Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

They were beautiful ships, slender, long, brilliant, shimmering behind force screens that softened them in outline, made them dream-like and added to their beauty. The Outsiders were tall and slender also, and lovely. He saw them as forms, beautiful forms with graceful lines and pleasing colours. When he attached the word outsider to them, the forms changed, and they were no longer human, but masked creatures whose hideousness was hidden. He could hear them speaking: we don’t want war; we don’t want to harm anyone… you must return to your homelands and venture forth no more until you are welcomed to the other worlds, until you have put aside your armaments, until you have replaced your generals with men of peace… He saw them above him. He was on a flight of stairs that wound upward into the sky, and slightly to one side, and above him was Lar; above both of them stood the glorious Outsiders, inhuman, more than human, beautiful. He hadn’t known the stairs continued above him; no one ever told him to look upward to see; he never had been able to see up that high before. He could hear Lar’s bit of poetry in his ear as he gazed up at the tall figure above him:

He stood paralysed on the stair and the Outsider was changing even as he gazed. It was taking on a metallic look, growing outward, getting rounder, with a single red eye in the middle of its head, a head that had grown domelike, resting on the shoulders. The red eye began searching for him. He knew it was searching for him, that it would not be satisfied with anything else. He reached his foot out behind him, feeling for the stairs he had climbed before. They were gone; only charred remains of them jutted from the framework of the staircase. He looked back and knew that to step backward was to die. It was more than miles down, an eternity of falling, an infinity of space lay behind him, more than could be covered in a lifetime. He stood on the narrow step and looked again at the robot turning its single eye to the right and left, searching for him. He knew it would find him this time. As the eye passed over the stairs above him, they vanished. Presently there were no other steps, only the one on which he continued to stand and it was alone and unsupported now. The piece of wood floating alone.

“Who trained you?” he shouted at the robot then, and faintly, like an echo, Lar’s voice answered, “…trained to be a soldier, trained to be a soldier, trained…” He looked behind him at the ruined steps, and he knew he could not go back. He could not return by the steps he had already used, and there was no other way. There was no way back or out for him, only death when the red eye found him, when the two of them finally met, each built for this one thing, each performing as he must in this one encounter. The buttons had all been pushed, and now there was only the response to them left to the two who soon must stare face to face.

He had his Tarbo; the robot had his Tensor. Neither of them could erase what had been built in… The red eye turned and turned, and it would fall on him soon. Eternities passed, and he had to do something. He screamed and flailed his arms and legs. He could not feel them, could not know if they moved, knew only that consciously he tried to swing his arms about, tried to kick out with his feet. One hand brushed against the switch that activated the audio of his helmet, and he could hear his own screams, and with the sound it was as if he were released from a spell. His groping, clawing hands found switches in the dinghy and there was light. Still the hoarse voice screamed until finally the screams gave way to sobbing, and sobbing he yanked off the suit and flung it from him.

Something had happened to him and he could not tell what it had been. He could not think, could only shiver with dread. He knew that if he had stayed in the suit, out of touch with physical reality, he would have died. His mind would have given in to the hallucinatory images, and he would have died, probably screaming until the end. He shivered again, harder, shaking uncontrollably.

He staggered across the dinghy to take a sip of water. It would be gone before noon. There had been images that he had to think about, clear from his mind once and for all, or risk insanity. He couldn’t think of them yet, and he knew he could not. He wrote them down in a shaky script: Lar and aliens Tarbo Duncan’s death the Outsiders… Then he returned to his seat-bed and stretched out and immediately fell asleep.

Trace awakened slowly, painfully. He didn’t want to wake up again. He wanted to return to the void which sleep had brought this time, a void with no thoughts, no pains, no thirst. A groan escaped his lips when he moved and slowly he dragged himself from the seat-bed and stood up. He looked down at himself with disgust and loathing.

His body was filthy with sweat, dust, sand, dried blood…

He was gaunt and bony. Fever, work, heat and worry had carved away his flesh until little was left but leather-like skin stretched over sharp bones.

He knew he was feverish that morning, probably had been slightly feverish ever since arriving in this hell. Thank god for the anti-fever capsules. There was a tic on the side of his face when he reached for a tube of the food, and he felt a wave of nausea pass through him. He had to take it; it contained some moisture and his water was down to less than a cupful. He took out the water bag and stared at it regretfully: less than half a cup actually. He sat down with half of the water, and a tube of fruit mixture and two of the anti-fever capsules. His mouth felt caked inside, hard and sore with deep cracks on the outside. His tongue was swollen, filling his entire mouth. He touched water to his tongue, took his time with the first scant spoonful. It hurt his throat going down. Something had happened to him. He couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything long enough to think it through. It took more water to get the capsules down, and his throat burned all the way down. At the first taste of the pasty fruit, he put it aside. He could not take that now. He looked at it for a long time and finally tried again, this time managing two swallows of it. He finished his water then and could have wept for more.

He had to inspect the passage he had worked on. Without thinking of anything, he got into his suit, left the audio on full this time, left the lights on in the dinghy itself, and he went outside. His feet seemed not to be making contact with the ground as he crossed the valley floor, and he felt that the short trip either took only an instant, or was endless. He felt that it was important to decide which, but even as he wondered about it, he forgot how he was trying to apply the time scale. When he got to the entrance of the passage, he forgot why he was there. He turned to go back to the dinghy, hesitated, and for no real reason went instead into the passageway between the cliffs. A barrier stopped him and he gaped at it with surprise. He couldn’t remember it at all. It was made of sand and rocks, was over his head, stretching from one wall to the other. Unsteadily he climbed over a rock or two to get a higher viewpoint, and from there he could see that the barrier appeared to stretch out the rest of the length of the passageway. He remembered working on it then, but dimly, as if that were an incident from ages past, from another lifetime. He decided to rest in the shade of the cliff and he sat down and again time was meaningless to him.

The medication moved through his system sluggishly; until the stimulants contained in it reached his brain, he sat unmoving in the shade. He sat without thought until very slowly patterns started to form again and he knew this was the fifth day, that on the following day he could expect the arrival of the robot. He got up and when he looked again at the sand and stone barriers, he knew they would prevent entry through this passage into his valley. Concentrating on his movements he left the passage and went to the one that remained. It was even broader, with only two narrow spots in it. It was a straight cut most of the way through the granite cliff, fairly steep but not so steep that the robot could not manage it. He followed it to the end, coming to one turn of about 100 degrees after two more gentle curves. The grade at the turn was steeper than it had been both below and above that spot. Trace stared at it for several seconds, turned and studied the passage behind him, and then clambered up to the top and outside. He examined the passage from the top. He could see that it went down into the valley, although he couldn’t see past the turn. The robot would know this was an entrance. If he could block it there where it curved…