Waiting was harder than physical activity, harder than daring the tornado winds, harder than trudging out under the burning sky. Why weren’t they trained in aloneness? Why was each man so carefully guarded from being alone, from the time he first arrived on Venus until the time of his death? Always in twos, or in groups, or squadrons, or battalions ― never alone. He must have had hours alone when he was a child. He could remember none. There had been the apartment, one of four hundred in the complex, with a giant nursery that housed seven hundred pre-school children of two to four years, and after that had come the school, and the dormitory at night, and the playgrounds alive with youngsters, teeming with them as a drop of water from a pond teems under a microscope. Then Venus and another dormitory… Never alone. He could hear the screaming of the wind as if it were far removed from him, and he wished almost that he had parked the dinghy out under an overhang after all. Inside the chimney even the wind chose to leave him with his isolation.
He should eat again. Then he could write letters, or bring the log up to date… or study the maps and make plans… With a start of surprise he considered the log: he had forgotten it for days. It would require hours to complete and up-date. He felt cheerful when he pulled it out and began glancing through it. He opened it to the entry of the day after Duncan’s death and burial, the start of his lone game of hide and seek with the robot. He shuddered, remembering the beam playing on the shallow grave, then flowing along the ground towards him. How long ago had it been? He couldn’t remember. He tried counting back, but the days blurred and ran together. Later, after he ate, he would work on the log. Later he would be able to remember what happened each day. There was the day that he had gone out on to the desert, hoping to lure the monster out on the sands, hoping it would sink, be mired, incapacitated…
And another day that he had walked to the edge of the desert and it had found him, and again the beam had turned rocks red, melted them. He couldn’t remember if that day had been before or after the day that he had gone out in the dinghy landing in the sand only to be covered over when the winds blew that night. It hadn’t followed him. When he returned to the shelter of the mountain ridge, it had been there, waiting. Why hadn’t it gone out after him? He gnawed his knuckles. Why had he left it so far behind? If it came now and mixed a new trail with the old ones, he wouldn’t be able to count on his detection system to tell the old from the new. It could sneak up on him, catch him unaware, unprepared, and then the beam would flow along the ground, melting what it touched, searching, always searching for him. Why didn’t it simply repair its own dinghy and get the hell out? It could afford to leave him alone; he was not a threat to it now. All he was was one weak, sick man, no threat to anything or anyone…
Why do you have to declare war and demand control of whole planets? Why can’t you simply trade for what you want and need? Why do you have to burn and destroy and kill first?
Lar couldn’t understand. He smiled at her helplessly. He had found her sitting at the river-bank, a book across her legs, her eyes half closed as she stared at the light patterns on ripples of water where the river swirled around a sand bar. He tried to explain it to her, but she cut him short.
You don’t even know why, do you? You have been told that this is the way it is to be, and you have accepted that unquestioningly. What kind of a threat was Mellic to your people? It was five thousand years since our last war on Mellic itself; we had forgotten how to wage war. The thought of killing another being sickened us. How did we threaten you and your people? You could have acquired the land you needed for a base, to further your space explorations. You didn’t have to conquer the entire planet and bring about its ruin as you did. You wonder why you are hated wherever you go? Do you really wonder?
We have gambled everything on continued growth.
You refuse to curb any of your appetites.
That isn’t it! Any organism needs to grow, or die…
You bred yourselves off your original planet, and now you spread through the galaxy like a disease…
We don’t hate any of the peoples we have found. We try to arrange peaceful alignments with them…
You don’t hate them because you have been taught that they are not people. How could one hate inoffensive animals, or peaceful birds? Why don’t you allow yourself the luxury of thinking? You should take one week, go alone into the woods, or up the mountain, and do nothing but think, Have they ever left you alone long enough to think? Look at me! I am a person! Just as you are a person. I am not simply a barrier to your world’s expansionistic dreams. I am a human being who bleeds and hurts. I lie awake at night and remember the quality of peace as it was, my brothers, my father, all alive and happy, now dead, burned out of existence, as if they never had lived. Did they threaten you? My father made lloyars. Like your violins, to make music, to free the mind of its earthly concerns and allow it to approach heaven… My brothers… a poet and a surgeon, threats to spur plans for eternal expansion? Can you look at me and honestly say you believe me to be less than human?
Lar, I am sorry…
No! Don’t tell me that! You can’t be sorry until you have suffered as we have. Not until you have felt alone as we have, alone and helpless. Not until you can know that the villages you have disintegrated with your beams contained people, real human beings who died in terror and pain… and alone.
“Stop! Stop! I won’t listen to you!” Trace shouted, jerking himself upright from the seat-bed, glaring wildly about the tiny dinghy as if he expected to see others inside it with him. His hand trembled when he touched it to his eyes. He had seen her! He had felt the breeze from the river, smelled the strange smells of the mosses, the ferns with their pungent sweet odours, the violet and blue flowers that bowed over the water. He had felt the impatience with her that he had been unable to conceal as she mouthed platitudes based on ignorance of the realities of the galaxy. It had been real! Something had happened to time itself, placing him back there again, living it over again…
He clutched his head in his hands and squeezed hard, thankful for the answering pain. A dream. He had dozed, dreamed. He listened to the wind, subsiding now, and knew that he had to eat. The thought of the tubes disgusted him, but he needed the strength they alone could give him now. Then he would go over his maps and plan for the next morning, and after that sleep. Perhaps it would end with the next morning. He would find the other dinghy, get through the screen somehow and take its water and fuel, boobytrap it, and then blast off for the orbiting ship, out of range of the inhuman killer that was inexorably closing in on him. He shivered when he thought of it out in the wind, never stopping, keeping steadily on his trail no matter how devious he tried to make it.
A logic box, Trace. That’s all it is; a logic box. It can’t think anything new or original, can’t feel anything, has to do what it’s been told to do, in the ways it’s been taught to do them. Someone taught it to kill. That’s all it knows, to kill.
Who, Trace wondered, had been its teacher after Venus and the carnage it left behind it there? Who had given it the invisibility shield, and in the name of heaven why? Especially why. Didn’t he realise what he was doing when he gave it that? Had he been so blind, so selfishly determined to try it out that he never even considered what he was doing? Had someone purposely made it invincible and then turned it out to kill whoever and whatever got in its path? Who had hated mankind enough to do that?