Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

The commander of Outpost Number Nine, stationed on Tensor, Sector Three, had orders not to destroy a single tree. His orders also read that he was to seek out the rebel band known to be hiding in the mountains that divided the land mass almost exactly in half, seek them out and either capture or kill the members. Stationed in Outpost Number Nine were four hundred and fifty men, roughly twenty per cent of them having had no taste of battle before except for the brief encounters on set-ups like Tarbo. Another ten per cent were non-combatants, medics, scientists, clerks, all the dead weight the army needed and begrudged space to maintain. The commander suspected that the rebels had at least one thousand men at their immediate disposal, with many, many more thousands simply waiting for a signal to join them. He hoped they would procrastinate until the relief ship arrived with the machinery to install the force screen for the outpost. Under the orders to preserve the trees he could not burn the rebels out of the surrounding hills and forests, and without the screen in place over the camp, he could not use gas without endangering his own men. Taking hostages in the towns and villages had proved to be ineffective. The hostages managed to kill themselves with ease; they were like animals, once deciding to discontinue living, they simply died. In the beginning of the campaign they had burned a dozen cities and towns to the ground, with the inhabitants in them, but still the rebel ranks swelled; still men disappeared from their homes overnight, melting into the woods without a trace. The commander thought bitterly of the weapons at his disposal: lasers, fire bombs, gases, hydrogen fusion bombs, BW agents. None of them could be used, each one posed a threat to the trees, or to his own men. But after the screens were in place… He had a chart prepared already, and a spraying programme ready to initiate: first the mountainous areas where he knew the rebel bands had massed, then the surrounding countryside, so that no more could escape the cities to join them, and finally the towns and cities themselves, but lightly. After all he didn’t want to commit genocide, just kill enough to demonstrate the power of the World Group forces, and enforce the cooperation of the people.

Until the ships arrived with the machinery all he could do was wait.

In the mountain cave the robot also waited. Without a first order purpose it could do nothing but wait, and record. It had time enough.

Trol stared at it from the entrance to the chamber. At Trol’s side was Luo. “Haven’t you been able to learn anything from it yet?” Trol asked. The robot had been standing just so for six days.

“Oh, I’ve learned much from it… Entirely hand-made, so we can be assured that this isn’t the forerunner of the next wave of fighters to be sent out by the World Group. This must be a prototype that someone let get away. It must have been en route to one of the other worlds, catastrophe of some sort in the ship, no survivors, and the ship set to land on the first planet it got within range of. It seems harmless enough, takes verbal instruction, probably only in WG language. Has versatility enough to replace men on the field of battle, probably. Seems to have no defensive measures built in however, which is strange. Of course the laser could be used as an interceptor, destroy bombs and such before they hit even, but that leaves it with no offensive weapons…”

Trol shrugged impatiently. “Can you programme it so that we can use it to get inside the WG camp? We need supplies, fuel for the aircraft, ammo, medical supplies. We have to break into this one if we want to continue the fight. It is the least protected of all their camps.”

“I think we can use it,” Luo said. “We’ll have to take it with us in any event if we want to use the laser… I was not able to dismantle any of it without risking its destruction. That should come as a surprise to the WG men, our attacking with a laser. Maybe even enough of a surprise to permit us to gain entry before they recover…”

“I have the interpreter,” Trol said. “He arrived minutes ago. As soon as he eats and rests, I’ll send him to you. Try the robot with WG languages. There has to be a way of controlling it. They wouldn’t have had it if they couldn’t control it.”

Luo nodded absently as Trol left him. Luo knew nothing about chemical storage, but he did understand transistors, monolithic crystals, the electronic relays that he had exposed in the robot’s massive barrel chest. He knew how to add to the store of knowledge already possessed by the metal thing. He reprogrammed it to increase its speed, so that the robot could keep up with the few motored vehicles the rebels already had. Luo wondered where the energy was going when it stood so quietly, and decided it had been programmed to scan and record perpetually.

When the interpreter arrived, Luo prepared a test of the laser. He placed a stone target fifty yards down a dead end passage inside the cave and directed the interpreter to tell the robot to burn it. Nothing happened.

It scanned and found no meaning for burn. It waited.

“Well,” Luo said dispiritedly, “I guess they built it without having a chance to programme it yet.”

“Can’t you teach it?”

“In time. God only knows how much time it would take. Meanwhile their reinforcements will arrive and they will destroy this base, and the robot along with it…

It scanned. Destroy. The circuit had activated, the laser pulsed with energy, but the feedback restrained it, and the scanning increased in intensity.

“Why haven’t they burned us out already? They could burn the whole mountain if they wanted to. They’ve got the laser for it, and the fire bombs… Whatever it would take…”

Burn… destroy. The disequilibrium it experienced supplied the connection, and the laser turned on, touched the rock at the end of the passage and vaporised it. The laser went off. It waited.

“My God!” the interpreter whispered. “What happened? Why did it do that?”

Luo put aside his fear. Brusquely he said, “Delayed response. I don’t know why. At least we know now that it does take verbal orders. Maybe we still can get that outpost before the reinforcements get here and get us.”

Its ability to abstract was growing. It understood “get us” as meaning destroy us. It was part of “us”. When the interpreter ordered it to come, it moved along the passages on its wheels, switching to the treads outside on the rocky ground. The next test of the laser demonstrated that it had an effective range of two miles.

They worked feverishly with it after that, a team busy with it around the clock, testing its abilities, adding new ones. It was taught to hurl bombs, and had an effective range of over a mile; it was taught to use the laser as an interceptor, knocking stones from the sky effortlessly, even when they rained from twenty hands simultaneously. None of them touched it.

And when they were not actively teaching it, it continued to learn, recording, tracking, assimilating constantly. The supply of data in the chemical units grew, and as cross references became more and more complex, circuits were reassigned to relieve some of the load. One entire circuit was reserved for data that thus far served no useful purpose in the second order purpose of maintaining self. This circuit stored bits of poetry, bird songs, the soft voices of men singing of loneliness, data about light reflections and sunsets, data about growing things, the spiral of unfolding flowers, unfurling leaves, mosses heavy and velvety with water glistening on them. They continued to direct it in World Group English, but everything said within its audio range was recorded to be transferred later to the chemical units. It learned of war and killing, and all the various names that try to hide the fact of killing. It learned that the enemy must be destroyed, subdued, captured, countered; all these things to it meant the enemy must be killed. It learned that in order to continue to live, one first must kill the enemy, and for the first time it had a glimmering of a first order purpose.