Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

He knew he could walk no farther than three miles in an hour, probably less than that, and he had only about three hours until the winds would make it unsafe to be outside at all, so he planned that first day to go no farther from his base than two miles; he would increase the distance in the days to follow. What he sought was the cliff of basalt where he had stood that first day, when he had realised that the robot was not dead. He would find the cliff, climb it, and re-locate the spot where the robot had been. After that it would be simple, a matter of getting close enough to the invisibility shield to let his radiation detector find the hidden dinghy.

He walked away from the sun, his shadow distorted ahead of him, flowing over rocks, merging with other blacker shadows, emerging again, more elongated and inhuman. He wondered if the robot would cast a shadow, and thought of the stories the boys in the bunks had exchanged after lights out so long ago. Stories of ancient horrors: living-dead things that cast no shadows, had no mirror reflections. He had been frightened by the stories, and sometimes he couldn’t sleep as he lay with the cover over his head, afraid to remove it, for fear of what he might see standing over his bed.

The land at the end of the mountain chain was more harshly used; there were fewer cliffs to absorb the shock of the continuous blows, and those rock masses that were there had been cut into stark, unrelieved peaks with razor-like edges. Jumbles of tumbled, split, broken rocks lay in unnatural piles, deposited there by the wind. Only occasionally did he see a rounded boulder, such as one would expect to see where the sand was the lapidarist. Here giant rocks had done the rough hewing, smashing against the sides of the cliffs. The sand was not trapped here, but blew on through the rocks, out the other side to become part of the ever-growing desert. There was an occasional natural bridge or arch where soft material had yielded to the wind.

The silent cliffs rose, reflecting the sun in his eyes, flashing brilliant colours that would vanish when the sun was at another angle, or when he shifted his position to examine one closely. Streaks of quartz in the granite flashed like diamonds; feldspar became rubies, a faceted face of quartzite shone like emeralds. Mica specks were like small mirrors signalling in response to the white sky. Basalt cuts appeared to be oiled and wet; they were hot when he touched them. The flashing, glaring rocks hurt his eyes, even though they were protected by the face mask. Somewhere along the way he turned slightly, and didn’t notice it until he caught himself wondering where the swaying, unfamiliar shadow had gone.

Fear came then; he whirled about and stared behind him. Would he recognise the right cliff this time? The one that meant the dinghy and safety? How long had he been walking with his shadow off to the right of him? He didn’t know. He had been walking for one hour and ten minutes when he turned back. The sun dipped behind a peak that abruptly turned midnight black against the white spotlight, and everywhere the shadows deepened and some of them looked like bottomless pits that suddenly yawned on all sides of him. This time he walked with the shadow following slightly to his left, and he looked back at it again and again. Once when he failed to see it among the deeper shadows of a peak, he almost cried out, but then it was there, moving with him. When to turn so that it was directly behind him, pointing him in the right direction? He didn’t know.

The cliffs rose all about him, two hundred feet, five hundred feet, but none of them was the basalt cliff on which he had stood that first day; none of them was the one that so cunningly concealed the slit of a chimney, the passage to the safety of his dinghy.

He looked behind him again, and now the shadows had grown so that the strips of white now were the narrow, strange shapes that defied recognition. Motionless, silent when he gazed at them, they grew in quiet leaps when his eyes were averted. The white was turning grey, its edges no longer sharply defined. The sky above his head was violet; away to the east it was deep purple; to the west it was yellow still. Wherever he fastened his gaze the land and sky were unmoving, changeless, but everywhere else the changes were hastening without sound. He walked faster. He had walked an hour from the time he had turned back, and still he had not found the slit, nor even the right cliffs. As though from a great distance he could hear a howling sound; he thought of the distant wolves that appeared with regularity in some of the stories the boys had told when he had been twelve or so. This time it wasn’t wolves. The wind was starting.

Another ten minutes. The face of the cliffs changed with each new alignment of the sun and the peaks, changed with each new configuration of shadow and light. With every step, every turn of his head the scene before him shifted, became less and less familiar. The valley had to be to his left, somewhere in the granite cliffs that towered high over him with a weight and massiveness that was terrifying. If only there were birds, or insects, or anything on this world. Something to break the silence and the motionlessness. Nothing moved except the wind. It started to swirl sand in small funnels, no more than five feet high, as yet swirling, then dropping, then starting again, rising higher each time, higher and denser. They were like nightmare figures, the threatening black shapes coming up from the earth, whirling about, and then collapsing while the wind sang a maniacal song.

He groped along the cliff wall searching for the slit, and found nothing. The first tornado formed, howling like a rocket motor. The wind was lifting rocks now, no larger as yet than eggs; tornadoes whipped them around faster and faster, suddenly letting go, and they hit the walls of the skeleton mountains with explosive force, sounding like a steady barrage of small arms.

Then the size of the rocks increased, and one that weighed at least ten pounds was hurled past Trace’s head, missing him by three feet. The noise was deafening now. He fell to the ground and lay there panting. He had to have shelter. Cautiously, creeping low against the ground, he made his way around a column of rocks where only sand blew, striking him with force, but not penetrating his suit. He could see only a few feet before him now; the wind was increasing minute by minute. It was coming from behind him, but suddenly he was hit in the face by a strong current of airborne sand. He staggered backwards, bewildered. Then, sobbing with relief, he realised that he had found the chimney, that the wind was whistling through it from the valley side of the cliffs.

He groped for it with his hands. It would be rough going back through it with the wind in his face, driving sand and stones against him, but either that or stay outside to be pulverised…

He got to his knees and started to crawl, keeping his head low, not even looking up when he heard the crash of a large rock near his right shoulder. He realised then why he had felt uneasy about the smooth walled valley where he had left his dinghy. The valley was shaped like a giant mixer, and nothing in it had not been rounded and smoothed by the twice-daily assault of the vicious wind. Ahead of him in the darkness he could hear the din of continuous thunder as tornadoes roared in the valley.

The grade was twenty degrees, and he fell flat out with his face pressed against the hot dry rocky earth. He hadn’t remembered it as being so far through the passage of the chimney, or so steep and treacherous. The roar of compressed air filled his ears, and he turned off the audio control in his helmet, immediately turning the world into a silent place where even the sound of his heart-beat was missing. It was worse than the wind had been. He turned it on again.