Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

Trol nodded. “It will take time for us to plan the next attack. Come, it’s time for dinner.”

It waited in the timeless period until the camp was silent, and then it repaired itself, as Dr. Vianti had programmed it to do. The new equipment took much space, and many circuits. It studied them thoroughly, and it scanned: “The learning capacity is the range of effective internal rearrangement, and as such can be measured by the number and the kinds of its uncommitted resources… needn’t be idle circuits, but reassignable from present functions…” It studied its circuits to see which would be reassigned. It recombined several circuits that had been disconnected; it processed electronic data into the chemical storage units. It redirected the energy flow to the screen controls so that it passed through the amplifier that also served the laser. When it turned on the screen hours after being left by Luo and Trol, there was a moment of audible power flow, then there was nothing. Spinning vortices of energy enveloped the robot. It was invisible behind this shield of energy.

With the screen on, it searched for the cause of the drain from its other circuits, and turning off the power once more, it again manipulated the circuits so that when it tested again, there was no weakness, no loss of other abilities. Satisfied that it had repaired all the damage done by Luo, it stood unmoving, and waited.

With the change of its circuits, it had taken the control from the box carried by Luo. The next day when Luo touched the button to activate the screen, the robot also released a spurt of energy, and the screen blinked on. Luo gasped. He touched his button and the screen went off. Luo left the room, carefully locking it on the outside. He went directly to Trol’s office.

“I am afraid of it,” Luo said simply. “I did not modify the screen. You saw. Yet today it is changed.”

“You say it can become invisible?” Trol’s vivid blue eyes closed and he was silent for a moment. “I want to see for myself.”

They returned and again Luo touched the button. The robot turned on the screen and blinked out of sight. “Do you know how that happened?” Trol asked.

Luo shook his head. “I told you that I understand the original screen only imperfectly, and this not at all.” As he talked his finger brushed the button repeatedly, without depressing it. He let it touch harder, enough to turn the screen off. It failed to respond. He fought a surge of fear and pushed hard on the button. The screen did go off that time, but he knew it should have before.

“Don’t say anything in World Group language,” he said softly. “Come away from it. I must think. It has taken over the function of the control box.”

Trol blinked rapidly and the two men backed from the room. “Is it dangerous?” Trol asked, outside the building. Luo silenced him, warningly, and in silence they walked back to the office Trol had taken over.

“We can’t use it,” Luo said then, keeping his voice low, when the panicky feeling within him would have forced it up high and shrill. “You saw how efficiently it attacked the camp. Think what it would be like with invisibility also!”

Trol nodded. “But first we use it to finish the job,” he said after a moment. “It still obeys you. It tried to cooperate with the control box, didn’t it?”

“Don’t you see?” Luo said. “It understands! It knew the meaning of the box, and the importance of keeping us ignorant of its potentials. What else does it understand?” He drew closer to Trol. “Remember that delay the first time it responded to verbal commands? It was thinking! It understood what we wanted, but it had to decide. God only knows why it decided to obey, but it did decide. It thought it over.”

Trol turned abruptly. His voice was harsh and ugly. “I don’t care! First we use it as we planned. We say nothing of this to anyone. Later I’ll turn it over to you and you can dispose of it as you wish…”

It recorded the words, scanned past experiences for comparison. It changed one word in the syllogism it had formed: for many it now constituted all, and its minor premise now read, all men wanted to destroy it. All men were the enemy. It had groped for a first order purpose and none had been forthcoming since the beginnings of its time. Suddenly there was one. It had the primary purpose of killing men. It had to kill men in order to maintain its own being. It had to maintain its own being because that had been programmed in at the start. It moved to the door and the laser touched he lock gently almost, not even burning the wood, but melting the metal parts away. It pushed the door open with its body as it rolled through it, and half-way through the second room it activated the energy screen and blinked out. The laser touched the men outside the building, touched the men grouped at the end of the street, touched the men who ran to see what was happening. It didn’t burn the buildings themselves. It didn’t reason that burning buildings could kill men also. It touched with the red light those men it found, and with its audio, and its infra-red, it found almost all of them. Then it left the compound, and an hour and fifteen minutes later it was back at its ship. Men were coming after it, coming through the forests, not knowing what it was they chased, only knowing that death had come this way. It turned the red light on, shone it into the forest and the trees burst into flames. When it left the planet it turned the bigger lasers of the ship downward and bigger areas of forest blazed. It changed its course when it sighted a city, and at a distance of fifty miles, it burned the city. When it turned finally to deep space the entire planet was afire here and there; other spaceships were molten masses on the ground, the crews surprised by the suddenness of the attack, unable to take off before the searing beams found them.

Out in space it warped, and in warp it set the computer to land it at the first planet it reached after it came out of warp. Then it waited. Its course would take it to Tau Ceti III.

Trace was swimming upward in a funnel that was a lustreless black, whose sides he could not touch, although he knew they were around him. Looking back through the darkness of it, he knew it swelled larger and larger behind him, that at the base its dimensions were of such enormity that it was virtually boundless, but still was a funnel. It was solid black, but he knew there were colour streaks through it, even though he could not see them: streaks of green, of blue, gold, pink… He was afraid to stop because once stopped he forgot how to proceed again. He was so tired that he knew he would have to stop shortly. Stopping meant tumbling back downwards past the vast spaces he had covered with his strenuous efforts. Ahead of him in the blackness he knew there was the apex; he could sense how the funnel narrowed until it would squeeze and elongate him. He knew it would hurt. He flinched from the anticipated pain, and still struggled upward towards it. He felt that he was as large as the funnel itself, that he stretched endlessly to fill in the space, and that gradually he was being forced into a narrowing cone of consciousness. He lost awareness of the smooth, black sides of the funnel, and it was more frightening not to know its limits than it had been to feel its immensity. The point of light that was the mouth was growing brighter, although no larger. He groaned as he neared it, and he struggled harder to reach it. The stabbing pinpoint of light hurt his eyes. Now he could no longer feel his feet they were so far removed from him, stretching out behind him, out of reach, out of touch. The pain increased, accompanied now by distant cries and shrill howls. He had to get through the hole, get to the other side. The howls grew louder and he felt ashamed of himself for screaming. But he wasn’t screaming. With a final agonising thrust he was through, and the howls were close to his ears.