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

The answer wasn’t hard to find. If you act civilized, you stick out like a bandaged thumb. But if you lay doggo and act stupid, you got the edge. Anything that comes along will underestimate you and then you are in a good position to let them have it, right between the eyes. Maybe I hadn’t been the first planet hunter to show up. Maybe there had been other planet hunters in the past. Maybe through the years these vicious little lobsters had figured out exactly how to deal with them.

Although what I couldn’t figure out was why they didn’t do it simple. Why all the fancy frills? When they killed a planet hunter why not let it go at that? Why did they have to bring him back to life and play silly games with him?

I crouched on the ground and looked across the land and it was as good, or better, than I had thought it was. There were forests along the streams that would provide good timber and back from the watercourses great stretches of rich and level land that could be used for farming. In those hills beyond lay silver ore—and how in the hell could I be so sure there was silver there?

It shook me up to know. I shouldn’t have known. I might guess there were minerals in the hills, but there was no way to know exactly where they were or what kind they’d be. But I did know—not guessing, not hoping, but knowing . It was my new body that knew, of course, employing some as yet unrealized sensor that was planted in it. More than likely later on, when it really got to working, I could look at any stretch of land and know precisely what was in it. It was all wonderful, of course, but without any arms and no way to get off the planet, it was a total loss. That was the way they worked it, that was how they got their laughs. They held out a piece of candy and when baby reached for it, they slashed off his grasping paws.

The sun felt warm on my body and I didn’t want to move. I should be up and doing, although I could not think, for the life of me, of a thing I should be doing. Doing, for the moment, was at an end for me. In a little while, perhaps, I might be able to figure out a thing or two to do. In the meantime I’d simply sit here and eat up some more sunlight.

That’s the way I knew. It came sneaking in upon me—all these new-fashioned abilities, all the fancy senses, all the newfound knowledge. I was eating sunlight. I didn’t need a mouth. I simply fed on the energy of sunlight. I thought about this eating, this soaking up of sunlight and I knew, as I thought about it, that it need not be sunlight, although sunlight was the easiest. But if necessary I could reach out and grab energy from anything at all. I could suck up the energy in a stream of water. I could drain it from a tree or rob a blade of grass. I could extract it from the soil.

Simple and efficient, and as close to foolproof as a body could be made. The dirty little creep, sticking his head out of the burrow, had said my human body had been badly made. And, of course, it had. It had not been engineered. It had simply grown evolutionally, through millennia, doing the best it could with the little that it had.

I felt the sunlight on me and I soaked it up and I knew about the sunlight, how it came about—the proton-proton reactions that brought about the rapid shuffling of subatomic particles from one form to another, releasing in the process the flood of energy which poured out from the star. I’d known all this before, of course, in my human form. But I had learned it once and then had never thought of it again. This was different. This was not a matter of simple learning, of an intellectual knowledge. Now I felt it, saw it, sensed it. I could, without half trying, imagine myself a hydrogen nucleus within that place of energy and pressure. I could hear the hissing of the gamma rays, glimpse the giddy flight of new-born neutrinos. And I knew it was not the star alone—I could probe, as well, into the secret of a plant, seek out the microbes and other tiny life forms that swarmed deep within the soil, trace the processes by which a geologic formation had come into being. Not only knowing, but being one with any of it, sharing with it, understanding far better than it (whatever it might be) could understand itself.

I was cold with a coldness that sunlight could not warm. My mind was frozen hard.

I wasn’t human any more at all. I wasn’t thinking human. My mind and thinking, my senses and my viewpoints had been tinkered with. I had been edited and only now was the editing beginning to take effect. It was not only my body, it was all of me. I was turning into something I didn’t want to be, that no human would ever want to be.

This thinking of the proton-proton business was all damn foolishness. There were more important things I should be thinking, of a plan to force my way into the ship, of how to cash in on this planet. There was a mint to be made out of this planet, more money than I could ever spend. But now, I thought, what did I need the money for? Certainly not for drink or food or clothes or women—and I wondered a bit about that woman business. I was, I suspected, the only thing of my kind existing in the galaxy and what about the reproductive process? Would there be just the one of me and not be any more? Or could I be bisexual and bear or spawn or hatch others of my kind? Or could I be immortal? Was there such a thing as death for me? Was there, perhaps, no need of reproduction? Was there just the one of me and no need of any more? No room for any more?

If that should be the case, why all this worry over money? And, thinking that, I didn’t seem to care as much about the money as I had at one time.

That was the hell of it—the human hell of it. I didn’t care. Not about the money, nor the lobsters nor what they’d done to me, nor about the humanity I’d lost. Perhaps that was the way I had been engineered, maybe it was the only way I could survive, the shape that I was in.

I fought against the great uncaring with all the bitterness I had. So you did it, I said to those lousy lobsters. So you pulled it off. You scratched one human who could have been a threat, who would have exploited you down to skin and bones. And you built a model of a new experimental life form you’d been aching to try out, but didn’t have the guts to try on one of your own people. You had to wait until someone else showed up. And now you’ll watch me all the time to see how I’m doing, to figure out the bugs and miscalculations, so that sometime in the future you can build a better one.

I hadn’t known of it before but there it was, naked, in my mind, as naturally in my mind as if I’d always known it, as if from the very beginning I had known I was no more than an experimental model.

They’d taken away my humanity and added a great uncaring, and that uncaring had been the gadget they had thought would be the final factor. But there was some stubbornness still left in me from the almost-vanished humanity of which they’d tried to rob me, so sneakily and smoothly that I never would suspect that it was gone until it was too late to do anything to save it.

Frantically, with panic rising in me, I went hunting down inside myself, scrabbling like a dog digging out a gopher, seeking for any fragment of humanity that might be left to me. Down into the dark, sniffing out the secret places where a fragmented piece of humanity might hide.

And I found it! A nasty piece of me hiding deep and dark, and yet a piece of me that was quite familiar, that I was well acquainted with, that in other times I had hugged close against me for the vicious comfort it had given me.

I found hatred.

It was tough and hard to kill. It resisted routing out. It still clung tenaciously.

As I clasped it hard inside my mind and hugged it close against me, as an old friend, an ancient weapon, I wondered vaguely if the reason it had been left was that the race of lobsters had no concept of hatred, that it might be something of which they were unaware, that what they had done to me might have been done for many reasons, but that hatred of me for what I meant to do to them was not one of the reasons.