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

“Your terms,” said Mackenzie, “are that we leave the trees unharmed.”

“Those are my terms.”

Mackenzie shook his head. “I can’t take the chance,” he said.

“When you decide, just step out and shout,” Wade told him. “I’ll stay in calling distance.”

He backed slowly from the door.

Smith needed warmth and food. In the hour since his blanket had been taken from him he had regained consciousness, had mumbled feverishly and tossed about, his hand clawing at his wounded side.

Squatting beside him, Mackenzie had tried to quiet him, had felt a wave of slow terror as he thought of the hours ahead.

There was no food in the tractor, no means for making heat. There was no need for such provision so long as they had had their life blankets—but now the blankets were gone. There was a first-aid cabinet and with the materials that he found there, Mackenzie did his fumbling best, but there was nothing to relieve Smith’s pain, nothing to control his fever. For treatment such as that they had relied upon the blankets.

The atomic motor might have been rigged up to furnish heat, but Wade had taken the firing mechanism control.

Night was falling and that meant the air would grow colder. Not too cold to live, of course, but cold enough to spell doom to a man in Smith’s condition.

Mackenzie squatted on his heels and stared at Smith.

“If I could only find Nellie,” he thought.

He had tried to find her—briefly. He had raced along the rim of the Bowl for a mile or so, but had seen no sign of her. He had been afraid to go farther, afraid to stay too long from the man back in the tractor.

Smith mumbled and Mackenzie bent low to try to catch the words. But there were no words.

Slowly he rose and headed for the door. First of all, he needed heat. Then food. The heat came first. An open fire wasn’t the best way to make heat, of course, but it was better than nothing.

The uprooted music tree, balled roots silhouetted against the sky, loomed before him in the dusk. He found a few dead branches and tore them off. They would do to start the fire. After that he would have to rely on green wood to keep it going. Tomorrow he could forage about for suitable fuel.

In the Bowl below, the music trees were tuning up for the evening concert.

Back in the tractor, he found a knife, carefully slivered several of the branches for easy lighting, piled them ready for his pocket lighter.

The lighter flared and a tiny figure hopped up on the threshold of the tractor, squatting there, blinking at the light.

Startled, Mackenzie held the lighter without touching it to the wood, stared at the thing that perched in the doorway.

Delbert’s squeaky thought drilled into his brain.

“What you doing?”

“Building a fire,” Mackenzie told him.

“What’s a fire?”

“It’s a … it’s a … say, don’t you know what a fire is?”

“Nope,” said Delbert.

“It’s a chemical action,” Mackenzie said. “It breaks up matter and releases energy in the form of heat.”

“What you building a fire with?” asked Delbert, blinking in the flare of the lighter.

“With branches from a tree.”

Delbert’s eyes widened and his thought was jittery.

“A tree?”

“Sure, a tree. Wood. It burns. It gives off heat. I need heat.”

“What tree?”

“Why—” And then Mackenzie stopped with sudden realization. His thumb relaxed and the flame went out.

Delbert shrieked at him in sudden terror and anger. “It’s my tree! You’re building a fire with my tree!”

Mackenzie sat in silence.

“When you burn my tree, it’s gone,” yelled Delbert. “Isn’t that right? When you burn my tree, it’s gone?”

Mackenzie nodded.

“But why do you do it?” shrilled Delbert.

“I need heat,” said Mackenzie, doggedly. “If I don’t have heat, my friend will die. It’s the only way I can get heat.”

“But my tree!”

Mackenzie shrugged. “I need a fire, see? And I’m getting it any way I can.”

He flipped his thumb again and the lighter flared.

“But I never did anything to you,” Delbert howled, rocking on the metal door sill. “I’m your friend, I am. I never did a thing to hurt you.”

“No?” asked Mackenzie.

“No,” yelled Delbert.

“What about that scheme of yours?” asked Mackenzie. “Trying to trick me into taking trees to Earth?”

“That wasn’t my idea,” yipped Delbert. “It wasn’t any of the trees’ ideas. The Encyclopedia thought it up.”

A bulky form loomed outside the door. “Someone talking about me?” it asked.

The Encyclopedia was back again.

Arrogantly, he shouldered Delbert aside, stepped into the tractor.

“I saw Wade,” he said.

Mackenzie glared at him. “So you figured it would be safe to come.”

“Certainly,” said the Encyclopedia. “Your formula of force counts for nothing now. You have no means to enforce it.”

Mackenzie’s hand shot out and grasped the Encyclopedia with a vicious grip, hurled him into the interior of the tractor.

“Just try to get out this door,” he snarled. “You’ll soon find out if the formula of force amounts to anything.”

The Encyclopedia picked himself up, shook himself like a ruffled hen. But his thought was cool and calm.

“I can’t see what this avails you.”

“It gives us soup,” Mackenzie snapped.

He sized the Encyclopedia up. “Good vegetable soup. Something like cabbage. Never cared much for cabbage soup, myself, but—”

“Soup?”

“Yeah, soup. Stuff to eat. Food.”

“Food!” The Encyclopedia’s thought held a tremor of anxiety. “You would use me as food.”

“Why not?” Mackenzie asked him. “You’re nothing but a vegetable. An intelligent vegetable, granted, but still a vegetable.”

He felt the Encyclopedia’s groping thought-fingers prying into his mind.

“Go ahead,” he told him, “but you won’t like what you find.”

The Encyclopedia’s thoughts almost gasped. “You withheld this from me!” he charged.

“We withheld nothing from you,” Mackenzie declared. “We never had occasion to think of it … to remember to what use Men at one time put plants, to what use we still put plants in certain cases. The only reason we don’t use them so extensively now is that we have advanced beyond the need of them. Let that need exist again and—”

“You ate us,” strummed the Encyclopedia. “You used us to build your shelters! You destroyed us to create heat for your selfish purposes!”

“Pipe down,” Mackenzie told him. “It’s the way we did it that gets you. The idea that we thought we had a right to. That we went out and took, without even asking, never wondering what the plant might think about it. That hurts your racial dignity.”

He stopped, then moved closer to the doorway. From the Bowl below came the first strains of the music. The tuning up, the preliminary to the concert, was over.

“O.K.,” Mackenzie said, “I’ll hurt it some more. Even you are nothing but a plant to me. Just because you’ve learned some civilized tricks doesn’t make you my equal. It never did. We humans can’t slur off the experiences of the past so easily. It would take thousands of years of association with things like you before we even began to regard you as anything other than a plant, a thing that we used in the past and might use again.”

“Still cabbage soup,” said the Encyclopedia.

“Still cabbage soup,” Mackenzie told him.

The music stopped. Stopped dead still, in the middle of a note.

“See,” said Mackenzie, “even the music fails you.”

Silence rolled at them in engulfing waves and through the stillness came another sound, the clop, clop of heavy, plodding feet.