The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  Benny was sagging in upon himself and I had a moment of wild panic, thinking that he might be dead, that the shock of the horror that leaped out of the peeper at him had been too much for him to stand.

  And I remembered what Mack had said: “Never kill a thing until you have figured out just how efficiently it may up and kill you back.”

  If Benny was dead, then we might have all hell exploding in our laps.

  If he was dead, though, he sure was acting funny. He was sinking in and splitting at a lot of different places, and he turning to what looked like dust, but wasn’t dust, and there wasn’t any Benny. There was just the harness with the bag and the jewel and then there wasn’t any bag, but a handful of trinkets lying on the ground where the bag had been.

  And there was something else.

  There still was Benny’s eye. The eye was a part of a cone that been in Benny’s head.

  I recalled how the survey party had seen other cones like that. But had not been able to get close to them.

  I was too scared to move. I stood and looked and there were a lot of goose pimples rising on my hide.

  For Benny was no alien. Benny was no more than the proxy of some other alien that we had never seen and could not even guess at.

  All sorts of conjectures went tumbling through my brain, but they were no more than panic-pictures, and they flipped off and on so fast, I couldn’t settle on any one of them.

  But one thing was clear as day – the cleverness of this alien for which the Shadows were the front.

  Too clever to confront us with anything that was more remotely human in its shape – a thing for which we could feel pity or contempt or perhaps exasperation, but something that would never rouse a fear within us. A pitiful little figure that was a caricature of our shape and one that so stupid that it couldn’t even talk. And one that was sufficiently alien to keep us puzzled and stump us on so many basic points that we would, at last, give up in sheer bewilderment any attempts that we might make to get it puzzled out.

  I threw a quick glance over my shoulder and kept my shoulders hunched, and if anything had moved, I’d have run like a frightened rabbit. But nothing moved. Nothing even rustled. There was nothing to be afraid of except the thoughts within my head.

  But I felt a frantic urge to get out of there and I went down on my hands and knees and began to gather what was left of Benny.

  I scooped up the pile of trinkets and the jewel and dumped them in the bag along with the peeper. Then I went back and picked up the cone, with the one eye looking at me, but I could see that the eye was dead. The cone was slippery and it didn’t feel like metal, but it was heavy and hard to get a good grip on and I had quite a time with it. But I finally got it in the bag and started out for camp.

  I went like a bat winging out of hell. Fear was roosting on one shoulder and I kept that roller wheeling.

  I swung into camp and headed for Mack’s tent, but before I got there, I found what looked like the entire project crew working at the craziest sort of contraption one would ever hope to see. It was a mass of gears and cams and wheels and chains and whatnot, and it sprawled over what, back home, would have been a good-sized lot, and there was no reason I could figure for building anything like that.

  I saw Thorne standing off to one side and superintending the work, yelling first at this one and then at someone else, and I could see that he was enjoying himself. Thorne was that kind of bossy jerk.

  I stopped the roller beside him and balanced it with one leg.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  “We’re giving them something to get doped out,” he said. “We’re going to drive them crazy.”

  “Them? You mean the Shadows?”

  “They want information, don’t they?” Thorne demanded. “They’ve been underfoot day and night, always in the way, so now we give them something to keep them occupied.”

  “But what does it do?”

  Thorne spat derisively. “Nothing. That’s the beauty of it.”

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose you know what you’re doing. Does Mack know what’s going on?”

  “Mack and Carr and Knight are the big brains that thought it up,” said Thorne. “I’m just carrying out orders.”

  I went on to Mack’s tent and parked the roller there and I knew that Mack was inside, for I heard a lot of arguing.

  I took the carrier bag and marched inside the tent and pushed my way up to the table and, up-ending the sack, emptied the whole thing on the tabletop.

  And I plumb forgot about the peeper being in there with all the other stuff.

  There was nothing I could do about it. The peeper lay naked on the table and there was a terrible silence and I could see that in another second Mack would blow his jets.

  He sucked in his breath to roar, but I beat him to it.

  “Shut up, Mack!” I snapped. “I don’t want to hear a word from you!”

  I must have caught him by surprise, for he let his breath out slowly, looking at me funny while he did it, and Carr and Knight were just slightly frozen in position. The tent was deathly quiet.

  “That was Benny,” I said, motioning at the tabletop. “That is all that’s left of him. A look in the peeper did it.”

  Carr came a bit unfrozen. “But the peeper! We looked everywhere –”

  “I knew Greasy had it and I stole it when I got a hunch. Remember, we were talking about how to catch a Shadow –”

  “I’m going to bring charges against you!” howled Mack. “I’m going to make an example out of you! I’m going to –”

  “You’re going to shut up,” I said at him. “You’re going to stay quiet and listen or I’ll heave you out of here tin cup over appetite.”

  “Please!” begged Knight. “Please, gentlemen, let’s act civilized.”

  And that was a hot one – him calling us gentlemen.

  “It seems to me,” said Carr, “that the matter of the peeper is somewhat immaterial if Bob has turned it to some useful purpose.”

  “Let’s all sit down,” Knight urged, “and maybe count to ten. Then Bob can tell us what is on his mind.”

  It was a good suggestion. We all sat down and I told them what had happened. They sat there listening, looking at all that junk on the table and especially at the cone, for it was lying on its side at one end of the table, where it had rolled, and it was looking at us with that dead and fishy eye.

  “Those Shadows,” I finished up, “aren’t alive at all. They’re just some sort of spy rig that something else is sending out. All we need to do is lure the Shadows off, one by one, and let them look into the peeper with knob 39 set full and –”

  “It’s no permanent solution,” said Knight. “Fast as we destroyed them, there’d be other ones sent out.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. No matter how good that alien race may be, they can’t control those Shadows just by mental contact. My bet is that there are machines involved, and when we destroy a Shadow, it would be my hunch that we knock out a machine. And if we knock out enough of them, we’ll give those other people so much headache that they may come out in the open and we can dicker with them.”

  “I’m afraid you’re wrong,” Knight answered. “This other race keeps hidden, I’d say, for some compelling reason. Maybe they have developed an underground civilization and never venture on the surface because it’s a hostile environment to them. But maybe they keep track of what is doing on the surface by means of these cones of theirs. And when we showed up, they rigged the cones to look like something slightly human, something they felt sure we would accept, and sent them out to get a good close look.”

  Mack put up his hands and rubbed them back and forth across his head. “I don’t like this hiding business. I like things out in the open where I can take a swipe at them and they can take a swipe at me. I’d have liked it a wh
ole lot better if the Shadows had really been the aliens.”

  “I don’t go for your underground race,” Carr said to Knight. “It doesn’t seem to me you could produce such a civilization if you lived underground. You’d be shut away from all the phenomena of nature. You wouldn’t –”

  “All right,” snapped Knight, “what’s your idea?”

  “They might have matter transmission – in fact, we know they do – whether by machine or mind, and that would mean that they’d never have to travel on the surface of the planet, but could transfer from place to place in the matter of a second. But they still would need to know what was going on, so they’d have their eyes and ears like a TV radar system –”

  “You jokers are just talking round in circles,” objected Mack. “You don’t know what the score is.”

  “I suppose you do,” Knight retorted.

  “No, I don’t,” said Mack. “But I’m honest enough to say straight out I don’t.”

  “I think Carr and Knight are too involved,” I said. “These aliens might be hiding only until they find out what we’re like – whether they can trust us or if it would be better to run us off the planet.”

  “Well,” said Knight, “no matter how you figure it, you’ve got to admit that they probably know practically all there is to know about us – our technology and our purpose and what kind of animals we are and they probably have picked up our language.”

  “They know too much,” said Mack. “I’m getting scared.”

  There was a scrabbling at the flap and Thorne stuck in his head.

  “Say, Mack,” he said, “I got a good idea. How about setting up some guns in that contraption out there? When the Shadows crowd around –”

  “No guns,” Knight said firmly. “No rockets. No electrical traps. You do just what we told you. Produce all the useless motion you can. Get it as involved and as flashy as possible. But let it go at that.”

  Thorne withdrew sulkily.

  Knight explained to me: “We don’t expect it to last too long, but it may keep them occupied for a week or so while we get some work done. When it begins to wear off, we’ll fix up something else.”

  It was all right, I suppose, but it didn’t sound too hot to me. At the best, it bought a little time and nothing more. It bought a little time, that is, if we could fool the Shadows. Somehow, I wasn’t sure that we could fool them much. Ten to one, they’d spot the contraption as a phony the minute it was set in motion.

  Mack got up and walked around the table. He lifted the cone and tucked it beneath one arm.

  “I’ll take this down to the shop,” he said. “Maybe the boys can find out what it is.”

  “I can tell you now,” said Carr. “It’s what the aliens use to control the Shadows. Remember the cones the survey people saw? This is one of them. My guess is that it’s some kind of a signal device that can transmit data back to base, wherever that might be.”

  “No matter,” Mack said. “Well cut into it and see what we can find.”

  “And the peeper?” I asked.

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  I reached out a hand and picked it up. “No, you won’t. You’re just the kind of bigot who would take it out and smash it.”

  “It’s illegal,” Mack declared.

  Carr sided with me. “Not any more. It’s a tool now – a weapon that we can use.”

  I handed it to Carr. “You take care of it. Put it in a good safe place. We may need it again before all this is over.”

  I gathered the junk that had been in Benny’s bag and picked up the jewel and dropped it into a pocket of my coat.

  Mack went out with the cone underneath his arm. The rest of us drifted outside the tent and stood there, just a little footloose now that the excitement was all over.

  “He’ll have Greasy’s hide,” worried Knight.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Carr said. “I’ll make him see that Greasy may have done us a service by sneaking the thing out here.”

  “I suppose,” I said, “I should tell Greasy what happened to the peeper.”

  Knight shook his head. “Let him sweat a while. It will do him good.”

  Back in my tent, I tried to do some paper work, but I couldn’t get my mind to settle down on it. I guess I was excited and I’m afraid that I missed Benny and I was tangled up with wondering just what the situation was, so far as the Shadows were concerned.

  We had named them well, all right, for they were little more than shadows – meant to shadow us. But even knowing they were just camouflaged spy rigs, I still found it hard not to think of them as something that was alive.

  They were no more than cones, of course, and the cones probably were no more than observation units for those hidden people who hung out somewhere on the planet. For thousands of years, perhaps, the cones had been watching while this race stayed in hiding somewhere. But maybe more than watching. Maybe the cones were harvesters and planters – perhaps hunters and trappers – bringing back the plunder of the wilds to their hidden masters. More than likely, it had been the cones that had picked all the Orchard fruit.

  And if there was a culture here, if another race had primal rights upon the planet, then what did that do to the claims that Earth might make? Did it mean we might be forced to relinquish this planet, after all – one of the few Earthlike planets found in years of exploration?

  I sat at my desk and thought about the planning and the work and the money that had gone into this project, which, even so, was no more than a driblet compared to what eventually would be spent to make this into another Earth.

  Even on this project center, we’d made no more than an initial start. In a few more weeks, the ships would begin bringing in the steel mill and that in itself was a tremendous task – to bring it in, assemble it, mine the ore to get it going and finally to put it into operation. But simpler and easier, infinitely so, than freighting out from Earth all the steel that would be needed to build this project alone.

  We couldn’t let it go down the drain. After all the years, after all the planning and the work, in face of Earth’s great need for more living space, we could not give up Stella IV. And yet we could not deny primal rights. If these beings, when they finally showed themselves, would say that they didn’t want us here, then there would be no choice. We would simply have to clear out.

  But before they threw us out, of course, they would steal us blind. Much of what we had would undoubtedly be of little value to them, but there would be some of it that they could use. No race can fail to enrich itself and its culture by contact with another. And the contact that these aliens had established was a completely one-sided bargain – the exchange flowed only in their direction.

  They were, I told myself, just a bunch of cosmic sharpers.

  I took the junk that had been in Benny’s bag out of my pocket and spread it on the desk and began to sort it out. There was the sector model and the roller and the desk and my little row of books and the pocket chess set and all the other stuff that belonged to me.

  There was all the stuff but me.

  Greasy’s Shadow had carried a statuette of Greasy, but I found none of me and I was a little sore at Benny. He could have gone to the extra effort to have made a statuette of me.

  I rolled the things around on the desk top with a finger and wondered once again just how deeply they went. Might they not be patterns rather than just models? Perhaps, I told myself, letting my imagination run away with me, perhaps each of these little models carried in some sort of code a complete analysis and description of whatever the article might be. A human, making a survey or an analysis, would write a sheaf of notes, would capture the subject matter in a page or two of symbols. Maybe these little models were the equivalent of a human notebook, the aliens’ way of writing.

  And I wondered how they wrote, how they made the models, but there wasn’t a
ny answer.

  I gave up trying to work and went out of the tent and climbed up the little rise to where Thorne and the men were building their flytrap for the Shadows.

  They had put a lot of work and ingenuity into it and it made no sense at all – which, after all, was exactly what it was meant to do.

  If we could get the Shadows busy enough trying to figure out what this new contraption was, maybe they’d leave us alone long enough to get some work done.

  Thorne and his crew had gotten half a dozen replacement motors out of the shop and had installed those to be used as power. Apparently they had used almost all the spare equipment parts they could find, for there were shafts and gears and cams and all sorts of other things all linked together in a mindless pattern. And here and there they had set up what looked like control boards, except, of course, that they controlled absolutely nothing, but were jammed with flashers and all sorts of other gimmicks until they looked like Christmas trees.

  I stood around and watched until Greasy rang the dinner bell, then ran a foot race with all the others to get to the tables.

  There was a lot of loud talk and joking, but no one wasted too much time eating. They bolted their food and hurried back to the flytrap.

  Just before sunset, they set it going and it was the screwiest mass of meaningless motion that anyone had ever seen. Shafts were spinning madly and a million gears, it seemed, were meshing, and cams were wobbling with their smooth, irregular strokes, and pistons were going up and down and up and down.

  It was all polished bright and it worked slicker than a whistle and it was producing nothing except motion, but it had a lot of fascination – even for a human. I found myself standing rooted in one spot, marveling at the smoothness and precision and the remorseless non-purpose of the weird contraption.

  And all the time the fake control boards were sparkling and flashing with the lamps popping on and off, in little jagged runs and series, and you got dizzy watching them, trying to make some pattern out of them.

  The Shadows had been standing around and gaping ever since work had started on the trap, but now they crowded closer and stood in a tight and solemn ring around the thing and they never moved.