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

“Steve,” said Gideon, speaking softly, “a human doctor isn’t too much use treating alien people. In time, if we had the time, we could find out about this fellow—something about his body chemistry and his metabolism. Then we could doctor him.”

“That’s right, Steve,” Abraham said.

Sheridan shrugged. “All right then, Hezekiah. Forget about the transmog.”

He laid the old man back on the floor again and got up off his knees.

He sat on his heels and rocked slowly back and forth.

“Perhaps,” he said to the native, “you’ll answer one question. Where did all your people go?”

“In there,” the native said, raising a feeble arm to point at the machine. “In there, and then they went away just as the harvest we gathered did.”

Sheridan stayed squatting on the floor beside the stricken native.

Reuben brought in an armload of grass and wadded it beneath the native’s head as a sort of pillow.

So the Garsonians had really gone away, Sheridan told himself, had up and left the planet. Had left it, using the machines that had been used to make delivery of the podars . And if Galactic Enterprises had machines like that, then they (whoever, wherever they might be) had a tremendous edge on Central Trading. For Central Trading’s lumbering cargo sleds, snaking their laborious way across the light-years, could offer only feeble competition to machines like those.

He had thought, be remembered, the first day they had landed, that a little competition was exactly what Central Trading needed. And here was that competition—a competition that had not a hint of ethics. A competition that sneaked in behind Central Trading’s back and grabbed the market that Central Trading needed—the market that Central could have cinched if it had not fooled around, if it had not been so sly and cynical about adapting the podar crop to Earth.

Just where and how, he wondered, had Galactic Enterprises found out about the podars and the importance of the drug? Under what circumstances had they learned the exact time limit during which they could operate in the podar market without Central interference? And had they, perhaps, been slightly optimistic in regard to that time limit and gotten caught in a situation where they had been forced to destroy all those beautiful machines?

Sheridan chuckled quietly to himself. That destruction must have hurt them!

It wasn’t hard, however, to imagine a hundred or a thousand ways in which they might have learned about the podar situation, for they were a charming people and really quite disarming. He would not be surprised if some of them might be operating secretly inside of Central Trading.

The native stirred. He reached out a skinny hand and tugged at the sleeve of Sheridan’s jacket.

“Yes, what is it, friend?”

“You will stay with me?” the native begged. “These others here, they are not the same as you and I.”

“I will stay with you,” Sheridan promised.

“I think we’d better go,” said Gideon. “Maybe we disturb him.”

The robots walked quietly from the barn and left the two alone.

Reaching out, Sheridan put a hand on the native’s brow. The flesh was clammy cold.

“Old friend,” he said, “I think perhaps you owe me something.”

The old man shook his head, rolling it slowly back and forth upon the pillow. And the fierce light of stubbornness and a certain slyness came into his eyes.

“We don’t owe you,” he said. “We owed the other ones.”

And that, of course, hadn’t been what Sheridan had meant.

But there they lay—the words that told the story, the solution to the puzzle that was Garson IV.

“That was why you wouldn’t trade with us,” said Sheridan, talking to himself rather than to the old native on the floor. “You were so deep in debt to these other people that you needed all the podars to pay off what you owed them?”

And that must have been the way it was. Now that he thought back on it, that supplied the one logical explanation for everything that happened. The reaction of the natives, the almost desperate sales resistance was exactly the kind of thing one would expect from people in debt up to their ears.

That was the reason, too, the houses bad been so neglected and the clothes had been in rags. It accounted for the change from the happy-go-lucky shiftlessness to the beaten and defeated and driven attitude. So pushed, so hounded, so fearful that they could not meet the payments on the debt that they strained their every resource, drove themselves to ever harder work, squeezing from the soil every podar they could grow.

“That was it?” he demanded sharply. “That was the way it was?”

The native nodded with reluctance.

“They came along and offered such a bargain that you could not turn it down. For the machines, perhaps? For the machines to send you to other places?”

The native shook his head. “No, not the machines. We put the podars in the machines and the podars went away. That was how we paid.”

“You were paying all these years?”

“That is right,” the native said. Then he added, with a flash of pride: “But now we’re all paid up.”

“That is fine,” said Sheridan. “It is good for a man to pay his debts.”

“They took three years off the payments,” said the native eagerly. “Was that not good of them?”

“I’m sure it was,” said Sheridan, with some bitterness.

He squatted patiently on the floor, listening to the faint whisper of a wind blowing in the loft and the rasping breath of the dying native.

“But then your people used the machines to go away. Can’t you tell me why?”

A racking cough shook the old man and his breath came in gasping sobs.

Sheridan felt a sense of shame in what he had to do. I should let him die in peace, he thought. I should not badger him. I should let him go in whatever dignity he can—not pushed and questioned to the final breath he draws.

But there was that last answer—the one Sheridan had to have.

Sheridan said gently: “But tell me, friend, what did you bargain for? What was it that you bought?”

He wondered if the native heard. There was no indication that he had.

“What did you buy?” Sheridan insisted.

“A planet,” said the native.

“But you had a planet!”

“This one was different,” the native told him in a feeble whisper. “This was a planet of immortality. Anyone who went there would never, never die.”

Sheridan squatted stiffly in shocked and outraged silence.

And from the silence came a whisper—a whisper still of faith and belief and pity that would haunt the human all his life.

“That was what I lost,” the whisper said. “That was what I lost …”

Sheridan opened his hands and closed them, strangling the perfect throat and the winning smile, shutting off the cultured flow of words.

If I had him now, he thought, if I only had him now!

He remembered the spread-out picnic cloth and the ornate jug and the appetizing food, the smooth, slick gab and the assurance of the creature. And even the methodical business of getting very drunk so that their meeting could end without unpleasant questions or undue suspicion.

And the superior way in which he’d asked if the human might know Ballic, all the time, more than likely, being able to speak English­ himself.

So Central Trading finally had its competition. From this moment, Central Trading would be fighting with its back against the wall. For these jokers in Galactic Enterprises played dirty and for keeps.

The Garsonians had been naive fools, of course, but that was no true measure of Galactic Enterprises. They undoubtedly would select different kinds of bait for different kinds of fish, but the old never-never business of immortality might be deadly bait for even the most sophisticated if appropriately presented.