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

and his crew tried the sample racket—handing out gift samples door to door with the understanding they would be back again to display their wares. The Garsonian householders weren’t having any. They refused to take the samples.
    Lemuel headed up the lottery project. A lottery, its proponents argued, appealed to basic greed. And this lottery had been rigged to carry maximum appeal. The price was as low as it could be set—one podar for a ticket. The list of prizes offered was just this side of fabulous. But the Garsonians, as it appeared, were not a greedy people. Not a ticket was sold.
    And the funny thing about it—the unreasonable, maddening, impossible thing about it—was that the Garsonians seemed tempted.
    â€œYou could see them fighting it,” Abraham reported at the conference that night. “You could see they wanted something we had for sale, but they’d steel themselves against it and they never weakened.”
    â€œWe may have them on the very edge,” said Lemuel. “Maybe just a little push is all it will take. Do you suppose we could start a whispering campaign? Maybe we could get it rumored that some other villages are buying right and left. That should weaken the resistance.”
    But Ebenezer was doubtful. “We have to dig down to causes. We have to find out what is behind this buyers’ strike. It may be a very simple thing, if we only knew …”
    Ebenezer took out a team to a distant village. They hauled along with them a pre-fabricated supermarket, which they set up in the village square. They racked their wares attractively. They loaded the place with glamor and excitement. They installed loud-speakers all over town to bellow out their bargains.
    Abraham and Gideon headed up two talking-billboard crews. They ranged far and wide, setting up their billboards splashed with attractive color, and installing propaganda tapes.
    Sheridan had transmogged Oliver and Silas into semantics experts and they had engineered the tapes—a careful, skillful job. They did not bear down too blatantly on the commercial angle, although it certainly was there. The tapes were cuddly in spots and candid in others. At all times, they rang with deep sincerity. They sang the praises of the Garsonians for the decent, upstanding folks they were; they preached pithy homilies on honesty and fairness and the keeping of contracts; they presented the visitors as a sort of cross between public benefactors and addle-pated nitwits who could easily be outsmarted.
    The tapes ran day and night. They pelted the defenseless Garsonians with a smooth, sleek advertising—and the effects should have been devastating, since the Garsonians were entirely unfamiliar with any kind of advertising.
    Lemuel stayed behind at base and tramped up and down the beach, with his hands clenched behind his back, thinking furiously. At times he stopped his pacing long enough to scribble frantic notes, jotting down ideas.
    Lemuel was trying to arrive at some adaptation of an old sales gag that he felt sure would work if he could only get it figured out—the ancient I-am-working-my-way-through-college wheeze.
    Joshua and Thaddeus came to Sheridan for a pair of playwright transmogs. Sheridan said they had none, but Hezekiah, forever optimistic, ferreted into the bottom of the transmog chest. He came up with one transmog labeled auctioneer and another public speaker. They were the closest he could find.
    Disgusted, the two rejected them and retired into seclusion, working desperately and as best they could on a medicine show routine.
    For example, how did one write jokes for an alien people? What would they regard as funny? The off-color joke—oh, very fine, except that one would have to know in some detail the sexual life of the people it was aimed at. The mother-in-law joke—once again one would have to know; there were a lot of places where mothers-in-law were held in high regard, and other places