I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories Read online

  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.”

  “But where have all the podars gone?”

  “We,” the man said stubbornly, “don’t grow podars any more. We changed the podars into another crop. Too much bad luck with podars.”

  “But those plants out in the fields?”

  “We do not call them podars.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you call them. Are they podars or are they not?”

  “We do not grow the podars.”

  Sheridan turned on his heel and walked back to the robots. “No soap,” he said. “Something’s happened here. They gave me a poor-mouth story and finally, as a clincher, said they don’t grow podars any more.”

  “But there are fields of podars,” declared Abraham. “If the data’s right, they’ve actually increased their acreage. I checked as I was coming in. They’re growing more right now than they ever grew before.”

  “I know,” said Sheridan. “It makes no sense at all. Hezekiah, maybe you should give base a call and find what’s going on.”

  “One thing,” Abraham pointed out. “What about this trade agreement that we have with them? Has it any force?”

  Sheridan shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe we can wave it in their faces, just to see what happens. It might serve as a sort of psychological wedge a little later on, once we get them softened up a bit.”

  “If we get them softened up.”

  “This is our first day and this is only one village.”

  “You don’t think we could use the agreement as a club?”

  “Look, Abe, I’m not a lawyer, and we don’t have a lawyer transmog along with us for a damned good reason—there isn’t any legal setup whatever on this planet. But let’s say we could haul them into a galactic court. Who signed for the planet? Some natives we picked as its representatives, not the natives themselves; their signing couldn’t bind anything or anybody. The whole business of drawing up a contract was nothing but an impressive ceremony without any legal basis—it was just meant to awe the natives into doing business with us.”

  “But the second expedition must have figured it would work.”

  “Well, sure. The Garsonians have a considerable sense of morality—individually and as families. Can we make that sense of morality extend to bigger groups? That’s our problem.”

  “That means we have to figure out an angle,” said Abraham. “At least for this one village.”

  “If it’s just this village,” declared Sheridan, “we can let them sit and wait. We can get along without it.”

  But it wasn’t just one village. It was all the rest of them, as well.

  Hezekiah brought the news.

  “Napoleon says everyone is having trouble,” he announced. “No one sold a thing. From what he said, it’s just like this all over.”

  “We better call in all the boys,” said Sheridan. “This is a situation that needs some talking over. We’ll have to plan a course of action. We can’t go flying off at a dozen different angles.”

  “And we’d better pull up a hill of podars,” Abraham suggested, “and see if they are podars or something else.”

  III

  Sheridan inserted a chemist transmog into Ebenezer’s brain case and Ebenezer ran off an analysis.

  He reported to the sales conference seated around the table.

  “There’s just one difference,” he said, “The podars that I analyzed ran a higher percentage of calenthropodensia—that’s the drug used as a tranquilizer—than the podars that were brought in by the first and second expeditions. The factor is roughly ten per cent, although that might vary from one field to another, depending upon weather and soil conditions—I would suspect especially soil conditions.”

  “Then they lied,” said Abraham, “when they said they weren’t growing podars.”

  “By their own standards,” observed Silas, “they might not have lied to us. You can’t always spell out alien ethics—satisfactorily, that is—from the purely human viewpoint. Ebenezer says that the composition of the tuber has changed to some extent. Perhaps due to better cultivation, perhaps to better seed or to an abundance of rainfall or a heavier concentration of the protozoan in the soil—or maybe because of something the natives did deliberately to make it shift …”

  “Si,” said Gideon, “I don’t see what you are getting at.”

  “Simply this. If they knew of the shift or change, it might have given them an excuse to change the podar name. Or their language or their rules of grammar might have demanded that they change it. Or they may have applied some verbal mumbo-jumbo so they would have an out. And it might even have been a matter of superstition. The native told Steve at the village that they’d had bad luck with podars. So perhaps they operated under the premise that if they changed the name, they likewise changed the luck.”

  “And this is ethical?”

  “To them, it might be. You fellows have been around enough to know that the rest of the Galaxy seldom operates on what we view as logic or ethics.”

  “But I don’t see,” said Gideon, “why they’d want to change the name unless it was for the specific purpose of not trading with us—so they could tell us they weren’t growing podars.”

  “I think that is exactly why they changed the name,” Maximilian said. “It’s all a piece with those nailed-up barns. They knew we had arrived. They could hardly have escaped knowing. We had clouds of floaters going up and down and they must have seen them.”

  “Back at that village,” said Sheridan, “I had the distinct impression that they had some reluctance telling us they weren’t growing podars. They had left it to the last, as if it were a final clincher they’d hoped they wouldn’t have to use, a desperate, last-ditch argument when all the other excuses failed to do the trick and—”

  “They’re just trying to jack up the price,” Lemuel interrupted in a flat tone.

  Maximilian shook his head. “I don’t think so. There was no price set to start with. How can you jack it up when you don’t know what it is?”

  “Whether there was a price or not,” said Lemuel testily, “they still could create a situation where they could hold us up.”

  “There is another factor that might be to our advantage,” Maximilian said. “If they changed the name so they’d have an
excuse not to trade with us, that argues that the whole village feels a moral obligation and has to justify its refusal.”

  “You mean by that,” said Sheridan, “that we can reason with them. Well, perhaps we can. I think at least we’ll try.”

  “There’s too much wrong,” Douglas put in. “Too many things have changed. The new name for the podars and the nailed-up barns and the shabbiness of the villages and the people. The whole planet’s gone to pot. It seems to me our job—the first job we do—is to find what happened here. Once we find that out, maybe we’d have a chance of selling.”

  “I’d like to see the inside of those barns,” said Joshua. “What have they got in there? Do you think there’s any chance we might somehow get a look?”

  “Nothing short of force,” Abraham told him. “I have a hunch that while we’re around, they’ll guard them night and day.”

  “Force is out,” said Sheridan. “All of you know what would happen to us if we used force short of self-defense against an alien people. The entire team would have its license taken away. You guys would spend the rest of your lives scrubbing out headquarters.”

  “Maybe we could just sneak around. Do some slick detective work.”

  “That’s an idea, Josh,” Sheridan said. “Hezekiah, do you know if we have some detective transmogs?”

  “Not that I know of, sir. I have never heard of any team using them.”

  “Just as well,” Abraham observed. “We’d have a hard time disguising ourselves.”

  “If we had a volunteer,” Lemuel said with some enthusiasm, “we could redesign him …”

  “It would seem to me,” said Silas, “that what we have to do is figure out all the different approaches that are possible. Then we can try each approach on a separate village till we latch onto one that works.”

  “Which presupposes,” Maximilian pointed out, “that each village will react the same.”

  Silas said: “I would assume they would. After all, the culture is the same and their communications must be primitive. No village would know what was happening in another village until some little time had passed, which makes each village a perfectly isolated guinea pig for our little tests.”

  “Si, I think you’re right,” said Sheridan. “Somehow or other we have to find a way to break their sales resistance. I don’t care what kind of prices we have to pay for the podars at the moment. I’d be willing to let them skin us alive to start with. Once we have them buying, we can squeeze down the price and come out even in the end. After all, the main thing is to get that cargo sled of ours loaded down with all the podars it can carry.”

  “All right,” said Abraham. “Let’s get to work.”

  They got to work. They spent the whole day at it. They mapped out the various sales approaches. They picked the villages where each one would be tried. Sheridan divided the robots into teams and assigned a team to each project. They worked out every detail. They left not a thing to chance.

  Sheridan sat down to his supper table with the feeling that they had it made—if one of the approaches didn’t work, another surely would. The trouble was that, as he saw it, they had done no planning. They had been so sure that this was an easy one that they had plunged ahead into straight selling without any thought upon the matter.

  In the morning, the robots went out, full of confidence.

  Abraham’s crew had been assigned to a house-to-house campaign and they worked hard and conscientiously. They didn’t miss a single house in the entire village. At every house, the answer had been no. Sometimes it was a firm but simple no; sometimes it was a door slammed in the face; at other times, it was a plea of poverty.

  One thing was plain: Individual Garsonians could be cracked no more readily than Garsonians en masse.

  Gideon and his crew tried the sample racket—handing out gift samples door to door with the understanding they would be back again to display their wares. The Garsonian householders weren’t having any. They refused to take the samples.

  Lemuel headed up the lottery project. A lottery, its proponents argued, appealed to basic greed. And this lottery had been rigged to carry maximum appeal. The price was as low as it could be set—one podar for a ticket. The list of prizes offered was just this side of fabulous. But the Garsonians, as it appeared, were not a greedy people. Not a ticket was sold.

  And the funny thing about it—the unreasonable, maddening, impossible thing about it—was that the Garsonians seemed tempted.

  “You could see them fighting it,” Abraham reported at the conference that night. “You could see they wanted something we had for sale, but they’d steel themselves against it and they never weakened.”

  “We may have them on the very edge,” said Lemuel. “Maybe just a little push is all it will take. Do you suppose we could start a whispering campaign? Maybe we could get it rumored that some other villages are buying right and left. That should weaken the resistance.”

  But Ebenezer was doubtful. “We have to dig down to causes. We have to find out what is behind this buyers’ strike. It may be a very simple thing, if we only knew …”

  Ebenezer took out a team to a distant village. They hauled along with them a pre-fabricated supermarket, which they set up in the village square. They racked their wares attractively. They loaded the place with glamor and excitement. They installed loud-speakers all over town to bellow out their bargains.

  Abraham and Gideon headed up two talking-billboard crews. They ranged far and wide, setting up their billboards splashed with attractive color, and installing propaganda tapes.

  Sheridan had transmogged Oliver and Silas into semantics experts and they had engineered the tapes—a careful, skillful job. They did not bear down too blatantly on the commercial angle, although it certainly was there. The tapes were cuddly in spots and candid in others. At all times, they rang with deep sincerity. They sang the praises of the Garsonians for the decent, upstanding folks they were; they preached pithy homilies on honesty and fairness and the keeping of contracts; they presented the visitors as a sort of cross between public benefactors and addle-pated nitwits who could easily be outsmarted.

  The tapes ran day and night. They pelted the defenseless Garsonians with a smooth, sleek advertising—and the effects should have been devastating, since the Garsonians were entirely unfamiliar with any kind of advertising.

  Lemuel stayed behind at base and tramped up and down the beach, with his hands clenched behind his back, thinking furiously. At times he stopped his pacing long enough to scribble frantic notes, jotting down ideas.

  Lemuel was trying to arrive at some adaptation of an old sales gag that he felt sure would work if he could only get it figured out—the ancient I-am-working-my-way-through-college wheeze.

  Joshua and Thaddeus came to Sheridan for a pair of playwright transmogs. Sheridan said they had none, but Hezekiah, forever optimistic, ferreted into the bottom of the transmog chest. He came up with one transmog labeled auctioneer and another public speaker. They were the closest he could find.

  Disgusted, the two rejected them and retired into seclusion, working desperately and as best they could on a medicine show routine.

  For example, how did one write jokes for an alien people? What would they regard as funny? The off-color joke—oh, very fine, except that one would have to know in some detail the sexual life of the people it was aimed at. The mother-in-law joke—once again one would have to know; there were a lot of places where mothers-in-law were held in high regard, and other places where it was bad taste to even mention them. The dialect routine, of course, was strictly out, as it well deserved to be. Also, so far as the Garsonians were concerned, was the business slicker joke. The Garsonians were no commercial people; such a joke would sail clear above their heads.

  But Joshua and Thaddeus, for all of that, were relatively undaunted. They requisitioned the files of data from Sheridan and spent hours p
oring over them, analyzing the various aspects of Garsonian life that might be safely written into their material. They made piles of notes. They drafted intricate charts showing relationships of Garsonian words and the maze of native social life. They wrote and rewrote and revised and polished. Eventually, they hammered out their script.

  “There’s nothing like a show,” Joshua told Sheridan with conviction, “to loosen up a people. You get them feeling good and they lose their inhibitions. Besides, you have made them become somewhat indebted to you. You have entertained them and naturally they must feel the need to reciprocate.”

  “I hope it works,” said Sheridan, somewhat doubtful and discouraged.

  For nothing else was working.

  In the distant village, the Garsonians had unbent sufficiently to visit the supermarket—to visit, not to buy. It almost seemed as if to them the market was some great museum or showplace. They would file down the aisles and goggle at the merchandise and at times reach out and touch it, but they didn’t buy. They were, in fact, insulted if one suggested perhaps they’d like to buy.

  In the other villages, the billboards had at first attracted wide attention. Crowds had gathered around them and had listened by the hour. But the novelty had worn off by now and they paid the tapes very little attention. And they still continued to ignore the robots. Even more pointedly, they ignored or rebuffed all attempts to sell.

  It was disheartening.

  Lemuel gave up his pacing and threw away his notes. He admitted he was licked. There was no way, on Garson IV, to adapt the idea of the college salesman.

  Baldwin headed up a team that tried to get the whisper campaign started. The natives flatly disbelieved that any other village would go out and buy.

  There remained the medicine show and Joshua and Thaddeus had a troupe rehearsing. The project was somewhat hampered by the fact that even Hezekiah could not dig up any actor transmogs, but, even so, they were doing well.

  Despite the failure of everything they had tried, the robots kept going out to the villages, kept plugging away, kept on trying to sell, hoping that one day they would get a clue, a hint, an indication that might help them break the shell of reserve and obstinacy set up by the natives.