Watching it before it blinked out, Trace had wondered at the reports claiming invulnerability for the machine, but then, knowing it was there, that it had a laser that could vaporise metal and rocks in half a minute or less, he had felt fear. He had run. Three weeks later, he was still running.
He was listening again, and this time there was an external sound; the small craft was being pelted with sand, and the wind was starting to whistle among the rocks. A dismal, faint sound now, it would howl and screech and scream maniacally later. It was time to leave this spot for another, fifty miles away. He took his seat at the controls, and just before he left the ground, he heard the radiation detector start warning him in a staccato voice. It was coming.
I can’t find the dinghy… It’s deflecting the radiation downward, into the ground. None of it’s escaping…
Destroy the dinghy and then hide, Trace. No other way.
Can’t find it.
Keep it too busy to go back and fix the dinghy. Keep it after you, too busy to go back…
Two
Trace took off then, feeling the shiver that passed through the small lifeboat when it left the ground and was hit by the wind that already was picking up strength away from the sheltering bases of the mountains. He flew with the wind pushing behind him, heading the dinghy east, straight out over the desert, away from the metal monster. The sun was going down behind him, lengthening the pointed shadows to slivers that lay across the rippled sand. Then the mountain shadows were gone and nothing but the sand was there. In the distance it seemed on fire, a ground-hugging, seething, molten lava lake ready to erupt to the sky in open flames. He looked behind him and could see the black fingers of mountains against the sky that was turning violet, like a rare, icy orchid being ripped with the black witches’ claws. Away from the mountains, in the east, the sky was becoming black, with night, with sand being raised from the desert floor. He flew twenty-five miles away from the mountains, and then headed north again, knowing he needed the bony lap shelter offered by the ravaged framework of the mountains. Once, days ago, he had tried to hide on the desert, and had lost one entire day in digging the little craft out from the hill of sand that had covered it overnight.
When he landed again, he had covered only fifteen miles in a straight line from the old camp, but maybe it would follow him out on the sands this time. When he could, he moved only minutes before the winds made moving impossible, always hoping the effects of the moving sand under the tornado-like wind would erase his trail. The last ten or fifteen miles he always hugged the bones of the mountains, hoping to damp his trail, hoping their mass would absorb his heat and noise, and whatever else it was that brought the robot to his new camp each day.
He chose his site carefully despite the wind gusts of fifty miles an hour, and the darkness that was enveloping the landscape. His craft was under a three-hundred-foot-high shelf that was being eaten out from below, leaving an overhang of forty feet.
Ain’t exactly Joyland, is it, Trace?
Lousy luck, that’s all. Just that one ridge we saw, that and sand…
Yeah. Well, six hundred miles of bare bones to play around for the next couple of weeks. We might get in some prospecting…
Watch out, Duncan! Object seven o’clock!
Very carefully Trace turned off the controls, forcing the voices away, refusing to go through it again. With the immediate need of action gone, he felt drained, and his exhaustion from the heat and the strenuous walk flooded him. He touched the stud that levelled out the seat into a bed, and he stretched out, his hands behind his head, eyes closed. It’s the end of this particular trail, he thought, drifting. From out on the desert he had seen that the mountains ended only a few miles beyond his camp. At this point the range was less than twenty miles wide, too narrow to hide in, certainly. He shouldn’t have tried that last manoeuvre. But perhaps this one time it would do something wrong…
A wry smile twisted his lips, although his eyes remained closed. It can do no wrong, unless wrong has been programmed into it. It’s a logic box. Nothing but a logic box. It can only do what it’s been programmed to do, and that’s it. If right and wrong are related in any way to logic and illogic, then it can do no wrong. It has been given a finite number of facts, and a finite number of propositions expressing relationships between those facts. It cannot question the validity of what it has been given, it can only act on those facts and relationships. And heaven help me, because I can question and doubt and make judgement mistakes…
The wind howled and tornadoes formed and lifted rocks, sand, boulders, sent them flying and crashing into the mountains. Immense slabs of granite were raised, ground together, and finally deposited as coarse sand that would be rubbed down finer and finer until it was like polishing powder.
How did it manage to dodge them? Did it keep to the lea side of the mountains always? Did it walk among shadows where the wind whistled past, but did not enter? Trace drifted; one muscle at a time, it seemed, jerked and relaxed, and then his hands slid out from under his head, one of them resting on his chest, the other dangling from the reclining seat, not quite touching the floor.
The bony, black fingers reaching for the sky curled in on themselves and crept along the ground, joining where they met other fingers, forming a black wall that was impenetrable. From the black forward line of the wall, new fingers probed tentatively, feeling their way around rocks, over boulders, dragging the wall after them, and the wall was getting closer and closer to him. He could not move as it formed, but suddenly was freed, and then he darted about crazily, looking for an opening in the wall, being forced backwards, step by step, until he knew there was nothing behind him but a chasm, and he could back up no farther. Again he froze, his eyes compelled to watch the progress of the wall.
It was there in the shadows. He could feel it as a horror too great to bear alone. If only someone would come along and open the wall for him. They would say nothing was there, nothing but the shadows; only he knew better. He knew it was there. It existed although he could not see it; when it moved he felt a tug; when he moved, he could feel it changing direction, an answering tug. It was in the shadows, and it was growing larger, filling in the shadows, spreading to fill every bend and curve and crack. His eyes deceived him, but his mind knew it was there. He could even understand its method now, its purpose. With the helpful fingers of the shadows to reach out and touch him, hold him until the thing got nearer, the thing would get him. He couldn’t back up into the chasm. He could only wait. The fingers crept from the darkness, twisting, feeling their blind way along the ground, and they grew nearer and nearer to where he crouched. He watched them, unable even to breathe, and felt the thing behind them.
He was too tired to run again, the chasm was too deep for him to jump over. He wanted to weep and couldn’t. The wall moved and one of the fingers was only inches away from his leg. He shivered. If only he knew what was in the chasm behind him it wouldn’t be so bad. Or if he knew where the other edge of the crevice was, perhaps he could still jump across it. He was too tired to make the effort it would take to turn and look. All his life he had been running from it and now it was there, inches away from his legs. Always running away, never able to stop and look at it, no name, no shape, no reason for being, but it was there, coming closer and closer. And he was afraid. His shivering increased and he couldn’t stop that either. The shadow touched his leg suddenly and he shrieked. “Duncan! Help me!”