Kate Wilhelm: The Killer Thing

There was the desert, glittering white sand that shifted like talcum when touched, cottony white sky, a quarter of it glaring with the white heat of the sun. There was no wind, no movement anywhere; not a grain of the powdery sand stirred. It looked like a blanket of white wool interwoven with silver threads in a random pattern, a blanket tossed down carelessly so that it rippled in smooth hills, all rising diagonally in a series. The cover stretched endlessly, hiding the rocky land under it from the gaze of the man; and where his vision failed, the bleached wood merged with the white cotton and the world was enclosed, as if he stood on the inside of a flattened sphere. Behind him and in the distance, between him and the desert, naked rocks thrust from the burned ground as barren as the view before him.

The rocks were basalts, granites, quartzites. Nothing as soft and weather vulnerable as sandstone existed above ground surface, but no weather stirred the air now, no wind blew. It would blow later, when the sun started to sink and the ground radiated away some of the heat load of the long day; it would blow for five or six hours then, exchanging heat for cool air, thin columns of tornado-like wind rising from the superheated ground to the high, thin atmosphere, to fall back through masses of hot air, whirling them about, starting new funnels. With the dawn the winds would have spent themselves, having established some sort of uneasy equilibrium; the sun-rise would start the winds again, shafts of heat stirring the night-cooled air more and more violently until all the atmosphere was superheated once more, and the violence subsided, becoming a gentle, steady breeze that died to nothing, as if the wind were anxious to amend the damage inflicted during the night, smooth back the tortured sands that had been whipped and tossed, and leave them in graceful rows of safely rounded dunes.

The man knew he could not remain that far from his base very long; his need to get away from it had been overpowering, however, and this day he had given in to the need. He lifted his pack, bending under its weight, his lungs and heart straining with the added burden, and he started to retrace his steps to his camp, keeping always in the shadows of the rocks. He was a big man, over six feet tall, well muscled, and young at thirty-two. But the air was thin. He did not have the added burden of oxygen tanks on this planet, but as his lungs strained for air he wondered if it wouldn’t be worth carrying them. Then he remembered they were empty. His suit was highly reflective, white, topped with a helmet that was wired and equipped to do things he couldn’t do without. He had turned up the audio so that if the killer robot moved within three miles of him he would be able to hear it. And he had adjusted the transparent face piece so that he could look out at the glaring world without risking “snowblindness”. In doing this he had cut down his visual field; he could not see the depths of the shadows cast by the grotesquely shaped rocks, and he could not see as far as his eyes unaided would have been able to, but neither would he go blind. As far as the killer robot was concerned, it would make no difference if he were blind or not.

His camp was the dinghy that had brought him from his ship, now in stationary orbit, invisible through the glare of the sun, but showing as a pearl drop of light late in the day when the sun started its descent. The dinghy was wedged between two mammoth columns of basalt three miles away. Every day he changed his camp, skimming the dinghy as close to the surface of the planet as he could, not settling for a new location less than fifty miles from the last. He had fuel remaining to move three more times only, reserving enough to take him back to the orbiting ship. The killer robot, obviously gravely damaged, was advancing at the rate of only five miles an hour, but even that reduced speed was much faster than the man could travel by foot, struggling against both heat and thin atmosphere.

He stopped in his march and listened. Something had clanged against a rock to his left. He flattened himself against the rock and didn’t move for the next ten minutes; there was no further sound. Cautiously then he moved away from the rock, around it, into the shadow of the next one. An energy beam cut through the granite above him, turning it cherry red, then white, and finally vaporising it. The man clung to his base. He was sheltered from a direct line of fire, surrounded as he was by the shafts that remained of ancient hills and mountains. Maybe the thing was trying to crush him with falling rocks.

No! He closed his eyes then, too tight, feeling pain in them.

It can’t do anything that requires imagination, remember that, Trace. It’s got a computer for a brain; it’s been programmed to kill with the laser, and the fusion shells, and that’s all.

You were wrong, boy! Didn’t you hear me telling you it blinked out? Just like that, out! Gone! It’s got something new, boy, a screen it can hide behind.

The voice had been there, in his ears, but it was gone now; everything was gone. The silence was complete, excluded even his own breathing and heart-beat. How used to hearing ourselves we get. I miss it. It couldn’t move so quietly that he wouldn’t hear it, even if he never saw it again. Not with its metal over the bare rocks, not with the radioactive trail it left behind it. The radiation alarm hadn’t sounded this time. Was the thing learning to stalk him, keeping the dense, radiation-damping rocks between itself and the man it hunted?

Two miles was its limit of fire; it must have been waiting quietly for him to blunder within that range. That meant it had to be somewhere even with him, or in front of him… He had heard it to his left; he was certain now that that was what he had heard, some slight shifting it made preparatory to firing. He began to squirm along the ground to his right, keeping close to the base of the rocks, dragging his pack after him. It fired once more, the beam falling short, still playing around the column he had left. After he had gone a quarter of a mile, he got to his feet cautiously at the foot of a basalt group that was sixty feet across, and twice as high. His camp was still thirty minutes away. He wondered if the thing had found it. He shouldn’t have risked leaving it, adding to the original mistake by not taking into account his own weakness, the enervating effects of too much sun, too little oxygen. But the killer robot shouldn’t have followed him this far so soon, either. Was it learning to cope with the uneven ground? Was it working on repairing its speed control?

He stopped his thoughts and listened instead to the voices:

The shell hit us, Trace, knocked out the secondary control-room.

Stan, Morris…?

They’re all dead. You still have a fix on it? Yeah, still closing, but pressure is going fast. We’ll have to abandon…

What’s it doing now?

Our hit must have bollixed the controls; it’s starting to spin.

They watched the ship they had chased for over three months, fixed on it so that it couldn’t shake them, entering warp sector after sector on its tail, always closing in, but not close enough to shoot it down, and now they knew that they had closed the gap enough. Trace’s fingers started towards the fire control and then drew back. A red light was flashing belligerently, and three green lights had flicked off. He turned to Duncan. Ready the dinghy.

It’s ready. It’s still firing. Looks like a random pattern.

The ship tumbled end over end, towards the planet, and every time it was in a position to fire the fusion shells, its automatic system fired a barrage. The patrol ship, limping now with its rear section gone, its protective screen damaged and ineffective, couldn’t manoeuvre, and aboard her the men could only wait.