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

Tierney sat drinking sunlight, and he remembered.

I had it made.

After years of fumbling around, after years of chewing stardust, of hope that never quite came off, of finally giving up the hope—here finally I was, walking down a hill, walking on a planet that I owned, with the pre-emption signals planted and all that needed to be done the filing of the claim. A planet that was worth the claiming—not one of those methane worlds, not carbon dioxide, not soup, but air that a man could breathe, and something to walk on besides rock, a world with vegetation and running water and not too great a sea surface and, what was best of all, a working force of natives who had just enough intelligence, if handled right, to exploit such a planet for you. They didn’t know it yet, but I had plans for them. It might take a bit of doing to get them into harness, but I was just the man who knew how to do it.

I was a little drunk, I guess. Christ, I had a right to be. After squatting on that hilltop with those crummy natives, lapping up the stuff, I should have been out cold. But I had soaked up too much alcoholic poison—and some that weren’t alcoholic—at too many grimy way stations all through space, to cave in from drinking stuff that wasn’t fit to drink. In my day, I’d drunk a lot of booze that wasn’t fit to drink. Come in from a long, hard run with nothing found and headaches all the way and you’ll drink anything at all just so it gives forgetfulness.

There always had been a lot of forgetting to be done. But that was over now. In just a while from now I’d be wading up to my knees through cash.

The luckiest part of it was those stupid natives. And that was just the way it should be. Hell, I told myself, they wouldn’t even know the difference. They might even like it. They would love working out their guts for me. I had them all psyched out. I knew what made them tick.

It had taken a lot of patience and a lot of observation and more work than I liked to think about, but I finally had them pegged. They had a culture, if you could call it that. They had a feeble kind of intelligence, enough intelligence so that you could tell them to put their backs into it and they’d put their backs into it. Before I was through with them they’d think I was the best friend they had and they’d bust their silly guts for me. They had been the ones who had asked me to the hilltop for a little get-together. They had supplied the food, which I had barely been able to gag down, and the likker, which had been a little easier to gag down, and we’d talked after a fashion—good, solid, friendly talk.

I had the little creeps in the hollow of my hand.

They were crazy-looking things, but for that matter all aliens are crazy-looking things.

They stood four feet or so in height and looked something like a lobster, or at least like something that far back in its evolutionary line had been something like a lobster. As if the crustacea, instead of striking out, had developed as the primates had developed on the Earth. They had been modified considerably from the ancestral lobster, but the resemblance was still there. They lived in burrows and there were big villages of these burrows everywhere I went. There were a lot of them and that suited me just fine. It takes a big labor force to milk a planet. If you had to import that kind of labor or bring in machines the overhead would kill you.

So I was walking down the hillside, perhaps not too steadily, but I was feeling fine. I could see the spaceship in the bright moonlight, just across the valley, and in the morning I’d take off and file the claim and see some people that I knew and then I’d be in business. No more tearing around in uncharted space to find that one particular planet, no more begging grubstakes to go out on another hunt, no more stinking fleabags in little planetary outposts, no more rotgut liquor, no more frowsy whores. From here on out I’d have the best there was. I’d made the kind of strike every planet hunter dreams about. I had struck it rich. Oh, it was sweet all right—an absolutely virgin planet with all sorts of riches and a gang of stupid natives to work for me.

I came to the rockslide and I could have walked around it and in a more sober moment I suppose I would have done just that. But I wasn’t sober. I was drunk on alien booze and on happiness, if happiness is finding what you’ve hunted all your life.

I saw that I could save some time by crossing the rockslide and it didn’t look too bad. Just a sheet of rubble where, in ages past, a cliff near the top of the hill had shed part of its face, sending down a fan of rock and boulders. A number of boulders were embedded in the slide and others, I saw, had simply slid off the cliff face and not rolled down the hill, remaining poised where they had fallen. I remember thinking, as I started across the slide, that it would not take too much to send them plunging down the slope. But they had been there, safely anchored, for many unknown years, and, anyhow, I was somewhat fuddled.

So I started across the slide and the walking was rougher than I’d expected it to be, but I was being careful so as not to fall and break my neck and I was getting along all right. I had to watch where I put my feet and was going slow and wasn’t paying too much attention to anything that might be happening.

A sudden grinding sound from somewhere above me jerked me around and a stone rolled underneath one foot and threw me to my knees. I saw the boulders coming down the slope straight at me. They came slow at first, slow and deliberate, seeming to topple rather than to roll. I yelled. I don’t remember what I yelled. I just yelled. I knew I didn’t have the time to get away, but I tried. I tried to get to my feet and had almost made it when another stone shifted underneath a foot and threw me down again. The boulders were much closer now, gathering speed, bounding high into the air when they struck other boulders in their paths, and the rest of the slide above me, jarred by the rolling boulders, was moving down on top of me, as if the rock and rubble had somehow come alive.

Before the first of the boulders reached me I seemed to see little shadowy figures running frantically along the base of the cliff and I thought, “Those God damned lobsters!”

Then the boulders reached me and I put out my hands to stop them, just as if there might have been a chance of stopping them; and I was still yelling.

The boulders hit and killed me. They smashed my flesh and bone. They busted in my rib cage and they cracked my skull. They smashed and rolled me flat. The blood went spraying out and stained the stones. The bladder broke, the intestines ruptured.

But there was, after a time, it seemed, a part of me that wasn’t killed. In the darkness of no-seeing I knew I had been killed. But there was this part of me that still hung onto knowing with bleeding fingernails.

I don’t believe I thought at first. I existed, that was all. In darkness, in emptiness, in nothingness; I was there, not dead. Or at least not entirely dead. I’d forgotten everything I had ever known. I began from scratch. No better than a worm. I tried to take it easy, but there was no such thing as easy. For no reason, I was frantic. Frantic without purpose. Just frantic to exist, to continue hanging on with bloody fingernails. A frantic worm, without knowing, with no reason.

After a time the tension eased a little and I thought. Not simple thoughts, but convoluted and intricate, going on and on, reaching for a simple answer, but going through a maze of mental contortions that were worse than hanging on to existence with no more than fingernails. The terrible thing about it was that I, or the existence that was I, for there was as yet no I, did not even know the problem to which it sought an answer.