Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

There, or there… There were four blank areas, any one of which could be the other dinghy. Within twelve miles of his valley there was fuel, oxygen, and water. There had to be a way of getting to it without getting too hot, or letting his dinghy get too hot… There had to be a way of entering it once he did pinpoint it exactly… He couldn’t waste his dwindling fuel in flying back and forth again until he had his plan readied. Tomorrow. He’d have figured it out by tomorrow and then… He thought of the cache of water that must be in the other dinghy and he almost sobbed wanting it. “Damn you, Duncan,” he whispered. “Damn you, damn you.” He thought hungrily of the water dripping off the injured man’s body, soaking into his clothing, wasted on him… He swallowed a mouthful of his remaining water, and he knew that it would be gone on the next day. He had to find the other dinghy on the next day, or he would die of thirst. He had to finish sealing his valley so that if the robot came before he took off, it wouldn’t be able to get him. He laughed and got up to go back to his fence. He had an hour before the wind would drive him back inside. He would finish the fence by then. Tomorrow he would find the other dinghy. It would take time to find it, to transfer the water and fuel, to sabotage it… If the robot got to him before he finished with everything, it wouldn’t matter any longer. He could take off and be out of range before it could swing its laser to cover him, even if it were on the rim of the valley itself by then. He would study the map, make a plan, he had all night to perfect his plans… He touched his cracked lips and knew even that didn’t matter. Soon there would be plenty of water. He finished building the fence, made it six feet high, and when the wind started to blow he went back to the dinghy and pulled out the maps. He didn’t take off his suit, didn’t even remove his hands from the gloves and when his head fell down to the maps, the face mask cushioned the fall so that he didn’t even feel it.

Trace had been sleeping, but was no longer. There was nothing he could see; his body felt nothing, his hands were somewhere and he couldn’t be certain where. He floated, drifted, with no knowledge of which way was up, which down. There was no sound anywhere. It was peaceful for a time, but then his eyes began straining to see something, anything. His field of vision was small, dark, completely black, a window blacked out. It grew, expanded until it filled all the space before him, then abruptly shrank to a keyhole-sized window again, but always black. Worse than the black of nothingness was the silence, with his body noises stilled, no sound of air in his chest, or in his nostrils. No sound of anything anywhere.

“I am awake; this isn’t a dream. Delirious? I must be delirious… It will pass.” There was a noise from somewhere… voices. He listened to them intently. Fleet voices raised in the dirge:

Some time later there were images, framed in glaring colours, sometimes like snapshots, sometimes like 3-D. They came very quickly, started small, grew to fill the window, were gone with the next already speeding up out of nowhere: god in a jar slides and desks don’t you understand at all if you know you belong you don’t fight swirling gases with figures growing green and blue flowers on wavery stems and figures rising from gases smelling of ovens and kilns children’s thumb pots blue and grey and brown either or this or that up or down black or white. It isn’t like that at all! Don’t you understand at all? I don’t decide now I will feel my happiness: I feel happy. Don’t say now I will think about this: think about it. Child again where you do things for nothing, just because you do pots smashed smelling of kilns contorted figures in death dances. Dances Corrine cool and untouched clean brittle clean scalded-and-painted-over-clean. They are pigs back on Earth, filthy pigs surrounded by filthy little pigs all sucking, sucking, standing on top of each other’s heads, copulating in beds overcrowded with little pigs already. Nobody ever goes back there! Dirty, dirty, filthy. Like a disease spreading through the universe. Broad circles black and light narrowing towards a centre somewhere far away, smooth, frictionless surfaces, sliding downwards towards the centre and is it black or light? No closer; too hot. Whole top layer seething, stark with atmosphere. A demonstration only boys, others will bow down down. Demonstration only. Couple of hundred years come back and re-seed it, start a paradise of our own. Mellic next seething to outermost atmosphere, find a piece of paradise and live happily ever after all lies sluts and bitches and god’s in a jar you are the new gods, didn’t they tell you alien bitches good for one thing you stick it in and let ‘er go, boy! alien bitches sluts not human die in convulsions of rejection Lar twisting in convulsions bleeding red and hot screaming around her figures rising in death dances from misty smoke and gases hideous room with a bed touching each wall dirty soiled bed words on the walls open windows with faces open mouths watering eyes clawing hands reaching inside Lar twisting and writhing with someone else using a strap on her, half human, inhuman unfinished human figures unfinished dancing drawing percussion weapons deafening noises of explosions and smells of gunpowder screams targets chained to trees out of range of their bullets beams touching them touching them only not lingering only touching them out of range of their bullets out of range of their bullets… Brunce’s gun in his hand spreading circle of blood on the shoulder of Gene Connors Brunce’s eyes boring into his the smoking revolver in his hand still behind Gene behind Trace… Running past Gene’s body… You’ve been to Tarbo boy! You’ve been to Tarbo totarbototarbo… don’t want to kill them. You don’t want not to. Indifference is worse than sheer brutality Captain Tracy. They are people like you like me like the Outsiders.

Trace was sitting where he had dropped, still clad in his all-weather suit, one arm dangling, the other stretched out on the maps, both numbed and asleep. The stool on which he sat was small, plastic, and he could no longer feel it under him, nor could he feel his feet and legs held too long in one position. His face mask and helmet protected his face from the surface of the pull-down desk-top, and with any slight shift of his position, he felt that he was floating, as he was, surrounded by foam and the ungiving rigidity of the helmet and face piece. He had turned off the audio and the helmet was soundproof within it. He had forgotten to turn on the night glow inside the dinghy and without it there was a complete absence of light. He had no sense of touch, of heat, cold, sound, sight… no sensory data of any kind, only a mind, free-floating, unattached…

Before his open, straining eyes paraded images superimposed one on another until there was no interior quiet; in his inner ear voices were raised and lowered. He could not tell if it lasted for minutes, or hours; he could not tell if he felt the sensations he experienced in his mind only, or in mind and body. When the figures were threatening, sometimes he ran, feeling hot and flushed with the effort, feeling the strain in his leg muscles and in his chest. His body told him he was running and he believed it. Lights began to come and go, patterned lights, blocks of yellows, with smaller rectangles of red and green, or violet and orange… lights that grew from coin size to cover the entire field of his vision, lights of dazzling brightness, other lights that were so dim that he squinted in order to see them better. There was a meaning in the lights, if he could only decipher it. The lights lost their precise forms and began wavering, looking like flames, tongues of colour that leaped, rose, fell, grew again. He understood that the lights represented his life: they had started subdued and dim without form and had become more and more violent, with rigid shapes, but now again they were formless. To his horror he saw that the clarity of the colours was diminishing; they were becoming muddied and ugly, and he realised that they were blending, all coming together, getting darker, muddier, uglier. He screamed at them to go away. He screamed again and again, for he could not hear the screams that were echoing through the dinghy. The colours ran together and began dripping away from the framework that had held them together. They ran down to form a puddle of colourless muck, and from it rose ship after ship. Outsiders’ ships of gold.