Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  That’s right. Disappeared.

  I said hello to Benny and he naturally didn’t answer and I walked around the table and began working on the model. Benny stood close behind me and watched me as I worked. He seemed to have a lot of interest in that model. He had a lot of interest in everything I did. He went everywhere I went. He was, after all, my Shadow.

  There was a poem that started out: I have a little shadow . . . I had thought about it often, but couldn’t recall who the poet was or how the rest of it went. It was an old, old poem and I remembered I had read it when I was a kid. I could close my eyes and see the picture that went with the words, the brightly colored picture of a kid in his pajamas, going up a stairs with a candle in his hand and the shadow of him on the wall beyond the stairs.

  I took some satisfaction in Benny’s interest in the sector model, although I was aware his interest probably didn’t mean a thing. He might have been just as interested if I’d been counting beans.

  I was proud of that model and I spent more time on it than I had any right to. I had my name, Robert Emmett Drake, spelled out in full on the plaster base and the whole thing was a bit more ambitious than I originally had intended.

  I had let my enthusiasm run away with me and that was not too hard to understand. It wasn’t every day that a conservationist got a chance to engineer from scratch an absolutely virgin Earth-type planet. The layout was only one small sector of the initial project, but it included almost all the factors involved in the entire tract and I had put in the works—the dams and roads, the power sites and the mill sites, the timber management and the water-conservation features and all the rest of it.

  I had just settled down to work when a commotion broke out down at the cookshack. I could hear Greasy cussing and the sound of thudding whacks. The door of the shack burst open and a Shadow came bounding out with Greasy just a leap behind him. Greasy had a frying pan and he was using it effectively, with a nifty backhand technique that was beautiful to see. He was laying it on the Shadow with every leap he took and he was yelling maledictions that were enough to curl one’s hair.

  The Shadow legged it across the camp with Greasy close behind. Watching them, I thought how it was a funny thing that a Shadow would up and disappear if you made a motion toward its jewel, but would stay and take the kind of treatment Greasy was handing out with that frying pan.

  When they came abreast of my model table, Greasy gave up the chase. He was not in the best of condition.

  He stood beside the table and put both fists belligerently on his hips, so that the frying pan, which he still clutched, stood out at a right angle from his body.

  “I won’t allow that stinker in the shack,” he told me, wheezing and gasping. “It’s bad enough to have him hanging around outside and looking in the windows. It’s bad enough falling over him every time I turn around. I will not have him snooping in the kitchen; he’s got his fingers into everything he sees. If I was Mack, I’d put the lug on all of them. I’d run them so fast, so far, that it would take them—”

  “Mack’s got other things to worry about,” I told him rather sharply. “The project is way behind schedule, with all the breakdowns we’ve been having.”

  “Sabotage,” Greasy corrected me. “That’s what it is. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. It’s them Shadows, I tell you, sabotaging the machines. If it was left to me, I’d run them clear out of the country.”

  “It’s their country,” I protested. “They were here before we came.”

  “It’s a big planet,” Greasy said. “There are other parts of it they could live in.”

  “But they have got a right here. This planet is their home.”

  “They ain’t got no homes,” said Greasy.

  He turned around abruptly and walked back toward the shack. His Shadow, which had been standing off to one side all the time, hurried to catch up with him. It didn’t look as if it had minded the pounding he had given it. But you could never tell what a Shadow was thinking. Their thoughts don’t show on them.

  What Greasy had said about their not having any homes was a bit unfair. What he meant, of course, was that they had no village, that they were just a sort of carefree bunch of gypsies, but to me the planet was their home and they had a right to go any place they wanted on it and use any part of it they wished. It should make no difference that they settled down on no particular spot, that they had no villages and possibly no shelters or that they raised no crops.

  Come to think of it, there was no reason why they should raise crops, for they had no mouths to eat with, and if they didn’t eat, how could they keep on living and if . . .

  You see how it went. That was the reason it didn’t pay to think too much about the Shadows. Once you started trying to get them figured out, you got all tangled up.

  I sneaked a quick look sidewise to see how Benny might be taking this business of Greasy beating up his pal, but Benny was just the same as ever. He was all rag doll.

  Men began to drift out of the tents and the Shadows galloped over to rejoin their humans, and everywhere a man might go, his Shadow tagged behind him.

  The project center lay there on its hilltop, and from where I stood beside my sector table, I could see it laid out like a blueprint come to life.

  Over there, the beginning of the excavation for the administration building, and there the gleaming stakes for the shopping center, and beyond the shopping center, the ragged, first-turned furrows that in time would become a street flanked by neat rows of houses.

  It didn’t look much like a brave beginning on a brand-new world, but in a little while it would. It would even now, if we’d not run into so much hard luck. And whether that hard luck could be traced to the Shadows or to something else, it was a thing that must be faced and somehow straightened out.

  For this was important. Here was a world on which Man would not repeat the ancient, sad mistakes that he had made on Earth. On this, one of the few Earth-like planets found so far, Man would not waste the valuable resources which he had let go down the drain on the old home planet. He’d make planned use of the water and the soil, of the timber and the minerals, and he’d be careful to put back as much as he took out. This planet would not be robbed and gutted as Earth had been. It would be used intelligently and operated like a well-run business.

  I felt good, just standing there, looking out across the valley and the plains toward the distant mountains, thinking what a fine home this would be for mankind.

  The camp was becoming lively now. Out in front of the tents, the men were washing up for breakfast and there was a lot of friendly shouting and a fair amount of horseplay. I heard considerable cussing down in the equipment pool and I knew exactly what was going on. The machines, or at least a part of them, had gone daffy again and half the morning would be wasted getting them repaired. It certainly was a funny deal, I thought, how those machines got out of kilter every blessed night.

  After a while, Greasy rang the breakfast bell and everyone dropped everything and made a dash for it and their Shadows hustled along behind them.

  I was closer to the cookshack than most of them and I am no slouch at sprinting, so I got one of the better seats at the big outdoor table. My place was just outside the cookshack door, where I’d get first whack at seconds when Greasy lugged them out. I went past Greasy on the run and he was grumbling and muttering the way he always was at chow, although sometimes I thought that was just a pose to hide his satisfaction at knowing his cooking still was fit to eat.

  I got a seat next to Mack, and a second later Rick Thorne, one of the equipment operators, grabbed the place on the other side of me. Across from me was Stan Carr, a biologist, and just down the table, on the other side, was Judson Knight, our ecologist.

  We wasted no time in small talk; we dived into the wheat cakes and the side pork and the fried potatoes. There is nothing in all the Universe like the morning air of Stella IV to hone an edge on the appetite.

  Finally we had enough of the e
dge off so we would waste time being civil.

  “It’s the same old story again this morning,” Thorne said bitterly to Mack. “More than half the equipment is all gummed up. It’ll take hours to get it moving.”

  He morosely shoveled food into his mouth and chewed with unnecessary savagery. He shot an angry glance at Carr across the table. “Why don’t you get it figured out?” he asked.

  “Me?” said Carr, in some astonishment. “Why should I be the one to get it figured out? I don’t know anything about machines and I don’t want to know. They’re stupid contraptions at best.”

  “You know what I mean,” said Thorne. “The machines are not to blame. They don’t gum up themselves. It’s the Shadows and you’re a biologist and them Shadows are your business and—”

  “I have other things to do,” said Carr. “I have this earthworm problem to work out, and as soon as that is done, Bob here wants me to run some habit-patterns on a dozen different rodents.”

  “I wish you would,” I said. “I have a hunch some of those little rascals may cause us a lot of trouble once we try our hand at crops. I’d like to know ahead of time what makes the critters tick.”

  That was the way it went, I thought. No matter how many factors you might consider, there were always more of them popping up from under rocks and bushes. It seemed somehow that a man never quite got through the list.

  “It wouldn’t be so bad,” Thorne complained, “if the Shadows would leave us alone and let us fix the damage after they’ve done their dirty work. But not them. They breathe down our necks while we’re making the repairs, and they’ve got their faces buried in those engines clear up to their shoulders, and every time you move, you bump into one of them. Someday,” he said fiercely, “I’m going to take a monkey wrench and clear some space around me.”

  “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 would
n’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—”