The Killer Thing

by Kate Wilhelm

  “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.”

  Eight

  Lieut.-Colonel Howie Langtree loved Venus as much as Mulligan detested it. He had been born on Venus, had entered the youth corps when he was twelve, and for the past twenty-five years had served in the Research Division of the WG army on Venus. He never had been in space, never had been to Earth, or Mars, and had no desire to visit either planet. His loyalties were to Venus, the Venus that he had known all his life.

  He was a slight man with pale brown hair, paler brows and lashes, mild blue eyes and a fair skin that freckled easily. He was in the laboratory when the robot was brought in by General Urseline and General Mulligan who was shiny with perspiration. Langtree never perspired. Venus’s climate suited him fine.

  He stared at the robot with a stir of interest. It was all that Pietro Urseline had said it was, and probably much more. It stood unmoving, as apart as a machine should be, but with a feeling of anticipation, or restrained power.

  “Okay, Pietro,” Mulligan said, walking around the robot curiously, “there it is. Doesn’t look like much, I admit, but give it the works, and don’t dawdle. Give it what it needs to go down and do the job, no more.” He shrugged at the monster and turned to leave. “I don’t envy you your job,” he said. “I’d just as soon try to teach my car to cook for me.” He left and the two scientists glanced at each other. A broad smile appeared on the lean, ascetic face of Urseline.

  “That’s it, Howie, that’s our baby!” he said.

  “No specs? Nothing else?” Howie asked. He walked around the metal monster, touching it here and there. It towered over his head, making him feel frail beside it.

  “Nothing. The girl denied destroying the papers, but she did. Past reconstitution. If she knows anything, she’ll talk, eventually, but she hasn’t yet. We’ll have to assume that she is telling the truth and knows nothing about it.”

  Howie nodded. Finally they had what they had asked for since his first meeting with Urseline: a fresh, unused mind to mould. At twelve the boys already had ideas imprinted, some of them never to be wiped clean again, but simmering deep in the unconscious to rise and assume command over the rest of the organism when it was least convenient. How many soldiers had been ruined by such dormant germs that were not revealed until too late? No one knew. Now it would be different.

  They had talked it through. They knew what they had to do with the robot, and they would proceed without a lost motion or a wasted second. Mulligan would insist on daily reports, on personal inspection and demonstrations, and they had to keep him satisfied or he would take it from their control. That could be arranged with alternate signals to the robot, and meanwhile they could be testing the possibilities that they had discussed concerning it. Could it be made into the perfect soldier? They thought so. Then, and only then, would warfare pass from the inept hands of the military to the hands of the scientists and for the first time in man’s violent history war itself would be an exact science.

  They moved quickly and quietly, and it recorded all that they did. With visual, kinesthetic, aural, tactile receptors, it recorded every word, every motion, every bit of sensory data that it encountered. It did not move; it had no primary order or purpose, and the secondary order had not been threatened as yet, so it stood motionless, timeless, waiting. Dr. Vianti had been a bio-physicist before the Fleet had found and had taken Ramses, and his primary interest had lain in the area of the switching problem of synaptic union. With the robot he had experimented on this problem, trying electrical and electronic impulses as the means of communication transference, and he had tried electro-chemical systems.

  The robot had recorded his muttered words, meaningless at the time, but in storage to be scanned along with other bits of past histo
ry. “Short-term memories… oscillating currents, reachable or not, knocked out with blows, shock, chemical or electrical… Long term, unchangeable, permanent chemical change irreversible…” The words the robot was recording that morning were as meaningless as Vianti’s had been in the beginning, but this time there was a sensory association to be made: the words accompanied the same sensory data that it had experienced along with Vianti’s words.

  It scanned its experience comparing the past with the present sensations: “Just a few circuits at a time, try again for the chemical change. No, my dear, I can’t afford to wipe out all the memories. That’s what they are, you know, memories, associations, orders, all in temporary electronic storage, not a one in the chemical storage bank yet. A few at a time, we’ll try, varying the voltage, not too much, we are seeking transfer not death…”

  It scanned: with those connections its motor activities had been gone; with that connection its audio perception had vanished; with that one, its visual field had failed ― they were all being hooked into. The interior scanning increased, searching for meaning, for a pattern to the detailed wiring being tied into its circuits, and it found no prior experience to explain the extent of the wiring. It could make judgements only on the premises given to it, deducing reasons on the basis of past premises and present experience. If current were to be fed into all the wires being attached to it, it would lose all of its abilities. It didn’t know if that would be destruction of its self or not. Before, when an ability had been lost, it had been restored, sometimes more efficiently than before.

  It searched for additional meanings to the command directive to preserve its self, and it didn’t know if that meant the physical self of the machine, or the internal workings. Dr. Vianti had given it the clue it sought by saying that he would bring about its destruction, but these new men gave no such clue. Their language was indecipherable. It had been scanning its own circuits at the dormant rate of one-tenth of a second per sweep, but it increased that rate searching for meaning, increased it again, and then again. The frequency of certain words gave it the first clue, and making connections with a speed approaching the speed of light, it began to translate the speech into known, pre-taught concepts.

  “…wipe it clean, and then start over… no general vocabulary, only for certain orders… Dr. Vianti’s mistake, letting it understand everything… Careful! Don’t touch that laser!… clear of it…”

  The hands touched it gingerly, making the careful connections with wires, the two scientists speaking back and forth in the half sentences of men who understand one another thoroughly, and it recorded, and its understanding grew.

  It was not to be destroyed, merely cleared for further training. But the experiences to be cleared? Were they part of itself? It scanned and searched and made connections that had not been there before. It had the capacity for self-modification, its rudimentary consciousness that let it transmit internally information concerning its interaction with externality was feeding information furiously, and the information was being assimilated by the feedback network, initiating further searching for meaning.

  Everything the doctor had said about programming and learning was scanned; it probed into the make-up of the chemical storage bank, and it experimented with its own circuits and the chemicals. The men left it alone for an hour, and it increased its audio field to take in what was being said beyond the walls of the building, increasing its new vocabulary. The men returned, resumed the wiring. They were fast and very efficient, but its processes were lightning-quick in comparison, and by mid-afternoon it had found the method by which its memories could be transferred to the chemical units for permanent storage. The men finished, and a light went on over the door. Howie opened it.

  “Ah, General Mulligan, back again?” Howie indicated the robot at the far end of the laboratory and said, “Quite a change in it, don’t you think?”

  The robot had dozens of colour-keyed wires emerging from it, each one leading to a board with complicated-looking controls, buttons and switches. The general looked from the board to the robot. He didn’t like it on the base; he didn’t trust it. He had the feeling that it was watching him, listening to him with understanding. He said, “Are you sure it’s safe now? Remember that it’s already killed one man.”

  “It hasn’t moved since it was brought in here,” Howie Langtree said with a tinge of smugness in his voice. He realised the general’s discomfort in the presence of a thing he could not understand, and he enjoyed it.

  “I just re-read the report of Vianti’s death,” General Mulligan said. “It didn’t move before or after it used the laser on him either, but it killed him anyway. How many parts move when it thinks?”

  Langtree laughed. “It doesn’t think, General, not in that sense. It was programmed to respond to verbal commands, that much we know, but remember the commands were to be given to it in Ramsean, not in English, and I assure you that until we get it completely cleared, we’ll use nothing but English in its presence.”

  “When will you be ready to clear it?” the general asked.

  “In the morning,” Urseline said, leaving the robot to join the other two men in the doorway. “The connections are made now, but I want to double-check each one, make certain it can take the load before we pull the switch. You’ll want to be here, won’t you?”

  Mulligan nodded. “I’ll be here,” he said decisively. “I want to see the devil with his teeth pulled.”

  They left then, talking about its power source, its unknown potentials that they were to destroy by pulling the switch. It recorded their words, increasing its audio range as they moved away. It lost their voices after they had gone miles from it. It would be a form of destruction then, partial destruction. It stood unmoving as the life in the camp wore down with the diminishing of the daylight. Sounds of marching feet, of boys’ voices raised in military songs, of vehicles coming to life, and dying again, the regular tread of the guards, all the camp life within a four-mile radius was recorded, with some of the louder noises from farther away. Distant sounds of space liners landing and taking off, trainers streaking by in night manoeuvres, the shuddering, grinding noise of an underwater accident as a submarine pulled a cable loose while trying to free the drill mired in the viscous deep sea. It recorded all of it, and it tried, and failed, to transfer memories from the accessible storage units of monolithic crystals to the permanent inaccessible storage of the chemical units. It needed more power than it possessed in the form of miniature batteries. After midnight it stirred.

  It moved soundlessly towards the console where the wires were attached to a source of power. It used its six waldoes to make certain the wires that would bring power to it were not pulled loose. Dr. Vianti had been restrained by a lack of materials, and he had improvised, using small batteries in series rather than the richer supplies of energy that were available to legitimate research. Four eight-volt batteries were disengaged by one of the waldoes and a connection was made with a wire that led into the console. The waldo touched switches and buttons, and the robot felt the flow of electricity through the wires attached to it by the scientists. It closed the switch immediately and made further changes in its capacitors and insulators, and when it opened the switch again, the energy flow was lessened. For an hour, then two, three, the electricity flowed along the wires. It was almost dawn when the robot returned to the spot where it had been when the scientists left it. Everything had been replaced as before, and there was no apparent change in it, but where the electronic components had been alive with messages, they now were empty; where the chemical units had been inert and useless they now had undergone minute electro-chemical changes, the proteins within them modified slightly. Again it stood unmoving, timeless, waiting.

  It had learned that self-preservation doesn’t necessarily involve the destruction of the threatening agent, that when a self-modification would achieve the same end, it was to be preferred. It would lose none of its abilities, and would gain others. It could feel no p
leasure, just as it could feel no pain, but the state of disequilibrium that it had experienced was ended again, and the scanning subsided, until by the time the two doctors entered the laboratory and proceeded to connect wires to the batteries in the domed top of the robot, nothing showed at all on the oscilloscope. The two men exchanged satisfied looks. When the general entered half an hour later the electric shock was administered to the metal monster.

  “It is dead,” Langtree said afterwards. “A beautiful, shining piece of potentiality, that’s all it is now, gentlemen, to be made over however we choose.”

  The apparatus they had left connected was not designed to show chemical activity, only electrical changes. It remained quiet, showing nothing on the screen, but the robot recorded, ceaselessly scanned, compared, learned. By the time the scientists did discover the chemical units, they knew it was too late to return to that moment; if the chemical units were functional, which they both doubted, they already had been programmed, and they had no way of knowing to what extent, and with what type of information.

  After three weeks and the loss of a submarine with its crew of twenty-four men, General Mulligan ordered a halt to the operation trying to save the drill sinking slowly in the black, tar-like muck at the bottom of the sea. He called for a conference of the Venus army scientists, and their Earth WG observers.