Clifford Simak - Shadow Of Life

“So help me, doc,” said Alf, “they got me in the clink.”

“What for this time?” asked Carter, figuring that he knew. Tales of the doings of an alcoholic Alf were among Red Rocks’ many legends.

“A bit of jug hunting,” Alf confessed, whuffling his mustache.

Carter could see that Alf was fairly sober. His faded eyes were a bit watery, but that was all.

“The Purple Jug again, I suppose,” said Carter.

“That’s just exactly what it was,” said Alf, trying to sound cheerful. “You wouldn’t want a fellow to pass up a fortune, would you?”

“The Purple Jug’s a myth,” said Carter, with a touch of bitterness. “Something someone thought up to get guys like you in trouble. There never was a Purple Jug.”

“But Elmer’s robot gave me the tip,” wailed Alf. “Told me just where to go.”

“Sure, I know,” said Carter. “Sent you out into the badlands. Worst country on all of Mars. Straight up and down and full of acid bugs. No one’s ever found a jug there. No one ever will. Even when the Martians were here, the badlands probably were a wilderness. No one in his right mind, not even a Martian, would live there and you only find jugs where someone has lived.”

“Look,” yelped Alf, “you don’t mean to tell

me Buster was playing a joke on me? Those badlands ain’t no joke. The acid bugs darn near got my sand buggy and I almost broke my neck three or four times. Then along came the cops and nailed me. Said I was trespassing on Elmer’s reservation.”

“Certainly Buster was playing a joke on you,” said Carter. “He gets bored sitting around and not having much to do. Fellows like you are made to order for him.”

“That little whippersnapper can’t do this to me,” howled Alf. “You wait until I get my hands on him. I’ll break him down into a tinker toy.”

“You won’t be getting your hands on anyone for thirty days or so unless I can talk you out of this,” Carter reminded him. “Is the sheriff around?”

“Right here,” said Alf. “Told him you’d probably want a word with him. Do the best you can for me.”

Alf’s face faded out of the ground glass and the sheriff’s came in, a heavy, florid face, but the face of a harassed man.

“Sorry about Alf, doc,” he said, “but I’m getting sick and tired of running the boys off the reservation. Thought maybe clapping some of them in jail might help. This reservation business is all damn foolishness, of course, but a law’s a law.”

“I don’t blame you,” Carter said. “The Preachers alone are enough to run you ragged.”

The sheriff’s florid face became almost apoplectic. “Them Preachers,” he confided, “are the devil’s own breed. Keeping the people stirred up all the time with their talk of evil from the stars and all such crazy notions. Earth’s getting tough about it, too. All of them seem to come from Mars and they’re riding us to find out how they get that way.”

“Just jug hunters gone wacky,” declared Carter. “Wandering around in the desert they get so they talk to themselves and after that anything can happen.”

The sheriff wagged his head. “Not so sure about that, doc. They talk pretty convincing — almost make me believe them sometimes. If they’re crazy, it’s a queer way to go crazy — all of them alike. All of them tell the same story — all of them got a funny look in their eyes.”

“How about Alf, sheriff?” asked Carter. “He’s my right-hand man and I need him now. Lots of work to do, getting ready to leave.”

“Maybe I can stretch a point,” said the sheriff, “long as you put it that way. I’ll see the district attorney.”

“Thanks, sheriff,” said Carter. The ground glass clouded and went dead as the connection was snapped at the other end.

The archaeologist swung around slowly from his desk.

“Buster,” he challenged, “why did you do that to Alf? You know there is no Purple Jug.”

“You accuse me falsely,” said Buster. “There is a Purple Jug.”

Carter laughed shortly. “It’s no use, Buster. You can’t get me all steamed up to look for it.”

He rose and stretched. “It’s time for me to eat,” he said. “Would you like to come along and talk with me?”

“No,” said the robot. “I’ll just sit here and think. I thought of something that will amuse me for a while. I’ll see you later.”

But when Carter came back, Buster was gone. So was the manuscript that had been lying on the desk. Drawers of filing cases that lined one side of the room had been pried open. The floor was littered with papers, as if someone had pawed through them hurriedly, selecting the ones he wanted, leaving the rest.

Carter stood thunderstruck, hardly believing what he saw. Then he sprang across the room, searched hastily, a sickening realization growing on him.

All the copies of his manuscript, all his notes, all his key research data were gone.

There was no doubt Buster had robbed him. And that meant Elmer had robbed him, for Buster was basically no more than an extension of Elmer, a physical agent for Elmer. Buster was the arms and legs and metallic muscles of a thing that had no arms or legs or muscles.

And Elmer, having robbed him, wanted him to know he had. Buster deliberately had set the stage for suspicion to point him out.

Charles Carter sat down heavily in the chair before his desk, staring at the papers on the floor. And through his brain rang one strident, mocking phrase:

“Twenty years of work. Twenty years of work.”

The mistiness that hung among the ornamental girders swirled uneasily with fear. Not the old, ancestral fear that always moved within its being, but a newer, sharper fear. Fear born of the knowledge it had made mistakes — not one alone, but two. And might make a third.

The Earth people, it knew, were clever, far too clever. They guessed too closely. They followed up their guesses with investigation. And they were skeptical. That was the worst of all, their skepticism.

It had taken them many years to recognize and accept him for what he really was — the residual personality of the ancient Martian race. Even now there were those who did not quite believe.

Fear was another thing. The Earthlings knew no fear. Quick, personal glimpses of it undoubtedly they knew. Perhaps even at times a widespread fear might seize them, although only temporarily. As a race they were incapable of the all-obliterating terror that lay forever on the consciousness of Elmer, the Martian Ghost.

But there were some, apparently, who could not comprehend even personal fear, whose thirst for knowledge superseded the acknowledgment of danger, who saw in danger a scientific enigma to be studied rather than a thing to flee.

Stephen Lathrop, Elmer knew, was one of these.

Elmer floated, a cloudy thing that sometimes looked like smoke and then like wispy fog and then again like something one couldn’t quite be sure was even there.

He had known he was making a mistake with Lathrop, but at the time it had seemed the thing to do. Such a man, reacting favorably, would have been valuable.

But the result had not been favorable. Elmer knew that much now, knew it in a sudden surge of fear, knew he should have known it twenty years before. But one, he told himself, cannot always be sure when dealing with an alien mind. Earthmen, after all, were newcomers to the planet. A few centuries counted for nothing in the chronology of Mars.

It was unfair that a Ghost be left to make decisions. Those others could not expect him to be infallible. He was nothing more than a blob of ancestral memories, the residue of a race, the pooling of millions of personalities. He was nothing one could prove. He was hardly life at all — just the shadow of a life that had been, the echo of voices stilled forever in the silence of millennia.