Free I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories by Clifford D. Simak

a look at it.”
    Sheridan took a look. The inside of the cap was a mass of fused metal.
    â€œThere were some working parts in there,” said Gideon, “but they have been destroyed.”
    Sheridan scratched his head. “Deliberately? A self-destruction relay?”
    Abraham nodded. “They apparently were all finished with it. If we hadn’t been here, I suppose they would have carted this machine and the rest of them back home, wherever that may be. But they couldn’t take a chance of one of them falling in our hands. So they pressed the button or whatever they had to do and the entire works went pouf.”
    â€œBut there are other machines. Apparently one in every barn.”
    â€œProbably just the same as this,” said Lemuel, rising from his knees beside the cap.
    â€œWhat’s your guess?” asked Sheridan.
    â€œA matter transference machine, a teleporter, whatever you want to call it,” Abraham told him. “Not deduced, of course, from anything in the machine itself, but from the circumstances. Look at this barn. There’s not a podar in it. Those podars went somewhere. This picnicking friend of yours—”
    â€œThey call themselves,” said Sheridan, “Galactic Enterprises. A messenger just arrived. He says they offered Central Trading a deal on the podar drug.”
    â€œAnd now Central Trading,” Abraham supplied, “enormously embarrassed and financially outraged, will pin the blame on us because we’ve delivered not a podar.”
    â€œI have no doubt of it,” said Sheridan. “It all depends upon whether or not we can locate these native friends of ours.”
    â€œI would think that most unlikely,” Gideon said. “Our reconnaissance showed all the villages empty throughout the entire planet. Do you suppose they might have left in these machines? If they’d transport podars, they’d probably transport people.”
    â€œPerhaps,” said Lemuel, making a feeble joke, “everything that begins with the letter p.”
    â€œWhat are the chances of finding how they work?” asked Sheridan. “This is something that Central could make a lot of use of.”
    Abraham shook his head. “I can’t tell you, Steve. Out of all these machines on the planet, which amounts to one in every barn, there is a certain mathematical chance that we might find one that was not destroyed.”
    â€œBut even if we did,” said Gideon, “there is an excellent chance that it would immediately destroy itself if we tried to tamper with it.”
    â€œAnd if we don’t find one that is not destroyed?”
    â€œThere is a chance,” Lemuel admitted. “All of them would not destroy themselves to the same degree, of course. Nor would the pattern of destruction always be the same. From, say, a thousand of them, you might be able to work out a good idea of what kind of machinery there was in the cone.”
    â€œAnd say we could find out what kind of machinery was there?”
    â€œThat’s a hard one to answer, Steve,” Abraham said. “Even if we had one complete and functioning, I honestly don’t know if we could ferret out the principle to the point where we could duplicate it. You must remember that at no time has the human race come even close to something of this nature.”
    It made a withering sort of sense to Sheridan. Seeing a totally unfamiliar device work, even having it blueprinted in exact detail, would convey nothing whatever if the theoretical basis was missing. It was, completely, and there was a great deal less available here than a blueprint or even working model.
    â€œThey used those machines to transport the podars ,” he said, “and possibly to transport the people. And if that is true, it must be the people went voluntarily—we’d have known if there was force involved. Abe, can you tell me: Why would the people go?”
    â€œI