Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

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 been 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.