Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  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 the 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.

  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 was 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 whole 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.”