The Wrong Stuff td-125

by Warren Murphy

  The Wrong Stuff

  ( The Destroyer - 125 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  KILL, CRUSH DESTROY...

  A mechanical killer space spider goes on the rampage in Florida. This, however, is no simple angry arachnid robbing armored cars and supermarkets. It's the adopted new brainchild of the reality-challenged head of NASA and his elite cadre of Space Cadets.

  But not even Captain Kirk is aware of the nightmare that's been unleashed in the name of interplanetary exploration. An old enemy is back in action and, with a click and a whir, can morph from titanium spider into his ugly old android self. And with NASA and America's favorite horror writer in his steel-plated back pocket, he's got a leg-or eight-up on his true mission: destroy the Destroyer.

  This time, failure is not an option.

  Destroyer 125: The Wrong Stuff

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  Life Discovered on Mars!

  That blaring headline, seen all around the world, had been one of Clark Beemer's. To this day it remained the public-relations man's personal favorite.

  The "meteorite" in which the fossilized bacteria had been discovered was a chunk of ordinary concrete Clark had found at a building demolition site on his way into work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Buffed, shellacked and dusted with an appropriate amount of space-age glitter from a local party-supply store, the rock had looked great for newspapers, networks and magazines. And, most importantly of all, it had gotten the tightwads in Washington to cough up an extra nine hundred million bucks for the United States space agency. Not bad for a piece of rock salvaged from the ruins of an old Piggly-Wiggly.

  When the truth was learned-that the only thing trapped in the stone was some Pepsi-Cola from an ancient spill in aisle 7-it no longer mattered. The media machine had long moved on to the next story. NASA quietly pocketed the budget windfall generated by the publicity, Clark Beemer accepted approval from the brass and the PR man moved on to the next project.

  Those were heady days. As he thought of that great life-on-Mars scam, Clark couldn't help but wax nostalgic.

  Back then his job had been a joy. Twenty bucks worth of supplies with a record-breaking payday. But that was a once-in-a-lifetime score. This time out, Clark wasn't sure he or NASA would be able to capture the public's imagination.

  Clark's fleeting nostalgic smile evaporated as he looked at the thing he was supposed to sell. It was a PR nightmare. The image was blurry on the computer monitor.

  "What the hell did you make it look like that for?" Clark groused. Sweat beaded on his broad forehead. The heat in the mobile control room was oppressive.

  The man before him wore a tense expression. His youthful face was dotted with a scruffy beard. "The extra legs are for balance and coordination," Pete Graham replied, annoyed. "And the redundancy's necessary for hostile climates. If there's a malfunction in one, others take up the slack." Graham was hunched over a control board. The computer terminal buried in the board's face tracked the movements of a bulky silver object as it walked through what looked like a shimmering cave.

  The mechanical device moved awkwardly on its eight slender metal legs. When its third right leg stumbled, the surrounding legs supported the object's weight.

  The scientists in the room watched the display with guarded enthusiasm. Clark Beemer alone wore a deep frown.

  Walking, the machine looked like a baby taking its first uncertain steps. But, unlike a baby, there was no one in his or her right mind who would want to cuddle up to it.

  "A spider," Clark growled softly as he studied the fuzzy outline of the device on the screen. His knuckles rested on the console next to Pete Graham's workstation.

  "Perfect design for Virgil," Graham said.

  "Right," Clark said with thin sarcasm. "I guess a cockroach or a snake would have been too perfect. And what's with that name anyway?"

  Graham flexed his fingers over his keyboard. "Virgil was Dante's guide through Hell," he explained absently.

  "Who?" Clark asked. When no one answered, the PR man shook his head. "How am I going to sell this thing?" he exhaled, dropping back into a swivel chair. He wiped the sweat from his face with his loose shirttail.

  For the past three days Clark had been reminding the scientists that it was his salesmanship that mattered more than this latest Erector Set reject of theirs.

  On the flight down from Florida to Mexico and on the chopper ride from the airport to this remote trailer in the shadow of Popocatepetl southeast of Mexico City, Clark Beemer had made his importance abundantly clear. So loud and frequent had been his words on the subject that most everyone had tuned him out by this point.

  Clark watched the scientists busy themselves for a long moment. They seemed so focused, so excited. A bunch of geeks playing games. None of them understood how this game was really played now.

  "You know," he said, exhaling loudly once more, "this is just like those boring whatchamacallit things they did at NASA back in the sixties. The ones where they put those guys on roman candles and shot them into the sky. But not the sky sky. The dark stuff that's above the sky. Bo-ring." He made a few snoring noises. "Damned if I know how the old Canaveral guys drummed up any interest in that."

  Engrossed in his work, Graham didn't bother to explain about the thrill of exploration that had driven everyone at NASA back in those heady days when all of space was new. Not that he had been around to see it. Pete Graham wasn't even born when man first walked on the moon.

  His eyes sharp, Graham studied the movements of the probe he had built.

  Popocatepetl was in one of its less active phases. Good thing, too. Virgil couldn't have survived inside an erupting volcano. But a completely dormant volcano was useless for their purposes. What they needed was a volcano with a recent active history that was in a down phase. With its constant threats of eruption, "Popo," as the Mexican volcano was commonly known, fit the bill perfectly.

  A helicopter had lifted Virgil to the mouth of the volcano an hour ago. A thick cable from its belly had lowered the spiderlike device into the crater where ash and glowing red rocks lined the dark throat like a disease.

  The trailer in which Pete Graham and his team monitored the progress of the probe was propped on rocks near a lava-and-mud-filled gorge beneath a freshly blown out parasitic cone. It was there they held their breath as they watched the probe being lowered into place.

  A million worries flooded Pete Graham's brain. Was the cable strong enough? Would it snap under stress? Could the helicopter negotiate the powerful updrafts? A single gust of wind buffeting the helicopter far above, and the gleaming probe would be dashed against the rocks and lost forever.

  Then there was the awful possibility that his baby might malfunction. During the deployment phase, he tried to keep this last, horrible notion as far from conscious thought as was humanly possible.

  When the Virgil probe was settled to the rock floor of the crater, anxiety rang in Graham's ears. There was a single, horrifying moment after the cable was released when it looked as if Virgil might tip over. But to the scientist's relief, the probe caught itself. A jerky manipulation of one leg, and the giant mechanical spider oriented itself on the floor of the cavern. When the applause erupted in the trailer, Clark Beemer didn't join in. After ten minutes of seeing that thing crawling around in Popocatepetl, the PR man was checking his watch, bored.

  The scientists instructed the probe to plant two stationary cameras on the floor of the cave to monitor its movements. Another head-mounted microcamera gave a bird's-eye view of Virgil's progress.

  As it crawled around in semidarkness in the steaming cavern,
the men in the trailer studied its every move. Clark Beemer couldn't believe how excited they all were.

  "What is it for anyway?" Clark muttered as the scientific team studied the data coming in from Virgil. Pete Graham didn't lift his eyes from his computer screen. "Virgil is a planetary probe designed to exist in hostile environments. If it can endure the heat of a volcano, it can do the same thing on an alien world."

  "Don't you have heat simulators at NASA?"

  "Nothing like this," Graham explained. "And a natural environment, not an artificial one, is what Virgil will be facing. We need to test him under battlefield conditions."

  The lava beds that the probe walked past were flaming orange. The black walls seemed to pulse with spectral energy. A sweep from a side-mounted light illuminated the nearby smoking wall in garish white. Virgil moved jerkily and the wall slipped away.

  As the light and camera were sweeping back ahead, Pete Graham sat up straight in his chair.

  "What was that?" he asked.

  "What was what?" one of his assistants asked. Graham didn't hear.

  "Stop him," he commanded. The others had long since gotten used to their project leader's use of masculine pronouns when referring to the probe.

  A technician dutifully halted the forward progress of the probe. Virgil stopped dead.

  Using his own keyboard, Graham shifted the focus of the camera. With a silent, fluid whir it moved back to where it had been a moment before.

  Flecks of deep red in the vast pebbled black were washed pale under Virgil's brilliant light.

  "There," Graham insisted. He pointed at the monitor. "What's that?"

  Men left their own screens to crowd around Graham's. When they saw the shining silver object he was pointing to, they frowned in confusion.

  "Looks too perfect to be naturally occurring," someone commented. "Maybe the Mexicans were doing some research and left something inside."

  "They built something that could survive in this heat?"

  The contours of the object were unclear. When Graham manually refocused Virgil's lens, he saw why.

  The edges of the unidentified object were buried in solidified magma. A gleaming bubble of silver peered out from the ragged rock like an otherworldly orb. "Maybe it's from another planet," an eager voice suggested very close to Graham's ear.

  Pete Graham scowled up at Clark Beemer. "Don't be an idiot, Beemer," the scientist snarled.

  "Hey, aliens sell," the PR man said.

  Virgil was standing at patient attention, camera trained steadily on the motionless object.

  Graham bit his cheek in concentration. He tipped his head as he studied the silver object.

  "Let's excavate," he announced abruptly. Excited with their strange discovery, the men scattered to retake their seats.

  Beside Graham, Beemer's frown deepened. "Some wetback tosses a Miller Lite can down there and you're gonna waste time digging it up?"

  "That's not ordinary trash," Graham said as he tapped away at his keyboard. "This volcano has been in an active cycle for a bunch of years now. That's hardened magma that thing's settled into. Nothing ordinary should have survived in there."

  "Yeah? Well, my vote's still for outer space," Beemer insisted.

  The PR man yawned as Virgil stepped closer to the half-buried object.

  Even with the camera's limitations, Beemer could make out the perfect curving fine. Measuring against one of Virgil's legs, which was framed in the foreground, Clark judged that the buried object was about the size of a croquet ball.

  The surface shimmered in the light as Virgil closed in. The optical illusion seemed to give the thing motion. The hard silver surface almost appeared to be rolling in a short series of waves. Of course that was impossible.

  There was a sudden sharp movement on the screen. Beemer blinked. "Did you see-?"

  "Okay," Graham interrupted, "we're gonna have to cut through that magma. Phil, bring me right up over it. You'll have to angle-" A glimpse at his monitor and he stopped dead. "What the hell's that?" he asked, his eyes going wide.

  No one heard his shocked question.

  "I've lost motor control," someone announced abruptly.

  Graham's head snapped around. "What?"

  "It's gone," the scientist insisted. "I'm locked out."

  When they transferred to another console, they found the same problem.

  "Cameras are down," another scientist remarked tensely.

  "All of them?" Beemer asked.

  "They're controlled by Virgil," Graham said. "If he's gone down, he takes the remotes down with him."

  "What is it?" Clark Beemer asked. "What's happening?"

  "Get out of the way," Graham growled. He pushed Beemer away as he jumped to his feet.

  Graham hurried from console to console in the cramped trailer. At each one the verdict was the same. For some reason unknown, their connection to the boiling belly of Popocatepetl had been severed.

  Sitting in their chairs, the men had grown mute. Their faces conveyed silent shock. In the background the portable air conditioner continued to chug away.

  The gray static of the final monitor shushed the room as Pete Graham straightened. His stunned face was covered with sweat. Wide eyes stared blankly into space.

  Years of research, design, programming. All gone in an instant. It was almost too much for his tired brain to register.

  Graham slowly shook his head. "Virgil's dead," the scientist whispered.

  And his disbelieving voice was small.

  THAT NIGHT the mood at the camp was funereal. They were stranded there until they could arrange for daylight transportation. Popocatepetl rumbled a few times after midnight. When the morning sun broke across the snow-encrusted volcanic cone of the mountain, its warming rays found Pete Graham still awake. He hadn't slept all night.

  After a long evening of vainly trying to contact Virgil, he had finally briefed NASA. The higher-ups were not pleased with this disaster.

  Graham's work there was supposed to be measured in days. They had finished in just over one hour. All Graham wanted now was to get the hell out of there and pick up the pieces of his career. Assuming he still had one.

  A separate trailer with a kitchenette was attached to the first. Some of the men were preparing a simple breakfast as they waited for the helicopter that would fly them back to Mexico City.

  The sunlight that beat in through the louvered windows was blinding. Lying in his bunk, Graham felt nothing but bitterness toward the common yellow star that dared to shine its cheery light across his haggard face.

  As he was squinting at the light, a dark figure rose from the bunk next to Graham's.

  Stretching, Clark Beemer noted Pete Graham's sick expression.

  "You think you've got problems?" the PR man asked. "I have to explain this mess to the media. And the way things have been going at NASA lately, it ain't gonna be easy."

  Shaking his head, Beemer headed for the trailer's small side door. Stepping into the light, the PR man let the door swing shut behind him.

  In the trailer Graham pulled himself woodenly to a sitting position. Someone brought him a steaming cup of coffee. Graham had barely taken a sip when the trailer door opened once more.

  Clark Beemer stepped numbly inside. He stood at stiff attention just inside the open door.

  "Um, that probe thing?" Beemer said. "You all seemed pretty sure it was kaput last night, right?" When a few sour faces turned his way, Beemer nodded.

  "I thought so," the PR man said, squirming. He pointed back over his shoulder. "It's just that when I went out to take a leak just now, it walked around the corner of the trailer. Scary stuff. Pissed my pants and everything."

  He indicated the dark liquid stains on the front of his trousers.

  "Real funny, asshole," one scientist muttered. They began turning away.

  "No, really," Beemer insisted. "It's waiting out there right now. Like it wants to talk to you or something."

  The PR man was so insistent and
agitated that someone finally went outside for a look. The technician exploded back through the door an instant later, his face filled with shock and joy.

  "Virgil's back!" he exclaimed.

  Pete Graham didn't even hear the sound of his heavy coffee mug as it struck the floor. By the time the liquid spilled, he was already bolting out the door. What he found made Pete Graham's heart soar.

  Standing in the shade beside the trailer, the majestic backdrop of Popocatepetl rising high above all, was his precious Virgil probe. Somehow, in defiance of all programming and human logic, his baby had come home.

  Behind Graham the other scientists, along with Clark Beemer, were hurrying down from the trailer. Pete Graham didn't even hear them. Like a fretting mother, he carefully circled the probe.

  When standing upright, Virgil was roughly seven feet tall. Squatting now, it was only five feet. Its eight mechanical legs were curled beneath the hard shell of its silver-plated thorax.

  Graham noted a set of big spidery tracks running from the lava-formed gorge a dozen yards away from the trailer. His amazed eyes tracked the furrow up to the parasitic cone in the wounded side of Popo.

  "He must have climbed out after he lost contact with us," Graham said, bewildered. "He used the cone as an exit and somehow followed the gorge to us."

  The rest of his team had clustered at an awed distance. Only Clark Beemer had the temerity to speak. He had gotten over his initial shock and was now shaking his pant legs in a vain attempt to dry the urine stains.

  "Is it a homing probe?" the PR man asked absently.

  "Don't be an idiot," Graham said.

  He was studying the clean silver surface of the Virgil probe. There wasn't so much as a scratch or dent in the smooth heat-resistant plating. Even more, Virgil wasn't even dirty. Despite its stay in the volcano crater and its trip down the muddy lava gorge, there wasn't the slightest visible hint of the punishing ordeal it had been through.

  "Homing probe might be sellable," Clark Beemer insisted as Graham ran a hand over the cool surface of the probe. "Not that you'd want this monster following you home." He frowned as he studied the mechanical body of the probe. "You ever think of putting a happy face on it? Like that spider in A Bug's Life? After all, you made it talk. Might as well make the words come from something nice."