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

wouldn’t know,” said Abraham. “All I have now is a physicist transmog. Give me one on sociology and I’ll wrestle with the problem.”
    There was a shout outside the barn and they whirled toward the door. Ebenezer was coming up the ramp and in his arms he carried a tiny, dangling form.
    â€œIt’s one of them,” gasped Gideon. “It’s a native, sure enough!”
    Ebenezer knelt and placed the little native tenderly on the floor. “I found him in the field. He was lying in a ditch. I’m afraid he’s done for.”
    Sheridan stepped forward and bent above the native. It was an old man—any one of the thousands of old men he’d seen in the villages. The same leathery old face with the wind and weather wrinkles in it, the same shaggy brows shielding deep-sunk eyes, the same scraggly crop of whiskers, the same sense of forgotten shiftlessness and driven stubbornness.
    â€œLeft behind,” said Ebenezer. “Left behind when all the others went. He must have fallen sick out in the field …”
    â€œGet my canteen,” Sheridan said. “It’s hanging by the door.”
    The oldster opened his eyes and glanced around the circle of faces that stared down at him. He rubbed a hand across his face, leaving streaks of dirt.
    â€œI fell,” he mumbled. “I remember falling. I fell into a ditch.”
    â€œHere’s the water, Steve,” said Abraham.
    Sheridan took it, lifted the old man and held him half upright against his chest. He tilted the canteen to the native’s lips. The oldster drank unneatly, gulping at the water. Some of it spilled, splashing down his whiskers to drip onto his belly.
    Sheridan took the canteen away.
    â€œThank you,” the native said and, Sheridan reflected, that was the first civil word to come their way from any of the natives.
    The native rubbed his face again with a dirty claw. “The people all are gone?”
    â€œAll gone,” said Sheridan.
    â€œToo late,” the old man said. “I would have made it if I hadn’t fallen down. Perhaps they hunted for me …” His voice trailed off into nothingness.
    â€œIf you don’t mind, sir,” suggested Hezekiah, “I’ll get a medic transmog.”
    â€œPerhaps you should,” said Sheridan. “Although I doubt it’ll do much good. He should have died days ago out there in the field.”
    â€œSteve,” said Gideon, speaking softly, “a human doctor isn’t too much use treating alien people. In time, if we had the time, we could find out about this fellow—something about his body chemistry and his metabolism. Then we could doctor him.”
    â€œThat’s right, Steve,” Abraham said.
    Sheridan shrugged. “All right then, Hezekiah. Forget about the transmog.”
    He laid the old man back on the floor again and got up off his knees.
    He sat on his heels and rocked slowly back and forth.
    â€œPerhaps,” he said to the native, “you’ll answer one question. Where did all your people go?”
    â€œIn there,” the native said, raising a feeble arm to point at the machine. “In there, and then they went away just as the harvest we gathered did.”
    Sheridan stayed squatting on the floor beside the stricken native.
    Reuben brought in an armload of grass and wadded it beneath the native’s head as a sort of pillow.
    So the Garsonians had really gone away, Sheridan told himself, had up and left the planet. Had left it, using the machines that had been used to make delivery of the podars . And if Galactic Enterprises had machines like that, then they (whoever, wherever they might be) had a tremendous edge on Central Trading. For Central Trading’s lumbering cargo sleds, snaking their laborious way across the light-years, could offer only feeble competition to machines like those.
    He had thought, be remembered, the first day they had landed, that a