Good old Hezekiah, he thought, he’ll do the job. Central Trading will be wondering for weeks exactly what it was that hit them.
He tilted his head forward and rubbed his aching neck.
He said to Gideon and Ebenezer: “You can get up off him now.”
The two arose, grinning, from the prostrate form of Tobias. Tobias got up, outraged. “You’ll hear of this,” he said to Sheridan.
“Yes, I know,” said Sheridan. “You hate my guts.”
Abraham stepped forward, “What is next?” he asked.
“Well,” Sheridan said, “I think we should all turn gleaners.”
“Gleaners?”
“There are bound to be some podars that the natives missed. We’ll need every one we can find for seed.”
“But we’re all physicists and mechanical engineers and chemists and other things like that. Surely you would not expect such distinguished specialists—”
“I think I can remedy that,” said Sheridan. “I imagine we still can find those spacehand transmogs. They should serve until Central sends us some farmer units.”
Tobias stepped forward and ranged himself alongside of Abraham. “As long as I must remain here, I demand to be of use. It’s not in a robot’s nature just to loaf around.”
Sheridan slapped his hand against his jacket pocket, felt the bulge of the transmog he’d taken out of Hezekiah.
“I think,” he told Tobias, “I have just the thing for you.”
I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air
Created for inclusion in The Last Dangerous Visions™, which was to have been the final entry in Harlan Ellison’s acclaimed series of original anthologies, this story has never actually seen print until now because the anthology has never been published.
This story, as is often the case with Simak stories, provides new takes on themes Cliff touched on elsewhere, but I keep thinking that it’s a story about life after life.
And it’s sad, for the line “You were so badly made” has more than a single meaning.
He had been Charlie Tierney, but was no longer. He had been a man, but was no longer. Now he was something else, something cobbled together. Now he had no head, had no arms, and his eyes were floating on stalks above his awakening body.
When he had been Charlie Tierney there had been only two really important things to know about him: he was venal, and he was alone. Venal to the point of it being a sickness, a poison that infected his every act. Alone, through years as a child, years as a man, years in space. So alone he could never learn that his ability to be bought was an illness.
Now he was more alone than he had ever been … and he was no longer venal. Venality was a human quality, and he was no longer human. Alone, because he was the only one like himself in the universe.
Tierney sat drinking sunlight, and he remembered.
I had it made.
After years of fumbling around, after years of chewing stardust, of hope that never quite came off, of finally giving up the hope—here finally I was, walking down a hill, walking on a planet that I owned, with the pre-emption signals planted and all that needed to be done the filing of the claim. A planet that was worth the claiming—not one of those methane worlds, not carbon dioxide, not soup, but air that a man could breathe, and something to walk on besides rock, a world with vegetation and running water and not too great a sea surface and, what was best of all, a working force of natives who had just enough intelligence, if handled right, to exploit such a planet for you. They didn’t know it yet, but I had plans for them. It might take a bit of doing to get them into harness, but I was just the man who knew how to do it.
I was a little drunk, I guess. Christ, I had a right to be. After squatting on that hilltop with those crummy natives, lapping up the stuff, I should have been out cold. But I had soaked up too much alcoholic poison—and some that weren’t alcoholic—at too many grimy way stations all through space, to cave in from drinking stuff that wasn’t fit to drink. In my day, I’d drunk a lot of booze that wasn’t fit to drink. Come in from a long, hard run with nothing found and headaches all the way and you’ll drink anything at all just so it gives forgetfulness.
There always had been a lot of forgetting to be done. But that was over now. In just a while from now I’d be wading up to my knees through cash.
The luckiest part of it was those stupid natives. And that was just the way it should be. Hell, I told myself, they wouldn’t even know the difference. They might even like it. They would love working out their guts for me. I had them all psyched out. I knew what made them tick.
It had taken a lot of patience and a lot of observation and more work than I liked to think about, but I finally had them pegged. They had a culture, if you could call it that. They had a feeble kind of intelligence, enough intelligence so that you could tell them to put their backs into it and they’d put their backs into it. Before I was through with them they’d think I was the best friend they had and they’d bust their silly guts for me. They had been the ones who had asked me to the hilltop for a little get-together. They had supplied the food, which I had barely been able to gag down, and the likker, which had been a little easier to gag down, and we’d talked after a fashion—good, solid, friendly talk.
I had the little creeps in the hollow of my hand.
They were crazy-looking things, but for that matter all aliens are crazy-looking things.
They stood four feet or so in height and looked something like a lobster, or at least like something that far back in its evolutionary line had been something like a lobster. As if the crustacea, instead of striking out, had developed as the primates had developed on the Earth. They had been modified considerably from the ancestral lobster, but the resemblance was still there. They lived in burrows and there were big villages of these burrows everywhere I went. There were a lot of them and that suited me just fine. It takes a big labor force to milk a planet. If you had to import that kind of labor or bring in machines the overhead would kill you.
So I was walking down the hillside, perhaps not too steadily, but I was feeling fine. I could see the spaceship in the bright moonlight, just across the valley, and in the morning I’d take off and file the claim and see some people that I knew and then I’d be in business. No more tearing around in uncharted space to find that one particular planet, no more begging grubstakes to go out on another hunt, no more stinking fleabags in little planetary outposts, no more rotgut liquor, no more frowsy whores. From here on out I’d have the best there was. I’d made the kind of strike every planet hunter dreams about. I had struck it rich. Oh, it was sweet all right—an absolutely virgin planet with all sorts of riches and a gang of stupid natives to work for me.
I came to the rockslide and I could have walked around it and in a more sober moment I suppose I would have done just that. But I wasn’t sober. I was drunk on alien booze and on happiness, if happiness is finding what you’ve hunted all your life.
I saw that I could save some time by crossing the rockslide and it didn’t look too bad. Just a sheet of rubble where, in ages past, a cliff near the top of the hill had shed part of its face, sending down a fan of rock and boulders. A number of boulders were embedded in the slide and others, I saw, had simply slid off the cliff face and not rolled down the hill, remaining poised where they had fallen. I remember thinking, as I started across the slide, that it would not take too much to send them plunging down the slope. But they had been there, safely anchored, for many unknown years, and, anyhow, I was somewhat fuddled.