Clifford Simak - I Am Crying All Inside - And Other Stories

They did not open the big barn doors, as one would have normally expected them to do. They simply opened a tiny, man-size door set into the bigger door and took the podars in that way. And when any of the Earth party hove in sight, they quickly stationed a heavy guard around the entire square.

“We’d better let them be,” Abraham advised Sheridan. “If we try to push them, we may have trouble in our lap.”

So the robots pulled back to the base and waited for the harvest to end. Finally it was finished and Sheridan counseled lying low for a few days more to give the Garsonians a chance to settle back to their normal routine.

Then they went out again and this time Sheridan rode along, on one of the floaters with Abraham and Gideon.

The first village they came to lay quiet and lazy in the sun. There was not a creature stirring.

Abraham brought the floater down into the square and the three stepped off.

The square was empty and the place was silent—a deep and deathly silence.

Sheridan felt the skin crawling up his back, for there was a stealthy, unnatural menace in the noiseless emptiness.

“They may be laying for us,” suggested Gideon.

“I don’t think so,” said Abraham. “Basically they are peaceful.”

They moved cautiously across the square and walked slowly down a street that opened from the square.

And still there was no living thing in sight.

And stranger still—the doors of some of the houses stood open to the weather and the windows seemed to watch them out of blind eyes, with the colorful crude curtains gone.

“Perhaps,” Gideon suggested, “they may have gone away to some harvest festival or something of that nature.”

“They wouldn’t leave their doors wide open, even for a day,” declared Abraham. “I’ve lived with them for weeks and I’ve studied them. I know what they would do. They’d have closed the doors very carefully and tried them to be sure that they were closed.”

“But maybe the wind …”

“Not a chance,” insisted Abraham. “One door, possibly. But I see four of them from here.”

“Someone has to take a look,” said Sheridan. “It might as well be me.”

He turned in at a gate where one of the doors stood open and went slowly up the path. He halted at the threshold and peered in. The room beyond was empty. He stepped into the house and went from room to room and all the rooms were empty—not simply of the natives, but of everything. There was no furniture and the utensils and the tools were gone from hooks and racks. There was no scrap of clothing. There was nothing left behind. The house was dead and bare and empty, a shabby and abandoned thing discarded by its people.

He felt a sense of guilt creep into his soul. What if we drove them off? What if we hounded them until they’d rather flee than face us?

But that was ridiculous, he told himself. There must be some other reason for this incredibly complete mass exodus.

He went back down the walk. Abraham and Gideon went into other houses. All of them were empty.

“It may be this village only,” suggested Gideon. “The rest may be quite normal.”

But Gideon was wrong.

Back at the floater, they got in touch with base.

“I can’t understand it,” said Hezekiah, “I’ve had the same report from four other teams. I was about to call you, sir.”

“You’d better get out every floater that you can,” said Sheridan. “Check all the villages around. And keep a lookout for the people. They may be somewhere in the country. There’s a possibility they’re at a harvest festival.”

“If they’re at a festival, sir,” asked Hezekiah, “why did they take their belongings? You don’t take along your furniture when you attend a festival.”

“I know,” said Sheridan. “You put your finger on it. Get the boys out, will you?’

“There’s just the possibility,” Gideon offered, “that they are changing villages. Maybe there’s a tribal law that says they have to build a new village every so often. It might have its roots in an ancient sanitation law that the camp must be moved at stated intervals.”

“It could be that,” Sheridan said wearily. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Abraham thumbed a fist toward the barn.

Sheridan hesitated, then threw caution to the winds.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Gideon stalked up the ramp and reached the door. He put out a hand and grasped one of the planks nailed across the door. He wrenched and there was an anguished shriek of tortured nails ripping from the wood and the board came free. Another plank came off and then another one and Gideon put his shoulder to the door and half of it swung open.

Inside, in the dimness of the barn, was the dull, massive shine of metal—a vast machine sitting on the driveway floor.

Sheridan stiffened with a cold, hollow sense of terror.

It was wrong, he thought. There could be no machine.

The Garsonians had no business having a machine. Their culture was entirely non-mechanical. The best they had achieved so far had been the hoe and wheel, and even yet they had not been able to put the hoe and wheel together to make themselves a plow.

They had had no machine when the second expedition left some fifteen years ago, and in those fifteen years they could not have spanned the gap. In those fifteen years, from all surface indications, they had not advanced an inch.

And yet the machine stood in the driveway of the barn.

It was a fair-sized cylinder, set on end and with a door in one side of it. The upper end of it terminated in a dome-shaped cap. Except for the door, it resembled very much a huge and snub-nosed bullet.

Interference, thought Sheridan. There had been someone here between the time the second expedition left and the third one had arrived.

“Gideon,” he said.

“What is it, Steve?”

“Go back to base and bring the transmog chest. Tell Hezekiah to get my tent and all the other stuff over here as soon as he is able. Call some of the boys off reconnaissance. We have work to do.”

There had been someone here, he thought—and most certainly there had. A very urbane creature who sat beneath a tree beside a spread-out picnic cloth, swigging at his jug and talking for three solid hours without saying anything at all!

The messenger from Central Trading brought his small ship down to one side of the village square, not far from where Sheridan’s tent was pitched. He slid back the visi-dome and climbed out of his seat.

He stood for a moment, shining in the sun, during which be straightened his SPECIAL COURIER badge, which had become askew upon his metal chest. Then he walked deliberately toward the barn, heading for Sheridan, who sat upon the ramp.

“You are Sheridan?” he asked.

Sheridan nodded, looking him over. He was a splendid thing.

“I had trouble finding you. Your base seems to be deserted.”

“We ran into some difficulty,” Sheridan said quietly.

“Not too serious, I trust. I see your cargo is untouched.”

“Let me put it this way—we haven’t been bored.”

“I see,” the robot said, disappointed that an explanation was not immediately forthcoming. “My name is Tobias and I have a message for you.”

“I’m listening.”

Sometimes, Sheridan told himself, these headquarters robots needed taking down a peg or two.

“It is a verbal message. I can assure you that I am thoroughly briefed. I can answer any questions you may wish to ask.”

“Please,” said Sheridan. “The message first.”

“Central Trading wishes to inform you that they have been offered the drug calenthropodensia in virtually unlimited supply by a firm which describes itself as Galactic Enterprises. We would like to know if you can shed any light upon the matter.”