I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories (5 page)

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 poring 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.

One day Gideon, out alone, radioed to base.

“There's something out here underneath a tree that you should take a look at,” he told Sheridan.

“Something?”

“A different kind of being. It looks intelligent.”

“A Garsonian?”

“Humanoid, all right, but it's no Garsonian.”

“I'll be right out,” said Sheridan. “You stay there so you can point it out to me.”

“It has probably seen me,” Gideon said, “but I did not approach it. I thought you might like first whack at it yourself.”

As Gideon had said, the creature was sitting underneath a tree. It had a glittering cloth spread out and an ornate jug set out and was taking things out of a receptacle that probably was a hamper.

It was more attractively humanoid than the Garsonians. Its features were finely chiseled and its body had a look of lithe ranginess. It was dressed in the richest fabrics and was all decked out with jewels. It had a decided social air about it.

“Hello, friend,” Sheridan said in Garsonian.

The creature seemed to understand him, but it smiled in a superior manner and seemed not to be too happy at Sheridan's intrusion.

“Perhaps,” it finally said, “you have the time to sit down for a while.”

Which, the way that it was put, was a plain and simple invitation for Sheridan to say no, he was sorry, but he hadn't and he must be getting on.

“Why, certainly,” said Sheridan. “Thank you very much.”

He sat down and watched the creature continue to extract things from the hamper.

“It's slightly difficult,” the creature told him, “for us to communicate in this barbaric language. But I suppose it's the best we can do. You do not happen to know Ballic, do you?”

“I'm sorry,” said Sheridan. “I've never heard of it.”

“I had thought you might. It is widely used.”

“We can get along,” said Sheridan quietly, “with the language native to this planet.”

“Oh, certainly,” agreed the creature. “I presume I'm not trespassing. If I am, of course—”

“Not at all. I'm glad to find you here.”

“I would offer you some food, but I hesitate to do so. Your metabolism undoubtedly is not the same as mine. It should pain me to poison you.”

Sheridan nodded to indicate his gratitude. The food indeed was tempting. All of it was packaged attractively and some of it looked so delectable that it set the mouth to watering.

“I often come here for …” The creature hunted for the Garsonian word and there wasn't any.

Sheridan tried to help him out. “I think in my language I would call it picnic.”

“An eating-out-of-doors,” the stranger said. “That is the nearest I can come in the language of our hosts.”

“We have the same idea.”

The creature brightened up considerably at this evidence of mutual understanding. “I think, my friend, that we have much in common. Perhaps I could leave some of this food with you and you could analyze it. Then the next time I come, you could join me.”

Sheridan shook his head. “I doubt I'll stay much longer.”

“Oh,” the stranger said, and he seemed pleased at it. “So you're a transitory being, too. Wings passing in the night. One hears a rustle and then the sound is gone forever.”

“A most poetic thought,” said Sheridan, “and a most descriptive one.”

“Although,” the creature said, “I come here fairly often. I've grown to love this planet. It is such a fine spot for an eating-out-of-doors. So restful and simple and unhurried. It is not cluttered up with activity and the people are so genuine, albeit somewhat dirty and very, very stupid. But I find it in my heart to love them for their lack of sophistication and their closeness to the soil and the clear-eyed view of life and their uncomplicated living of that life.”

He halted his talk and cocked an eye at Sheridan.

“Don't you find it so, my friend?”

“Yes, of course I do,” agreed Sheridan, rather hurriedly.

“There are so few places in the Galaxy,” mourned the stranger, “where one can be alone in comfort. Oh, I do not mean alone entirely, or even physically. But an aloneness in the sense that there is space to live, that one is not pushed about by boundless, blind ambitions or smothered by the impact of other personalities. There are, of course, the lonely planets which are lonely only by the virtue of their being impossible for one to exist upon. These we must rule out.”

He ate a little, daintily, and in a mincing manner. But he took a healthy snort from the ornate jug.

“This is excellent,” said the creature, holding out the jug. “Are you sure you do not want to chance it?”

“I think I'd better not.”

“I suppose it's wise of you,” the stranger admitted. “Life is not a thing that a person parts from without due consideration.”

He had another drink, then put the jug down in his lap and sat there fondling it.

“Not that I am one,” he said, “to extoll the virtue of living above all other things. Surely there must be other facets of the universal pattern that have as much to offer …”

They spent a pleasant afternoon together.

When Sheridan went back to the flier, the creature had finished off the jug and was sprawled, happily pickled, among the litter of the picnic.

IV

Grasping at straws, Sheridan tried to fit the picnicking alien into the pattern, but there was no place where he'd fit.

Perhaps, after all, he was no more than what he seemed—a flitting dilettante with a passion for a lonely eating-out-of-doors and an addiction to the bottle.

Yet he knew the native language and he had said he came here often and that in itself was more than merely strange. With apparently the entire Galaxy in which to flit around, why should he gravitate to Garson IV, which, to the human eye, at least, was a most unprepossessing planet?

And another thing—how had he gotten here?

“Gideon,” asked Sheridan, “did you see, by any chance, any sort of conveyance parked nearby that our friend could have traveled in?”

Gideon shook his head. “Now that you mention it, I am sure there wasn't. I would have noticed it.”

“Has it occurred to you, sir,” inquired Hezekiah, “that he may have mastered the ability of teleportation? It is not impossible. There was that race out on Pilico …”

“That's right,” said Sheridan, “but the Pilicoans were good for no more than a mile or so at a time. You remember how they went popping along, like a jack rabbit making mile-long jumps, but making them so fast that you couldn't see him jump. This gent must have covered light-years. He asked me about a language that I never heard of. Indicated that it is widely spoken in at least some parts of the Galaxy.”

“You are worrying yourself unduly, sir,” cautioned Hezekiah. “We have more important things than this galivanting alien to trouble ourselves about.”

“You're right,” said Sheridan. “If we don't get this cargo moving, it will be my neck.”