Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

“In the morning,” Urseline said, leaving the robot to join the other two men in the doorway. “The connections are made now, but I want to double-check each one, make certain it can take the load before we pull the switch. You’ll want to be here, won’t you?”

Mulligan nodded. “I’ll be here,” he said decisively. “I want to see the devil with his teeth pulled.”

They left then, talking about its power source, its unknown potentials that they were to destroy by pulling the switch. It recorded their words, increasing its audio range as they moved away. It lost their voices after they had gone miles from it. It would be a form of destruction then, partial destruction. It stood unmoving as the life in the camp wore down with the diminishing of the daylight. Sounds of marching feet, of boys’ voices raised in military songs, of vehicles coming to life, and dying again, the regular tread of the guards, all the camp life within a four-mile radius was recorded, with some of the louder noises from farther away. Distant sounds of space liners landing and taking off, trainers streaking by in night manoeuvres, the shuddering, grinding noise of an underwater accident as a submarine pulled a cable loose while trying to free the drill mired in the viscous deep sea. It recorded all of it, and it tried, and failed, to transfer memories from the accessible storage units of monolithic crystals to the permanent inaccessible storage of the chemical units. It needed more power than it possessed in the form of miniature batteries. After midnight it stirred.

It moved soundlessly towards the console where the wires were attached to a source of power. It used its six waldoes to make certain the wires that would bring power to it were not pulled loose. Dr. Vianti had been restrained by a lack of materials, and he had improvised, using small batteries in series rather than the richer supplies of energy that were available to legitimate research. Four eight-volt batteries were disengaged by one of the waldoes and a connection was made with a wire that led into the console. The waldo touched switches and buttons, and the robot felt the flow of electricity through the wires attached to it by the scientists. It closed the switch immediately and made further changes in its capacitors and insulators, and when it opened the switch again, the energy flow was lessened. For an hour, then two, three, the electricity flowed along the wires. It was almost dawn when the robot returned to the spot where it had been when the scientists left it. Everything had been replaced as before, and there was no apparent change in it, but where the electronic components had been alive with messages, they now were empty; where the chemical units had been inert and useless they now had undergone minute electro-chemical changes, the proteins within them modified slightly. Again it stood unmoving, timeless, waiting.

It had learned that self-preservation doesn’t necessarily involve the destruction of the threatening agent, that when a self-modification would achieve the same end, it was to be preferred. It would lose none of its abilities, and would gain others. It could feel no pleasure, just as it could feel no pain, but the state of disequilibrium that it had experienced was ended again, and the scanning subsided, until by the time the two doctors entered the laboratory and proceeded to connect wires to the batteries in the domed top of the robot, nothing showed at all on the oscilloscope. The two men exchanged satisfied looks. When the general entered half an hour later the electric shock was administered to the metal monster.

“It is dead,” Langtree said afterwards. “A beautiful, shining piece of potentiality, that’s all it is now, gentlemen, to be made over however we choose.”

The apparatus they had left connected was not designed to show chemical activity, only electrical changes. It remained quiet, showing nothing on the screen, but the robot recorded, ceaselessly scanned, compared, learned. By the time the scientists did discover the chemical units, they knew it was too late to return to that moment; if the chemical units were functional, which they both doubted, they already had been programmed, and they had no way of knowing to what extent, and with what type of information.

After three weeks and the loss of a submarine with its crew of twenty-four men, General Mulligan ordered a halt to the operation trying to save the drill sinking slowly in the black, tar-like muck at the bottom of the sea. He called for a conference of the Venus army scientists, and their Earth WG observers.

“I think you’re all stalling!” he shouted at them. “What else does it need? You’ve given it the laser with a range of two miles and complete flexibility so it can use it in any position. It can operate the capsule so water and muck can’t get into it; it can see in pitch dark, it can float, or dive… What are you waiting for?” Ching Li Sung smiled gently.

“General, one more week,” Urseline said. “Just one more week…”

“What for?”

“A precaution only, General,” Urseline said easily. “We have not given it control of its own power system yet, not until we are certain that it will obey orders and will not initiate its own action, as it did on Ramses. We are working on this aspect of it.”

Urseline didn’t add that they were worried about the chemical units and their possible intended purpose, and about whether or not they had been used already.

“Programme it to do what it’s told! For God’s sake, I thought that was the first thing any machine was programmed to do. I don’t understand this delay, gentlemen. Thirty-six hours! If you don’t deliver it within thirty-six hours, I’ll commandeer it and ask for a hearing.”

Urseline and Langtree exchanged rueful glances; Ching Li Sung’s face remained impassive. Langtree said, “We need time to prepare diagrams, specifications… This one can last no longer than three years underwater. When it goes, we’ll need to know what to look for, what signs of deterioration to look for. We’ll start making others, of course, but our drawings are incomplete as yet. There has not been time enough to make the schematics…”

“Schematics be damned! Three years should be enough to go around this hellhole! Haul it up then and study it to your heart’s content! I want that machine in operation by the end of the week!”

Three miles away the robot swivelled its domed top, its infra-red perceptors searching for a means of escape. It was to be destroyed after all, down in the seas it was to be destroyed. It had no concept of time, three years was meaningless to it. It knew only that they planned to destroy it, just as Vianti had planned to destroy it. Scanning internally it reviewed what it had picked up concerning the operation of the spaceships used by the fleet; there was enough. It had listened and recorded the minute, day-by-day instructions given to the boys in training, and it had been programmed to operate a submarine and a capsule; it could also operate a spaceship. Learning involves the ability to transfer training, and it could transfer what it knew about one machine to other similar machines. Because it had not initiated action, they had assumed that it could not. Now in response to the direct threat to its existence, it initiated action; it moved swiftly to the supplies cabinet and withdrew four atomic packs, batteries and transformers, putting one of them in position inside its dome, storing the other three inside its barrel-like chest. Then it went to the door of the laboratory and rolled down the floor to the outside door where it used its treads to get down the steps.

At the first shout, it turned on the laser, and sweeping a half-circle of death before it the robot rolled over the walkways to the port where the ships were waiting order.