its immensity. The point of light that was the mouth was growing brighter, although no larger. He groaned as he neared it, and he struggled harder to reach it. The stabbing pinpoint of light hurt his eyes. Now he could no longer feel his feet they were so far removed from him, stretching out behind him, out of reach, out of touch. The pain increased, accompanied now by distant cries and shrill howls. He had to get through the hole, get to the other side. The howls grew louder and he felt ashamed of himself for screaming. But he wasn’t screaming. With a final agonising thrust he was through, and the howls were close to his ears.

  He sat up, awake. It was the wind. The morning wind had awakened him. He remembered the wakening dream and shuddered once. He was cold and sick. He thought of the form of his sickness and could give no real diagnosis for it: cold, fever, and fatigue. He never had felt so tired before in his life, tired to the point of dreading movement itself, any movement. He sat for several moments listening to the wind in the valley, with an occasional blast through the chimney, He was tired to death of the wind, and the dinghy, and the sand and rocks, and himself… He stared dully at nothing and knew he was most of all tired of himself.

  His motions were agonisingly slow when he heaved himself from the seat-bed and went to the unit for the food capsules. He shut his eyes and squeezed the tube, trying not to think of the paste that filled his mouth, gagged him. Half a tube was all he could force himself to take. Later, he promised, later, he would eat more. He sipped water, holding it in his mouth as long as he could before allowing it to trickle down his throat. It wasn’t enough to cleanse his mouth of the after-taste of the food compound. He hadn’t looked to see what he was eating; he didn’t look then. Slowly, as if apart from the rest of him, his hand groped for the water bag and lifted it again. He drank again, all the while keeping his eyes tightly closed. He didn’t look to see how much of the water remained.

  He would search for the dinghy while the sun was high. Meanwhile he had to start fortifying the valley. That morning, again in the evening, the next morning. What day was it? He couldn’t decide. It seemed that he had been in the valley for months, or years, that possibly he had been born in the valley and everything else was illusory, phantoms that crossed his mind concerning other places, other times. He knew nothing about any of them; he knew only the valley, the sun, the wind, the sand. The wind was dying then. He had to start. His face was set in hard, unyielding lines when he opened the hatch and started to climb outside. Violently he shook his head and turned back. He had forgotten his suit. His hands were clumsy and awkward when he pulled it on, and immediately he was too hot after having been chilled.

  He remembered that there were two more entrances to his valley: one almost directly opposite from the chimney, one to the left of that. Both were precipitous, but negotiable by the robot. Stepping out into the glare of the world after the dim light of the dinghy made him blink, made his eyes feel on fire. He walked straight across the circular valley floor, stumbling once or twice over rocks that he failed to notice in time, but by the time he got to the other wall, he felt less dull. The passage that led out of the valley was steep, narrow in spots, but never too narrow for the robot to manage. The ground was strewn with rocks banked up the walls at each curve in the passage. The turns were sharp for the most part, with only two sweeping curves among them. He clambered the length of the passage, scrabbling over rocks where they had piled up, wading through sand that lodged against them. By the time he got to the end of the passage he was gasping for air and he collapsed in the shade of the high, steep side of the cleft. After his heaving lungs were satisfied, he continued to sprawl there, too exhausted for further efforts. What sort of rocks had made up this cut, he wondered, gazing at the straight rise of granite on the wall opposite him as he rested. The wall behind him was granite also. A band of sandstone, perhaps? Eroded away now, leaving a clean cut through the granite. A metamorphic rock that had given way to the driving force of sand? A lode of gold, or silver? He laughed aloud and suddenly felt more cheerful. From where he was lying he could not see into the valley at all, and again he realised how fortunate he had been in locating his hideaway. Unless the robot got into the valley itself, he would be relatively safe from it. If he could block the passages that led inside…

  He pulled himself upright again and started through the passageway. Around one of the the sweeping curves he halted and looked around him. If he could construct a windbreak here… He narrowed his eyes, considering the sand being hurled from the valley through the passage. If it were stopped by a windbreak… It would act like a snow fence…

  The passage was nine feet wide at that point. It would take a fence that wide, as thick as necessary to withstand the wind ― three feet, four? ― and at least five feet high, six perhaps… The materials were in the passage itself, in the heaps of rocks banked at each turn. For an instant the thought of the work involved made him hesitate, but he put the thought aside and began building the fence. He didn’t think of anything at all as he pushed and hauled rocks up the slope for the base, rolling them into place, or pushing one
over another, trying to lift as few as possible. Almost automatically he stopped when he had the first course done, and he stepped over it and went up the slopes to the farthest turn where the rocks were banked. Carefully he moved rocks, not wanting to start them rolling down the passage, until he had moved a line of rocks across the passage. He went back down to the next curve and did the same thing, making this one slightly higher than the first, and then he returned to the first fence. He was muttering softly to himself when he resumed work.

  “…not one grain can get out… gold in the sand, boy, or silver… we’ll catch it all right here, piles of gold and silver…”

  He continued to mutter sporadically, and the fence grew, was to his knees, then his thighs. He was working automatically, no longer aware of the heat, or his protesting muscles, or the heaviness of the rocks he staggered with. He was thinking of a rainstorm he had seen on Earth once. On the coast where the buildings rose from the cliffs overlooking the ocean, rose from two to three hundred stories high, with thousands of people in each one. As far as he had been able to see up and down the coast the buildings had obstructed the westward view. He had felt that there was no land behind them, only more buildings, transportation nets, buildings, on into infinity. But the ocean had been the other way, rolling and heavy with mysterious smells and strong tasting winds. Once, he knew, man had considered expanding his world right into the sea itself, but he never had. Instead he had leaped into space, leaving the oceans strange and unknown. The storm had come from the sea, wind, rain, lightning, thunder. He had stood on the balcony of the apartment where he was staying, and he had felt great fear of the storm as it was building, and ever greater fear of it when it was unleashed and struck with fury. It was a primeval fear, inexplicable, unleavened by the knowledge of the strength of the buildings. To his amazement none of the other people in the building appeared to be aware of what was taking place beyond their windows and the safety of their steel and plastic shield. It never stormed on Venus: the rains came with dull ponderous regularity when the days were grey and the air was water-laden, with no touch of the furious energy, of that one Earth storm. He never had witnessed such a storm again. Always in the back of his mind the idea had swum that one day he would return to Earth and find one of the small parcels of government land that still contained trees and hills, and there he would wait until another such storm appeared. It had touched something in him that had been dormant until then, and had become dormant again afterwards.