The Killer Thing Page 6

  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?

  Seven

  “I don’t give a goddam how sophisticated it is! You can’t fight a war with robots! It’s been tried. Read your military history books!” General Leroy Mulligan chewed his cigar angrily, stamping up and down the cramped room in the military planning headquarters office. Several other men were seated in the room. The building was grey, inside as well as outside, the domed roof curving to make the sides, from which windows had been cut out. He paused before one of the windows and stared at the dismal scene beyond it. Swamps, as far as he could see, here at the edge of the compound. In the opposite direction was a forest of domed buildings, each on piles sunken deep into the mire to rest on the bedrock. The hot air stank of decay and endless death and uncontrollable growth. He hated Venus! God, how he hated Venus! He was a tall, powerfully built man, not yet fifty, with hair the colour and sheen of coal, and eyes like obsidian drops.

  “General, the committee doesn’t insist that we adopt this machine to use in combat, merely that we put it through a battery of tests… ” Ching Li Sung sat quietly, his pale hands in a nigh steeple before his face. He had sat thus without moving for the past hour. His ivory-skinned face was un-lined, untroubled, contrasting cruelly with the florid, contorted features of the general.

  “Tests be damned! I know what they want! It’s that Outsider nonsense, that’s what it is. Rumours, nothing but rumours. By God, we’ve had rumours ever since man picked up a club and started to swing it. Now suddenly the galaxy’s getting in a panic because of rumours.” General Mulligan whirled and strode back, stopping in front of the Armaments Committee member. “Why did the government send you? Why not the routine request for information they usually send along?”

  Ching Li Sung shrugged delicately, didn’t answer. A second officer stood up, a colonel. He was with WGI, the intelligence arm of the World Group government. “General when you ordered the pickup on the robot, what did you plan to do with it?”

  General Mulligan glared at the colonel. As much as he detested the WG committees and sub-committees, and sub-sub-committees, he detested the intelligence branches even more. He knew how to appease committee members for the appropriations he needed to run the army, but the intelligence was never appeased; every question answered for them led them to ten more. There wasn’t a man in Intelligence who knew anything about army protocol. He said, “We have lost over a thousand men in this mud bath of a planet, a thousand men, millions of dollars worth of equipment from diving gear to boats, to subs, to bathyspheres, to pumps. You name it, we’ve tried it and lost it. You ever try to drill down through two miles of gook? Not water, not good solid earth, but filthy, stinking, rotting gook? Year after year we plead for relocation of the Fleet base, and every year they turn us down. Mars’ atmosphere too thin; Earth too crowded;
everything else too far away. So we are stuck here. Every year we try to get the job of drying up this hellhole turned over to civilian authorities, and they turn that down. So I want a machine that will get the goddam job done.”

  “I see,” the colonel said. It would all go in the report, Mulligan knew, and he hoped it would be read by the WG President himself.

  “I think, gentlemen,” the fourth man said quietly, “that it will benefit all of us if the men selected by the committee are allowed to observe the robot, and make suggestions, if they so choose. But, I think, also, that the machine itself should remain under the authority of the army for the time being.”

  General Mulligan nodded briefly, the nearest he could bring himself to a demonstration of the satisfaction he felt. The man was Serge Vislov, the committee adviser delegated by the World Group President, and his recommendation would be followed.

  Mulligan watched them leave his planning-room with a feeling of relief. He had come out just about as he had expected to: there would be observers, but his men would do the actual programming of the thing when it got there. Meanwhile there would be the luncheon for the vips, and then the tour, and then the dinner and dance. A slender uniformed man entered the planning-room quietly, Dr. Pietro Urseline, a general, also a physiologist specialising in brain research and cybernetics.

  “How’d it go?”

  “It’ll be your baby,” Mulligan said. “Remember, all we want is something that can get down in that muck and dry it up. Nothing else!”

  “With one robot?”

  “We’ll make more, if it works out. You said it could be used for dredging, for underwater blasting, for cutting. You said it could be adapted to the pressure, its sensors adapted to the muck. You’re getting it; it’s up to you to make good.”

  Urseline sighed. “Think back, General. I said I’d like to try the thing. I was interested in it. We don’t even know if this Tracy knows what he was talking about. I promise nothing.”

  “Tracy’s a good man. Under my command five years. Smart.. Knew his father, too, Colonel Wilmot Tracey.”

  Mulligan headed for the door, stopping with his hand on the knob. “What made you think this thing was any better than the robots we already have?”

  “If Tracy is as good as you say he is, and if his report was correct, this robot is advanced over any of our present models. It can act on verbal orders; it contains more potential in a smaller package than anything we have. It’s already more widely adapted than anything we have. Ours are simple servitors, each one manufactured to do a simple, exacting task, or a few very closely related tasks. According to Tracy’s report, and my deductions from his sparse clues, this new robot already can handle more different kinds of orders than ours. According to the report your major sent in regarding the death of Dr. Vianti, this machine can also initiate action. I am curious about that. Why did it act then? The girl’s statement that her grandfather said only for her to return to her desk in the other office, which she did immediately following his death, was a lie, naturally. Why would simple instructions like that have caused the robot to go into action? On the other hand, what could he have said to cause it to kill him? How did it know that laser would cut through flesh? How did it know it would kill? Does it know what kill is?” Urseline spread his hands in an all embracing gesture. “I am most curious about this machine, General. Most curious.”

  Mulligan snorted and yanked the door open. “You just see to it that it can go down in that goddam muck and deepen that channel. Every other lousy planet in the universe can get dredged, or oceans built into it, or mountains either made or erased, but here? Not on your life! The colonists like Venus! Okay. Let them keep their half of it knee deep in mud and muck, but I want this half clean and dry! And, by God, I intend to have it clean and dry!”

  He stamped outside, slamming the door after him. The odour of rot filled his nostrils and his anger deepened. The compound was on the edge of the Glenn Swamp and threatened to revert to swamp, as did all areas that were not tended constantly. He stood staring about him for several seconds, searching for something, someone to take out his anger on; he saw nothing that wasn’t running smoothly, as ordered.

  Venus had been colonised by a mixed group of U.N. chosen immigrants as an experiment. Only one-fiftieth of the planet was habitable, the rest being under the shallow oceans and swamps that made up almost all of it. Nowhere was there more than five thousand feet difference in altitude from the deepest ocean floor to the highest hillcrest. The oceans were for the most part only hundreds of feet deep, the highest point of land on the planet was three thousand feet. The colonists had taken all the land available, and later, when peace was again established between the colonists, Mars and Earth, the U.N. giving way to the World Group government, the army was allotted Mount Odessa, mountain in name more than in actuality. It was two hundred feet higher than the surrounding ocean, and the dry land was measured in feet rather than in miles when the army had arrived. Now, over a hundred years later, the relatively dry areas had spread, but still were inadequate for the needs of the growing army. On the map Mount Odessa measured nearly one thousand miles by nearly nine hundred miles, but in reality almost half of that figure was a measurement of swamp and mud, unusable and to date almost impossible to drain. The trouble had been that there were no channels in the shallow oceans. Water from only hundreds of feet to two thousand feet deep overlay mud and silt of up to eight thousand feet, or deeper, before bedrock could be reached, and dredging the mud and silt was an endless job, for it flowed back before the dredgers even surfaced. Slowly, foot by foot, the land area had been increased, but it was a treacherous landfill that they used: the silt dried to powdery fineness. Bricks made from it crumbled; it refused to mix properly with sand or rocks and cement to make concrete; it expanded under rains until walls made from it cracked and split and fell. Refineries had been set up to process it, but when it was touched by water, it all went back into suspension, and when it was wet it stank.

  Mostly it was decayed plants, not even trees with good hard wood trunks, but soft, useless plants that grew in spurts measured by feet overnight, grew, blossomed, fell, decayed and were washed out to the seas, or lay rotting underfoot, piling upon the floor of the swamps so that in places a man could sink in seconds, swallowed by the muck before he could be reached.

  General Mulligan returned to his quarters to shower and change his uniform, as he did several times daily, in time to have lunch with his visitors from the World Group government.

  “The government of Mellic is refusing a conference at this time,” one of the lesser emissaries said over coffee and cigars three hours later. Mulligan perked his ears. Mellic had been one of his finds, his and his crew’s, before his grounding on Venus over a year before.

  “Let ‘em pout,” said one of the representatives from the Venus group. “Isn’t the first time a nation pouted when the Fleet took over.”

  “This is a little different,” Ching Li Sung interrupted in his quiet voice. “You see, they admit their defeat; they admit our troops and follow all orders scrupulously. However they will not confer with our representatives, not even those from Mellic who are on Earth. They are extremely polite and do all that is requested of them, except talk. That Mellic is under military rule seems to concern them not at all, as if they have no wish at this time to re-establish their own civilian control.”

  “Isn’t that where the rumours of the Outsiders came from?” General Mulligan asked.

  “Let us say additional rumours of the Outsiders have originated on Mellic,” Ching Li Sung said, smiling blandly. “Did you not hear of them on your initial foray into Mellic?”

  General Mulligan scowled. Mellic had been a sitting duck as far as he was concerned, a great big planet without a single gun in sight. His team had been small, a scouting patrol of the fleet, and they had been received cordially. When he had returned three years later with the remainder of the Fleet under orders to seize the government of the planet, he had bee
n met with guns, and ships. Mellic had not been one of the easy ones after that. Six months it had taken, his last active duty before the present assignment on Venus. He had been criticised for the trouble, but he had not anticipated the swingover to munitions that had developed so rapidly. He still didn’t know how they had come up with modern weaponry in so short a time. The thought of tutorship from Outside stirred coldly down his spine.

  He said, “There were rumours here and there when we landed our wounded on Mellic, after the surrender, of course. There are always rumours of big brothers who will pay you back.”

  “Of course,” Ching murmured.

  The talk shifted to politics and economics and then it was time for the tour, and the party divided into smaller groups to spend the rest of the day riding through the swamps, up and down the gentle hills. General Mulligan was in the lead car, an atomic powered ground effect vehicle. He pointed out the newest in weapons, transportation, defensive shields, and all the while his mind was reviewing the thin stream of rumours he had heard regarding the Outsiders before he had been sent to Venus.

  It was said that Mellic had appealed to them for help as soon as the Fleet had left it after the initial contact. The small contingent that had remained had been left strictly alone, and had no suspicion that anything whatever was wrong until the Fleet had returned to be met by Mellic ships, fewer in number, but as fully equipped and as skilfully handled as the WG ships. He hadn’t asked for many ships for the take-over of Mellic; he had thought few would be needed. Of course, when the reinforcements had arrived, the battle had ended abruptly, with absolute surrender of the defenders. And then had come the hints and rumours, none of them taken seriously alone, but together making an impressive, if unproven, catalogue of the Outsiders’ potentialities. Mellic had asked for and received information about space battles, and ships, what was needed, how to manufacture them, how to man them. An army had been raised and trained practically overnight, and no hint of its existence given to the detachment Mulligan left there. They, in fact, had been entertained royally during the three-year wait. After the surrender, when the wounded were put down on Mellic, the rumours had been less than specific: there was another force, farther out; they were peaceful; they were powerful, at least equal to the WG Fleet; they probably were humanoid; they would resist the WG efforts to take the galaxy.