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

“It is a rule you live by,” the Encyclopedia said. “It is something that is necessary. You cannot violate it.”

“He got that from Nellie,” said Smith.

“You think because there is a law against it, we won’t take the trees?”

“There is a law against it,” said the Encyclopedia. “You cannot take the trees.”

“So as soon as you found that out, you lammed up here and stole the serum, eh?”

“He’s figuring on indoctrinating us,” Nellie explained. “Maybe that word ain’t so good. Maybe conditioning is better. It’s sort of mixed up. I don’t know if I’ve got it straight. He took the serum so we would hear the trees without being able to defend ourselves against them. He figured when we heard the music, we’d go ahead and take the trees.”

“Law or no law?”

“That’s it,” Nellie said. “Law or no law.”

Smith whirled on the robot. “What kind of jabber is this? How do you know what he was planning?”

“I read his mind,” said Nellie. “Hard to get at, the thing that he was planning, because he kept it deep. But some of it jarred up where I could reach it when you threatened him.”

“You can’t do that!” shrieked the Encyclopedia. “Not you! Not a machine!”

Mackenzie laughed shortly. “Too bad, big boy, but she can. She’s been doing it.”

Smith stared at Mackenzie.

“It’s all right,” Mackenzie said. “It isn’t any bluff. She told me about it last night.”

“You are unduly alarmed,” the Encyclopedia said. “You are putting a wrong interpretation—”

A quiet voice spoke, almost as if it were a voice inside Mackenzie’s mind.

“Don’t believe a thing he tells you, pal. Don’t fall for any of his lies.”

“Nicodemus! You know something about this?”

“It’s the trees,” said Nicodemus. “The music does something to you. It changes you. Makes you different than you were before. Wade is different. He doesn’t know it, but he is.”

“If you mean the music chains one to it, that is true,” said Wade. “I may as well admit it. I could not live without the music. I could not leave the Bowl. Perhaps you gentlemen have thought that I would go back with you. But I cannot go. I cannot leave. It will work the same with anyone. Alexander was here for a while when he ran short of serum. Doctors treated him and he was all right, but he came back. He had to come back. He couldn’t stay away.”

“It isn’t only that,” declared Nicodemus. “It changes you, too, in other ways. It can change you any way it wants to. Change your way of thinking. Change your viewpoints.”

Wade strode forward. “It isn’t true,” he yelled. “I’m the same as when I came here.”

“You heard things,” said Nicodemus, “felt things in the music you couldn’t understand. Things you wanted to understand, but couldn’t. Strange emotions that you yearned to share, but could never reach. Strange thoughts that tantalized you for days.”

Wade sobered, stared at them with haunted eyes.

“That was the way it was,” he whispered. “That was just the way it was.”

He glanced around, like a trapped animal seeking escape.

“But I don’t feel any different,” he mumbled. “I still am human. I think like a man, act like a man.”

“Of course you do,” said Nicodemus. “Otherwise you would have been scared away. If you had known what was happening to you, you wouldn’t let it happen. And you have had less than a year of it. Less than a year of this conditioning. Five years and you would be less human. Ten years and you would be beginning to be the kind of thing the trees want you to be.”

“And we were going to take some of those trees to Earth!” Smith shouted. “Seven of them! So the people of the Earth could hear them. Listen to them, night after night. The whole world listening to them on the radio. A whole world being conditioned, being changed by seven music trees.”

“But why?” asked Wade, bewildered.

“Why did men domesticate animals?” Mackenzie asked. “You wouldn’t find out by asking the animals, for they don’t know. There is just as much point asking a dog why he was domesticated as there is in asking us why the trees want to condition us. For some purpose of their own, undoubtedly, that is perfectly clear and logical to them. A purpose that undoubtedly never can be clear and logical to us.”

“Nicodemus,” said the Encyclopedia, and his thought was deadly cold, “you have betrayed your own.”

Mackenzie laughed harshly. “You’re wrong there,” he told the vegetable, “because Nicodemus isn’t a plant, any more. He’s a human. The same thing has happened to him as you want to have happen to us. He has become a human in everything but physical make-up. He thinks as a man does. His viewpoints are ours, not yours.”

“That is right,” said Nicodemus. “I am a man.”

A piece of cloth ripped savagely and for an instant the group was blinded by a surge of energy that leaped from the thicket a hundred yards away. Smith gurgled once in sudden agony and the energy was gone.

Frozen momentarily by surprise, Mackenzie watched Smith stagger, face tight with pain, hand clapped to his side. Slowly the man wilted, sagged in the middle and went down.

Silently, Nellie leaped forward, was sprinting for the thicket. With a hoarse cry, Mackenzie bent over Smith.

Smith grinned at him, a twisted grin. His mouth worked, but no words came. His hand slid away from his side and he went limp, but his chest rose and fell with a slightly slower breath. His life blanket had shifted its position to cover the wounded side.

Mackenzie straightened up, hauling the pistol from his belt. A man had risen from the thicket, was leveling a gun at the charging Nellie. With a wild yell, Mackenzie shot from the hip. The lashing charge missed the man but half the thicket disappeared in a blinding sheet of flame.

The man with the gun ducked as the flame puffed out at him and in that instant Nellie closed. The man yelled once, a long-drawn howl of terror as Nellie swung him above her head and dashed him down. The smoking thicket hid the rest of it. Mackenzie, pistol hanging limply by his side, watched Nellie’s right fist lift and fall with brutal precision, heard the thud of life being beaten from a human body.

Sickened, he turned back to Smith. Wade was kneeling beside the wounded man. He looked up.

“He seems to be unconscious.”

Mackenzie nodded. “The blanket put him out. Gave him an anesthetic. It’ll take care of him.”

Mackenzie glanced up sharply at a scurry in the grass. The Encyclopedia, taking advantage of the moment, was almost out of sight, scuttling toward a grove of rifle trees.

A step grated behind him.

“It was Alexander,” Nellie said. “He won’t bother us no more.”

Nelson Harper, factor at the post, was lighting up his pipe when the visiphone signal buzzed and the light flashed on.

Startled, Harper reached out and snapped on the set. Mackenzie’s face came in, a face streaked with dirt and perspiration, stark with fear. He waited for no greeting. His lips were already moving even as the plate flickered and cleared.

“It’s all off, chief,” he said. “The deal is off. I can’t bring in those trees.”

“You got to bring them in,” yelled Harper. “I’ve already called Earth. I got them turning handsprings. They say it’s the greatest thing that ever happened. They’re sending out a ship within an hour.”

“Call them back and tell them not to bother,” Mackenzie snapped.

“But you told me everything was set,” yelped Harper. “You told me nothing could happen. You said you’d bring them in if you had to crawl on hands and knees and pack them on your back.”