I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories (12 page)

And now I come to the point of this letter, the thing that has me worried.

Today there are just a few less than three billion of us humans in the world. By the year 2000 there may be as many as six billion of us.

We're pretty small, of course, and these things went in for tonnage, for dinosaurs and mastodon and such. But there are so many of us! Small as we are, we may be getting to the point where we'll be worth their while.

Ogre

One of the earliest of many Simak stories that explore the notion of plant-based intelligence, this story, originally published in the January 1944 issue of
Astounding Science Fiction
, was initially entitled “Last Concert,” which gives a better hint at the point of the story than does the title under which it was ultimately released. But while there is a great deal that could be said about numerous aspects of this story, going into such detail might spoil it for you. However, I'll mention the rather unusual action Cliff took, more than a decade later, of using the concept of the “life blanket” in his later story “So Bright the Vision”—not the usual reuse of an idea or name from an older story, but a rare form of self-reference that implied credit to the older story for providing a concept in the newer one.

—dww

The moss brought the news. Hundreds of miles the word had gossiped its way along, through many devious ways. For the moss did not grow everywhere. It grew only where the soil was sparse and niggardly, where the larger, lustier, more vicious plant things could not grow to rob it of light, or uproot it, or crowd it out, or do it other harm.

The moss told the story to Nicodemus, life blanket of Don Mackenzie, and it all came about because Mackenzie took a bath.

Mackenzie took his time in the bathroom, wallowing around in the tub and braying out a song, while Nicodemus, feeling only half a thing, moped outside the door. Without Mackenzie, Nicodemus was, in fact, even less than half of a thing. Accepted as intelligent life, Nicodemus and others of his tribe were intelligent only when they were wrapped about their humans. Their intelligence and emotions were borrowed from the things that wore them.

For the aeons before the human beings came to this twilight world, the life blankets had dragged out a humdrum existence. Occasionally one of them allied itself with a higher form of plant life, but not often. After all, such an arrangement was very little better than staying as they were.

When the humans came, however, the blankets finally clicked. Between them and the men of Earth grew up a perfect mutual agreement, a highly profitable and agreeable instance of symbiosis. Overnight, the blankets became one of the greatest single factors in galactic exploration.

For the man who wore one of them, like a cloak around his shoulders, need never worry where a meal was coming from; knew, furthermore, that he would be fed correctly, with a scientific precision that automatically counterbalanced any upset of metabolism that might be brought by alien conditions. For the curious plants had the ability to gather energy and convert it into food for the human body, had an uncanny instinct as to the exact needs of the body, extending, to a limited extent, to certain basic medical requirements.

But if the life blankets gave men food and warmth, served as a family doctor, man lent them something that was even more precious—the consciousness of life. The moment one of the plants wrapped itself around a man it became, in a sense, the double of that man. It shared his intelligence and emotions, was whisked from the dreary round of its own existence into a more exalted pseudo-life.

Nicodemus, at first moping outside the bathroom door, gradually grew peeved. He felt his thin veneer of human life slowly ebbing from him and he was filled with a baffling resentment.

Finally, feeling very put upon, he waddled out of the trading post upon his own high lonesome, flapping awkwardly along, like a sheet billowing in the breeze.

The dull brick-red sun that was Sigma Draco shone down upon a world that even at high noon appeared to be in twilight and Nicodemus' bobbling shape cast squirming, unsubstantial purple shadows upon the green and crimson ground. A rifle tree took a shot at Nicodemus but missed him by a yard at least. That tree had been off the beam for weeks. It had missed everything it shot at. Its best effort had been scaring the life out of Nellie, the bookkeeping robot that never told a lie, when it banked one of its bulletlike seeds against the steel-sheeted post.

But no one had felt very badly about that, for no one cared for Nellie. With Nellie around, no one could chisel a red cent off the company. That, incidentally, was the reason she was at the post.

But for a couple of weeks now, Nellie hadn't bothered anybody. She had taken to chumming around with Encyclopedia, who more than likely was slowly going insane trying to figure out her thoughts.

Nicodemus told the rifle tree what he thought of it, shooting at its own flesh and blood, as it were, and kept shuffling along. The tree, knowing Nicodemus for a traitor to his own, a vegetable renegade, took another shot at him, missed by two yards and gave up in disgust.

Since he had become associated with a human, Nicodemus hadn't had much to do with other denizens of the planet—even the Encyclopedia. But when he passed a bed of moss and heard it whispering and gossiping away, he tarried for a moment, figurative ear cocked to catch some juicy morsel.

That is how he heard that Alder, a minor musician out in Melody Bowl, finally had achieved a masterpiece. Nicodemus knew it might have happened weeks before, for Melody Bowl was half a world away and the news sometimes had to travel the long way round, but just the same he scampered as fast as he could hump back toward the post.

For this was news that couldn't wait. This was news Mackenzie had to know at once. He managed to kick up quite a cloud of dust coming down the home stretch and flapped triumphantly through the door, above which hung the crudely lettered sign:

GALACTIC TRADING CO.

Just what good the sign did, no one yet had figured out. The humans were the only living things on the planet that could read it.

Before the bathroom door, Nicodemus reared up and beat his fluttering self against it with tempestuous urgency.

“All right,” yelled Mackenzie. “All right. I know I took too long again. Just calm yourself. I'll be right out.”

Nicodemus settled down, still wriggling with the news he had to tell, heard Mackenzie swabbing out the tub.

With Nicodemus wrapped happily about him, Mackenzie strode into the office and found Nelson Harper, the factor, with his feet up on the desk, smoking his pipe and studying the ceiling.

“Howdy, lad,” said the factor. He pointed at a bottle with his pipestem. “Grab yourself a snort.”

Mackenzie grabbed one.

“Nicodemus has been out chewing fat with the moss,” he said. “Tells me a conductor by the name of Alder has composed a symphony. Moss says it's a masterpiece.”

Harper took his feet off the desk. “Never heard of this chap, Alder,” he said.

“Never heard of Kadmar, either,” Mackenzie reminded him, “until he produced the Red Sun symphony. Now everyone is batty over him. If Alder has anything at all, we ought to get it down. Even a mediocre piece pays out. People back on Earth are plain wacky over this tree music of ours. Like that one fellow … that composer—”

“Wade,” Harper filled in. “J. Edgerton Wade. One of the greatest composers Earth had ever known. Quit in mortification after he heard the
Red Sun
piece. Later disappeared. No one knows where he went.”

The factor nursed his pipe between his palms. “Funny thing. Came out here figuring our best trading bet would be new drugs or maybe some new kind of food. Something for the high-class restaurants to feature, charge ten bucks a plate for. Maybe even a new mineral. Like out on Eta Cassiop. But it wasn't any of those things. It was music. Symphony stuff. High-brow racket.”

Mackenzie took another shot at the bottle, put it back and wiped his mouth. “I'm not so sure I like this music angle,” he declared. “I don't know much about music. But it sounds funny to me, what I've heard of it. Brain-twisting stuff.”

Harper grunted. “You're O.K. as long as you have plenty of serum along. If you can't take the music, just keep yourself shot full of serum. That way it can't touch you.”

Mackenzie nodded. “It almost got Alexander that time, remember? Ran short of serum while he was down in the Bowl trying to dicker with the trees. Music seemed to have a hold on him. He didn't want to leave. He fought and screeched and yelled around. … I felt like a heel, taking him away. He never has been quite the same since then. Doctors back on Earth finally were able to get him straightened out, but warned him never to come back.”

“Alexander's back again,” said Harper. “Grant spotted him over at the Groombridge post. Throwing in with the Groomies, I guess. Just a yellow-bellied renegade. Going against his own race. You boys shouldn't have saved him that time. Should have let the music get him.”

“What are you going to do about it?” demanded Mackenzie.

Harper shrugged his shoulders. “What can I do about it? Unless I want to declare war on the Groombridge post. And that is out. Haven't you heard it's all sweetness and light between Earth and Groombridge 34? That's the reason the two posts are stuck away from Melody Bowl. So each one of us will have a fair shot at the music. All according to some pact the two companies rigged up. Galactic's got so pure they wouldn't even like it if they knew we had a spy planted on the Groomie post.”

“But they got one planted on us,” declared Mackenzie. “We haven't been able to find him, of course, but we know there is one. He's out there in the woods somewhere, watching every move we make.”

Harper nodded his head. “You can't trust a Groomie. The lousy little insects will stoop to anything. They don't want that music, can't use it. Probably don't even know what music is. Haven't any hearing. But they know Earth wants it, will pay any price to get it, so they are out here to beat us to it. They work through birds like Alexander. They get the stuff, Alexander peddles it.”

“What if we run across Alexander, chief?”

Harper clicked his pipestem across his teeth. “Depends on circumstances. Try to hire him, maybe. Get him away from the Groomies. He's a good trader. The company would do right by him.”

Mackenzie shook his head. “No soap. He hates Galactic. Something that happened years ago. He'd rather make us trouble than turn a good deal for himself.”

“Maybe he's changed,” suggested Harper. “Maybe you boys saving him changed his mind.”

“I don't think it did,” persisted Mackenzie.

The factor reached across the desk and drew a humidor in front of him, began to refill his pipe.

“Been trying to study out something else, too,” he said. “Wondering what to do with the Encyclopedia. He wants to go to Earth. Seems he's found out just enough from us to whet his appetite for knowledge. Says he wants to go to Earth and study our civilization.”

Mackenzie grimaced. “That baby's gone through our minds with a fine-toothed comb. He knows some of the things we've forgotten we ever knew. I guess it's just the nature of him, but it gets my wind up when I think of it.”

“He's after Nellie now,” said Harper. “Trying to untangle what she knows.”

“It would serve him right if he found out.”

“I've been trying to figure it out,” said Harper. “I don't like this brain-picking of his any more than you do, but if we took him to Earth, away from his own stamping grounds, we might be able to soften him up. He certainly knows a lot about this planet that would be of value to us. He's told me a little—”

“Don't fool yourself,” said Mackenzie. “He hasn't told you a thing more than he's had to tell to make you believe it wasn't a one-way deal. Whatever he has told you has no vital significance. Don't kid yourself he'll exchange information for information. That cookie's out to get everything he can get for nothing.”

The factor regarded Mackenzie narrowly. “I'm not sure but I should put you in for an Earth vacation,” he declared. “You're letting things upset you. You're losing your perspective. Alien planets aren't Earth, you know. You have to expect wacky things, get along with them, accept them on the basis of the logic that makes them the way they are.”

“I know all that,” agreed Mackenzie, “but honest, chief, this place gets in my hair at times. Trees that shoot at you, moss that talks, vines that heave thunderbolts at you—and now the Encyclopedia.”

“The Encyclopedia is logical,” insisted Harper. “He's a repository for knowledge. We have parallels on Earth. Men who study merely for the sake of learning, never expect to use the knowledge they amass. Derive a strange, smug satisfaction from being well informed. Combine that yearning for knowledge with a phenomenal ability to memorize and co-ordinate that knowledge and you have the Encyclopedia.”

“But there must be a purpose to him,” insisted Mackenzie. “There must be some reason at the back of this thirst for knowledge. Just soaking up facts doesn't add up to anything unless you use those facts.”

Harper puffed stolidly at his pipe. “There may be a purpose in it, but a purpose so deep, so different, we could not recognize it. This planet is a vegetable world and a vegetable civilization. Back on earth the animals got the head start and plants never had a chance to learn or to evolve. But here it's a different story. The plants were the ones that evolved, became masters of the situation.”

“If there is a purpose, we should know it,” Mackenzie declared, stubbornly. “We can't afford to go blind on a thing like this. If the Encyclopedia has a game, we should know it. Is he acting on his own, a free lance? Or is he the representative of the world, a sort of prime minister, a state department? Or is he something that was left over by another civilization, a civilization that is gone? A kind of living archive of knowledge, still working at his old trade even if the need of it is gone?”

“You worry too much,” Harper told him.

“We have to worry, chief. We can't afford to let anything get ahead of us. We have taken the attitude we're superior to this vegetable civilization, if you can call it a civilization, that has developed here. It's the logical attitude to take because nettles and dandelions and trees aren't anything to be afraid of back home. But what holds on Earth, doesn't hold here. We have to ask ourselves what a vegetable civilization would be like. What would it want? What would be its aspirations and how would it go about realizing them?”