Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

He sat up, awake. It was the wind. The morning wind had awakened him. He remembered the wakening dream and shuddered once. He was cold and sick. He thought of the form of his sickness and could give no real diagnosis for it: cold, fever, and fatigue. He never had felt so tired before in his life, tired to the point of dreading movement itself, any movement. He sat for several moments listening to the wind in the valley, with an occasional blast through the chimney, He was tired to death of the wind, and the dinghy, and the sand and rocks, and himself… He stared dully at nothing and knew he was most of all tired of himself.

His motions were agonisingly slow when he heaved himself from the seat-bed and went to the unit for the food capsules. He shut his eyes and squeezed the tube, trying not to think of the paste that filled his mouth, gagged him. Half a tube was all he could force himself to take. Later, he promised, later, he would eat more. He sipped water, holding it in his mouth as long as he could before allowing it to trickle down his throat. It wasn’t enough to cleanse his mouth of the after-taste of the food compound. He hadn’t looked to see what he was eating; he didn’t look then. Slowly, as if apart from the rest of him, his hand groped for the water bag and lifted it again. He drank again, all the while keeping his eyes tightly closed. He didn’t look to see how much of the water remained.

He would search for the dinghy while the sun was high. Meanwhile he had to start fortifying the valley. That morning, again in the evening, the next morning. What day was it? He couldn’t decide. It seemed that he had been in the valley for months, or years, that possibly he had been born in the valley and everything else was illusory, phantoms that crossed his mind concerning other places, other times. He knew nothing about any of them; he knew only the valley, the sun, the wind, the sand. The wind was dying then. He had to start. His face was set in hard, unyielding lines when he opened the hatch and started to climb outside. Violently he shook his head and turned back. He had forgotten his suit. His hands were clumsy and awkward when he pulled it on, and immediately he was too hot after having been chilled.

He remembered that there were two more entrances to his valley: one almost directly opposite from the chimney, one to the left of that. Both were precipitous, but negotiable by the robot. Stepping out into the glare of the world after the dim light of the dinghy made him blink, made his eyes feel on fire. He walked straight across the circular valley floor, stumbling once or twice over rocks that he failed to notice in time, but by the time he got to the other wall, he felt less dull. The passage that led out of the valley was steep, narrow in spots, but never too narrow for the robot to manage. The ground was strewn with rocks banked up the walls at each curve in the passage. The turns were sharp for the most part, with only two sweeping curves among them. He clambered the length of the passage, scrabbling over rocks where they had piled up, wading through sand that lodged against them. By the time he got to the end of the passage he was gasping for air and he collapsed in the shade of the high, steep side of the cleft. After his heaving lungs were satisfied, he continued to sprawl there, too exhausted for further efforts. What sort of rocks had made up this cut, he wondered, gazing at the straight rise of granite on the wall opposite him as he rested. The wall behind him was granite also. A band of sandstone, perhaps? Eroded away now, leaving a clean cut through the granite. A metamorphic rock that had given way to the driving force of sand? A lode of gold, or silver? He laughed aloud and suddenly felt more cheerful. From where he was lying he could not see into the valley at all, and again he realised how fortunate he had been in locating his hideaway. Unless the robot got into the valley itself, he would be relatively safe from it. If he could block the passages that led inside…

He pulled himself upright again and started through the passageway. Around one of the the sweeping curves he halted and looked around him. If he could construct a windbreak here… He narrowed his eyes, considering the sand being hurled from the valley through the passage. If it were stopped by a windbreak… It would act like a snow fence…

The passage was nine feet wide at that point. It would take a fence that wide, as thick as necessary to withstand the wind ― three feet, four? ― and at least five feet high, six perhaps… The materials were in the passage itself, in the heaps of rocks banked at each turn. For an instant the thought of the work involved made him hesitate, but he put the thought aside and began building the fence. He didn’t think of anything at all as he pushed and hauled rocks up the slope for the base, rolling them into place, or pushing one over another, trying to lift as few as possible. Almost automatically he stopped when he had the first course done, and he stepped over it and went up the slopes to the farthest turn where the rocks were banked. Carefully he moved rocks, not wanting to start them rolling down the passage, until he had moved a line of rocks across the passage. He went back down to the next curve and did the same thing, making this one slightly higher than the first, and then he returned to the first fence. He was muttering softly to himself when he resumed work.

“…not one grain can get out… gold in the sand, boy, or silver… we’ll catch it all right here, piles of gold and silver…”

He continued to mutter sporadically, and the fence grew, was to his knees, then his thighs. He was working automatically, no longer aware of the heat, or his protesting muscles, or the heaviness of the rocks he staggered with. He was thinking of a rainstorm he had seen on Earth once. On the coast where the buildings rose from the cliffs overlooking the ocean, rose from two to three hundred stories high, with thousands of people in each one. As far as he had been able to see up and down the coast the buildings had obstructed the westward view. He had felt that there was no land behind them, only more buildings, transportation nets, buildings, on into infinity. But the ocean had been the other way, rolling and heavy with mysterious smells and strong tasting winds. Once, he knew, man had considered expanding his world right into the sea itself, but he never had. Instead he had leaped into space, leaving the oceans strange and unknown. The storm had come from the sea, wind, rain, lightning, thunder. He had stood on the balcony of the apartment where he was staying, and he had felt great fear of the storm as it was building, and ever greater fear of it when it was unleashed and struck with fury. It was a primeval fear, inexplicable, unleavened by the knowledge of the strength of the buildings. To his amazement none of the other people in the building appeared to be aware of what was taking place beyond their windows and the safety of their steel and plastic shield. It never stormed on Venus: the rains came with dull ponderous regularity when the days were grey and the air was water-laden, with no touch of the furious energy, of that one Earth storm. He never had witnessed such a storm again. Always in the back of his mind the idea had swum that one day he would return to Earth and find one of the small parcels of government land that still contained trees and hills, and there he would wait until another such storm appeared. It had touched something in him that had been dormant until then, and had become dormant again afterwards.

He thought of the storm, of the cold, wet winds smelling of seas, of the blindingly bright lightning thrusts, and he wondered at the strange desires the thoughts aroused in him.

“Our weather is gentle always,” Lar had said. He had been saddened by the words, without knowing why. Trace lifted a rock and fell with it, letting go of his burden only an instant before crashing to the ground. He lay there with his eyes closed and wondered if he would be able to get up again, later, when he risked the effort. A swift flood of desire for Lar pounded through him and he knew that always he had wanted to take her with the violence of a storm that loves the land that it pounds. He wanted to hold her naked in his arms while the lightning flashed and thunder reverberated; he wanted to share the terror evoked by the elements, and forget the terrors in the violence of love making.