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

Perhaps, he thought, my father was a mutant, a mutant that no one suspected. Or it may have been my mother. And neither of them would have been suspected. For my father was a farmer and if his mutancy had made the crops grow a little better through his better understanding of the soil or through a deeper feeling for the art of growing things, who would there be to know that he was a mutant? He would simply have been a better farmer than his neighbors. And if at night, when he read the well-worn books that stood on the shelf in the dining room, he understood those books and the things they meant to say better than most other men, who was there to know?

But I, he said, I was noticed. That is the crime of mutancy, to be noticed. Like the Spartan boy whose crime of stealing a fox was no crime at all, but whose cries when the fox ripped out his guts were a crime indeed.

I rose too fast, he thought. I cut through too much red tape. I understood too well. And in governmental office you cannot rise too fast nor cut red tape nor understand too well. You must be as mediocre as your fellow office-holders. You cannot point to a blueprint of a rocket motor and say, “There is the trouble,” when men who are better trained than you cannot see the trouble. And you cannot devise a system of production that will turn out two rocket motors for the price of one in half the time. For that is not only being too efficient; it’s downright blasphemy.

But most of all you cannot stand up in open meeting of government policy makers and point out that mutancy is no crime in itself … that it only is a crime when it is wrongly used. Nor say that the world would be better off if it used its mutants instead of being frightened of them.

Of course, if one knew one was a mutant, one would never say a thing like that. And a mutant, knowing himself a mutant, never would point out a thing that was wrong with a rocket engine. For a mutant has to keep his mouth shut, has to act the mediocre man and arrive at the ends he wishes by complex indirection.

If I had only known, thought West. If I had only known in time. I could have fooled them, as I hope many others even now are fooling them.

But now he knew it was too late, too late to turn back to the life that he had rejected, to go back and accept the dead-end trap that had been fashioned for him … a trap that would catch and hold him, where he would be safe. And where the human race would be safe from him.

West turned around and found the path that led up the rocky decline toward the laboratory.

A hulking figure stepped out of the shadows and challenged him.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

West halted. “Just got in,” he said. “Looking for a friend of mine. By the name of Nevin.”

Inside the pocket of his suit, he felt Annabelle stirring restlessly. Probably she was getting cold.

“Nevin?” asked the man, a note of alarm chilling his voice. “What do you want of Nevin?”

“He’s got a painting,” West declared.

The man’s voice turned silky and dangerous. “How much do you know about Nevin and his painting?”

“Not much,” said West. “That’s why I’m here. Wanted to talk with him about it.”

Annabelle turned a somersault inside West’s zippered pocket. The man’s eyes caught the movement.

“What you got in there?” he demanded, suspiciously.

“Annabelle,” said West. “She’s—well, she’s something like a skinned rat, partly, with a face that’s almost human, except it’s practically all mouth.”

“You don’t say. Where did you get her?”

“Found her,” West told him.

Laughter gurgled in the man’s throat. “So you found her, eh? Can you imagine that?”

He reached out and took West by the arm.

“Maybe we’ll have a lot to talk about,” he said. “We’ll have to compare our notes.”

Together they moved up the hillside, the man’s gloved hand clutching West by the arm.

“You’re Langdon,” West hazarded, as casually as he could speak.

The man chuckled. “Not Langdon. Langdon got lost.”

“That’s tough,” commented West. “Bad place to get lost on … Pluto.”

“Not Pluto,” said the man. “Somewhere else.”

“Maybe Darling, then …” and he held his breath to hear the answer.

“Darling left us,” said the man. “I’m Cartwright. Burton Cartwright.”

On the top of the tiny plateau in front of the laboratory, they stopped to catch their breath. The dim starlight painted the valley below with silver tracery.

West pointed. “That ship!”

Cartwright chuckled. “You recognize it, eh? The Alpha Centauri.”

“They’re still working on the drive, back on Earth,” said West. “Someday they’ll get it.”

“I have no doubt of it,” said Cartwright.

He swung back toward the laboratory. “Let’s go in. Dinner will be ready soon.”

The table was set with white cloth and shining silver that gleamed in the light of the flickering dinner tapers. Sparkling wine glasses stood in their proper places. The centerpiece was a bowl of fruit—but fruit such as West had never seen before.

Cartwright tilted a chair and dumped a thing that had been sleeping there onto the floor.

“Your place, Mr. West,” he said.

The thing uncoiled itself and glared at West with an eye of fishy hatred, purred with lusty venom and slithered out of sight.

Across the table Louis Nevin apologized. “The damn things keep sneaking through all the time. I suppose, Mr. West, you have trouble with them, too.”

“We tried rat traps,” said Cartwright, “but they were too smart for that. So we get along with them the best we can.”

West laughed to cover momentary confusion, but he found Nevin’s eyes upon him.

“Annabelle,” he said, “is the only one that ever bothered me.”

“You’re lucky,” Nevin told him. “They get to be pests. There is one of them that insists on sleeping with me.”

“Where’s Belden?” Cartwright asked.

“He ate early,” explained Nevin. “Said there were a few things he wanted to get done. Asked to be excused.”

He said to West, “James Belden. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.”

West nodded.

He pulled back his chair, started to sit down, then jerked erect.

A woman had appeared in the doorway, a woman with violet eyes and platinum hair and wrapped in an ermine opera cloak. She moved forward and the light from the flaring tapers fell across her face. West stiffened at the sight, felt the blood run cold as ice within his veins.

For the face was not a woman’s face. It was like a furry skull, like a moth’s face that had attempted to turn human and had stuck halfway.

Down at the end of the table, Cartwright was chuckling.

“You recognize her, Mr. West?”

West clutched the back of his chair so hard that his knuckles suddenly were white.

“Of course I do,” he said. “The White Singer. But how did you bring her here?”

“So that’s what they call her back on Earth,” said Nevin.

“But her face,” insisted West. “What’s happened to her face?”

“There were two of them,” said Nevin. “One of them we sent to Earth. We had to fix her up a bit. Plastic surgery, you know.”

“She sings,” said Cartwright.

“Yes, I know,” said West. “I’ve heard her sing. Or, at least the other one … the one you sent to Earth with the made-over face. She’s driven practically everything else off the air. All the networks carry her.”

Cartwright sighed. “I should like to hear her back on Earth,” he said. “She would sing differently there, you know, than she sang here.”

“They sing,” interrupted Nevin, “only as they feel.”

“Firelight on the wall,” said Cartwright, “and she’d sing like firelight on the wall. Or the smell of lilacs in an April rain and her music would be like the perfume of lilacs and the mist of rain along the garden path.”