Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

“You were wrong, Mother!” he moaned, his eyes tightly closed in pain: the pain of his tormented body, worse, the pain of his desire that was not ebbing, but rising still.

Marry Conine, dear. It’s a gesture only. There are family monies, records, a bit of land here and there… Someone should inherit it after you… Don’t turn away, dear. This is how it is done. Your father and I saw each other only three or four times, after all. It was a very satisfactory arrangement… Corrine won’t make any demands, other than a son…

To be a soldier…?

Of course. We have the family tradition, as does Corrine. We have always bred soldiers. You are a man now, dear, with a man’s responsibilities… Love is nothing. You must believe this. I know you are romantic, dear, all of you youngsters are. You should be, but you should also be realistic. You think that out there somewhere is the perfect girl for you, that after you retire you will find a piece of paradise somewhere and marry a princess and live happily ever after… Darling, it isn’t like that. Earthmen are not compatible with any aliens yet found. There can be no mating with any aliens. They are never human, you know.

Lar mocking him with black eyes shining. You don’t have to ask me, Captain. You know that. The others don’t ask the women. They take them. You would pretend it is something that it isn’t?

Damn you, Lar!

I met this girl, Duncan, small girl, back hair, black eyes, a nurse…

I know what you need, boy. Some dish, eh? Come on, let’s go get ‘em.

You’re hurting me, Captain. Please…

I want to hurt you, you slut. You bitch! You alien bitch!

Bleeding and weeping, large blue eyes tear-filled, contorted face…

Lying on the hot ground Trace thought of the girl he had misused after leaving Lar untouched. He didn’t even know the girl’s name, or how badly he had hurt her… He thought of other girls, other women… “Lar,” he whispered, “I am sorry. I am sorry.”

After a moment he pushed himself away from the ground; the sun was coming straight down on him. It was noon. His body felt only soreness then, and a distant ache that never really left him, an emptiness that nothing seemed to satisfy. He didn’t look again at the wall, but staggered from the passage reeling drunkenly as he went.

Inside the dinghy he rested several minutes without thought. Time seemed to be changing somehow; he had no awareness of time passing when he was not actively thinking of it. He could not have said if he had rested for five minutes or for half a day when he rose from the bed. He knew he had to eat, had to drink, knew that he had to finish the search for the robot’s dinghy. Even his thoughts were distorted, each one occupying his entire being, as if his whole organism was involved with thinking through a simple thought like, I must eat.

He chose a fruit mixture, and a meat preparation, and he forced the contents of both tubes down. He found that it was easier if he didn’t think of what he was doing, but paid attention only long enough to get his hands started, to get his throat muscles swallowing properly, and then forgot the process. He felt far removed from it all. He measured out his water carefully and sipped it, letting his thoughts remain distant, sorry as soon as the water was gone that he had not concentrated on it, for suddenly he felt that he hadn’t had any at all. He searched through the medical supplies and found nothing that he could rely on to bring him back into firmer contact with his surroundings, but he felt that as long as he realised this curious dissociation was his symptom, he would be able to cope with it, make allowances for it. He tried to swallow anti-fever capsules and found that he couldn’t swallow them dry any longer; they stuck to his mouth and throat, choking him until he took water and washed them down.

He took his photograph-maps out then and made his eyes see the radiation trails he had crossed; he discovered that with no volition on his part, his eyes drifted from the trails and began weaving in and out of the towers of rocks that threw shadow patterns on the map. Very carefully he set controls on the panel of the dinghy, and then double checked them. He never had used these controls except in practice. If he stopped controlling the little craft, it would hover where he relinquished control, then would return to this spot at the end of a two-hour period of flight. He changed the time to allow him three hours for the search, and then, knowing that he would be returned to camp in the event that he blacked out, he eased the dinghy out from the rocks and took off. He felt very lightheaded, sometimes feeling that he was on the inside of the craft, and that it was motionless, other times feeling that he was on the outside of it with the ground tumbling away from him. The dinghy was flying almost entirely on automatic when he rejoined the radiation lines he had mapped before. Every time the craft came to another trail, crossing the one it followed, it hovered until he took over. When it hovered, the down drafts of air blew up columns of sand that then settled in neat little hills over each juncture when he went on. Once he let the craft fly out for twenty-four miles before he turned it around and followed the trail back to the first cross-trail. It all seemed to be so far removed from him personally, so unimportant. The radiation alarm sounded incessantly, and it became the voices of Duncan, of the men aboard the fleet ship in orbit, his mother, the voices of the boys back in the barracks…

He dared not land. His dinghy would get hot and his radiation alarm would then be useless. He laughed. If he landed somewhere else and came back on foot, he would get hot… He had been out for two hours when he began to come wide awake and alert again, and he cursed vehemently when he checked his mileage. In the state he had been in he could have flown over the other dinghy a dozen times without its making an impression on his befuddled mind. It would be on his film if he had, but he had no way to know until he examined the film. Below him there seemed to be at least half a dozen trails leading in different directions, and he realised that the robot had been using this as its starting point in its search for him and Duncan. Later it had learned that it need not return to the starting point after each false trail, but here, it seemed the thing had come back again and again…

Trace jerked wide awake then. It had returned to this location. Its starting place. That meant that the dinghy had to be close now. He slowed and studied the ground, searching for the basalt cliff where he had seen the robot. There were too many of the black shadows for him to be able to tell if any given rocks were black or white, or any of the shades in between. The dinghy itself would not be radiating; its radiation would be entering the ground underneath the shield of invisibility. He searched for an area in the midst of the hot trails that was free of radiation. There were several such blank spaces. Carefully he covered the area beneath the dinghy so that the cameras would be certain to have every inch of it on film, and then it was time to turn and go back to the valley. There was still much work to be done on the passages. As he turned he saw the basalt cliffs.

He stiffened with excitement, and disregarding the automatic pilot light that blinked off and on, as if in annoyance, he took over the controls and circled the cliff, trying to pick out the ledge on which he had stood that day. They had landed on the other side of it, and he had found the ledge that he could climb, winding around the cliff, giving him a view for ten miles around almost. He circled the site of the first landing; he saw the ledge he had climbed. The radiation trails were thick and heavy under him; the robot had found the site of their landing then. Knowing that the entire area was on the film, that he could study the film and find the right spot to locate the other dinghy, he did turn back. Within minutes he was landed and had his maps spread out, superimposing the films over them.