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

them. I know what they would do. They’d have closed the doors very carefully and tried them to be sure that they were closed.”
    â€œBut maybe the wind …”
    â€œNot a chance,” insisted Abraham. “One door, possibly. But I see four of them from here.”
    â€œSomeone has to take a look,” said Sheridan. “It might as well be me.”
    He turned in at a gate where one of the doors stood open and went slowly up the path. He halted at the threshold and peered in. The room beyond was empty. He stepped into the house and went from room to room and all the rooms were empty—not simply of the natives, but of everything. There was no furniture and the utensils and the tools were gone from hooks and racks. There was no scrap of clothing. There was nothing left behind. The house was dead and bare and empty, a shabby and abandoned thing discarded by its people.
    He felt a sense of guilt creep into his soul. What if we drove them off? What if we hounded them until they’d rather flee than face us?
    But that was ridiculous, he told himself. There must be some other reason for this incredibly complete mass exodus.
    He went back down the walk. Abraham and Gideon went into other houses. All of them were empty.
    â€œIt may be this village only,” suggested Gideon. “The rest may be quite normal.”
    But Gideon was wrong.
    Back at the floater, they got in touch with base.
    â€œI can’t understand it,” said Hezekiah, “I’ve had the same report from four other teams. I was about to call you, sir.”
    â€œYou’d better get out every floater that you can,” said Sheridan. “Check all the villages around. And keep a lookout for the people. They may be somewhere in the country. There’s a possibility they’re at a harvest festival.”
    â€œIf they’re at a festival, sir,” asked Hezekiah, “why did they take their belongings? You don’t take along your furniture when you attend a festival.”
    â€œI know,” said Sheridan. “You put your finger on it. Get the boys out, will you?’
    â€œThere’s just the possibility,” Gideon offered, “that they are changing villages. Maybe there’s a tribal law that says they have to build a new village every so often. It might have its roots in an ancient sanitation law that the camp must be moved at stated intervals.”
    â€œIt could be that,” Sheridan said wearily. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
    Abraham thumbed a fist toward the barn.
    Sheridan hesitated, then threw caution to the winds.
    â€œGo ahead,” he said.
    Gideon stalked up the ramp and reached the door. He put out a hand and grasped one of the planks nailed across the door. He wrenched and there was an anguished shriek of tortured nails ripping from the wood and the board came free. Another plank came off and then another one and Gideon put his shoulder to the door and half of it swung open.
    Inside, in the dimness of the barn, was the dull, massive shine of metal—a vast machine sitting on the driveway floor.
    Sheridan stiffened with a cold, hollow sense of terror.
    It was wrong, he thought. There could be no machine.
    The Garsonians had no business having a machine. Their culture was entirely non-mechanical. The best they had achieved so far had been the hoe and wheel, and even yet they had not been able to put the hoe and wheel together to make themselves a plow.
    They had had no machine when the second expedition left some fifteen years ago, and in those fifteen years they could not have spanned the gap. In those fifteen years, from all surface indications, they had not advanced an inch.
    And yet the machine stood in the driveway of the barn.
    It was a fair-sized cylinder, set on end and with a door in one side of it. The upper end of it terminated in a dome-shaped cap. Except for the door, it resembled very much a huge and snub-nosed