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

So this was it, thought West.

Here he was, at the end of the Solar System’s trail, in an empty house. And it was, finally, as he had hoped it would be. No one around. A storehouse full of food. Adequate shelter. A shop where he could work. A place guarded by the patrol against unwelcome callers.

Just the place for a man who might be hiding. Just the place for a fugitive from the human race.

There were things to do … later on. Two bodies to be given burial. A screen to be cleaned up and thrown on a junk heap. A few chittering things to be hunted down and killed.

Then he could settle down.

There were robots, of course. One had brought in the dinner.

Later on, he said.

But there was something else to do … something to do immediately, if he could just remember.

He stood and looked around the room, cataloguing its contents.

Chairs, drapes, a desk, the table, the imitation fireplace …

That was it, the fireplace.

He walked across the room to stand in front of it. Reaching up, he took down the bottle from the mantel, the bottle with the black silk bow tied around its neck. The bottle for the last man’s club.

And he was the last man, there was no doubt of it. The very last of all.

He had not been in the pact, of course, but he would carry out the pact. It was melodrama, undoubtedly, but there are times, he told himself, when a little melodrama may be excusable.

He uncorked the bottle and swung around to face the room. He raised the bottle in salute—salute to the gaping, blackened frame that had held the painting, to the dead man on the floor, to the thing that mewed in a far, dark corner.

He tried to think of a word to say, but couldn’t. And there had to be a word to say, there simply had to be.

“Mud in your eye,” he said, and it wasn’t any good, but it would have to do.

He put the bottle to his lips and tipped it up and tilted back his head.

Gagging, he snatched the bottle from his lips.

It wasn’t whisky and it was awful. It was gall and vinegar and quinine, all rolled into one. It was a brew straight from the Pit. It was all the bad medicine he had taken as a boy, it was sulphur and molasses, it was castor oil, it was—

“Good God,” said Frederick West.

For suddenly he remembered the location of a knife he had lost twenty years before. He saw it where he had left it, just as plain as day.

He knew an equation he’d never known before, and what was more, he knew what it was for and how it could be used.

Unbidden, he visualized, in one comprehensive picture, just how a rocket motor worked … every detail, every piece, every control, like a chart laid out before his eyes.

He could capture and hold seven fence posts in his mental eye and four was the best any human ever had been able to see mentally before.

He whooshed out his breath to air his mouth and stared at the bottle.

Suddenly he was able to recite, word for word, the first page from a book he had read ten years ago.

“The hormones,” he whispered. “Darling’s hormones!”

Hormones that did something to his brain. Speeded it up, made it work better, made more of it work than had ever worked before. Made it think cleaner and clearer than it had ever thought before.

“Good Lord,” he said.

A head start to begin with. And now this!

The man who has it could rule the Solar System. That was what Belden had said about it.

Belden had hunted for it. Had torn this place apart. And Darling had hunted for it, too. Darling, who had thought he had it, who had played a trick on Nevin and Cartwright so he could be sure he had it, who had drank himself to death trying to find the bottle he had it in.

And all these years the hormones had been in this bottle on the mantel!

Someone else had played a trick on all of them. Langdon, maybe. Langdon, who had been given away as a pet to a thing so monstrous that even Cartwright had shrunk from naming it.

With shaking hand, West put the bottle back on the mantel, placed the cork beside it. For a moment he stood there, hands against the mantel, gripping it, staring out the vision port beside the fireplace. Staring down into the valley where a shadowy cylinder tilted upward from the rocky planet, as if striving for the stars.

The Alpha Centauri —the ship with the space drive that wouldn’t work. Something wrong … something wrong. …

A sob rose in West’s throat and his hands tightened on the mantel with a grip that hurt.

He knew what was wrong!

He had studied blueprints of the drive back on Earth.

And now it was as if the blueprints were before his eyes again, for he remembered them, each line, each symbol, as if they were etched upon his brain.

He saw the trouble, the simple adjustment that would make the space drive work. Ten minutes … ten minutes would be all he needed. So simple. So simple. So simple that it seemed beyond belief it had not been found before, that all the great minds which had worked upon it should not have seen it long ago.

There had been a dream—a thing that he had not even dared to say aloud, not even to himself. A thing he had not dared even to think about.

West straightened from the mantel and faced the room again. He took the bottle and for a second time raised it in salute.

But this time he had a toast for the dead men and the thing that whimpered in the corner.

“To the stars,” he said.

And he drank without gagging.

To my mind, this is one of the best Simak stories of any length, and I find it difficult to believe that it was rejected by both Horace Gold and John W. Campbell Jr. before Robert Mills finally took it for publication in the March 1960 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction . I don’t think that any other story, by any other author, has done a better job of portraying the humanization of, and the humanity of, a robot.

The inventory list was long. On its many pages, in his small and precise script, he had listed furniture, paintings, china, silverware and all the rest of it—all the personal belongings that had been accumulated by the Barringtons through a long family history.

And now that he had reached the end of it, he noted down himself, the last item of them all:

One domestic robot, Richard Daniel, antiquated but in good repair.

He laid the pen aside and shuffled all the inventory sheets together and stacked them in good order, putting a paper weight upon them—the little exquisitely carved ivory paper weight that Aunt Hortense had picked up that last visit she had made to Peking.

And having done that, his job came to an end.

He shoved back the chair and rose from the desk and slowly walked across the living room, with all its clutter of possessions from the family’s past. There, above the mantel, hung the sword that ancient Jonathon had worn in the War Between the States, and below it, on the mantelpiece itself, the cup the Commodore had won with his valiant yacht, and the jar of moon-dust that Tony had brought back from Man’s fifth landing on the Moon, and the old chronometer that had come from the long-scrapped family spacecraft that had plied the asteroids. And all around the room, almost cheek by jowl, hung the family portraits, with the old dead faces staring out into the world that they had helped to fashion.

And not one of them from the last six hundred years, thought Richard Daniel, staring at them one by one, that he had not known.

There, to the right of the fireplace, old Rufus Andrew Barrington, who had been a judge some two hundred years ago. And to the right of Rufus, Johnson Joseph Barrington, who had headed up that old lost dream of mankind, the Bureau of Paranormal Research. There, beyond the door that led out to the porch, was the scowling pirate face of Danley Barrington, who had first built the family fortune.