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

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 known about them until it came time to use them. I wondered how many other abilities I wouldn’t know about until