Greasy had the cookshack stove fired up and smoke was curling from the chimney. I could hear him singing lustily amid the clatter of his pans. This was his noisy time. During the entire morning, he was noisy and obnoxious, but toward the middle of the afternoon, he turned mousy quiet. That was when he began to take a really dangerous chance and hit the peeper.
There were laws which made it very rough on anyone who had a peeper. Mack Baldwin, the project superintendent, would have raised merry hell if he had known that Greasy had one. But I was the only one who knew it. I had found out by accident and not even Greasy knew I knew and I had kept my mouth shut.
I said hello to Benny, but he didn’t answer me. He never answered me; he had no mouth to answer with. I don’t suppose he even heard me, for he had no ears. Those Shadows were a screwy lot. They had no mouths and they had no ears and they hadn’t any noses.
But they did have an eye, placed in the middle of the face, about where the nose would have been if they’d had noses. And that eye made up for the lack of ears and mouth and nose.
It was about three inches in diameter and, strictly speaking, it wasn’t built exactly like an eye; it had no iris or no pupil, but was a pool of light and shadow that kept shifting all around so it never looked the same. Sometimes it looked like a bowl of goop that was slightly on the spoiled side, and at other times it was hard and shining like a camera lens, and there were other times when it looked sad and lonely, like a mournful hound dog’s eyes.
They were a weird lot for sure, those Shadows. They looked mostly like a rag doll before any one had gotten around to painting in the features. They were humanoid and they were strong and active and I had suspected from the very first that they weren’t stupid. There was some division of opinion on that latter point and a lot of the boys still thought of them as howling savages. Except they didn’t howl – they had no mouths to howl with. No mouths to howl or eat with, no nose to smell or breathe with, and no ears to hear with.
Just on bare statistics, one would have put them down as plain impossible, but they got along all right. They got along just fine.
They wore no clothes. On the point of modesty, there was no need of any. They were as bare of sexual characteristics as they were of facial features. They were just a gang of rag dolls with massive eyes in the middle of their faces.
But they did wear what might have been a decoration or a simple piece of jewelry or a badge of Shadowhood. They wore a narrow belt, from which was hung a bag or sack in which they carried a collection of trinkets that jingled when they walked. No one had ever seen what was in those sacks. Cross straps from the belt ran over the shoulders, making the whole business into a simple harness, and at the juncture of the straps upon their chest was mounted a huge jewel. Intricately carved, the jewel sparkled like a diamond, and it might have been a diamond, but no one knew if it was or not. No one ever got close enough to see. Make a motion toward that jewel and the Shadow disappeared.
That’s right. Disappeared.
I said hello to Benny and he naturally didn’t answer and I walked around the table and began working on the model. Benny stood close behind me and watched me as I worked. He seemed to have a lot of interest in that model. He had a lot of interest in everything I did. He went everywhere I went. He was, after all, my Shadow.
There was a poem that started out: I have a little shadow… I had thought about it often, but couldn’t recall who the poet was or how the rest of it went. It was an old, old poem and I remembered I had read it when I was a kid. I could close my eyes and see the picture that went with the words, the brightly colored picture of a kid in his pajamas, going up a stairs with a candle in his hand and the shadow of him on the wall beyond the stairs.
I took some satisfaction in Benny’s interest in the sector model, although I was aware his interest probably didn’t mean a thing. He might have been just as interested if I’d been counting beans.
I was proud of that model and I spent more time on it than I had any right to. I had my name, Robert Emmett Drake, spelled out in full on the plaster base and the whole thing was a bit more ambitious than I originally had intended.
I had let my enthusiasm run away with me and that was not too hard to understand. It wasn’t every day that a conservationist got a chance to engineer from scratch an absolutely virgin Earth-type planet. The layout was only one small sector of the initial project, but it included almost all the factors involved in the entire tract and I had put in the works – the dams and roads, the power sites and the mill sites, the timber management and the water-conservation features and all the rest of it.
I had just settled down to work when a commotion broke out down at the cookshack. I could hear Greasy cussing and the sound of thudding whacks. The door of the shack burst open and a Shadow came bounding out with Greasy just a leap behind him. Greasy had a frying pan and he was using it effectively, with a nifty backhand technique that was beautiful to see. He was laying it on the Shadow with every leap he took and he was yelling maledictions that were enough to curl one’s hair.
The Shadow legged it across the camp with Greasy close behind. Watching them, I thought how it was a funny thing that a Shadow would up and disappear if you made a motion toward its jewel, but would stay and take the kind of treatment Greasy was handing out with that frying pan.
When they came abreast of my model table, Greasy gave up the chase. He was not in the best of condition.
He stood beside the table and put both fists belligerently on his hips, so that the frying pan, which he still clutched, stood out at a right angle from his body.
“I won’t allow that stinker in the shack,” he told me, wheezing and gasping. “It’s bad enough to have him hanging around outside and looking in the windows. It’s bad enough falling over him every time I turn around. I will not have him snooping in the kitchen; he’s got his fingers into everything he sees. If I was Mack, I’d put the lug on all of them. I’d run them so fast, so far, that it would take them –”
“Mack’s got other things to worry about,” I told him rather sharply. “The project is way behind schedule, with all the breakdowns we’ve been having.”
“Sabotage,” Greasy corrected me. “That’s what it is. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. It’s them Shadows, I tell you, sabotaging the machines. If it was left to me, I’d run them clear out of the country.”
“It’s their country,” I protested. “They were here before we came.”
“It’s a big planet,” Greasy said. “There are other parts of it they could live in.”
“But they have got a right here. This planet is their home.”
“They ain’t got no homes,” said Greasy.
He turned around abruptly and walked back toward the shack. His Shadow, which had been standing off to one side all the time, hurried to catch up with him. It didn’t look as if it had minded the pounding he had given it. But you could never tell what a Shadow was thinking. Their thoughts don’t show on them.
What Greasy had said about their not having any homes was a bit unfair. What he meant, of course, was that they had no village, that they were just a sort of carefree bunch of gypsies, but to me the planet was their home and they had a right to go any place they wanted on it and use any part of it they wished. It should make no difference that they settled down on no particular spot, that they had no villages and possibly no shelters or that they raised no crops.
Come to think of it, there was no reason why they should raise crops, for they had no mouths to eat with, and if they didn’t eat, how could they keep on living and if…