Mack warned, “No rough stuff. You can’t go using violence until you know your critter. You don’t do any killing until you have some idea how efficiently the thing that you are killing can up and kill you back.”
“No rough stuff,” Carr agreed. “If a Shadow can bollix up the innards of some of those big earthmovers, I wouldn’t like to see what he could do to a human body.”
“It’s got to be fast and sure,” said Knight, “and we can’t even start until we know it is. If you hit one on the head with a baseball bat, would the bat bounce or would you crush the Shadow’s skull? That’s about the way it would be with everything we could think of at the moment.”
Carr nodded. “That’s right. We can’t use gas, because a Shadow doesn’t breathe.”
“He might breathe through his pores,” said Knight.
“Sure, but we’d have to know before we tried using gas. We might jab a hypo into one, but what would you use in the hypo? First you’d have to find something that would knock a Shadow out. You might try hypnotism –”
“I’d doubt hypnotism,” said Knight.
“How about Doc?” I asked. “If we could knock out a Shadow, would Doc give him a going over? If I know Doc, he’d raise a lot of hell. Claim the Shadow was an intelligent being and that it would be in violation of medical ethics to examine one without first getting its consent.”
“You get one,” Mack promised grimly, “and I’ll handle Doc.”
“He’ll do a lot of screaming.”
“I’ll handle Doc,” repeated Mack. “This inspector is going to be here in a week or so –”
“We wouldn’t have to have it all cleared up,” said Knight. “If we could show the inspector that we had a good lead, that we were progressing, he might play ball with us.”
I was seated with my back to the entrance of the tent and I heard someone fumbling with the canvas.
Mack said: “Come in, Greasy. Got something on your mind?”
Greasy walked in and came up to the table. He had the bottom of his apron tucked into his trouser band, the way he always did when he wasn’t working, and he held something in his hand. He tossed it on the table.
It was one of the bags that the Shadows carried at their belts!
We all sucked in our breath and Mack’s hair fairly stood on end.
“Where did you get this?” he demanded.
“Off my Shadow, when he wasn’t looking.”
“When he wasn’t looking!”
“Well, you see, it was this way, Mack. That Shadow is always into things. I stumble over him everywhere I go. And this morning he had his head halfway into the dishwasher and that bag was hanging on his belt, so I grabbed up a butcher knife and just whacked it off.”
As Mack got up and pulled himself to his full height, you could see it was hard for him to keep his hands off Greasy.
“So that was all you did,” he said in a low, dangerous voice.
“Sure,” said Greasy. “There was nothing hard about it.”
“All you’ve done is spill the beans to them! All you’ve done is made it almost impossible –”
“Maybe not,” Knight interrupted in a hurry.
“Now that the damage has been done,” said Carr, “we might as well have a look. Maybe there’s a clue inside that bag.”
“I can’t open it,” grumbled Greasy. “I tried every way I know. There’s no way to open it.”
“And while you were trying to open it,” asked Mack, “what was the Shadow doing?”
“He didn’t even notice. He had his head inside that washer. He’s as stupid as –”
“Don’t say that! I don’t want anyone thinking a Shadow’s stupid. Maybe they are, but there’s no sense believing it until we’re sure.”
Knight had picked up the bag and was turning it around and around in his hand. Whatever was inside was jingling as he turned and twisted it.
“Greasy’s right,” he said. “I don’t see any way to get it open.”
“You get out of here!” Mack roared at Greasy. “Get back to your work. Don’t you ever make another move toward any of the Shadows.”
Greasy turned around and left, but he was no more than out of the tent when he gave a yelp that was enough to raise your scalp.
I almost knocked the table over getting out of there to see what was going on.
What was happening was no more than plain solemn justice.
Greasy was running for all he was worth, and behind him was the Shadow with a frying pan, and every jump that Greasy took, the Shadow let him have it, and was every bit as good with that frying pan as Greasy was.
Greasy was weaving and circling, trying to head back for the cookshack, but each time the Shadow got him headed off and went on chasing him.
Everyone had stopped work to watch. Some of them were yelling advice to Greasy and some of the others were cheering on the Shadow. I’d have liked to stay and watch, but I knew that if I was going to put my hunch into execution, I’d never have a better chance to do it.
So I turned and walked swiftly down the street to my own tent and ducked inside and got a specimen bag and came out again.
I saw that Greasy was heading for the equipment pool and that the Shadow still was one long stride behind. Its arm was holding up well, for the frying pan never missed a lick.
I ran down to the cookshack and, at the door, I stopped and looked back. Greasy was shinnying up the derrick of a shovel and the Shadow was standing at the bottom, waving the frying pan as though daring him to come down and take it like a man. Everyone else was running toward the scene of action and there was no one, I was sure, who had noticed me.
So I opened the cookshack door and stepped inside.
The dishwasher was chugging away and everything was peaceable and quiet.
I was afraid I might have trouble finding what I was looking for, but I found it in the third place I looked – underneath the mattress on Greasy’s bunk.
I pulled the peeper out and slipped it in the bag and got out of there as fast as I could go.
Stopping at my tent, I tossed the bag into a corner and threw some old clothes over it and then went out again.
The commotion had ended. The Shadow was walking back toward the cookshack, with the pan tucked underneath its arm, and Greasy was climbing down off the shovel. The men were all gathered around the shovel, making a lot of noise, and I figured that it would take a long, long time for Greasy to live down what had happened. Although, I realized, he had it coming to him.
I went back into Mack’s tent and found the others there. All three of them were standing beside the table, looking down at what lay there upon the surface.
The bag had disappeared and had left behind a little pile of trinkets. Looking at the pile, I could see that they were miniatures of frying pans and kettles and all the other utensils that Greasy worked with. And there, half protruding out of the pile, was a little statuette of Greasy.
I reached out a hand and picked up the statuette. There was no mistaking it – it was Greasy to a T. It was made of some sort of stone, as if it might have been a carving, and was delicate beyond all belief. Squinting closely, I could even see the lines on Greasy’s face.
“The bag just went away,” said Knight. “It was lying here when we dashed out, and when we came back, it was gone and all this junk was lying on the table.”
“I don’t understand,” Carr said.
And he was right. None of us did.
“I don’t like it,” Mack said slowly.
I didn’t like it, either. It raised too many questions in my head and some of them were resolving into some miserable suspicions.