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

Total vision wasn’t all of it, of course. There were many other sensory centers located in the eyestalks, some of which I had figured out, but a lot of others that still had me puzzled and a bit confused; they were picking up information to which my human senses had been blind—the kind of stuff I’d never known about and couldn’t put a name to. The really curious thing about it was that none of these new senses were particularly emphasized—they seemed very natural. They were feeding into me an integrated awareness of all the forces and conditions that surrounded me. I had a total and absolute awareness of my physical environment.

I reached the spaceship and I didn’t bother with the ladder. I just upended myself and went scooting up the side of that slick metal without a single thought. There were sucking discs in the pads of the caterpillar legs and I hadn’t known about them until it came time to use them. I wondered how many other abilities I wouldn’t know about until there was need of them.

I hadn’t bothered to lock the hatch cover when I’d left, because there was nothing on the planet that could get into the ship, and now, finally at the hatch, I was glad I hadn’t: if I had, the key would now be lost, buried somewhere in the rock slide.

All I had to do was push and the cover of the hatch would open. So I went to put out an arm to push and absolutely nothing happened. I didn’t have arms.

I hung there, sick and cold.

And in that moment of shock, in the sick and cold, not only the lack of arms and hands, but all the rest of it, all the impact of what had happened and what I had become hit me in the face, except I hadn’t any face. My entrails shriveled up. My marrow turned to water. The bitter taste of bile surged up inside of me.

I huddled close against the hard metal of the ship, clinging to it as the last thing of any meaning in my life. A cold wind out of nowhere was blowing through and through me, moaning as it blew. This was it, I thought. There wasn’t anything more pitiful than a being without manipulatory organs and, even in my present mental state, pity was something I could get along without.

Thinking about the pity made me sore, I guess, the idea that anything, anything at all, would feel sorry for me. Pity was the one thing that I couldn’t stomach.

Those crummy lobsters, I thought, the stupid bunglers, the stinking yokels! To give me better senses and better feet and a better body and then forget the arms! How could they expect me to do anything without arms?

And, hanging there, still sick, still cold, but feeling an edge of anger now, I knew there had been no mistake. They weren’t bunglers and they weren’t yokels. They were miles ahead of me. They’d left off the arms on purpose so I could do nothing. They had crippled me and tied me to the planet. They’d upset all my plans. I could never get away and I’d never tell anyone about this planet and they could go on living out their stupid lives inside their filthy burrows.

They’d upset my plans and that must have meant they had known, or guessed, my plans. They had me figured out to the fraction of a millimeter. While I had been psyching them, they’d been psyching me. They knew exactly what I was and what I’d meant to do and, when the time had come, they had known exactly what to do about me.

The rolling boulders had been no accident. I remembered, now that I thought about it, the shadowy figures running along the cliff’s base when the rocks had begun to move.

They had killed me, and much as I might resent it, I could understand the killing. What I couldn’t understand was why they didn’t let it go at that. They had solved their problem with my death; why did they bother to dig into the rubble to get a piece of brain so they could resurrect me?

As I thought about all the implications of it, rage built up in me. They had not let well enough alone, they’d not been satisfied; they’d made a plaything out of me—a toy, a bauble in which they could find amusement, but if I knew them, amusement from afar, at a distance where there’d be no danger to them. Although what in hell I could do to them, without any arms, was more than I could imagine.

But I wasn’t going to let them get away with it, by God!

I’d get into the spaceship somehow and take off and somewhere I would find a human or some other thing that had arms or the equivalent of arms and I’d make a deal with them and those stinking lobsters would finish up working out their hearts for me.

I bent an eyestalk down and tried to push against the cover, but the stalk had little power. So I doubled it over and pushed with it again and the cover barely moved—but it did move. I kept on pushing and the cover swung slowly inward and finally stood open. Who needed arms, I thought triumphantly. If I could use an eyestalk to open the hatch, I could practice with the stalks until I could use them to operate the ship.

You clowns out there, I said, better start right now to dig those burrows deeper because, so help me, I’m coming back to get you. There couldn’t no one do what they’d done to me and get away with it.

I moved over a bit to get into the hatch and I found there was no way to get into the hatch. I was just a bit too big. Not very much, just a bit too big. I pushed and shoved. I twisted and turned every way I could. No matter what I did, the body was too big.

Planned, I thought. They never missed a lick. They hadn’t overlooked a thing. They’d made me without arms and had the hatch all measured and made me just too big—not too much too big, but just a shade too big. They had led me on and now they were rolling in their burrows laughing and the day would come when I’d make them smart for that.

But that was an empty thought and I knew it was. There was no way that I could make them smart.

I wasn’t going anywhere and I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t going to get into the ship and if I couldn’t get into the ship, I wouldn’t leave the planet. I hadn’t any arms and I hadn’t any head and since I didn’t have a head, I hadn’t any mouth. Without a mouth, how was a man to eat? Had they condemned me not only to being trapped upon this planet, but dying of starvation?

I climbed down to the ground, so shaken with fear and anger that I was extra careful in my climbing down for fear that I might slip and fall.

Once down I crouched beside the ship and tried to lay it all out in a row so I could have a look at it.

I wasn’t human any more. Still human in my mind, of course, but certainly not in body. I was trapped upon the planet and would not be going back to the human race again. And even if I could, there’d be a lot of things I couldn’t do. I’d never take a babe to bed again. I’d never eat a steak. I’d never have a drink. And my own people would either laugh at me or be scared of me and I couldn’t quite make out which would be the worse.

It seemed incredible, on the face of it, that the lobsters would be able to do a thing like this. It didn’t quite make sense that a tribe of prairie dogs that looked like something you’d expect upon your dinner plate could take a piece of brain and from it construct a new and living being. There was about them nothing that suggested such ability and knowledge, no trappings to indicate they were other than what they appeared to be, a species of creatures that had developed some intelligence, but had made no great cultural advances.

But appearances were wrong; there was no doubt of that. They had a culture and an ability and knowledge—far more of both of them than my psych testing had even hinted at. And that, of course, would be the way with a race like them. I hadn’t based my conclusions upon fact, but on data they had fed me.

If they had this kind of culture, why were they hiding it? Why live in burrows? Why use a drill to start a fire? Why not a city? Why not a road? Why couldn’t the crummy little stinkers at least act civilized?