The Killer Thing

Fifteen

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.

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.