Кейт Вильгельм: The Killer Thing

PROGRAMMED FOR DESTRUCTION

In a way, they were the same, the man and the machine. Both had been ordered to do one thing — kill.

The robot had been created to wreak revenge on the humans who had brutally conquered its planet.

The man was the product of years of training by an Earth that had set out to take over the Universe.

Now the two faced each other in the icy reaches of the galaxy. The robot, with its calculating machine of a brain, its impenetrable force shield, its deadly laser beam. The man, with the kind of nerve that refused to admit the odds against survival…