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

He said to Napoleon: “How about yourself? Don’t you ever hanker to go out? If you’d just say the word, you could.”

“I like to cook,” Napoleon stated. He dug at the ground with a metal finger. “I guess, Steve, you could say I’m pretty much an old retainer.”

“A transmog would take care of that in a hurry.”

“And then who’d cook for you? You know you’re a lousy cook.”

Sheridan ate his lunch and sat in his chair, staring at the lake, waiting for the first reports on the radio.

The job at last was started. All that had gone before—the loading of the cargo, the long haul out through space, the establishing of the orbits and the unshipping of the cargo—had been no more than preliminary to this very moment.

The job was finally started, but it was far from done. There would be months of work. There would be many problems and a thousand headaches. But they’d get it done, he told himself with a sure pride. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could stump this gang of his.

Late in the afternoon, Hezekiah came with the word: “Abraham is calling, sir. It seems that there is trouble.”

Sheridan leaped to his feet and ran to the shack. He pulled up a chair and reached for the headset. “That you, Abe? How is it going, boy?”

“Badly, Steve,” said Abraham. “They aren’t interested in doing business. They want the stuff, all right. You can see the way they look at it. But they aren’t buying. You know what I think? I don’t believe they have anything to trade.”

“That’s ridiculous, Abe! They’ve been growing podars all these years. The barns are crammed with them.”

“Their barn is all nailed up,” said Abraham. “They have bars across the doors and the windows boarded. When I tried to walk up to it, they acted sort of ugly.”

“I’ll be right out,” decided Sheridan. “I want to look this over.” He stood up and walked out of the shack. “Hezekiah, get the flier started. We’re going out and have a talk with Abe. Nappy, you mind the radio. Call me at Abe’s village if anything goes wrong.”

“I’ll stay right here beside it,” Napoleon promised him.

Hezekiah brought the flier down in the village square, landing it beside the floater, still loaded with its merchandise.

Abraham strode over to them as soon as they were down. “I’m glad you came, Steve. They want me out of here. They don’t want us around.”

Sheridan climbed from the flier and stood stiffly in the square. There was a sense of wrongness—a wrongness with the village and the people—something wrong and different.

There were a lot of natives standing around the square, lounging in the doorways and leaning against the trees. There was a group of them before the barred door of the massive barn that stood in the center of the square, as if they might be a guard assigned to protect the barn.

“When I first came down,” said Abraham, “they crowded around the floater and stood looking at the stuff and you could see they could hardly keep their hands off it. I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t talk too much, except to say that they were poor. Now all they do is just stand off and glare.”

The barn was a monumental structure when gauged against the tiny houses of the village. It stood up foursquare and solid and entirely without ornament and it was an alien thing—alien of Earth. For, Sheridan realized, it was the same kind of barn that he had seen on the backwoods farms of Earth—the great hip-roof, the huge barn door, the ramp up to the door, and even the louvered cupola that rode astride the ridge-pole.

The man and the two robots stood in a pool of hostile silence and the lounging natives kept on staring at them and there was something decidedly wrong.

Sheridan turned slowly and glanced around the square and suddenly he knew what the wrongness was.

The place was shabby; it approached the downright squalid. The houses were neglected and no longer neat and the streets were littered. And the people were a piece with all the rest of it.

“Sir,” said Hezekiah, “they are a sorry lot.”

And they were all of that.

There was something in their faces that had a look of haunting and their shoulders stooped and there was fatigue upon them.

“I can’t understand it,” said the puzzled Abraham. “The data says they were a happy-go-lucky bunch, but look at them out there. Could the data have been wrong?”

“No, Abe. It’s the people who have changed.”

For there was no chance that the data could be wrong. It had been compiled by a competent team, one of the very best, and headed by a human who had long years of experience on many alien planets. The team had spent two years on Garson IV and had made it very much its business to know this race inside out.

Something had happened to the people. They had somehow lost their gaiety and pride. They had let the houses go uncared for. They had allowed themselves to become a race of ragamuffins.

“You guys stay here,” Sheridan said.

“You can’t do it, sir,” said Hezekiah in alarm.

“Watch yourself,” warned Abraham.

Sheridan walked toward the barn. The group before it did not stir. He stopped six feet away.

Close up, they looked more gnomelike than they had appeared in the pictures brought back by the survey team. Little wizened gnomes, they were, but not happy gnomes at all. They were seedy-looking and there was resentment in them and perhaps a dash of hatred. They had a hangdog look and there were some among them who shuffled in discomfiture.

“I see you don’t remember us,” said Sheridan conversationally. “We were away too long, much longer than we had thought to be.”

He was having, he feared, some trouble with the language. It was, in fact, not the easiest language in the Galaxy to handle. For a fleeting moment, he wished that there were some sort of transmog that could be slipped into the human brain. It would make moments like this so much easier.

“We remember you,” said one of them in a sullen voice.

“That’s wonderful,” said Sheridan with forced enthusiasm. “Are you speaker for this village?”

Speaker because there was no leader, no chief—no government at all beyond a loose, haphazard talking over what daily problems they had, around the local equivalent of the general store, and occasional formless town meetings to decide what to do in their rare crises, but no officials to enforce the decisions.

“I can speak for them,” the native said somewhat evasively. He shuffled slowly forward. “There were others like you who came many years ago.”

“You were friends to them.”

“We are friends to all.”

“But special friends to them. To them you made the promise that you would keep the podars.”

“Too long to keep the podars . The podars rot away.”

“You had the barn to store them in.”

“One podar rots. Soon there are two podars rotten. And then a hundred podars rotten. The barn is no good to keep them. No place is any good to keep them.”

“But we—those others showed you what to do. You go through the podars and throw away the rotten ones. That way you keep the other podars good.”

The native shrugged. “Too hard to do. Takes too long.”

“But not all the podars rotted. Surely you have some left.”

The creature spread his hands. “We have bad seasons, friend. Too little rain, too much. It never comes out right. Our crop is always bad.”

“But we have brought things to trade you for the podars . Many things you need. We had great trouble bringing them. We came from far away. It took us long to come.”

“Too bad,” the native said. “No podars . As you can see, we are very poor.”