Read Online I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories by Clifford D. Simak - Free Book Online

that’s the answer. The boys would go along. Theoretically they’re loyal to Central, but deep down at the bottom of it, it’s you they’re really loyal to. We could load up the cargo and that would give us capital and we’d have a good head start …”
    â€œNo,” Sheridan said firmly. “We’ll try a little longer and we may solve the situation. If not, I face the music.”
    He scraped his hand across his jaw.
    â€œMaybe,” he said, “Nappy and his crap-shooters can turn the trick for us. It’s fantastic, sure, but stranger things have happened.”
    Napoleon and his pals came back, sheepish and depressed.
    â€œThey beat the pants off us,” the cook told Sheridan in awe. “Those boys are really naturals. But when we tried to pay our bets, they wouldn’t take our stuff!”
    â€œWe have to try to arrange a powwow,” said Sheridan, “and talk it out with them, although I hold little hope for it. Do you think, Napoleon, if we came clean and told them what a spot we’re in, it would make a difference?”
    â€œNo, I don’t,” Napoleon said.
    â€œIf they only had a government,” observed Ebenezer, who had been a member of Napoleon’s gambling team, “we might get somewhere with a powwow. Then you could talk with someone who represented the entire population. But this way you’ll have to talk with each village separately and that will take forever.”
    â€œWe can’t help it, Eb,” said Sheridan. “It’s all we have left.”
    But before any powwow could be arranged, the podar harvest started. The natives toiled like beavers in the fields, digging up the tubers, stacking them to dry, packing them in carts and hauling them to the barns by sheer manpower, for the Garsonians had no draft animals.
    They dug them up and hauled them to the barns, the very barns where they’d sworn that they had no podars .
    But that was not to wonder at when one stopped to think of it, for the natives had also sworn that they grew no podars .
    They did not open the big barn doors, as one would have normally expected them to do. They simply opened a tiny, man-size door set into the bigger door and took the podars in that way. And when any of the Earth party hove in sight, they quickly stationed a heavy guard around the entire square.
    â€œWe’d better let them be,” Abraham advised Sheridan. “If we try to push them, we may have trouble in our lap.”
    So the robots pulled back to the base and waited for the harvest to end. Finally it was finished and Sheridan counseled lying low for a few days more to give the Garsonians a chance to settle back to their normal routine.
    Then they went out again and this time Sheridan rode along, on one of the floaters with Abraham and Gideon.
    The first village they came to lay quiet and lazy in the sun. There was not a creature stirring.
    Abraham brought the floater down into the square and the three stepped off.
    The square was empty and the place was silent—a deep and deathly silence.
    Sheridan felt the skin crawling up his back, for there was a stealthy, unnatural menace in the noiseless emptiness.
    â€œThey may be laying for us,” suggested Gideon.
    â€œI don’t think so,” said Abraham. “Basically they are peaceful.”
    They moved cautiously across the square and walked slowly down a street that opened from the square.
    And still there was no living thing in sight.
    And stranger still—the doors of some of the houses stood open to the weather and the windows seemed to watch them out of blind eyes, with the colorful crude curtains gone.
    â€œPerhaps,” Gideon suggested, “they may have gone away to some harvest festival or something of that nature.”
    â€œThey wouldn’t leave their doors wide open, even for a day,” declared Abraham. “I’ve lived with them for weeks and I’ve studied