Clifford Simak - The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

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.