Clifford Simak: Shadow Of Life

Elmer floated gently toward the room below, his mind reaching out toward the brain of the man sitting there. Softly, almost furtively, he sought to probe into the mental processes of the pink-whiskered artist. A froth of ideas, irrelevant thoughts, detached imagining, and then — a blank wall.

Elmer recoiled, terror seizing him again, a wild wave of unreasoning apprehension. It was the same as it had been the many previous times he had tried to reach this mind. Something must be hidden behind that unyielding barrier, something he must know. Never before had there been an Earthman’s mind he could not read. Never before had his groping thoughts been blocked. It was baffling — and terrifying.

Mistakes! The idea hammered at him remorselessly. First the mistake with Lathrop. Now this — another mistake. He never should have allowed Peter Harper to come, despite the recommendations of the Earthian embassy, the unquestioned references of the college out on Earth. He would have had right and precedent in such refusal. But he had allowed hundreds of art students and art lovers to view his canvases — to have refused Harper might have aroused suspicion.

The awful idea he was being made the victim of an Earthian plot surged up within him, but he rejected it fiercely. Earthmen never had plotted against him, always made it a meticulous point of honor to accede to all his wishes, to grant him, as the last representative of a great race, considerations over and above those to which his diplomatic status entitled him.

Peter Harper said: “Elmer, your people may have been greater than we know. That painting”—he gestured toward “The Watchers”—“is something no Earthman has the technique to produce.”

Elmer’s thoughts milled muddily, panic edging in on him. Other Earthmen had said the same thing, but there was a difference. He could read their minds and know they meant what they said.

“You could help us, Elmer,” Harper said. “I’ve often wondered why you haven’t.”

“Why should I?” Elmer asked.

“Brother races,” the man explained. “The Martians and the Earthmen. Your race, whatever happened to them, wouldn’t want to keep their knowledge from us.”

“I do not have the knowledge of the Martian race.” Elmer’s thoughts were curt.

“You have some of it. The fourth dimension, for example. Think of what we could do with that. A surgeon could go inside his patient and fix him up without a single knife stroke. We could press a button and go a million miles.”

“Then what?” asked Elmer.

“Progress,” said Harper. “Certainly you must understand that. Man was Earth-bound. Now he has reached the planets. He’s already reaching toward the stars.”

“Maybe when you reach the stars you won’t like what you find,” Elmer declared. “Maybe you’ll find things you’d wish you left alone.”

Harper grinned and pawed at his pink chin whiskers.

“You’re an odd one,” he said.

“To you,” Elmer said, “the word is ‘alien.’”

“Not exactly,” declared Harper. “We had things like you back on Earth, only no one except old women believed in them. They were just something to talk about on stormy nights when the wind whistled down the chimney. We called them ghosts, but we never would admit that they were real. Probably ours, weren’t really real, sort of feeble ghosts, just the beginning of ghosts.”

“They never had a chance,” said Elmer.

“That’s right,” Harper agreed. “As a race, we haven’t lived long enough. We seldom stay in one place long enough to allow it to soak up the necessary personality. There are a few rather shadowy ghosts in some of the old castles and manor houses in Europe, maybe a few in Asia, but that’s about all. The Americans were apartment dwellers, moved every little while or so. A ghost would get started in one pattern and then would have to change over again. I suspect that was at least discouraging, if not fatal.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Elmer.

“With the Martians, of course, it was different,” went on Harper. “Your people lived in their cities for thousands of years, perhaps millions of years. The very stones of the place fairly dripped with personality — the accumulated personality of billions of people — that whatever-you-call-it that stays behind. No wonder the Martian Ghosts got big and tough—”

Metallic feet clicked along the corridor outside. A door opened and Buster rolled in.

“Dr. Carter is here,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” said Elmer, “he wants to see me about a manuscript.”

There was no way to get out. Stephen Lathrop now was convinced of that. Elmer’s city, so far as he was concerned, might just as well have been in the depths of space.

In the three days which had passed since he had stumbled in off the desert, he had searched the place methodically. The central spire had been his last chance. But even before he climbed the stairs he knew it was no chance at all. When Elmer decided to make the place a rattrap, he really made it one.

A web of force surrounded the entire city, extending three feet or so from the outer surfaces. Doors would open, so would windows. But that meant nothing, for one could go no farther.

Buster apparently had given up trying to stalk him. Now, it appeared, the game had settled to a deadlock. Buster didn’t dare to tackle him so long as he had the weapon and he, on the other hand, couldn’t leave the city. Elmer probably had decided on starving him out.

Lathrop knew, deep within him, that he was licked, but that knowledge still was something he would not admit. In the end, logic told him, he would give up, let Elmer wipe out the memory of those twenty years in space, replace them with synthetic memories. Under different circumstances, he might have welcomed such a course, for the things he had seen were not pleasant to remember — certainly Elmer could supply him with a more pleasant past. But the proposition was too highhanded to be accepted without a fight, without at least a struggle to maintain his right to order his own life. Then, too, there was the feeling that if he lost the knowledge of the outer worlds he would be losing something the Earth might need, the opportunity to approach the problem scientifically rather than hysterically, as the Preachers approached it.

He sat down heavily on a step, pulled the weapon from his belt and held it, dangling from a hand that rested on his knee. Although there had been no sign of Buster for a long time, there was no telling when the robot might pop up and once Buster laid a tentacle on him, the game was over.

The weapon was not easy to grip. It was not made for human hands, although its operation was apparent — simply press the button on the side. He shifted it in his hand and studied it. Had it not been for the weapon, he knew, there were times when he would have been tempted to write off that trip through space as the product of an irrational mind.

But there the weapon was, a familiar, tangible thing. For years he had seen it dangling from the belt of the thing that piloted the ship. Even now he remembered how it had flashed in the light from the instrument panel as he knocked it from the grasp of the being, then closed in to make his kill.

He didn’t know what the weapon was, but Buster knew and Buster wasn’t coming near it.

It was increasingly hard, he found, to continue thinking of the creature of the spaceship as merely a “thing,” as something that had no identity, but he knew that despite mounting suspicion, he must continue to think of it as such or give way to illogic.