Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  “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 any 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.

  I turned around and Mack was just behind me. He was rubbing his hands in satisfaction and his face was all lit up with smiles.

  “Pretty slick,” he said.

  I agreed with him, but I had some doubts that I could not quite express.

  “We’ll string up some lights,” said Mack, “so they can see it day and night and then we’ll have them pegged for good.”

  “You think they’ll stay with it?” I asked. “They won’t catch on?”

  “Not a chance.”

  I went down to my tent and poured myself a good stiff drink, then sat down in a chair in front of the tent.

  Some of the men were stringing cable and others were rigging up some batteries of lights and down in the cookshack I could hear Greasy singing, but the song was sad. I felt sorry for Greasy.

  Mack might be right, I admitted to myself. We might have built a trap that would cook the Shadows’ goose. If nothing else, the sheer fascination of all that motion might keep them stuck there. It had a hypnotic effect even for a human and one could never gauge what effect it might have on an alien mind. Despite the evident technology of the aliens, it was entirely possible that their machine technology might have developed along some divergent line, so that the spinning wheel and the plunging piston and the smooth fluid gleam of metal was new to them.

  I tried to imagine a machine technology that would require no motion, but such a thing was entirely inconceivable to me. And for that very reason, I thought, the idea of all this motion might be just as inconceivable to an alien intellect.

  The stars came out while I sat there and no one wandered over to gab and that was fine. I was just as satisfied to be left alone.

  After a time, I went into the tent, had another drink and decided to go to bed.

  I took off my coat and slung it on the desk. When it hit, there was a thump, and as soon as I heard that thump, I knew what it was. I had dropped Benny’s jewel into the pocket of the coat and had then forgotten it.

  I fished into the pocket and got out the jewel, fearing all the while that I had broken it. And there was something wrong with it—it had somehow come apart. The jewel face had come loose from the rest of it and I saw that the jewel was no more than a cover for a box-shaped receptacle.

  I put it on the desk and swung the jewel face open and there, inside the receptacle, I found myself.

  The statuette was nestled inside a weird piece of mechanism and it was as fine a piece of work as Greasy’s statuette.

  It gave me a flush of pride and satisfaction. Benny, after all, had not forgotten me!

  I sat for a long time looking at the statuette, trying to puzzle out the mechanism. I had a good look at the jewel and I finally figured out what it was all about.

  The jewel was no jewel at all; it was a camera. Except that instead of taking two-dimensional pictures, it worked in three dimensions. And that, of course, was how the Shadows made the models. Or maybe they were patterns rather than just models.

  I finished undressing and got into bed and lay on the cot, staring at the canvas, and the pieces all began to fall together and it was beautiful. Beautiful, that is, for the aliens. It made us look like a bunch of saps.

  The cones had gone out and watched the survey party and had not let it get close to them, but they had been ready for us when we came. They’d disguised the cones to look like something that we wouldn’t be afraid of, something perhaps that we could even laugh at it. And that was the safest kind of disguise that anyone could assume—something that the victim might think was mildly funny. For no one gets too upset about what a clown might do.

  But the Shadows had been loaded and they’d let us have it and apparently, by the time we woke up, they had us pegged and labeled.

  And what would they do now? Still stay behind their log, still keep watching us, and suck us dry of everything that we had to offer?

  And when they were ready, when they’d gotten all they wanted or all they felt that they could get, they’d come out and finish us.

  I was somewhat scared and angry and felt considerably like a fool and it was frustrating just to think about.

  Mack might kid himself that he had solved the problem with his flytrap out there, but there was still a job to do. Somehow or other, we had to track down these hiding aliens and break up their little game.

  Somewhere along the way, I went to sleep, and suddenly someone was shaking me and yelling for me to get out.

  I came half upright and saw that it was Carr who had been shaking me. He was practically gibbering. He kept pointing outside and babbling something about a funny cloud and I couldn’t get much more out of him.

  So I shucked into my trousers and my shoes and went out with him and headed for the hilltop at a run. Dawn was just breaking and the Shadows still were clustered around the flytrap and a crowd of men had gathered just beyond the flytrap and were looking toward the east.

  We pushed our way through the crowd up to the front and there was the cloud that Carr had been jabbering about, but it was a good deal closer now and was sailing across the plains, slowly and majestically, and flying above it was a little silver sphere that flashed and glittered in the first rays of the sun.

  The cloud looked, more than anything, like a mass of junk. I could see what looked like a derrick sticking out of it and here and there what seemed to be a wheel. I tried to figure out what it might be, but I couldn’t, and all the time it was moving closer to us.

  Mack was at my left and I spoke to him, but he didn’t answer me. He was just like Benny—he couldn’t answer me. He looked hypnotized.

  The closer that cloud came, the more fantastic it was and the more unbelievable. For there was no question now that it was a mass of machinery, just like the equipment we had. There were tractors and earthmovers and shovels and dozers and all the other stuff, and in between these bigger pieces was all sorts of little stuff.

  In another five minutes, it was hovering almost over us and then slowly it began to lower. While we watched, it came down to the ground, gently, almost without a bump, even though there were a couple or three acres of it. Besides the big equipment, there were tents and cups and spoons and tables and chairs and benches and a case or two of whisky and some surveying equipment—there was, it seemed to me, almost exactly all the items there were in the camp.

  When it had all sat down, the little silver sphere came down, too, and floated slowly toward us. It stopped a little way away from us and Mack walked out toward it and I followed Mack. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Carr and Knight were walking forward, too.

  We stopped four or five feet from it and now we saw that the sphere was some sort of protective suit. Inside it sat a pale little humanoid. Not human, but at least with two legs and arms and a single head. He had antennae sprouting from his forehead and his ears were long and pointed and he had no hair at all.

&n
bsp; He let the sphere set down on the ground and we got a little closer and squatted down so we would be on a level with him.

  He jerked a thumb backward over his shoulder, pointing at the mass of equipment he’d brought.

  “Is pay.” he announced in a shrill, high, piping voice.

  We didn’t answer right away. We did some gulping first.

  “Is pay for what?” Knight finally managed to ask him.

  “For fun,” the creature said.

  “I don’t understand,” said Mack.

  “We make one of everything. We not know what you want, so we make one of all. Unfortunate, two lots are missing. Accident, perhaps.”

  “The models,” I said to the others. “That’s what he’s talking about. The models were patterns and the models from Greasy’s Shadow and from Benny—”

  “Not all,” the creature said. “The rest be right along.”

  “Now wait a minute,” said Carr. “Let us get this straight. You are paying us. Paying us for what? Exactly what did we do for you?”

  Mack blurted out: “How did you make this stuff?”

  “One question at a time,” I pleaded.

  “Machines can make,” the creature said. “Knowing how, machines can make anything. Very good machines.”

  “But why?” asked Carr again. “Why did you make it for us?”

  “For fun,” the creature explained patiently. “For laugh. For watch. Is a big word I cannot—”

  “Entertainment?” I offered.

  “That is right,” the creature said. “Entertainment is the word. We have lot of time for entertainment. We stay home, watch our entertainment screen. We get tired of it. We seek for something new. You something new. Give us much interesting. We try to pay you for it.”

  “Good Lord!” exclaimed Knight. “I begin to get it now. We were a big news event and so they sent out all those cones to cover us. Mack, did you saw into that cone last night?”

  “We did,” said Mack. “As near as we could figure, it was a TV sender. Not like ours, of course—there would be differences. But we figured it for a data-sending rig,”