New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) by Clifford D. Simak

“maybe I can do something for you. Perhaps not myself. But the Ghosts can.”
    “The Ghosts?” asked Ann.
    “Certainly, the Ghosts. What would anyone come here to study if not the Ghosts? There are thousands of them in Mad-Man’s. That’s what Belmont came here to do. When he didn’t come back, and no one was able to locate him, I came out here secretly. I thought maybe he found something he didn’t want the rest of the world to know, so I didn’t leave any tracks for anyone else to follow.”
    “But how could the Ghosts help anyone?” asked Kent. “Apparently they are an entirely different order of being. They would have nothing in common with mankind. No sympathies.”
    Carter’s beard jutted fiercely. “The Ghosts,” he said, “are beings of force. Instead of protoplasm, they are constructed of definite force fields. They live independently of everything which we know as essential to life. And yet they are life. And intelligent life, at that. They are the true, dominant beings of Mars. At one time they weren’t as they are now. They are a product of evolution. The Eaters evolved by taking on silica armor. The Hounds and beaver met conditions by learning to do with little food and even less water, grew heavy fur to protect them against the cold. It’s all a matter of evolution.
    “The Ghosts could solve many of the problems of the human race, could make the race godlike overnight. That is—if they wanted to. But they don’t want to. They have no capacity for pity, no yearning to become benefactors. They are just indifferent. They watch the pitiful struggle of the human race here on Mars, and if they feel anything at all, it is a smug sort of humor. They don’t pity us or hate us. They just don’t care.”
    “But you,” said Ann, “you made friends with them.”
    “Not friends,” said her uncle. “We just had an understanding, an agreement. The Ghosts lack a sense of co-operation and responsibility. They have no sense for leadership. They are true individualists, but they know that these very lacks have stood in the way of progress. Their knowledge, great as it is, has lain dormant for thousands of years. They realize that under intelligent leadership they can go ahead and increase that knowledge, become a race of purely intellectual beings, the match of anything in the System, perhaps in the galaxy.”
    He paused for a moment, drummed his fingers on the table.
    “I’m furnishing them that leadership,” he declared.
    “But what about dad?” asked Ann. “You and he never could get along, you hated one another, I know, but you can help him. You will help him, won’t you?”
    The scientist rose from the table, strode to the chattering, clucking machine at the other side of the room. “My communicator,” he said. “A machine which enables me to talk with the Ghosts. Based on the radio, tuning in on the frequencies of the Ghosts’ thought-waves. Through this machine comes every scrap of information which the Ghosts wish to relay to me. The thoughts were recorded on spools of fine wire. All I have to do to learn whatever has been transmitted over the machine is to put on a thought-translation helmet, run the spools of wire through it, and the thoughts impinge on my brain. I hear nothing, feel nothing—but I know. The thoughts of the Ghosts are impressed into my brain, become my thoughts.”
    Charley waggled his beard, excitement and wonder written on his features. “Then you know everything that’s going on all over Mars,” he said. “The Ghosts are everywhere, see everything.”
    “I know everything they think is important enough for me to know,” Carter declared. “They can find out anything I might want to know.”
    “How do you talk to them?” asked Kent.
    “Same process,” said the scientist. “A helmet that broadcasts my thoughts to them.”
    He picked up a helmet and set it on his head. “I’m going to find out about your father,” he told Ann.
    “But he isn’t in