The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  “The bag just went away,” said Knight. “It was lying here when we dashed out, and when we came back, it was gone and all this junk was lying on the table.”

  “I don’t understand,” Carr said.

  And he was right. None of us did.

  “I don’t like it,” Mack said slowly.

  I didn’t like it, either. It raised too many questions in my head and some of them were resolving into some miserable suspicions.

  “They’re making models of our stuff,” said Knight. “Even down to the cups and spoons.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that so much,” Carr said. “It’s the model of Greasy that gives me the jitters.”

  “Now let’s sit down,” Mack told us, “and not go off on any tangents. This is exactly the sort of thing we could have expected.”

  “What do you mean?” I prompted.

  “What do we do when we find an alien culture? We do just what the Shadows are doing. Different way, but the same objective. We try to find out all we can about this alien culture. And don’t you ever forget that, to the Shadows, we’re not only an alien culture, but an invading alien culture. So if they had any sense at all, they’d make it their business to find out as much about us as they could in the shortest time.”

  That made sense, of course. But this making of models seemed to be carrying it beyond what was necessary.

  And if they had made models of Greasy’s cups and spoons, of the dishwasher and the coffee pot, then they had other models, too. They had models of the earthmovers and the shovels and the dozers and all the rest of it And if they had a model of Greasy, they had models of Mack and Thorne and Carr and all the rest of the crew, including me.

  Just how faithful would those models be? How much deeper would they go than mere external appearances?

  I tried to stop thinking of it, for I was doing little more than scaring myself stiff.

  But I couldn’t stop. I went right on thinking.

  They had been gumming up equipment so that the mechanics had to rip the machines all apart to get them going once again. There seemed no reason in the world why the Shadows should be doing that, except to find out what the innards of those machines were like. I wondered if the models of the equipment might not be faithful not only so far as the outward appearance might go, but faithful as well on the most intricate construction of the entire machine.

  And if that was true, was that faithfulness also carried out in the Greasy statuette? Did it have a heart and lungs, blood vessels and brain and nerve? Might it not also have the very essence of Greasy’s character, the kind of animal he was, what his thoughts and ethics might be?

  I don’t know if, at that very moment, the others were thinking the same thing, but the looks on their faces argued that they might have been.

  Mack put out a finger and stirred the contents of the pile, scattering the miniatures all about the tabletop.

  Then his hand darted out and picked up something and his face went red with anger.

  Knight asked: “What is it, Mack?”

  “A peeper!” said Mack, his words rasping in his throat. “There’s a model of a peeper!”

  All of us sat and stared and I could feel the cold sweat breaking out on me.

  “If Greasy has a peeper,” Mack said woodenly, “I’ll break his scrawny neck.”

  “Take it easy, Mack,” said Carr.

  “You know what a peeper is?”

  “Sure, I know what a peeper is.”

  “You ever see what a peeper does to a man who used one?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “I have.” Mack threw the peeper model back on the table and turned and went out of the tent. The rest of us followed him.

  Greasy was coming down the street, with some of the men following along behind, kidding him about the Shadow treeing him.

  Mack put his hands on his hips and waited.

  Greasy got almost to us.

  “Greasy!” said Mack.

  “Yes, Mack.”

  “You hiding out a peeper?”

  Greasy blinked, but he never hesitated. “No, sir,” he said, lying like a trooper. “I wouldn’t rightly know one if somebody should point it out to me. I’ve heard of them, of course.”

  “I’ll make a bargain with you,” said Mack. “If you have one, just hand it over to me and I’ll bust it up and fine you a full month’s wages and that’s the last that we’ll say about it. But if you lie to me and we find you have one hidden out, I’ll can you off the job.”

  I held my breath. I didn’t like what was going on and I thought what a lousy break it was that something like this should happen just when I had swiped the peeper. Although I was fairly sure that no one had seen me sneak into the cookshack – at least I didn’t think they had.

  Greasy was stubborn. He shook his head. “I haven’t got one, Mack.”

  Mack’s face got hard. “All right. We’ll go down and see.”

  He headed for the cookshack and Knight and Carr went along with him, but I headed for my tent.

  It would be just like Mack, when he didn’t find the peeper in the cookshack, to search the entire camp. If I wanted to stay out of trouble, I knew, I’d better be zipping out of camp and take the peeper with me.

  Benny was squatted outside the tent, waiting for me. He helped me get the roller out and then I took the specimen bag with the peeper in it and stuffed it in the roller’s carrying bag.

  I got on the roller and Benny jumped on the carrier behind me and sat there showing off, balancing himself – like a kid riding a bicycle with no hands.

  “You hang on,” I told him sharply. “If you fall off this time, I won’t stop to pick you up.”

  I am sure he didn’t hear me, but however that may be, he put his arms around my waist and we were off in a cloud of dust.

  Until you’ve ridden on a roller, you haven’t really lived. It’s like a roller coaster running on the level. But it is fairly safe and it gets you there. It’s just two big rubber doughnuts with an engine and a seat and it could climb a barn if you gave it half a chance. It’s too rambunctious for civilized driving, but it is just the ticket for an alien planet.

  We set off across the plain toward the distant foothills. It was a fine day, but for that matter, every day was fine on Stella IV. It was an ideal planet, Earth-like, with good weather nearly all the time, crammed with natural resources, free of vicious animal life or deadly virus – a planet that virtually pleaded for someone to come and live on it.

  And in time there’d be people here. Once the administration center was erected, the neat rows of houses had been built, once the shopping center had been installed, the dams built, the power plant completed – then there would be people. And in the years to come, sector by sector, project community by community, the human race would spread across the planet’s face. But it would spread in an orderly progression.

  Here there would be no ornery misfits slamming out on their own, willy-nilly, into the frontier land of wild dream and sudden death; no speculators, no strike-it-rich, no go-for-broke. Here there would be no frontier, but a systematic taking over. And here, for once, a planet would be treated right.

  But there was more to it than that, I told myself.

  If Man was to keep going into space, he would have to accept the responsibility of making proper use of the natural resources that he found there. Just because there might be a lot of them was no excuse for wasting them. We were no longer children and we couldn’t gut every world as we had gutted Earth.

  By the time an intelligence advances to a point where it can conquer space, it must have grown up. And now it was time for the human race to prove that it was adult. We couldn’t go ravaging out into the Galaxy like a horde of greedy children.

  Here on this planet, it seemed to me, was one of the many proving grounds on which the race of
Man must stand and show its worth.

  Yet if we were to get the job done, if we were to prove anything at all, there was another problem that first must be met and solved. If it was the Shadows that were causing all our trouble, then somehow we must put a stop to it. And not merely put a stop to it, but understand the Shadows and their motives. For how can anybody fight a thing, I asked myself, that he doesn’t understand?

  And to understand the Shadows, we’d agreed back in the tent, we had to know what kind of critters they might be. And before we could find that out, we had to grab off one for examination. And that first grab had to be perfect, for if we tried and failed, if we put them on their guard, there’d be no second chance.

  But the peeper, I told myself, might give us at least one free try. If I tried the peeper and it didn’t work, no one would be the wiser. It would be a failure that would go unnoticed.

  Benny and I crossed the plain on the roller and headed into the foothills. I made for a place that I called the Orchard, not because it was a formal orchard, but because there were a lot of fruit-bearing trees in the area. As soon as I got around to it, I was planning to run tests to see if any of the fruit might be fit for human food.

  We reached the Orchard and I parked the roller and looked around. I saw immediately that something had happened. When I had been there just a week or so before, the trees had been loaded with fruit and it seemed to be nearly ripe, but now it all was gone.

  I peered underneath the trees to see if the fruit had fallen off and it hadn’t. It looked for all the world as if someone had come in and picked it.

  I wondered if the Shadows had done the picking, but even as I thought it, I knew it couldn’t be. The Shadows didn’t eat

  I didn’t get the peeper out right away, but sat down beneath a tree and sort of caught my breath and did a little thinking.

  From where I sat, I could see the camp and I wondered what Mack had done when he hadn’t found the peeper. I could imagine he’d be in a towering rage. And I could imagine Greasy, considerably relieved, but wondering just the same what had happened to the peeper and perhaps rubbing it into Mack a little how he had been wrong.

  I got the feeling that maybe it would be just as well if I stayed away a while. At least until mid-afternoon. By that time, perhaps, Mack would have cooled off a little.

  And I thought about the Shadows.

  Lousy savages, Thorne had said. Yet they were far from savages. They were perfect gentlemen (or ladies, God knows which they were, if either) and your genuine savage is no gentleman on a number of very fundamental points. The Shadows were clean in body, healthy and well mannered. They had a certain cultural poise. They were, more than anything else, like a group of civilized campers, but unencumbered by the usual camp equipment.

  They were giving us a going over – there could be no doubt of that. They were learning all they could of us and why did they want to know? What use could they make of pots and pans and earthmovers and all the other things?

  Or were they merely taking our measure before they clobbered us?

  And there were all the other questions, too.

  Where did they hang out?

  How did they disappear, and when they disappeared, where did they go?

  How did they eat and breathe?

  How did they communicate?

  Come right down to it, I admitted to myself, the Shadows undoubtedly knew a great deal more about us than we knew about them. Because when you tried to chalk up what we knew about them, it came out to almost exactly nothing.

  I sat under the tree for a while longer, with the thoughts spinning in my head and not adding up. Then I got to my feet and went over to the roller and got out the peeper.

  It was the first time I’d ever had one in my hands and I was interested and slightly apprehensive. For a peeper was nothing one should monkey with.

  It was a simple thing to look at – like a lopsided pair of binoculars, with a lot of selector knobs on each side and on the top of it.

  You looked into it and you twisted the knobs until you had what you wanted and then there was a picture. You stepped into the picture and you lived the life you found there – the sort of life you picked by the setting of the knobs. And there were many lives to pick from, for there were millions of combinations that could be set up on the knobs and the factors ranged from the lightest kind of frippery to the most abysmal horror.

  The peeper was outlawed, naturally – it was worse than alcoholism, worse than dope, the most insidious vice that had ever hit mankind. It threw psychic hooks deep into the soul and tugged forevermore. When a man acquired the habit, and it was easy to acquire, there was no getting over it. He’d spend the rest of his life trying to sort out his life from all the fantasied ones, getting further and further from reality all the while, till nothing was real any more.

  I squatted down beside the roller and tried to make some sense out of the knobs. There were thirty-nine of them, each numbered from one to thirty-nine, and I wondered what the numbering meant.

  Benny came over and hunkered down beside me, with one shoulder touching mine, and watched what I was doing.

  I pondered over the numbering, but pondering did no good. There was only one way to find out what I was looking for. So I set all the knobs back to zero on the graduated scales, then twisted No. 1 up a notch or two.

  I knew that was not the way to work a peeper. In actual operation, one would set a number of the knobs at different settings, mixing in the factors in different proportions to make up the kind of life that one might want to sample. But I wasn’t after a life. What I wanted to find out was what factor each of the knobs controlled.

  So I set No. 1 up a notch or two and lifted the peeper and fitted it to my face and I was back again in the meadow of my boyhood – a meadow that was green as no meadow ever was before, with a sky as blue as old-time watered silk and with a brook and butterflies.

  And more than that – a meadow that lay in a day that would never end, a place that knew no time, and a sunlight that was the bright glow of boyish happiness.

  I knew exactly how the grass would feel beneath bare feet and I could remember how the sunlight would bounce off the wind-ripples of the brook. It was the hardest thing I ever did in my entire life, but I snatched the peeper from my eyes.

  I squatted there, with the peeper cradled in my lap. My hands were unsteady, longing to lift the peeper so I could look once again at that scene out of a long-lost boyhood, but I made myself not do it.

  No. 1 was not the knob I wanted, so I turned it back to zero and, since No. 1 was about as far away as one could imagine from what I was looking for, I turned knob 39 up a notch or two.

  I lifted the peeper halfway to my face and then I turned plain scared. I put it down again until I could get a good grip on my courage. Then I lifted it once more and stuck my face straight into a horror that reached out and tried to drag me in.

  I can’t describe it. Even now, I cannot recall one isolated fragment of what I really saw. Rather than seeing, it was pure impression and raw emotion – a sort of surrealistic representation of all that is loathsome and repellent, and yet somehow retaining a hypnotic fascination that forbade retreat.

  Shaken, I snatched the peeper from my face and sat frozen. For a moment, my mind was an utter blank, with stray wisps of horror streaming through it.

  Then the wisps gradually cleared away and I was squatting once again on the hillside with the Shadow hunkered down beside me, his shoulder touching mine.

  It was a terrible thing, I thought, an act no human could bring himself to do, even to a Shadow. Just turned up a notch or two, it was terrifying; turned on full power, it would twist one’s brain.

  Benny reached out a hand to take the peeper from me. I jerked it away from him. But he kept on pawing for it and that gave me time to think.

  This, I told myself, was exactly t
he way I had wanted it to be. All that was different was that Benny, by his nosiness, was making it easy for me to do the very thing I’d planned.

  I thought of all that depended on our getting us a Shadow to examine. And I thought about my job and how it would bust my heart if the inspector should come out and fire us and send in another crew. There just weren’t planets lying around every day in the week to be engineered. I might never get another chance.

  So I put out my thumb and shoved knob 39 to its final notch and let Benny have the peeper.

  And even as I gave it to him, I wondered if it would really work or if I’d just had a pipe-dream. It might not work, I thought, for it was a human mechanism, designed for human use, keyed to the human nervous system and response.

  Then I knew that I was wrong, that the peeper did not operate by virtue of its machinery alone, but by the reaction of the brain and the body of its user – that it was no more than a trigger mechanism to set loose the greatness and the beauty and the horror that lay within the user’s brain. And horror, while it might take a different shape and form, appear in a different guise, was horror for a Shadow as well as for a human.

  Benny lifted the peeper to that great single eye of his and thrust his head forward to fit into the viewer. Then I saw his body jerk and stiffen and I caught him as he toppled and eased him to the ground.

  I stood there above him and felt the triumph and the pride – and perhaps a little pity, too – that it should be necessary to do a thing like this to a guy like Benny. To play a trick like this on my Shadow who had sat, just moments ago, with his shoulder touching mine.

  I knelt down and turned him over. He didn’t seem so heavy and I was glad of that, because I’d have to get him on the roller and then make a dash for camp, going as fast as I could gun the roller, because there was no telling how long Benny would stay knocked out.

  I picked up the peeper and stuck it back into the roller’s bag, then hunted for some rope or wire to tie Benny on so he would not fall off.

  I don’t know if I heard a noise or not. I’m half inclined to think that there wasn’t any noise – that it was some sort of built-in alarm system that made me turn around.