The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  “They’re worried about what you’re doing to their machines,” said Carr. “The Shadows have taken over those machines just like they’ve adopted us.”

  “That’s what you think,” Thorne said.

  “Maybe they’re trying to find out about the machines,” Carr declared. “Maybe they gum them up so that, when you go to fix them, they can look things over. They haven’t missed a single part of any machine so far. You were telling me the other day it’s a different thing wrong every time.”

  Knight said, solemn as an owl: “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this situation.”

  “Oh, you have,” said Thorne, and the way he said it, you could see he figured that what Knight might think would cut no ice.

  “I’ve been seeking out some motive,” Knight told him. “Because if the Shadows are the ones who are doing it, they’d have to have a motive. Don’t you think so, Mack?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” said Mack.

  “For some reason,” Knight went on, “those Shadows seem to like us. They showed up as soon as we set down and they’ve stayed with us ever since. The way they act, they’d like us to stay on and maybe they’re wrecking the machines so we’ll have to stay.”

  “Or drive us away,” Thorne answered.

  “That’s all right,” said Carr, “but why should they want us to stay? What exactly is it they like about us? If we could only get that one on the line, we might be able to do some bargaining with them.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know,” Knight admitted. “There might be a lot of different reasons.”

  “Name just three of them,” Thorne challenged him nastily.

  “Gladly,” said Knight, and he said it as if he were slipping a knife into the left side of Thorne’s gizzard. “They may be getting something from us, only don’t ask me what it is. Or they may be building us up to put the bite on us for something that’s important. Or they may be figuring on reforming us, although just what’s in us they object to, I can’t faintly imagine. Or they may worship us. Or maybe it’s just love.”

  “Is that all?” asked Thorne.

  “Just a start,” said Knight. “They may be studying us and they may need more time to get us puzzled out. They may be prodding us to get some reactions from us –”

  “Studying us!” yelled Thorne, outraged. “They’re just lousy savages!”

  “I don’t think they are,” Knight replied.

  “They don’t wear any clothes,” Thorne thundered, slamming the table with his fist. “They don’t have any tools. They don’t have a village. They don’t know how to build a hut. They don’t have any government. They can’t even talk or hear.”

  I was disgusted with Thorne.

  “Well, we got that settled,” I said. “Let’s go back to work.”

  I got up off the bench, but I hadn’t gone more than a step or two before a man came pounding down from the radio hut, waving a piece of paper in his hand. It was Jack Pollard, our communications man, who also doubled in brass as an electronics expert.

  “Mack!” he was hollering. “Hey, Mack!”

  Mack lumbered to his feet.

  Pollard handed him the paper. “It was coming in when Greasy blew the horn,” he gasped. “I was having trouble getting it. Relayed a long way out.”

  Mack read the paper and his face turned hard and red.

  “What’s the matter, Mack?” I wanted to know.

  “There’s an inspector coming out,” he said, and he choked on each and every word. He was all burned up. And maybe scared as well.

  “Is it likely to be bad?”

  “He’ll probably can the lot of us,” said Mack.

  “But he can’t do that!”

  “That’s what you think. We’re six weeks behind schedule and this project is hotter than a pile. Earth’s politicians have made a lot of promises, and if those promises don’t pay off, there’ll be hell to pay. Unless we can do something and do it fast, they’ll bounce us out of here and send a new gang in.”

  “But considering everything, we haven’t done so badly,” Carr said mildly.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Mack told him. “The new gang will do no better, but there has to be some action for the record and we’re the ones who’ll get it in the neck. If we could lick this breakdown business, we might have a chance. If we could say to that inspector: ‘Sure, we’ve had a spot of trouble, but we have it licked and now we’re doing fine –’ if we could say that to him, then we might save our hides.”

  “You think it’s the Shadows, Mack?” asked Knight.

  Mack reached up and scratched his head. “Must be them. Can’t think of anything else.”

  Somebody shouted from another table: “Of course it’s them damn Shadows!”

  The men were getting up from their seats and crowding around.

  Mack held up his hands. “You guys get back to work. If any of you got some good ideas, come up to the tent and we’ll talk them over.”

  They started jabbering at him.

  “Ideas!” Mack roared. “I said ideas! Anyone that comes up without a good idea, I’ll dock him for being off the job.”

  They quieted down a little.

  “And another thing,” said Mack. “No rough stuff on the Shadows. Just go along the way we always have. I’ll fire the man who strongarms them.”

  He said to me: “Let’s go.”

  I followed him, and Knight and Carr fell in beside me. Thorne didn’t come. I had expected that he would.

  Inside Mack’s tent, we sat down at a table littered with blueprints and spec sheets and papers scribbled with figures and offhand diagrams.

  “I suppose,” said Carr, “that it has to be the Shadows.”

  “Some gravitational peculiarity?” suggested Knight. “Some strange atmospheric condition? Some space-warping quality?”

  “Maybe,” said Mack. “It all sounds a bit far-fetched, but I’m ready to grab any straw you shove at me.”

  “One thing that puzzles me,” I put in, “is that the survey crew didn’t mention Shadows. Survey believed the planet was uninhabited by any sort of intelligence. It found no signs of culture. And that was good, because it meant the project wouldn’t get all tangled up with legalities over primal rights. And yet the minute we landed, the Shadows came galloping to meet us, almost as if they’d spotted us a long way off and were waiting for us to touch down.”

  “Another funny thing,” said Carr, “is how they paired off with us – one Shadow to every man. Like they had it all planned out. Like they’d married us or something.”

  “What are you getting at?” growled Mack.

  I said: “Where were the Shadows, Mack, when the survey gang was here? Can we be absolutely sure they’re native to this planet?”

  “If they aren’t native,” demanded Mack, “how did they get here? They have no machines. They haven’t even got tools.”

  “There’s another thing about that survey report,” said Knight, “that I’ve been wondering about. The rest of you have read it –”

  We nodded. We had not only read it, we had studied and digested it. We’d lived with it day and night on the long trip out to Stella IV.

  “The survey report told about some cone-shaped things,” said Knight. “All sitting in a row, as if they might be boundary markers. But they never saw them except from a long way off. They had no idea what they were. They just wrote them off as something that had no real significance.”

  “They wrote off a lot of things as having no significance,” said Carr.

  “We aren’t getting anywhere,” Mack complained. “All we do is talk.”

  “If we could talk to the Shadows,” said Knight, “we might be getting somewhere.”

  “But we can’t!” argued Mack. “We tried to talk to them and we couldn’t raise a ripple. We tried sign language and
we tried pantomime and we filled reams of paper with diagrams and drawings and we got exactly nowhere. Jack rigged up that electronic communicator and he tried it on them and they just sat and looked at us, all bright and sympathetic, with that one big eye of theirs, and that was all there was. We even tried telepathy –”

  “You’re wrong there, Mack,” said Carr. “We didn’t try telepathy, because we don’t know a thing about it. All we did was sit in a circle, holding hands with them and thinking hard at them. And of course it was no good. They probably thought it was just a game.”

  “Look,” pleaded Mack, “that inspector will be here in ten days or so. We have to think of something. Let’s get down to cases.”

  “If we could run the Shadows off somehow,” said Knight. “If we could scare them away –”

  “You know how to scare a Shadow?” Mack asked, “You got any idea what they might be afraid of?”

  Knight shook his head.

  “Our first job,” said Carr, “is to find out what a Shadow is like. We have to learn what kind of animal he is. He’s a funny kind, we know. He doesn’t have a mouth or nose or ears…”

  “He’s impossible,” Mack said. “There ain’t no such animal.”

  “He’s alive,” said Carr, “and doing very well. We have to find out how he gets his food, how he communicates, what tolerances he may have, what his responses are to various kinds of stimuli. We can’t do a thing about the Shadows until we have some idea of what we’re dealing with.”

  Knight agreed with him. “We should have started weeks ago. We made a stab at it, of course, but our hearts were never in it. We were too anxious to get started on the project.”

  Mack said bitterly: “Fat lot of good it did us.”

  “Before you can examine one, you have to have a subject,” I answered Knight. “Seems to me we should try to figure out how to catch a Shadow. Make a sudden move toward one and he disappears.”

  But even as I said it, I knew that was not entirely right. I remembered how Greasy had chased his Shadow from the cookshack, lamming him with the frying pan.

  And I remembered something else and I had a hunch and got a big idea, but I was scared to say anything about it. I didn’t even, for the moment, dare to let on to myself I had it.

  “We’d have to take one by surprise somehow and knock him out before he had a chance to disappear,” Carr said. “And it has to be a sure way, for if we try it once and fail we’ve put the Shadows on their guard and we’ll never have another chance.”

  Mack warned, “No rough stuff. You can’t go using violence until you know your critter. You don’t do any killing until you have some idea how efficiently the thing that you are killing can up and kill you back.”

  “No rough stuff,” Carr agreed. “If a Shadow can bollix up the innards of some of those big earthmovers, I wouldn’t like to see what he could do to a human body.”

  “It’s got to be fast and sure,” said Knight, “and we can’t even start until we know it is. If you hit one on the head with a baseball bat, would the bat bounce or would you crush the Shadow’s skull? That’s about the way it would be with everything we could think of at the moment.”

  Carr nodded. “That’s right. We can’t use gas, because a Shadow doesn’t breathe.”

  “He might breathe through his pores,” said Knight.

  “Sure, but we’d have to know before we tried using gas. We might jab a hypo into one, but what would you use in the hypo? First you’d have to find something that would knock a Shadow out. You might try hypnotism –”

  “I’d doubt hypnotism,” said Knight.

  “How about Doc?” I asked. “If we could knock out a Shadow, would Doc give him a going over? If I know Doc, he’d raise a lot of hell. Claim the Shadow was an intelligent being and that it would be in violation of medical ethics to examine one without first getting its consent.”

  “You get one,” Mack promised grimly, “and I’ll handle Doc.”

  “He’ll do a lot of screaming.”

  “I’ll handle Doc,” repeated Mack. “This inspector is going to be here in a week or so –”

  “We wouldn’t have to have it all cleared up,” said Knight. “If we could show the inspector that we had a good lead, that we were progressing, he might play ball with us.”

  I was seated with my back to the entrance of the tent and I heard someone fumbling with the canvas.

  Mack said: “Come in, Greasy. Got something on your mind?”

  Greasy walked in and came up to the table. He had the bottom of his apron tucked into his trouser band, the way he always did when he wasn’t working, and he held something in his hand. He tossed it on the table.

  It was one of the bags that the Shadows carried at their belts!

  We all sucked in our breath and Mack’s hair fairly stood on end.

  “Where did you get this?” he demanded.

  “Off my Shadow, when he wasn’t looking.”

  “When he wasn’t looking!”

  “Well, you see, it was this way, Mack. That Shadow is always into things. I stumble over him everywhere I go. And this morning he had his head halfway into the dishwasher and that bag was hanging on his belt, so I grabbed up a butcher knife and just whacked it off.”

  As Mack got up and pulled himself to his full height, you could see it was hard for him to keep his hands off Greasy.

  “So that was all you did,” he said in a low, dangerous voice.

  “Sure,” said Greasy. “There was nothing hard about it.”

  “All you’ve done is spill the beans to them! All you’ve done is made it almost impossible –”

  “Maybe not,” Knight interrupted in a hurry.

  “Now that the damage has been done,” said Carr, “we might as well have a look. Maybe there’s a clue inside that bag.”

  “I can’t open it,” grumbled Greasy. “I tried every way I know. There’s no way to open it.”

  “And while you were trying to open it,” asked Mack, “what was the Shadow doing?”

  “He didn’t even notice. He had his head inside that washer. He’s as stupid as –”

  “Don’t say that! I don’t want anyone thinking a Shadow’s stupid. Maybe they are, but there’s no sense believing it until we’re sure.”

  Knight had picked up the bag and was turning it around and around in his hand. Whatever was inside was jingling as he turned and twisted it.

  “Greasy’s right,” he said. “I don’t see any way to get it open.”

  “You get out of here!” Mack roared at Greasy. “Get back to your work. Don’t you ever make another move toward any of the Shadows.”

  Greasy turned around and left, but he was no more than out of the tent when he gave a yelp that was enough to raise your scalp.

  I almost knocked the table over getting out of there to see what was going on.

  What was happening was no more than plain solemn justice.

  Greasy was running for all he was worth, and behind him was the Shadow with a frying pan, and every jump that Greasy took, the Shadow let him have it, and was every bit as good with that frying pan as Greasy was.

  Greasy was weaving and circling, trying to head back for the cookshack, but each time the Shadow got him headed off and went on chasing him.

  Everyone had stopped work to watch. Some of them were yelling advice to Greasy and some of the others were cheering on the Shadow. I’d have liked to stay and watch, but I knew that if I was going to put my hunch into execution, I’d never have a better chance to do it.

  So I turned and walked swiftly down the street to my own tent and ducked inside and got a specimen bag and came out again.

  I saw that Greasy was heading for the equipment pool and that the Shadow still was one long stride behind. Its arm was holding up well, for the frying pan never missed a lick.

  I
ran down to the cookshack and, at the door, I stopped and looked back. Greasy was shinnying up the derrick of a shovel and the Shadow was standing at the bottom, waving the frying pan as though daring him to come down and take it like a man. Everyone else was running toward the scene of action and there was no one, I was sure, who had noticed me.

  So I opened the cookshack door and stepped inside.

  The dishwasher was chugging away and everything was peaceable and quiet.

  I was afraid I might have trouble finding what I was looking for, but I found it in the third place I looked – underneath the mattress on Greasy’s bunk.

  I pulled the peeper out and slipped it in the bag and got out of there as fast as I could go.

  Stopping at my tent, I tossed the bag into a corner and threw some old clothes over it and then went out again.

  The commotion had ended. The Shadow was walking back toward the cookshack, with the pan tucked underneath its arm, and Greasy was climbing down off the shovel. The men were all gathered around the shovel, making a lot of noise, and I figured that it would take a long, long time for Greasy to live down what had happened. Although, I realized, he had it coming to him.

  I went back into Mack’s tent and found the others there. All three of them were standing beside the table, looking down at what lay there upon the surface.

  The bag had disappeared and had left behind a little pile of trinkets. Looking at the pile, I could see that they were miniatures of frying pans and kettles and all the other utensils that Greasy worked with. And there, half protruding out of the pile, was a little statuette of Greasy.

  I reached out a hand and picked up the statuette. There was no mistaking it – it was Greasy to a T. It was made of some sort of stone, as if it might have been a carving, and was delicate beyond all belief. Squinting closely, I could even see the lines on Greasy’s face.