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

“We’ll see,” said Ravenholt, still nasty.

“Now,” said Spencer, “you’re thinking that you can have me fired. Probably you could. Undoubtedly you know the very strings to pull. But it’s no solution.”

“I would think,” said Ravenholt, “it would be the perfect one.”

“I’d still fight you as a private citizen. I’d take it to the floor of the United Nations if I had to.”

They both were on their feet now, facing one another across the width of desk.

“I’m sorry,” Spencer said, “that it turned out this way. But I meant everything I said.”

“So did I,” said Ravenholt, stalking out the door.

Spencer sat down slowly in his chair.

A swell way to start a day, he told himself.

But the guy had burned him up.

Miss Crane came in the door with a sheaf of papers for his desk.

“Mr. Spencer,” shall I send in Mr. Hudson? He’s been waiting a long time.”

“Is Hudson the applicant?”

“No, that is Mr. Cabell.”

“Cabell is the man I want to see. Bring me his file.” She sniffed contemptuously and left.

Damn her, Spencer told himself, I’ll see who I want to see when I want to see them!

He was astounded at the violence of his thought. What was wrong with him? Nothing was going right. Couldn’t he get along with anyone any more?

Too tensed up, he thought. Too many things to do, too much to worry over.

Maybe what he ought to do was walk out into Operations and step into a carrier for a long vacation. Back to the Old Stone Age, which would require no indoctrination. There wouldn’t be too many people, perhaps none at all. But there’d be mosquitoes. And cave bears. And saber-tooths and perhaps a lot of other things equally obnoxious. And he’d have to get some camping stuff together and—oh, the hell with it!

But it was not a bad idea.

He’d thought about it often. Some day he would do it. Meanwhile, he picked up the sheaf of papers Miss Crane had dropped upon his desk.

They were the daily batch of future assignments dreamed up by the Dirty Tricks department. There was always trouble in them. He felt himself go tense as he picked them up.

The first one was a routine enough assignment—an investigation of some tributes paid the Goths by Rome. There was, it seemed, a legend that the treasure had been buried somewhere in the Alps. It might never have been recovered. That was S.O.P., checking up on buried treasure.

But the second paper—

“Miss Crane!” he yelled.

She was coming through the door, with a file clutched in her hand. Her face changed not a whit at his yelp of anguish; she was used to it.

“What is the matter, Mr. Spencer?” she inquired, at least three degrees too calmly.

Spencer banged his fist down on the pile of sheets. “They can’t do this to me! I won’t stand for it. Get Rogers on the phone!”

“Yes, sir.”

“No, wait a minute there,” Spencer interrupted grimly. “This I can do better personal. I’ll go up and see him. In fact, I’ll take him apart barehanded.”

“But there are those people waiting …”

“Let them wait for a while. It will make them humble.”

He snatched up the assignment sheet and went striding out the door. He shunned the elevator. He climbed two flights of stairs. He went in a door marked Evaluation .

Rogers was sitting tilted back, with his feet up on the desk top, staring at the ceiling.

He glanced at Spencer with a bland concern. He took his feet down off the desk and sat forward in his chair.

“Well? What’s the matter this time?”

“This!” said Spencer, throwing the sheet down in front of him.

Rogers poked it with a delicate finger. “Nothing difficult there. Just a little ingenuity …”

“Nothing difficult!” howled Spencer. “Movies of Nero’s fire in Rome!”

Rogers sighed. “This movie outfit will pay us plenty for it.”

“And there’s nothing to it. One of my men can just walk out into the burning streets of Rome and set up a movie camera in an age where the principle of the camera hasn’t yet been thought of.”

“Well, I said it would call for some ingenuity,” said Rogers. “Look, there’ll be a lot of people running, carrying stuff, trying to save themselves and anything they can. They won’t pay any attention to your man. He can cover the camera with something so that it will look …”

“It’ll be an ugly crowd,” insisted Spencer. “It won’t like the city being burned. There’ll be rumors that the Christians are the ones who set the fire. That crowd will be looking for suspicious characters.”

“There’s always an element of danger,” Rogers pointed out.

“Not as dangerous as this!” said Spencer, testily. “Not deliberately asking for it. And there is something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like introducing an advanced technology to the past. If that crowd beat up my man and busted the camera …”

Rogers shrugged. “What difference if they did? They could make nothing of it.”

“Maybe. But what I’m really worried about,” Spencer persisted, “is what the watchdog group would say when they audit our records. It would have to be worth an awful lot of money before I’d take a chance.”

“Believe me, it is worth a lot of money. And it would open up a new field for us. That’s why I liked it.”

“You guys in Dirty Tricks,” said Spencer, bitterly, “just don’t give a damn. You’ll hand us anything …”

“Not everything,” said Rogers. “Sales pushed us pretty hard on this one …”

“Sales!” spat Spencer, contempt in his voice.

“There was a woman in here the other day,” said Rogers. “She wanted to send her two children to their great-great-grandfather’s farm back in the nineteenth century. For a vacation, mind you. A summer in the country in another century. Said it would be educational and quite relaxing for them. Said the old folks would understand and be glad to have them once we had explained.”

Rogers sighed. “I had quite a session with her. She pooh-poohed our regulations. She said …”

“You passed up a good one there,” Spencer said sarcastically. “That would have opened up another field—vacations in the past. I can see it now. Family reunions with old friends and neighbors foregathering across the centuries.”

“You think you are the only one who has his troubles.”

“I am bleeding for you,” Spencer told him.

“There’s a TV outfit,” Rogers said, “that wants interviews with Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander and all the rest of those ancient big shots. There are hunters who want to go back into the primordial wilderness to get a spot of shooting. There are universities that want to send teams of investigators back …”

“You know that all of that is out,” said Spencer. “The only ones we can send back are travelers we have trained.”

“There’ve been times.”

“Oh, sure, a few. But only when we got a special dispensation. And we sent along so many travelers to guard them that it was an expedition instead of a simple little study group.”

Spencer got up from his chair. “Well, what about this latest brainstorm?”

Rogers picked up the offending assignment sheet and tossed it into an overflowing basket.

“I’ll go down to Sales, with tears streaming down my cheeks …”

“Thanks,” said Spencer and went out.

Back in his office, he sat down at the desk and picked up the file on Cabell.

The squawk box gibbered at him. He thumbed up the lever.

“What is it?”

“Operations, Hal. Williams just got back. Everything’s okay; he snagged the Picasso without any trouble. Only took six weeks.”