Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

It’s going to fire every damn shell in the ship.

Wouldn’t you?

They couldn’t fire back, nor could they change position except by using the main braking rockets, which were still green in the major control panel. The lights over the manoeuvring controls had gone out with the hit. Two more lights started to blink red and the ship shuddered once. There was an acrid smell of smouldering insulation.

We have to damp it. Pressure going faster. Check pressure hit.

Okay.

We’ll put her in stationary orbit and turn everything off. Communications gone. Didn’t get to finish the message… Not enough oxygen to wait up here for a rescue. Looks like we sit it out planet-side. Good thing we got our fix before the hit.

The ship shuddered again and a whole row of lights flashed red. A second hit…

Trace shook his head violently, clearing away the distant, yet distinct voices, forcing out the scenes that played whenever he forgot to look away. He stumbled on towards the dinghy, his legs aching with his exertion, his whole body sagging now, exhausted by the heat and the effort of getting enough oxygen from the thin air on this planet. Before he approached the dinghy, he patrolled a circle around it, looking for tracks of the robot, his radiation detector turned on high, because the thing had got hot along with its ship, and it was still radiating furiously. No radiation escaped its screen, but the ground it touched got hot. Searching for tracks was automatic, done without any real hope of finding any in the sand that lay between the rocks. The few times he had found visual tracks had only added to his bewilderment, until he realised the robot had several different means of travel; it had wheels, and treads, and something else—spherical, something that left one broad three-foot swath of crushed rocks and packed sand behind it. Trace refused to allow himself to think what it would be like if it had been able to regain its ability to travel as fast as the treads indicated it should. Tracks usually registered only through the clicking voice of the radiation detector. This time it remained quiet.

The thing hadn’t been there. The area was clean. Trace went directly to the dinghy and locked himself in. Before he removed his helmet, he adjusted the detectors inside the small craft, and then he undressed. The temperature inside the dinghy was 108, almost fifteen degrees cooler than outside, and although Trace was perspiring profusely, the dried air took the moisture as it formed. His skin felt crusty with salt and dirt. The dinghy was a two-seater, the two reclining seats side by side, a foot apart before the abbreviated control panel. There was room enough behind the seats only for the emergency stores needed by a two-man scout team—medical supplies, emergency rations, lights, and the all-weather suits. There had been extra oxygen tanks, but Trace had tossed them out to make more room, after he had exhausted them. When the dinghy had landed it was with a hole he could put his fist through, and with Duncan unconscious, his chest smashed by a meteorite.

Don’t do it, Trace. You’ll need it.

Duncan’s whisper. His voice was still in the dinghy, as if it had penetrated every wall to seep out slowly over the coming weeks, a little at a time, always whispering.

The plastic Trace had used for his oxygen tent was still draped over the right-hand seat, Duncan’s seat, and it gleamed black-red where it touched the cushion and was held to it by static electricity.

Trace ate sparingly, not regretful of the need to conserve his stocks. The heat took his sweat, his appetite, his energy. He wished the dinghy had a water converter, and thought longingly of the disabled converter on the mother ship hanging over the world of sands and rocks.

After he ate, there was nothing to do. He would move soon, but not yet, not until the thing got closer, not until it was nearly night-time, so the robot wouldn’t track him down during the long night and find him asleep. It moved towards him unceasingly now that there were only the two of them, and the attack of that noon had been the fourth one so far in the three-week-old hunt. Another week and a half to go before Trace could expect relief, another week and a half of playing hide-and-seek with the killer robot. He stared at the screen that showed his own trail, and there was nothing but the rocks and the sand. The shadows were growing now, and soon he would be in a nightmare world of black monoliths that rose dizzily, crookedly into the white sky, and black lines that striped the white sand among the feet of the rocks. This was the bad time—waiting for the wind when the stripes were obscured by blowing sand—the silent, unmoving time of the long shadows that were nowhere grey, but were unyielding black against white.

Duncan’s whisper came to him again, and he cocked his head to listen.

It can’t get off the planet now, Trace, but no one else knows it’s here. You have to stay alive and tell them, Trace. There’s no one else now. The message didn’t get through in time, cut off after the fix was reported. That’s all they know. They’ll find the ship up there, and they’ll search for the dinghy, but they won’t be looking for the killer. Tell them, Trace. Tell them.

“Sure, Duncan,” Trace said out loud, in a normal conversational tone, looking about for him. He shook himself and stood up, fear standing out in the form of small beads of cold sweat about his mouth and nose. He made coffee then and drank it black and hot, and only once looked at the striped world showing itself on the screen.

It was being alone that made it bad, he told himself, sipping a second cup of coffee. He couldn’t remember ever being alone before in his life. The crews of the patrol were always six or eight men, and the dinghies carried two or more. No one went out in space alone, and when your partner slept, you could still hear his breathing. Even if you couldn’t hear him, you always knew he was there. It made a difference, knowing another man was there. He caught himself listening too hard, and he pulled out the log he had been keeping and started to fill it in for that day. His mind wandered from it again and again; in the end he wrote nothing. He re-examined his calculations instead.

He had enough oxygen to last four days on the ship in orbit after he left the planet, and he had enough fuel to move one hundred and fifty miles, a thirty-hour trip for the robot. Even counting the time it would take for the robot to locate him after the moves, he had no more than forty hours of comparative safety remaining to him on the ground. He could not leave the planet for at least a week. So far he had been lucky, had dared remain after he knew his location had been spotted by the thing’s sensors. He had been able to rely on his sound system to warn him when the thing was getting near enough to fire. The robot always found him. No matter what damage the hit they had scored on it, or the crash landing had done, its sensors were working well enough for it to keep finding him. He had no way of knowing what functions had been repaired, had no way of knowing what functions had been built into it. One by one, as they were manifested, he wrote them down, but each new ability was a surprise and a threat.

He didn’t dare leave the planet any sooner than he had to, because the robot could repair its own dinghy. He had caught it busy at the repair job the first day of their enforced stay on the planet.

Standing high on a ridge cut out on a basalt cliff, he had seen the thing for the first time. It was ten feet high, with a barrel-like chest and retractable waldoes, then wielding tools. The dinghy had left the crippled, falling ship like a shot, plunging straight down towards the planet, glowing red then white as it plummeted. Trace and Duncan had watched it, certain that the robot killer had burned up with it. They didn’t see it land, and not until Trace saw the metal monster repairing it did he consider that the robot might have survived such a landing. It had sensed him before he was close enough to fire at it with the small hand gun he carried, and the robot had blinked out. A second later the dinghy was gone too. Somehow the robot had brought the little dinghy to ground without an explosion, and it was repairing the craft. It had already made operational a force field that was new, that curved light and caused invisibility.