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

refusal.”
    â€œYou mean by that,” said Sheridan, “that we can reason with them. Well, perhaps we can. I think at least we’ll try.”
    â€œThere’s too much wrong,” Douglas put in. “Too many things have changed. The new name for the podars and the nailed-up barns and the shabbiness of the villages and the people. The whole planet’s gone to pot. It seems to me our job—the first job we do—is to find what happened here. Once we find that out, maybe we’d have a chance of selling.”
    â€œI’d like to see the inside of those barns,” said Joshua. “What have they got in there? Do you think there’s any chance we might somehow get a look?”
    â€œNothing short of force,” Abraham told him. “I have a hunch that while we’re around, they’ll guard them night and day.”
    â€œForce is out,” said Sheridan. “All of you know what would happen to us if we used force short of self-defense against an alien people. The entire team would have its license taken away. You guys would spend the rest of your lives scrubbing out headquarters.”
    â€œMaybe we could just sneak around. Do some slick detective work.”
    â€œThat’s an idea, Josh,” Sheridan said. “Hezekiah, do you know if we have some detective transmogs?”
    â€œNot that I know of, sir. I have never heard of any team using them.”
    â€œJust as well,” Abraham observed. “We’d have a hard time disguising ourselves.”
    â€œIf we had a volunteer,” Lemuel said with some enthusiasm, “we could redesign him …”
    â€œIt would seem to me,” said Silas, “that what we have to do is figure out all the different approaches that are possible. Then we can try each approach on a separate village till we latch onto one that works.”
    â€œWhich presupposes,” Maximilian pointed out, “that each village will react the same.”
    Silas said: “I would assume they would. After all, the culture is the same and their communications must be primitive. No village would know what was happening in another village until some little time had passed, which makes each village a perfectly isolated guinea pig for our little tests.”
    â€œSi, I think you’re right,” said Sheridan. “Somehow or other we have to find a way to break their sales resistance. I don’t care what kind of prices we have to pay for the podars at the moment. I’d be willing to let them skin us alive to start with. Once we have them buying, we can squeeze down the price and come out even in the end. After all, the main thing is to get that cargo sled of ours loaded down with all the podars it can carry.”
    â€œAll right,” said Abraham. “Let’s get to work.”
    They got to work. They spent the whole day at it. They mapped out the various sales approaches. They picked the villages where each one would be tried. Sheridan divided the robots into teams and assigned a team to each project. They worked out every detail. They left not a thing to chance.
    Sheridan sat down to his supper table with the feeling that they had it made—if one of the approaches didn’t work, another surely would. The trouble was that, as he saw it, they had done no planning. They had been so sure that this was an easy one that they had plunged ahead into straight selling without any thought upon the matter.
    In the morning, the robots went out, full of confidence.
    Abraham’s crew had been assigned to a house-to-house campaign and they worked hard and conscientiously. They didn’t miss a single house in the entire village. At every house, the answer had been no. Sometimes it was a firm but simple no; sometimes it was a door slammed in the face; at other times, it was a plea of poverty.
    One thing was plain: Individual Garsonians could be cracked no more readily than Garsonians en masse.
    Gideon