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

“It might be hard,” admitted Cabell.

Spencer nodded. “So far as I know, Mr. Cabell, no one has ever succumbed to these temptations. But I live in terror of the day when someone does.”

And he wondered as he said it how much he might be talking through his hat, might be whistling past the graveyard. For surely there must by now have been some interference.

What about the men who had not come back?

Some of them undoubtedly had died. But surely some had stayed. And wasn’t staying back there the worst form of intervention? What were the implications, he wondered, of a child born out of time—a child that had not been born before, that should never have been born? The children of that child and the children of those children—they would be a thread of temporal interference reaching through the ages.

Cabell asked: “Is there something wrong, sir?”

“No. I was just thinking that the time will surely come, some day, when we work out a formula for safely interfering in the past. And when that happens, our responsibilities will be even greater than the ones that we face now. For then we’ll have license for intervening, but will in turn be placed under certain strictures to use that power of intervention only for the best. I can’t imagine what sort of principle it will be, you understand. But I am sure that soon or late we will arrive at it.

“And perhaps, too, we’ll work out another formula which will allow us to venture to the future.”

He shook his head and thought: How like an old man, to shake your head in resigned puzzlement. But he was not an old man—not very old, at least.

“At the moment,” he said, “we are little more than gleaners. We go into the past to pick up the gleanings—the things they lost or threw away. We have made up certain rules to make sure that we never touch the sheaves, but only the ear of wheat left lying on the ground.”

“Like the Alexandria manuscripts?”

“Well, yes, I would suppose so—although grabbing all those manuscripts and books was inspired entirely by a sordid profit motive. We could just as easily have copied them. Some of them we did; but the originals themselves represented a tremendous sum of money. I would hate to tell you what Harvard paid us for those manuscripts. Although, when you think of it,” Spencer said, reflectively, “I’m not sure they weren’t worth every cent of it. It called for the closest planning and split-second co-ordinating and we used every man we had. For, you see, we couldn’t grab the stuff until it was on the verge of burning. We couldn’t deprive even so much as a single person of the chance of even glancing at a single manuscript. We can’t lift a thing until it’s lost. That’s an iron-bound rule.

“Now, you take the Ely tapestry. We waited for years, going back and checking, until we were quite sure that it was finally lost. We knew it was going to be lost, you understand. But we couldn’t touch it until it was lost for good. Then we h’isted it.” He waved a hand. “I talk too much. I am boring you.”

“Mr. Spencer, sir,” protested Cabell, “talk like yours could never bore me. This is something I have dreamed of. I can’t tell you how happy …”

Spencer raised a hand to stop him. “Not so fast. You aren’t hired yet.”

“But Mr. Jensen down in Personnel …”

“I know what Jensen said. But the final word is mine.”

“What have I done wrong?” asked Cabell.

“You have done nothing wrong. Come back this afternoon.”

“But, Mr. Spencer, if only you could tell me …”

“I want to think about you. See me after lunch.”

Cabell unfolded upward from his chair and he was ill at ease.

“That man who was in ahead of me …”

“Yes. What about him?”

“He seemed quite angry, sir. As if he might be thinking of making trouble for you.”

Spencer said angrily. “And that’s none of your damn business!”

Cabell stood his ground. “I was only going to say, sir, that I recognized him.”

“So?”

“If he did try to cause you trouble, sir, it might be worth your while to investigate his association with a stripper down at the Golden Hour. Her name is Silver Starr.”

Spencer stared at Cabell without saying anything.

The man edged toward the door.

He put out his hand to grasp the knob, then turned back to Spencer. “Perhaps that’s not actually her name, but it’s fine for advertising—Silver Starr at the Golden Hour. The Golden Hour is located at …”

“Mr. Cabell,” Spencer said, “I’ve been at the Golden Hour.”

The impudent punk! What did he figure he was doing—buying his way in?

He sat quietly for a moment after Cabell had gone out, cooling down a bit, wondering about the man. There had been something about him that had been disturbing. That look in his eyes, for one thing. And the awkwardness and shyness didn’t ring quite true. As if it had been an act of some sort. But why, in the name of God, should anyone put on such an act when it would be quite clearly to his disadvantage?

You’re psycho, Spencer told himself. You’re getting so you jump at every shadow, sight a lurking figure behind every bush.

Two down, he thought, and another one to see—that is, if more had not piled into the office and were out there waiting for him.

He reached out his hand to press the buzzer. But before his finger touched it, the back door of the office suddenly burst open. A wild-eyed man came stumbling through it. He had something white and wriggly clutched within his arms. He dumped the white and wriggly thing on Hallock Spencer’s desk and unhappily stepped back.

It was a rabbit—a white rabbit with a great pink ribbon tied around its neck in a fancy bow.

Spencer glanced up, startled, at the man who’d brought the rabbit.

“Ackermann,” he shouted. “For Chrissake, Ackermann, what is the matter with you? It isn’t Easter yet!”

Ackermann worked his mouth in a painful manner and his Adam’s apple went bobbing up and down. But he made no words come out.

“Come on, man! What is it?”

Ackermann got his voice back. “It’s Nickerson!” he blurted.

“O.K., so Nickerson brought a rabbit back …”

“He didn’t bring it back, sir. It came all by itself!”

“And Nickerson?”

Ackermann shook his head. “There was just the rabbit.”

Spencer had started to get up from the chair. Now he sat back down again, harder than intended.

“There’s an envelope, sir, tied to the rabbit’s bow.”

“So I see,” said Spencer, absently. But he felt the coldness running through him.

The rabbit hoisted itself around until it was face to face with Spencer. It flapped an ear, wiggled its pink nose at him, put its head carefully to one side and lifted a deliberate hind leg to scratch a flea.

He pivoted in his chair and watched the operator sidle through the door. Three men lost in the last ten days. And now there was a fourth.

But this time, at least, he’d got back the carrier. The rabbit had brought back the carrier. Any living thing, once the mechanism had been rigged, by its very presence would have brought back the carrier. It need not be a man.

But Nickerson! Nickerson was one of the best there were. If a man could not depend on Nickerson, there was no one that he could.

He turned back to the desk and reached for the rabbit. It didn’t try to get away. He slipped out the folded sheet of paper and broke the blob of sealing wax. The paper was so stiff and heavy that it crackled as he smoothed it.

The ink was dead black and the script cramped. No fountain pen, thought Spencer—nothing but a goose quill.

The letter was addressed to him. It said: