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

Harper nodded his head. “You can’t trust a Groomie. The lousy little insects will stoop to anything. They don’t want that music, can’t use it. Probably don’t even know what music is. Haven’t any hearing. But they know Earth wants it, will pay any price to get it, so they are out here to beat us to it. They work through birds like Alexander. They get the stuff, Alexander peddles it.”

“What if we run across Alexander, chief?”

Harper clicked his pipestem across his teeth. “Depends on circumstances. Try to hire him, maybe. Get him away from the Groomies. He’s a good trader. The company would do right by him.”

Mackenzie shook his head. “No soap. He hates Galactic. Something that happened years ago. He’d rather make us trouble than turn a good deal for himself.”

“Maybe he’s changed,” suggested Harper. “Maybe you boys saving him changed his mind.”

“I don’t think it did,” persisted Mackenzie.

The factor reached across the desk and drew a humidor in front of him, began to refill his pipe.

“Been trying to study out something else, too,” he said. “Wondering what to do with the Encyclopedia. He wants to go to Earth. Seems he’s found out just enough from us to whet his appetite for knowledge. Says he wants to go to Earth and study our civilization.”

Mackenzie grimaced. “That baby’s gone through our minds with a fine-toothed comb. He knows some of the things we’ve forgotten we ever knew. I guess it’s just the nature of him, but it gets my wind up when I think of it.”

“He’s after Nellie now,” said Harper. “Trying to untangle what she knows.”

“It would serve him right if he found out.”

“I’ve been trying to figure it out,” said Harper. “I don’t like this brain-picking of his any more than you do, but if we took him to Earth, away from his own stamping grounds, we might be able to soften him up. He certainly knows a lot about this planet that would be of value to us. He’s told me a little—”

“Don’t fool yourself,” said Mackenzie. “He hasn’t told you a thing more than he’s had to tell to make you believe it wasn’t a one-way deal. Whatever he has told you has no vital significance. Don’t kid yourself he’ll exchange information for information. That cookie’s out to get everything he can get for nothing.”

The factor regarded Mackenzie narrowly. “I’m not sure but I should put you in for an Earth vacation,” he declared. “You’re letting things upset you. You’re losing your perspective. Alien planets aren’t Earth, you know. You have to expect wacky things, get along with them, accept them on the basis of the logic that makes them the way they are.”

“I know all that,” agreed Mackenzie, “but honest, chief, this place gets in my hair at times. Trees that shoot at you, moss that talks, vines that heave thunderbolts at you—and now the Encyclopedia.”

“The Encyclopedia is logical,” insisted Harper. “He’s a repository for knowledge. We have parallels on Earth. Men who study merely for the sake of learning, never expect to use the knowledge they amass. Derive a strange, smug satisfaction from being well informed. Combine that yearning for knowledge with a phenomenal ability to memorize and co-ordinate that knowledge and you have the Encyclopedia.”

“But there must be a purpose to him,” insisted Mackenzie. “There must be some reason at the back of this thirst for knowledge. Just soaking up facts doesn’t add up to anything unless you use those facts.”

Harper puffed stolidly at his pipe. “There may be a purpose in it, but a purpose so deep, so different, we could not recognize it. This planet is a vegetable world and a vegetable civilization. Back on earth the animals got the head start and plants never had a chance to learn or to evolve. But here it’s a different story. The plants were the ones that evolved, became masters of the situation.”

“If there is a purpose, we should know it,” Mackenzie declared, stubbornly. “We can’t afford to go blind on a thing like this. If the Encyclopedia has a game, we should know it. Is he acting on his own, a free lance? Or is he the representative of the world, a sort of prime minister, a state department? Or is he something that was left over by another civilization, a civilization that is gone? A kind of living archive of knowledge, still working at his old trade even if the need of it is gone?”

“You worry too much,” Harper told him.

“We have to worry, chief. We can’t afford to let anything get ahead of us. We have taken the attitude we’re superior to this vegetable civilization, if you can call it a civilization, that has developed here. It’s the logical attitude to take because nettles and dandelions and trees aren’t anything to be afraid of back home. But what holds on Earth, doesn’t hold here. We have to ask ourselves what a vegetable civilization would be like. What would it want? What would be its aspirations and how would it go about realizing them?”

“We’re getting off the subject,” said Harper, curtly. “You came in here to tell me about some new symphony.”

Mackenzie flipped his hands. “O.K., if that’s the way you feel about it.”

“Maybe we better figure on grabbing up this symphony soon as we can,” said Harper. “We haven’t had a really good one since the Red Sun . And if we mess around, the Groomies will beat us to it.”

“Maybe they have already,” said Mackenzie.

Harper puffed complacently at his pipe. “They haven’t done it yet. Grant keeps me posted on every move they make. He doesn’t miss a thing that happens at the Groombridge post.”

“Just the same,” declared Mackenzie, “we can’t go rushing off and tip our hand. The Groomie spy isn’t asleep, either.”

“Got any ideas?” asked the factor.

“We could take the ground car,” suggested Mackenzie. “It’s slower than the flier, but if we took the flier the Groomie would know there was something up. We use the car a dozen times a day. He’d think nothing of it.”

Harper considered. “The idea has merit, lad. Who would you take?”

“Let me have Brad Smith,” said Mackenzie. “We’ll get along all right, just the two of us. He’s an old-timer out here. Knows his way around.”

Harper nodded. “Better take Nellie, too.”

“Not on your life!” yelped Mackenzie. “What do you want to do? Get rid of her so you can make a cleaning?”

Harper wagged his grizzled head sadly. “Good idea, but it can’t be did. One cent off and she’s on your trail. Used to be a little graft a fellow could pick up here and there, but not any more. Not since they got these robot bookkeepers indoctrinated with truth and honesty.”

“I won’t take her,” Mackenzie declared, flatly. “So help me, I won’t. She’ll spout company law all the way there and back. With the crush she has on this Encyclopedia, she’ll probably want to drag him along, too. We’ll have trouble enough with rifle trees and electro vines and all the other crazy vegetables without having an educated cabbage and a tin-can lawyer underfoot.”

“You’ve got to take her,” insisted Harper, mildly. “New ruling. Got to have one of the things along on every deal you make to prove you did right by the natives. Come right down to it, the ruling probably is your own fault. If you hadn’t been so foxy on that Red Sun deal, the company never would have thought of it.”

“All I did was to save the company some money,” protested Mackenzie.

“You knew,” Harper reminded him crisply, “that the standard price for a symphony is two bushels of fertilizer. Why did you have to chisel half a bushel on Kadmar?”

“Cripes,” said Mackenzie, “Kadmar didn’t know the difference. He practically kissed me for a bushel and a half.”