Then the wonder went and the darkness went. There was light again and knowing, not only the knowing of the present, but of the past as well. As if something had snapped a switch or pushed a button. As if I’d been turned on.
I had been human once (and I knew what human was), but I was no longer. I knew it from the instant that unseen operator snapped the switch. It wasn’t hard to know. I hadn’t any head and my eyes were floating way up in the air and they were funny eyes. They didn’t look just one way; they looked all the way around and saw everything. Somewhere between my eyes and me were hearing and taste and smell and a lot of other senses I’d never had before—a heat sense, a magnetic indicator, a sniffer-out of life.
I sniffed out a lot of life—big life—and it was moving fast and I saw it was the lobsters, moving very fast to dive down into their burrows. They must have dived down like scared rabbits, for in an instant I lost all sense of them, the sense of them shielded out by many feet of ground. But to replace them was a great deal of other life, a thousand different kinds of life, perhaps more than a thousand different kinds of life and I knew that deep inside my brain all these different life forms—all the plants and grasses, all the insects (or this planet’s equivalent of insects), all the viruses and bacteria—were being filed away most neatly, to be pulled out and identified if there ever should be need.
My brain, I knew, was somewhere in my guts. It had to be, I knew, for I hadn’t any head. It was no proper place for a brain to be, but I had no more than thought that than I knew that it was the right place, down where it was protected and not sticking up into the air where anything or anyone at all could take a swipe at it.
I hadn’t any head and my brain was somewhere in the middle of me and my body was an oval, sort of like an egg, and it was armor-plated. Legs—I had a hundred legs, tiny things like caterpillar legs. I figured out, as well, that my eyes weren’t floating in the air, but were at the ends of two flexible stalks, which I guess you’d call antennae. And those antennae were more than just stalks to hold up my eyes. They were ears as well, more sensitive than my human ears had been, and taste and smell, heat sense, life sense, magnetic sense and other things which had not come clear as yet.
Just knowing all I had parked away in those two antennae gave me a queasy feeling, but there seemed really nothing bad about it, nothing that I couldn’t handle. With all the extra senses, I thought, I’d sure be hard to catch. Even feeling a little proud, perhaps, at how well equipped I was.
I saw that I was on a hilltop, the very hilltop I’d sat upon with the lobsters lapping up the booze. How long ago I might have been there, there was no way of knowing. The ashes of the fire were still there, the fire that they had kindled, proudly, with a fire-drill, and I had let them kindle it, never letting on that I could have lit the fire with a thumb-stroke on my lighter. Even managing, if I remembered rightly, to look a little envious at the ease with which they handled fire. The campfire was old, however, with the prints of pattering raindrops imprinted on the ash.
The ship was just across the valley and in a little while I’d go over to it and take off. I’d file my claim and make arrangements to put the planet on a paying basis. Everything was all right, except that I wasn’t human, and there upon that hilltop I began to miss my humanness. It’s a funny thing; you don’t ever stop to think what human is until you haven’t got it.
I was slightly scared, I suppose, at not being human; perhaps more than a little scared at all the junk I had that made me not be human. With a little effort I still could make myself feel human in my mind, although I knew damn well I wasn’t. And I got lonesome, just like that, for the spaceship squatting over there across the valley. Once I got inside it, I told myself, I would finally be safe.
But safe from what, I wondered. I had been dead, but now I wasn’t dead. It seemed to me I should be happy, but I couldn’t seem to be.
One of the lobsters stuck his head out of a burrow. I saw him and I heard him and I sensed his lifeness and his temperature. I thought that he would know.
“What is going on?” I asked him. “What has happened to me?”
“There was nothing else to do,” he told me. “We feel so sorry for you. There was so much wrong with you. We did the best we could, but you were so badly made.”
“Badly made!” I yelled and started for him and he went down the burrow so fast that even with all my sensory equipment I never saw him go.
Two things hit me hard.
I had talked to him and he’d answered and we’d understood each other and that night by the campfire we had barely passed the grunt-and-gesture stage.
And if I’d heard him right, it had been the lobsters that had put me back together, that had made me what I was. It was all insane, of course. How could those crummy lobsters do a thing like that? They lived in burrows and they used a fire-drill to build themselves a campfire and they didn’t even know how to make decent booze. It made no sense that a pack of lobsters living like a herd of woodchucks could have patched me back together.
But apparently they had; they were the only ones around. But if they had—and, again, they must have—they could have put me back into my former shape. It they were able to make me the kind of thing I was, they could have made me human. They must have used a lot of bio-engineering to fix me up at all, working with completely flexible culture tissues and a lot of other stuff of which I had no idea. If they had that kind of stuff to work with, the little creeps could have made me human.
I wondered if they’d played some sort of joke on me, and if, by God, they had, they would pay for it. When I got back I’d work their stupid tails off; I’d show them who was playing jokes.
They had dug me out and patched me up and I was still alive. There must not have been much left of me the way those boulders socked me. Perhaps they had no more than a hunk of brain to build on. It must have been a job to make anything of me. I suppose I should have been grateful to them, but I wasn’t able to work up much gratitude.
They had loused me up for sure. No matter how human I might feel or even act, to the eye I wasn’t human. Out in the galaxy I’d not be accepted as a human. By certain people, perhaps, and intellectually, but to most human beings I’d be nothing but a freak.
I’d get along, of course. With a planet such as this, one couldn’t help but get along. With the kind of bankroll I’d have I’d get along all right.
When I started for the ship I was afraid those caterpillar legs of mine might slow me down, but they didn’t. I went skimming along faster than I would have walked and over uneven ground I ordinarily would have walked around. I thought at first I might have to concentrate to make all those legs track in line, but I went along as if I’d been walking caterpillar-fashion all my life.
The eyes were something, too. I could see all around me and up into the sky as well. I realized that, as a primate, I had been looking down a tunnel, blind by more than half. And I realized, too, that as a primate I would have been confused and disoriented by this total vision, but as I was made it wasn’t. Not only my body had been changed, but my sensory centers as well.
Total vision wasn’t all of it, of course. There were many other sensory centers located in the eyestalks, some of which I had figured out, but a lot of others that still had me puzzled and a bit confused; they were picking up information to which my human senses had been blind—the kind of stuff I’d never known about and couldn’t put a name to. The really curious thing about it was that none of these new senses were particularly emphasized—they seemed very natural. They were feeding into me an integrated awareness of all the forces and conditions that surrounded me. I had a total and absolute awareness of my physical environment.
I reached the spaceship and I didn’t bother with the ladder. I just upended myself and went scooting up the side of that slick metal without a single thought. There were sucking discs in the pads of the caterpillar legs and I hadn’t k
nown about them until it came time to use them. I wondered how many other abilities I wouldn’t know about until there was need of them.
I hadn’t bothered to lock the hatch cover when I’d left, because there was nothing on the planet that could get into the ship, and now, finally at the hatch, I was glad I hadn’t: if I had, the key would now be lost, buried somewhere in the rock slide.
All I had to do was push and the cover of the hatch would open. So I went to put out an arm to push and absolutely nothing happened. I didn’t have arms.
I hung there, sick and cold.
And in that moment of shock, in the sick and cold, not only the lack of arms and hands, but all the rest of it, all the impact of what had happened and what I had become hit me in the face, except I hadn’t any face. My entrails shriveled up. My marrow turned to water. The bitter taste of bile surged up inside of me.
I huddled close against the hard metal of the ship, clinging to it as the last thing of any meaning in my life. A cold wind out of nowhere was blowing through and through me, moaning as it blew. This was it, I thought. There wasn’t anything more pitiful than a being without manipulatory organs and, even in my present mental state, pity was something I could get along without.
Thinking about the pity made me sore, I guess, the idea that anything, anything at all, would feel sorry for me. Pity was the one thing that I couldn’t stomach.
Those crummy lobsters, I thought, the stupid bunglers, the stinking yokels! To give me better senses and better feet and a better body and then forget the arms! How could they expect me to do anything without arms?
And, hanging there, still sick, still cold, but feeling an edge of anger now, I knew there had been no mistake. They weren’t bunglers and they weren’t yokels. They were miles ahead of me. They’d left off the arms on purpose so I could do nothing. They had crippled me and tied me to the planet. They’d upset all my plans. I could never get away and I’d never tell anyone about this planet and they could go on living out their stupid lives inside their filthy burrows.
They’d upset my plans and that must have meant they had known, or guessed, my plans. They had me figured out to the fraction of a millimeter. While I had been psyching them, they’d been psyching me. They knew exactly what I was and what I’d meant to do and, when the time had come, they had known exactly what to do about me.
The rolling boulders had been no accident. I remembered, now that I thought about it, the shadowy figures running along the cliff’s base when the rocks had begun to move.
They had killed me, and much as I might resent it, I could understand the killing. What I couldn’t understand was why they didn’t let it go at that. They had solved their problem with my death; why did they bother to dig into the rubble to get a piece of brain so they could resurrect me?
As I thought about all the implications of it, rage built up in me. They had not let well enough alone, they’d not been satisfied; they’d made a plaything out of me—a toy, a bauble in which they could find amusement, but if I knew them, amusement from afar, at a distance where there’d be no danger to them. Although what in hell I could do to them, without any arms, was more than I could imagine.
But I wasn’t going to let them get away with it, by God!
I’d get into the spaceship somehow and take off and somewhere I would find a human or some other thing that had arms or the equivalent of arms and I’d make a deal with them and those stinking lobsters would finish up working out their hearts for me.
I bent an eyestalk down and tried to push against the cover, but the stalk had little power. So I doubled it over and pushed with it again and the cover barely moved—but it did move. I kept on pushing and the cover swung slowly inward and finally stood open. Who needed arms, I thought triumphantly. If I could use an eyestalk to open the hatch, I could practice with the stalks until I could use them to operate the ship.
You clowns out there, I said, better start right now to dig those burrows deeper because, so help me, I’m coming back to get you. There couldn’t no one do what they’d done to me and get away with it.
I moved over a bit to get into the hatch and I found there was no way to get into the hatch. I was just a bit too big. Not very much, just a bit too big. I pushed and shoved. I twisted and turned every way I could. No matter what I did, the body was too big.
Planned, I thought. They never missed a lick. They hadn’t overlooked a thing. They’d made me without arms and had the hatch all measured and made me just too big—not too much too big, but just a shade too big. They had led me on and now they were rolling in their burrows laughing and the day would come when I’d make them smart for that.
But that was an empty thought and I knew it was. There was no way that I could make them smart.
I wasn’t going anywhere and I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t going to get into the ship and if I couldn’t get into the ship, I wouldn’t leave the planet. I hadn’t any arms and I hadn’t any head and since I didn’t have a head, I hadn’t any mouth. Without a mouth, how was a man to eat? Had they condemned me not only to being trapped upon this planet, but dying of starvation?
I climbed down to the ground, so shaken with fear and anger that I was extra careful in my climbing down for fear that I might slip and fall.
Once down I crouched beside the ship and tried to lay it all out in a row so I could have a look at it.
I wasn’t human any more. Still human in my mind, of course, but certainly not in body. I was trapped upon the planet and would not be going back to the human race again. And even if I could, there’d be a lot of things I couldn’t do. I’d never take a babe to bed again. I’d never eat a steak. I’d never have a drink. And my own people would either laugh at me or be scared of me and I couldn’t quite make out which would be the worse.
It seemed incredible, on the face of it, that the lobsters would be able to do a thing like this. It didn’t quite make sense that a tribe of prairie dogs that looked like something you’d expect upon your dinner plate could take a piece of brain and from it construct a new and living being. There was about them nothing that suggested such ability and knowledge, no trappings to indicate they were other than what they appeared to be, a species of creatures that had developed some intelligence, but had made no great cultural advances.
But appearances were wrong; there was no doubt of that. They had a culture and an ability and knowledge—far more of both of them than my psych testing had even hinted at. And that, of course, would be the way with a race like them. I hadn’t based my conclusions upon fact, but on data they had fed me.
If they had this kind of culture, why were they hiding it? Why live in burrows? Why use a drill to start a fire? Why not a city? Why not a road? Why couldn’t the crummy little stinkers at least act civilized?
The answer wasn’t hard to find. If you act civilized, you stick out like a bandaged thumb. But if you lay doggo and act stupid, you got the edge. Anything that comes along will underestimate you and then you are in a good position to let them have it, right between the eyes. Maybe I hadn’t been the first planet hunter to show up. Maybe there had been other planet hunters in the past. Maybe through the years these vicious little lobsters had figured out exactly how to deal with them.
Although what I couldn’t figure out was why they didn’t do it simple. Why all the fancy frills? When they killed a planet hunter why not let it go at that? Why did they have to bring him back to life and play silly games with him?
I crouched on the ground and looked across the land and it was as good, or better, than I had thought it was. There were forests along the streams that would provide good timber and back from the watercourses great stretches of rich and level land that could be used for farming. In those hills beyond lay silver ore—and how in the hell could I be so sure there was silver there?
It shook me up to know. I shouldn’t have known. I might guess there were minerals in the hill
s, but there was no way to know exactly where they were or what kind they’d be. But I did know—not guessing, not hoping, but knowing. It was my new body that knew, of course, employing some as yet unrealized sensor that was planted in it. More than likely later on, when it really got to working, I could look at any stretch of land and know precisely what was in it. It was all wonderful, of course, but without any arms and no way to get off the planet, it was a total loss. That was the way they worked it, that was how they got their laughs. They held out a piece of candy and when baby reached for it, they slashed off his grasping paws.
The sun felt warm on my body and I didn’t want to move. I should be up and doing, although I could not think, for the life of me, of a thing I should be doing. Doing, for the moment, was at an end for me. In a little while, perhaps, I might be able to figure out a thing or two to do. In the meantime I’d simply sit here and eat up some more sunlight.
That’s the way I knew. It came sneaking in upon me—all these new-fashioned abilities, all the fancy senses, all the newfound knowledge. I was eating sunlight. I didn’t need a mouth. I simply fed on the energy of sunlight. I thought about this eating, this soaking up of sunlight and I knew, as I thought about it, that it need not be sunlight, although sunlight was the easiest. But if necessary I could reach out and grab energy from anything at all. I could suck up the energy in a stream of water. I could drain it from a tree or rob a blade of grass. I could extract it from the soil.
Simple and efficient, and as close to foolproof as a body could be made. The dirty little creep, sticking his head out of the burrow, had said my human body had been badly made. And, of course, it had. It had not been engineered. It had simply grown evolutionally, through millennia, doing the best it could with the little that it had.
I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories Page 8