Elmer floated, a cloudy thing that sometimes looked like smoke and then like wispy fog and then again like something one couldn’t quite be sure was even there.
He had known he was making a mistake with Lathrop, but at the time it had seemed the thing to do. Such a man, reacting favorably, would have been valuable.
But the result had not been favorable. Elmer knew that much now, knew it in a sudden surge of fear, knew he should have known it twenty years before. But one, he told himself, cannot always be sure when dealing with an alien mind. Earthmen, after all, were newcomers to the planet. A few centuries counted for nothing in the chronology of Mars.
It was unfair that a Ghost be left to make decisions. Those others could not expect him to be infallible. He was nothing more than a blob of ancestral memories, the residue of a race, the pooling of millions of personalities. He was nothing one could prove. He was hardly life at all — just the shadow of a life that had been, the echo of voices stilled forever in the silence of millennia.
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.”