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

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