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

That made me one up on them, I thought fiercely as I clutched the hatred at the core of me. It gave me an advantage they would never guess. With hatred to bolster and sustain me, I could hope and wait and plan and the time would never seem too long if revenge could be at the end of it.

They’d taken away my body, my motives, almost all my humanity. They had tinkered with my thinking and my values and my viewpoints. They had taken me; they had taken me but good. They had outfoxed me on every point but one and on that one point they had, unknowingly, outfoxed themselves as badly. Maybe they had seen that little piece of hatred as no more than a minor biochemical imperfection. After all, as the lobster had pointed out, I had been badly made. But in mistaking it, or neglecting it, they had fouled up their project. With a piece of hatred still left in him, a man would never utterly lose his hold upon humanity. What a wondrous thing it is to be a hating creature!

I held the hatred and could feel it turning cold—and cold hatred is the best of all. I know. It drives you, it never lets you be, it keeps on nagging you. Hot hatred flashes up and is over in a moment, but cold hatred lies there, at the heart and gut of you, and you know it all the time. It niggles at your brain and it clenches up your fists even when there is no one there to hit.

But I hadn’t any fists, I thought, I hadn’t any arms. I was just an armor-plated oval with silly caterpillar legs and eyestalks sticking up into the air.

Then, on schedule, as if there might be some sort of biological computer tucked away inside me, feeding in the data that was me, feeding it in slowly so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by a rush of data, not overloading me, I knew about the arms.

I didn’t have them yet and I wouldn’t have them for a while. But they were there and growing underneath my shell, waiting to be freed. I would have to moult before I had the arms. It wasn’t only arms. There were other things as well—other appendages, other budding senses, other extensions of new abilities, all of them only dimly sensed, fogged in the mist of things-to-come. But the arms I knew about because arms were not new to me. I had had arms before and I knew about them. These other things I didn’t know about, but in time I would. Marvelous additional adjuncts to the performance of a life form’s full abilities, planned most carefully by the lobsters, to be tried out in an experimental model before the lobsters made such bodies for themselves.

They had planned long and hard. They had figured out the angles and then had engineered them. They were aiming at an ideal body. And I would take all that planning and all the engineering and all their dirty scheming and I’d shove it down their throats. As soon as I had arms and all those other appendages and senses and God knows what, I’d cram it down their throats.

I couldn’t go back to the human race, nor to women, nor to money, nor to food and drink. But I didn’t need them any more. I had never needed them—really needed them. The one thing I did need I had, the one last thing that was left to me. It seemed sheer cosmic justice that the one thing that I needed was the one thing I had left—the capacity to get even with the ones who’d done me dirt, to cram it down their throats, to make them mourn the day that saw their spawning.

I was different and I would be more different still. I would, in the end, be human in only one regard. And the important thing, the most important thing of all, was that in this one regard my one remnant of humanity was stronger than all the rest of it. It had come from the bowels of time. It came from that never-dated day when a certain little primate, with a new-found cunning that was stronger than the jungle’s tooth-and-claw, remembered an anger that should have been over in a moment and had waited for a chance to act upon that remembered anger, nursing that cooling anger as a comfort and a prop to dignity, changing it from anger into hatred. Long before anything that could have been called Australopithecine walked the earth, the concept of revenge had been forged and in those millennia it had served the vicious little strain of primates well. It had made them the most deadly creatures that had ever come to life.

It would serve me well, I told myself. I would make it serve me well. It would give me purpose and a certain kind of dignity and self-respect.

A figure came to mind, another piece of information spewed into me from the biochemical computer. A thousand years, it said. A thousand years to moult. A thousand years to wait.

A long time. Ten centuries. Thirty human generations. Empires rose and fell in a thousand years. Were forgotten in another thousand. A thousand years would give me time to think and plan, to harden the coldness of the hatred, to realize and examine the new abilities and capacities that would evolve with moulting.

It called for planning. No simple, easy revenge. No mere physical torture, no killing. By the time I got through with them death would be the height of kindness, physical torture a mere inconvenience. Nor would it merely be an exploitation of them to harvest the resources of the planet. It was the worst day they’d ever known when they had taken from me the need (or desire) for those resources. If I still held that need, normal human greed might have stayed my hand. But now, nothing would stay my hand.

I had them, I thought. Thinking coldly and with calculation. With no anger. With no urgency. With no mercy in me. Mercy was a human trait made to balance revenge and now the balance had been wiped out and I had only hatred left.

How it might be done I did not know. I would not know until I had explored to the limit the capacity of the abilities that waited upon moulting. But I knew this: they would live out their lives in ever-mounting terror; they would seek for hiding places and there’d be no hiding places; each day they would face new horrors and their nerves would strain and their brains would turn to water, then congeal again to face another fear. They would be allowed, at times, a slender hope so the agony would be the greater when the tiny hope had failed. They would run in the hopeless circles of their panic, they would squeal with an insanity which would never reach the point where it might offer refuge, and while they might pray for surcease, I would most tenderly see that they stayed alive and capable of fear. Not just a few of them, but all of them, every stinking soul of them. And I would keep it up, I would never tire. I would never have enough, I would feed upon my hatred of them. It would be the breath of life to me. It would be my only purpose, taking the place of all the other purposes they had taken from me. It was the one last shred of humanity I had left and I would never let it go.

I hugged the hatred and thought of a thousand years. A long, long time. Empires totter, technologies change, religions shift their forms, social mores undergo revisions, ideas blossom and have their day and die, stars slide down just a little toward stellar death, light travels a hundredth of the way across the galaxy. So long a span of time that the mind of man quails before the prospect of it.

But not me. I do not quail before a thousand years.

I can use those thousand years. I can study the lobsters and see what makes them tick. I can learn their purposes, their philosophies, their dreams—learning all the things to strip away from them, giving them instead the things they fear and loathe and sicken at the sight and feel of.

I’ll enjoy it, every minute of it.

I am in no hurry.

I can wait.

The alien wind blows cool and sweet around Charlie Tierney as he sits drinking sunlight. He remembers and remembers, playing it over and over in his mind: a mind growing more acute every moment. He clings to the last vestige of his humanity, the greatest gift handed down to him from his ape ancestors: a desire for killing, torturing, never-ending revenge. He sits and is content in his hatred. It will sustain him.