The Killer Thing

Seven

“I don’t give a goddam how sophisticated it is! You can’t fight a war with robots! It’s been tried. Read your military history books!” General Leroy Mulligan chewed his cigar angrily, stamping up and down the cramped room in the military planning headquarters office. Several other men were seated in the room. The building was grey, inside as well as outside, the domed roof curving to make the sides, from which windows had been cut out. He paused before one of the windows and stared at the dismal scene beyond it. Swamps, as far as he could see, here at the edge of the compound. In the opposite direction was a forest of domed buildings, each on piles sunken deep into the mire to rest on the bedrock. The hot air stank of decay and endless death and uncontrollable growth. He hated Venus! God, how he hated Venus! He was a tall, powerfully built man, not yet fifty, with hair the colour and sheen of coal, and eyes like obsidian drops.

“General, the committee doesn’t insist that we adopt this machine to use in combat, merely that we put it through a battery of tests… ” Ching Li Sung sat quietly, his pale hands in a nigh steeple before his face. He had sat thus without moving for the past hour. His ivory-skinned face was un-lined, untroubled, contrasting cruelly with the florid, contorted features of the general.

“Tests be damned! I know what they want! It’s that Outsider nonsense, that’s what it is. Rumours, nothing but rumours. By God, we’ve had rumours ever since man picked up a club and started to swing it. Now suddenly the galaxy’s getting in a panic because of rumours.” General Mulligan whirled and strode back, stopping in front of the Armaments Committee member. “Why did the government send you? Why not the routine request for information they usually send along?”

Ching Li Sung shrugged delicately, didn’t answer. A second officer stood up, a colonel. He was with WGI, the intelligence arm of the World Group government. “General when you ordered the pickup on the robot, what did you plan to do with it?”

General Mulligan glared at the colonel. As much as he detested the WG committees and sub-committees, and sub-sub-committees, he detested the intelligence branches even more. He knew how to appease committee members for the appropriations he needed to run the army, but the intelligence was never appeased; every question answered for them led them to ten more. There wasn’t a man in Intelligence who knew anything about army protocol. He said, “We have lost over a thousand men in this mud bath of a planet, a thousand men, millions of dollars worth of equipment from diving gear to boats, to subs, to bathyspheres, to pumps. You name it, we’ve tried it and lost it. You ever try to drill down through two miles of gook? Not water, not good solid earth, but filthy, stinking, rotting gook? Year after year we plead for relocation of the Fleet base, and every year they turn us down. Mars’ atmosphere too thin; Earth too crowded; everything else too far away. So we are stuck here. Every year we try to get the job of drying up this hellhole turned over to civilian authorities, and they turn that down. So I want a machine that will get the goddam job done.”

“I see,” the colonel said. It would all go in the report, Mulligan knew, and he hoped it would be read by the WG President himself.

“I think, gentlemen,” the fourth man said quietly, “that it will benefit all of us if the men selected by the committee are allowed to observe the robot, and make suggestions, if they so choose. But, I think, also, that the machine itself should remain under the authority of the army for the time being.”

General Mulligan nodded briefly, the nearest he could bring himself to a demonstration of the satisfaction he felt. The man was Serge Vislov, the committee adviser delegated by the World Group President, and his recommendation would be followed.

Mulligan watched them leave his planning-room with a feeling of relief. He had come out just about as he had expected to: there would be observers, but his men would do the actual programming of the thing when it got there. Meanwhile there would be the luncheon for the vips, and then the tour, and then the dinner and dance. A slender uniformed man entered the planning-room quietly, Dr. Pietro Urseline, a general, also a physiologist specialising in brain research and cybernetics.

“How’d it go?”

“It’ll be your baby,” Mulligan said. “Remember, all we want is something that can get down in that muck and dry it up. Nothing else!”

“With one robot?”

“We’ll make more, if it works out. You said it could be used for dredging, for underwater blasting, for cutting. You said it could be adapted to the pressure, its sensors adapted to the muck. You’re getting it; it’s up to you to make good.”

Urseline sighed. “Think back, General. I said I’d like to try the thing. I was interested in it. We don’t even know if this Tracy knows what he was talking about. I promise nothing.”

“Tracy’s a good man. Under my command five years. Smart.. Knew his father, too, Colonel Wilmot Tracey.”

Mulligan headed for the door, stopping with his hand on the knob. “What made you think this thing was any better than the robots we already have?”

“If Tracy is as good as you say he is, and if his report was correct, this robot is advanced over any of our present models. It can act on verbal orders; it contains more potential in a smaller package than anything we have. It’s already more widely adapted than anything we have. Ours are simple servitors, each one manufactured to do a simple, exacting task, or a few very closely related tasks. According to Tracy’s report, and my deductions from his sparse clues, this new robot already can handle more different kinds of orders than ours. According to the report your major sent in regarding the death of Dr. Vianti, this machine can also initiate action. I am curious about that. Why did it act then? The girl’s statement that her grandfather said only for her to return to her desk in the other office, which she did immediately following his death, was a lie, naturally. Why would simple instructions like that have caused the robot to go into action? On the other hand, what could he have said to cause it to kill him? How did it know that laser would cut through flesh? How did it know it would kill? Does it know what kill is?” Urseline spread his hands in an all embracing gesture. “I am most curious about this machine, General. Most curious.”

Mulligan snorted and yanked the door open. “You just see to it that it can go down in that goddam muck and deepen that channel. Every other lousy planet in the universe can get dredged, or oceans built into it, or mountains either made or erased, but here? Not on your life! The colonists like Venus! Okay. Let them keep their half of it knee deep in mud and muck, but I want this half clean and dry! And, by God, I intend to have it clean and dry!”

He stamped outside, slamming the door after him. The odour of rot filled his nostrils and his anger deepened. The compound was on the edge of the Glenn Swamp and threatened to revert to swamp, as did all areas that were not tended constantly. He stood staring about him for several seconds, searching for something, someone to take out his anger on; he saw nothing that wasn’t running smoothly, as ordered.

Venus had been colonised by a mixed group of U.N. chosen immigrants as an experiment. Only one-fiftieth of the planet was habitable, the rest being under the shallow oceans and swamps that made up almost all of it. Nowhere was there more than five thousand feet difference in altitude from the deepest ocean floor to the highest hillcrest. The oceans were for the most part only hundreds of feet deep, the highest point of land on the planet was three thousand feet. The colonists had taken all the land available, and later, when peace was again established between the colonists, Mars and Earth, the U.N. giving way to the World Group government, the army was allotted Mount Odessa, mountain in name more than in actuality. It was two hundred feet higher than the surrounding ocean, and the dry land was measured in feet rather than in miles when the army had arrived. Now, over a hundred years later, the relatively dry areas had spread, but still were inadequate for the needs of the growing army. On the map Mount Odessa measured nearly one thousand miles by nearly nine hundred miles, but in reality almost half of that figure was a measurement of swamp and mud, unusable and to date almost impossible to drain. The trouble had been that there were no channels in the shallow oceans. Water from only hundreds of feet to two thousand feet deep overlay mud and silt of up to eight thousand feet, or deeper, before bedrock could be reached, and dredging the mud and silt was an endless job, for it flowed back before the dredgers even surfaced. Slowly, foot by foot, the land area had been increased, but it was a treacherous landfill that they used: the silt dried to powdery fineness. Bricks made from it crumbled; it refused to mix properly with sand or rocks and cement to make concrete; it expanded under rains until walls made from it cracked and split and fell. Refineries had been set up to process it, but when it was touched by water, it all went back into suspension, and when it was wet it stank.

Mostly it was decayed plants, not even trees with good hard wood trunks, but soft, useless plants that grew in spurts measured by feet overnight, grew, blossomed, fell, decayed and were washed out to the seas, or lay rotting underfoot, piling upon the floor of the swamps so that in places a man could sink in seconds, swallowed by the muck before he could be reached.

General Mulligan returned to his quarters to shower and change his uniform, as he did several times daily, in time to have lunch with his visitors from the World Group government.

“The government of Mellic is refusing a conference at this time,” one of the lesser emissaries said over coffee and cigars three hours later. Mulligan perked his ears. Mellic had been one of his finds, his and his crew’s, before his grounding on Venus over a year before.

“Let ‘em pout,” said one of the representatives from the Venus group. “Isn’t the first time a nation pouted when the Fleet took over.”

“This is a little different,” Ching Li Sung interrupted in his quiet voice. “You see, they admit their defeat; they admit our troops and follow all orders scrupulously. However they will not confer with our representatives, not even those from Mellic who are on Earth. They are extremely polite and do all that is requested of them, except talk. That Mellic is under military rule seems to concern them not at all, as if they have no wish at this time to re-establish their own civilian control.”

“Isn’t that where the rumours of the Outsiders came from?” General Mulligan asked.

“Let us say additional rumours of the Outsiders have originated on Mellic,” Ching Li Sung said, smiling blandly. “Did you not hear of them on your initial foray into Mellic?”

General Mulligan scowled. Mellic had been a sitting duck as far as he was concerned, a great big planet without a single gun in sight. His team had been small, a scouting patrol of the fleet, and they had been received cordially. When he had returned three years later with the remainder of the Fleet under orders to seize the government of the planet, he had been met with guns, and ships. Mellic had not been one of the easy ones after that. Six months it had taken, his last active duty before the present assignment on Venus. He had been criticised for the trouble, but he had not anticipated the swingover to munitions that had developed so rapidly. He still didn’t know how they had come up with modern weaponry in so short a time. The thought of tutorship from Outside stirred coldly down his spine.

He said, “There were rumours here and there when we landed our wounded on Mellic, after the surrender, of course. There are always rumours of big brothers who will pay you back.”

“Of course,” Ching murmured.

The talk shifted to politics and economics and then it was time for the tour, and the party divided into smaller groups to spend the rest of the day riding through the swamps, up and down the gentle hills. General Mulligan was in the lead car, an atomic powered ground effect vehicle. He pointed out the newest in weapons, transportation, defensive shields, and all the while his mind was reviewing the thin stream of rumours he had heard regarding the Outsiders before he had been sent to Venus.

It was said that Mellic had appealed to them for help as soon as the Fleet had left it after the initial contact. The small contingent that had remained had been left strictly alone, and had no suspicion that anything whatever was wrong until the Fleet had returned to be met by Mellic ships, fewer in number, but as fully equipped and as skilfully handled as the WG ships. He hadn’t asked for many ships for the take-over of Mellic; he had thought few would be needed. Of course, when the reinforcements had arrived, the battle had ended abruptly, with absolute surrender of the defenders. And then had come the hints and rumours, none of them taken seriously alone, but together making an impressive, if unproven, catalogue of the Outsiders’ potentialities. Mellic had asked for and received information about space battles, and ships, what was needed, how to manufacture them, how to man them. An army had been raised and trained practically overnight, and no hint of its existence given to the detachment Mulligan left there. They, in fact, had been entertained royally during the three-year wait. After the surrender, when the wounded were put down on Mellic, the rumours had been less than specific: there was another force, farther out; they were peaceful; they were powerful, at least equal to the WG Fleet; they probably were humanoid; they would resist the WG efforts to take the galaxy.

“Venus is the basic training camp for all army personnel,” Mulligan said to the group. “We receive the boys at the age of twelve, school them for the next five years, and then place them where they are most suited. This is the section devoted to the first training of the youngsters.”

The forest of grey-domed buildings had increased in density; it was laid out in rings, each building connected to the next by plastic walkways over the damp ground. There were hundreds of boys in the parade grounds, all dressed in grey shorts, grey shirts, all doing knee bends in unison. Lines of equipment were on another dry area: everything from ground effect cars to space craft. All of the training equipment was of current design. Boys and instructors were around, on, or in all of them. The area was very quiet.

“They have four hours of rigorous exercise, four hours of classwork, two hours of study daily,” Mulligan said. “Gradually as they grow older the exercise is cut to one hour daily, and their classwork is increased to seven hours, with two hours of individual study, and two hours of maintenance work on the various machines they are learning to operate and maintain.”

His voice droned on as they left one area for the next, sometimes being forced to take to the air over tree-like plants that had appeared overnight, again skimming over brick-red water with a poisonous odour, now and then stopping to settle on the ground that felt shivery under the heavy vehicle. “There, gentlemen, is the dredging operation,” he said finally, motioning the driver to stop at the edge of the road. Below them a mammoth bay had been cut out of the land. “As you can see, it is not working at the moment: our latest submarines are all down now trying to extricate a drilling machine from a tar-like layer of ooze they have run into.” A bitter note was in his voice. “They won’t be able to free it. It is sinking slowly despite all their efforts, and if they persist they will get caught in the same filth and go down too.”

A Mars scientist looked at the water with envy, and then turned to the general. “What is the purpose of the operation, sir?”

“We have to blast and dig a channel down into the bedrock under all that gook in order to drain the land,” Mulligan said. “We have tried evaporation; we’ve tried dredging the silt. Our engineers have decided the only approach that is going to work is a two-mile-wide channel a mile deep all the way around the land masses. With the material we’ll then have to work with we will build a sea wall of rock and fill it with the mud…”

“And for that you need the robot…” Ching Li Sung said softly. “Why do you think it will be able to do what your other machines have failed to do?”

“Why not plant bombs?” someone else asked.

“We could use atom bombs,” General Mulligan said even more bitterly, “but Venus government objects. The oceans might get ‘hot’. That mud is such a fine suspension that it would take years for the stuff to settle out again, even a clean bomb… And the robot? It’s a natural. It’s already got the sensors for operating in total darkness; they work around the clock in those mines, you know. And it’s made out of platinum mostly, won’t rust or corrode or dissolve. These are highly acid waters here, all that rotting vegetable matter… And the robot’s got lasers built in already, all this in a small package, manoeuvrable. It’s got treads and wheels, and we can give it buoyancy so that it can stay at any level. And it takes orders. Verbal orders. It can transmit to our men exactly what the conditions are down there, and they can tell it how to cope. See?”

“It would seem,” the intelligence officer remarked in the silence that followed, “that all those things would also apply to it as a fighting instrument.”

Mulligan stared at him through narrowed eyes for a moment. “Men fight our wars,” he said. “It’s men that go out and take the planets and hold them. Men with imagination enough to know when to fire and when to stop, when to kill and when to spare a life. Men who can die, so that the land they died for is worth holding. Every world we take has some of our blood spilled on it, and that’s the kind of tie that even the Outsiders can’t break. You can’t do that with machines, Colonel. You have to take lands with your blood, yours and theirs, mixing together in the dirt so that in the ages to come you can’t tell whose blood it is that nourishes the trees and grasses. Then you know it’s your world, Colonel, and not until then.”