I was disgusted with Thorne.
“Well, we got that settled,” I said. “Let’s go back to work.”
I got up off the bench, but I hadn’t gone more than a step or two before a man came pounding down from the radio hut, waving a piece of paper in his hand. It was Jack Pollard, our communications man, who also doubled in brass as an electronics expert.
“Mack!” he was hollering. “Hey, Mack!”
Mack lumbered to his feet.
Pollard handed him the paper. “It was coming in when Greasy blew the horn,” he gasped. “I was having trouble getting it. Relayed a long way out.”
Mack read the paper and his face turned hard and red.
“What’s the matter, Mack?” I wanted to know.
“There’s an inspector coming out,” he said, and he choked on each and every word. He was all burned up. And maybe scared as well.
“Is it likely to be bad?”
“He’ll probably can the lot of us,” said Mack.
“But he can’t do that!”
“That’s what you think. We’re six weeks behind schedule and this project is hotter than a pile. Earth’s politicians have made a lot of promises, and if those promises don’t pay off, there’ll be hell to pay. Unless we can do something and do it fast, they’ll bounce us out of here and send a new gang in.”
“But considering everything, we haven’t done so badly,” Carr said mildly.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Mack told him. “The new gang will do no better, but there has to be some action for the record and we’re the ones who’ll get it in the neck. If we could lick this breakdown business, we might have a chance. If we could say to that inspector: ‘Sure, we’ve had a spot of trouble, but we have it licked and now we’re doing fine –’ if we could say that to him, then we might save our hides.”
“You think it’s the Shadows, Mack?” asked Knight.
Mack reached up and scratched his head. “Must be them. Can’t think of anything else.”
Somebody shouted from another table: “Of course it’s them damn Shadows!”
The men were getting up from their seats and crowding around.
Mack held up his hands. “You guys get back to work. If any of you got some good ideas, come up to the tent and we’ll talk them over.”
They started jabbering at him.
“Ideas!” Mack roared. “I said ideas! Anyone that comes up without a good idea, I’ll dock him for being off the job.”
They quieted down a little.
“And another thing,” said Mack. “No rough stuff on the Shadows. Just go along the way we always have. I’ll fire the man who strongarms them.”
He said to me: “Let’s go.”
I followed him, and Knight and Carr fell in beside me. Thorne didn’t come. I had expected that he would.
Inside Mack’s tent, we sat down at a table littered with blueprints and spec sheets and papers scribbled with figures and offhand diagrams.
“I suppose,” said Carr, “that it has to be the Shadows.”
“Some gravitational peculiarity?” suggested Knight. “Some strange atmospheric condition? Some space-warping quality?”
“Maybe,” said Mack. “It all sounds a bit far-fetched, but I’m ready to grab any straw you shove at me.”
“One thing that puzzles me,” I put in, “is that the survey crew didn’t mention Shadows. Survey believed the planet was uninhabited by any sort of intelligence. It found no signs of culture. And that was good, because it meant the project wouldn’t get all tangled up with legalities over primal rights. And yet the minute we landed, the Shadows came galloping to meet us, almost as if they’d spotted us a long way off and were waiting for us to touch down.”
“Another funny thing,” said Carr, “is how they paired off with us – one Shadow to every man. Like they had it all planned out. Like they’d married us or something.”
“What are you getting at?” growled Mack.
I said: “Where were the Shadows, Mack, when the survey gang was here? Can we be absolutely sure they’re native to this planet?”
“If they aren’t native,” demanded Mack, “how did they get here? They have no machines. They haven’t even got tools.”
“There’s another thing about that survey report,” said Knight, “that I’ve been wondering about. The rest of you have read it –”
We nodded. We had not only read it, we had studied and digested it. We’d lived with it day and night on the long trip out to Stella IV.
“The survey report told about some cone-shaped things,” said Knight. “All sitting in a row, as if they might be boundary markers. But they never saw them except from a long way off. They had no idea what they were. They just wrote them off as something that had no real significance.”
“They wrote off a lot of things as having no significance,” said Carr.
“We aren’t getting anywhere,” Mack complained. “All we do is talk.”
“If we could talk to the Shadows,” said Knight, “we might be getting somewhere.”
“But we can’t!” argued Mack. “We tried to talk to them and we couldn’t raise a ripple. We tried sign language and we tried pantomime and we filled reams of paper with diagrams and drawings and we got exactly nowhere. Jack rigged up that electronic communicator and he tried it on them and they just sat and looked at us, all bright and sympathetic, with that one big eye of theirs, and that was all there was. We even tried telepathy –”
“You’re wrong there, Mack,” said Carr. “We didn’t try telepathy, because we don’t know a thing about it. All we did was sit in a circle, holding hands with them and thinking hard at them. And of course it was no good. They probably thought it was just a game.”
“Look,” pleaded Mack, “that inspector will be here in ten days or so. We have to think of something. Let’s get down to cases.”
“If we could run the Shadows off somehow,” said Knight. “If we could scare them away –”
“You know how to scare a Shadow?” Mack asked, “You got any idea what they might be afraid of?”
Knight shook his head.
“Our first job,” said Carr, “is to find out what a Shadow is like. We have to learn what kind of animal he is. He’s a funny kind, we know. He doesn’t have a mouth or nose or ears…”
“He’s impossible,” Mack said. “There ain’t no such animal.”
“He’s alive,” said Carr, “and doing very well. We have to find out how he gets his food, how he communicates, what tolerances he may have, what his responses are to various kinds of stimuli. We can’t do a thing about the Shadows until we have some idea of what we’re dealing with.”
Knight agreed with him. “We should have started weeks ago. We made a stab at it, of course, but our hearts were never in it. We were too anxious to get started on the project.”
Mack said bitterly: “Fat lot of good it did us.”
“Before you can examine one, you have to have a subject,” I answered Knight. “Seems to me we should try to figure out how to catch a Shadow. Make a sudden move toward one and he disappears.”
But even as I said it, I knew that was not entirely right. I remembered how Greasy had chased his Shadow from the cookshack, lamming him with the frying pan.
And I remembered something else and I had a hunch and got a big idea, but I was scared to say anything about it. I didn’t even, for the moment, dare to let on to myself I had it.
“We’d have to take one by surprise somehow and knock him out before he had a chance to disappear,” Carr said. “And it has to be a sure way, for if we try it once and fail we’ve put the Shadows on their guard and we’ll never have another chance.”