I Am Crying All Inside : And Other Stories

I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air

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.

So I started across the slide and the walking was rougher than I’d expected it to be, but I was being careful so as not to fall and break my neck and I was getting along all right. I had to watch where I put my feet and was going slow and wasn’t paying too much attention to anything that might be happening.

A sudden grinding sound from somewhere above me jerked me around and a stone rolled underneath one foot and threw me to my knees. I saw the boulders coming down the slope straight at me. They came slow at first, slow and deliberate, seeming to topple rather than to roll. I yelled. I don’t remember what I yelled. I just yelled. I knew I didn’t have the time to get away, but I tried. I tried to get to my feet and had almost made it when another stone shifted underneath a foot and threw me down again. The boulders were much closer now, gathering speed, bounding high into the air when they struck other boulders in their paths, and the rest of the slide above me, jarred by the rolling boulders, was moving down on top of me, as if the rock and rubble had somehow come alive.

Before the first of the boulders reached me I seemed to see little shadowy figures running frantically along the base of the cliff and I thought, “Those God damned lobsters!”

Then the boulders reached me and I put out my hands to stop them, just as if there might have been a chance of stopping them; and I was still yelling.

The boulders hit and killed me. They smashed my flesh and bone. They busted in my rib cage and they cracked my skull. They smashed and rolled me flat. The blood went spraying out and stained the stones. The bladder broke, the intestines ruptured.

But there was, after a time, it seemed, a part of me that wasn’t killed. In the darkness of no-seeing I knew I had been killed. But there was this part of me that still hung onto knowing with bleeding fingernails.

I don’t believe I thought at first. I existed, that was all. In darkness, in emptiness, in nothingness; I was there, not dead. Or at least not entirely dead. I’d forgotten everything I had ever known. I began from scratch. No better than a worm. I tried to take it easy, but there was no such thing as easy. For no reason, I was frantic. Frantic without purpose. Just frantic to exist, to continue hanging on with bloody fingernails. A frantic worm, without knowing, with no reason.

After a time the tension eased a little and I thought. Not simple thoughts, but convoluted and intricate, going on and on, reaching for a simple answer, but going through a maze of mental contortions that were worse than hanging on to existence with no more than fingernails. The terrible thing about it was that I, or the existence that was I, for there was as yet no I, did not even know the problem to which it sought an answer.

Wonder came to replace the thinking, a quiet, hard, chilling wonder that stretched out flat and thin. And the wonder asked: Is this afterlife? Is there really afterlife? Is this what happens when one dies? Hoping it was not, frantic it was not, despairing at the prospect of an eternal, groping afterlife, so flat and thin and dark. Wonder went on forever and forever—not thinking, not reasoning, not speculating, just a wonder that filled the little being that existed, a hopeless, helpless wonder that grew no less or greater, but stretched, unmarked, toward eternity.

Then the wonder went and the darkness went. There was light again and knowing, not only the knowing of the present, but of the past as well. As if something had snapped a switch or pushed a button. As if I’d been turned on.

I had been human once (and I knew what human was), but I was no longer. I knew it from the instant that unseen operator snapped the switch. It wasn’t hard to know. I hadn’t any head and my eyes were floating way up in the air and they were funny eyes. They didn’t look just one way; they looked all the way around and saw everything. Somewhere between my eyes and me were hearing and taste and smell and a lot of other senses I’d never had before—a heat sense, a magnetic indicator, a sniffer-out of life.

I sniffed out a lot of life—big life—and it was moving fast and I saw it was the lobsters, moving very fast to dive down into their burrows. They must have dived down like scared rabbits, for in an instant I lost all sense of them, the sense of them shielded out by many feet of ground. But to replace them was a great deal of other life, a thousand different kinds of life, perhaps more than a thousand different kinds of life and I knew that deep inside my brain all these different life forms—all the plants and grasses, all the insects (or this planet’s equivalent of insects), all the viruses and bacteria—were being filed away most neatly, to be pulled out and identified if there ever should be need.

My brain, I knew, was somewhere in my guts. It had to be, I knew, for I hadn’t any head. It was no proper place for a brain to be, but I had no more than thought that than I knew that it was the right place, down where it was protected and not sticking up into the air where anything or anyone at all could take a swipe at it.

I hadn’t any head and my brain was somewhere in the middle of me and my body was an oval, sort of like an egg, and it was armor-plated. Legs—I had a hundred legs, tiny things like caterpillar legs. I figured out, as well, that my eyes weren’t floating in the air, but were at the ends of two flexible stalks, which I guess you’d call antennae. And those antennae were more than just stalks to hold up my eyes. They were ears as well, more sensitive than my human ears had been, and taste and smell, heat sense, life sense, magnetic sense and other things which had not come clear as yet.

Just knowing all I had parked away in those two antennae gave me a queasy feeling, but there seemed really nothing bad about it, nothing that I couldn’t handle. With all the extra senses, I thought, I’d sure be hard to catch. Even feeling a little proud, perhaps, at how well equipped I was.

I saw that I was on a hilltop, the very hilltop I’d sat upon with the lobsters lapping up the booze. How long ago I might have been there, there was no way of knowing. The ashes of the fire were still there, the fire that they had kindled, proudly, with a fire-drill, and I had let them kindle it, never letting on that I could have lit the fire with a thumb-stroke on my lighter. Even managing, if I remembered rightly, to look a little envious at the ease with which they handled fire. The campfire was old, however, with the prints of pattering raindrops imprinted on the ash.

The ship was just across the valley and in a little while I’d go over to it and take off. I’d file my claim and make arrangements to put the planet on a paying basis. Everything was all right, except that I wasn’t human, and there upon that hilltop I began to miss my humanness. It’s a funny thing; you don’t ever stop to think what human is until you haven’t got it.

I was slightly scared, I suppose, at not being human; perhaps more than a little scared at all the junk I had that made me not be human. With a little effort I still could make myself feel human in my mind, although I knew damn well I wasn’t. And I got lonesome, just like that, for the spaceship squatting over there across the valley. Once I got inside it, I told myself, I would finally be safe.

But safe from what, I wondered. I had been dead, but now I wasn’t dead. It seemed to me I should be happy, but I couldn’t seem to be.

One of the lobsters stuck his head out of a burrow. I saw him and I heard him and I sensed his lifeness and his temperature. I thought that he would know.

“What is going on?” I asked him. “What has happened to me?”

“There was nothing else to do,” he told me. “We feel so sorry for you. There was so much wrong with you. We did the best we could, but you were so badly made.”

“Badly made!” I yelled and started for him and he went down the burrow so fast that even with all my sensory equipment I never saw him go.

Two things hit me hard.

I had talked to him and he’d answered and we’d understood each other and that night by the campfire we had barely passed the grunt-and-gesture stage.

And if I’d heard him right, it had been the lobsters that had put me back together, that had made me what I was. It was all insane, of course. How could those crummy lobsters do a thing like that? They lived in burrows and they used a fire-drill to build themselves a campfire and they didn’t even know how to make decent booze. It made no sense that a pack of lobsters living like a herd of woodchucks could have patched me back together.

But apparently they had; they were the only ones around. But if they had—and, again, they must have—they could have put me back into my former shape. It they were able to make me the kind of thing I was, they could have made me human. They must have used a lot of bio-engineering to fix me up at all, working with completely flexible culture tissues and a lot of other stuff of which I had no idea. If they had that kind of stuff to work with, the little creeps could have made me human.

I wondered if they’d played some sort of joke on me, and if, by God, they had, they would pay for it. When I got back I’d work their stupid tails off; I’d show them who was playing jokes.

They had dug me out and patched me up and I was still alive. There must not have been much left of me the way those boulders socked me. Perhaps they had no more than a hunk of brain to build on. It must have been a job to make anything of me. I suppose I should have been grateful to them, but I wasn’t able to work up much gratitude.

They had loused me up for sure. No matter how human I might feel or even act, to the eye I wasn’t human. Out in the galaxy I’d not be accepted as a human. By certain people, perhaps, and intellectually, but to most human beings I’d be nothing but a freak.

I’d get along, of course. With a planet such as this, one couldn’t help but get along. With the kind of bankroll I’d have I’d get along all right.

When I started for the ship I was afraid those caterpillar legs of mine might slow me down, but they didn’t. I went skimming along faster than I would have walked and over uneven ground I ordinarily would have walked around. I thought at first I might have to concentrate to make all those legs track in line, but I went along as if I’d been walking caterpillar-fashion all my life.

The eyes were something, too. I could see all around me and up into the sky as well. I realized that, as a primate, I had been looking down a tunnel, blind by more than half. And I realized, too, that as a primate I would have been confused and disoriented by this total vision, but as I was made it wasn’t. Not only my body had been changed, but my sensory centers as well.

Total vision wasn’t all of it, of course. There were many other sensory centers located in the eyestalks, some of which I had figured out, but a lot of others that still had me puzzled and a bit confused; they were picking up information to which my human senses had been blind—the kind of stuff I’d never known about and couldn’t put a name to. The really curious thing about it was that none of these new senses were particularly emphasized—they seemed very natural. They were feeding into me an integrated awareness of all the forces and conditions that surrounded me. I had a total and absolute awareness of my physical environment.

I reached the spaceship and I didn’t bother with the ladder. I just upended myself and went scooting up the side of that slick metal without a single thought. There were sucking discs in the pads of the caterpillar legs and I hadn’t known about them until it came time to use them. I wondered how many other abilities I wouldn’t know about until 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 with the stalks until I could use them to operate the ship.

You clowns out there, I said, better start right now to dig those burrows deeper because, so help me, I’m coming back to get you. There couldn’t no one do what they’d done to me and get away with it.

I moved over a bit to get into the hatch and I found there was no way to get into the hatch. I was just a bit too big. Not very much, just a bit too big. I pushed and shoved. I twisted and turned every way I could. No matter what I did, the body was too big.

Planned, I thought. They never missed a lick. They hadn’t overlooked a thing. They’d made me without arms and had the hatch all measured and made me just too big—not too much too big, but just a shade too big. They had led me on and now they were rolling in their burrows laughing and the day would come when I’d make them smart for that.

But that was an empty thought and I knew it was. There was no way that I could make them smart.

I wasn’t going anywhere and I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t going to get into the ship and if I couldn’t get into the ship, I wouldn’t leave the planet. I hadn’t any arms and I hadn’t any head and since I didn’t have a head, I hadn’t any mouth. Without a mouth, how was a man to eat? Had they condemned me not only to being trapped upon this planet, but dying of starvation?

I climbed down to the ground, so shaken with fear and anger that I was extra careful in my climbing down for fear that I might slip and fall.

Once down I crouched beside the ship and tried to lay it all out in a row so I could have a look at it.

I wasn’t human any more. Still human in my mind, of course, but certainly not in body. I was trapped upon the planet and would not be going back to the human race again. And even if I could, there’d be a lot of things I couldn’t do. I’d never take a babe to bed again. I’d never eat a steak. I’d never have a drink. And my own people would either laugh at me or be scared of me and I couldn’t quite make out which would be the worse.

It seemed incredible, on the face of it, that the lobsters would be able to do a thing like this. It didn’t quite make sense that a tribe of prairie dogs that looked like something you’d expect upon your dinner plate could take a piece of brain and from it construct a new and living being. There was about them nothing that suggested such ability and knowledge, no trappings to indicate they were other than what they appeared to be, a species of creatures that had developed some intelligence, but had made no great cultural advances.

But appearances were wrong; there was no doubt of that. They had a culture and an ability and knowledge—far more of both of them than my psych testing had even hinted at. And that, of course, would be the way with a race like them. I hadn’t based my conclusions upon fact, but on data they had fed me.

If they had this kind of culture, why were they hiding it? Why live in burrows? Why use a drill to start a fire? Why not a city? Why not a road? Why couldn’t the crummy little stinkers at least act civilized?

The answer wasn’t hard to find. If you act civilized, you stick out like a bandaged thumb. But if you lay doggo and act stupid, you got the edge. Anything that comes along will underestimate you and then you are in a good position to let them have it, right between the eyes. Maybe I hadn’t been the first planet hunter to show up. Maybe there had been other planet hunters in the past. Maybe through the years these vicious little lobsters had figured out exactly how to deal with them.

Although what I couldn’t figure out was why they didn’t do it simple. Why all the fancy frills? When they killed a planet hunter why not let it go at that? Why did they have to bring him back to life and play silly games with him?

I crouched on the ground and looked across the land and it was as good, or better, than I had thought it was. There were forests along the streams that would provide good timber and back from the watercourses great stretches of rich and level land that could be used for farming. In those hills beyond lay silver ore—and how in the hell could I be so sure there was silver there?

It shook me up to know. I shouldn’t have known. I might guess there were minerals in the hills, but there was no way to know exactly where they were or what kind they’d be. But I did know—not guessing, not hoping, but knowing. It was my new body that knew, of course, employing some as yet unrealized sensor that was planted in it. More than likely later on, when it really got to working, I could look at any stretch of land and know precisely what was in it. It was all wonderful, of course, but without any arms and no way to get off the planet, it was a total loss. That was the way they worked it, that was how they got their laughs. They held out a piece of candy and when baby reached for it, they slashed off his grasping paws.

The sun felt warm on my body and I didn’t want to move. I should be up and doing, although I could not think, for the life of me, of a thing I should be doing. Doing, for the moment, was at an end for me. In a little while, perhaps, I might be able to figure out a thing or two to do. In the meantime I’d simply sit here and eat up some more sunlight.

That’s the way I knew. It came sneaking in upon me—all these new-fashioned abilities, all the fancy senses, all the newfound knowledge. I was eating sunlight. I didn’t need a mouth. I simply fed on the energy of sunlight. I thought about this eating, this soaking up of sunlight and I knew, as I thought about it, that it need not be sunlight, although sunlight was the easiest. But if necessary I could reach out and grab energy from anything at all. I could suck up the energy in a stream of water. I could drain it from a tree or rob a blade of grass. I could extract it from the soil.

Simple and efficient, and as close to foolproof as a body could be made. The dirty little creep, sticking his head out of the burrow, had said my human body had been badly made. And, of course, it had. It had not been engineered. It had simply grown evolutionally, through millennia, doing the best it could with the little that it had.

I felt the sunlight on me and I soaked it up and I knew about the sunlight, how it came about—the proton-proton reactions that brought about the rapid shuffling of subatomic particles from one form to another, releasing in the process the flood of energy which poured out from the star. I’d known all this before, of course, in my human form. But I had learned it once and then had never thought of it again. This was different. This was not a matter of simple learning, of an intellectual knowledge. Now I felt it, saw it, sensed it. I could, without half trying, imagine myself a hydrogen nucleus within that place of energy and pressure. I could hear the hissing of the gamma rays, glimpse the giddy flight of new-born neutrinos. And I knew it was not the star alone—I could probe, as well, into the secret of a plant, seek out the microbes and other tiny life forms that swarmed deep within the soil, trace the processes by which a geologic formation had come into being. Not only knowing, but being one with any of it, sharing with it, understanding far better than it (whatever it might be) could understand itself.

I was cold with a coldness that sunlight could not warm. My mind was frozen hard.

I wasn’t human any more at all. I wasn’t thinking human. My mind and thinking, my senses and my viewpoints had been tinkered with. I had been edited and only now was the editing beginning to take effect. It was not only my body, it was all of me. I was turning into something I didn’t want to be, that no human would ever want to be.

This thinking of the proton-proton business was all damn foolishness. There were more important things I should be thinking, of a plan to force my way into the ship, of how to cash in on this planet. There was a mint to be made out of this planet, more money than I could ever spend. But now, I thought, what did I need the money for? Certainly not for drink or food or clothes or women—and I wondered a bit about that woman business. I was, I suspected, the only thing of my kind existing in the galaxy and what about the reproductive process? Would there be just the one of me and not be any more? Or could I be bisexual and bear or spawn or hatch others of my kind? Or could I be immortal? Was there such a thing as death for me? Was there, perhaps, no need of reproduction? Was there just the one of me and no need of any more? No room for any more?

If that should be the case, why all this worry over money? And, thinking that, I didn’t seem to care as much about the money as I had at one time.

That was the hell of it—the human hell of it. I didn’t care. Not about the money, nor the lobsters nor what they’d done to me, nor about the humanity I’d lost. Perhaps that was the way I had been engineered, maybe it was the only way I could survive, the shape that I was in.

I fought against the great uncaring with all the bitterness I had. So you did it, I said to those lousy lobsters. So you pulled it off. You scratched one human who could have been a threat, who would have exploited you down to skin and bones. And you built a model of a new experimental life form you’d been aching to try out, but didn’t have the guts to try on one of your own people. You had to wait until someone else showed up. And now you’ll watch me all the time to see how I’m doing, to figure out the bugs and miscalculations, so that sometime in the future you can build a better one.

I hadn’t known of it before but there it was, naked, in my mind, as naturally in my mind as if I’d always known it, as if from the very beginning I had known I was no more than an experimental model.

They’d taken away my humanity and added a great uncaring, and that uncaring had been the gadget they had thought would be the final factor. But there was some stubbornness still left in me from the almost-vanished humanity of which they’d tried to rob me, so sneakily and smoothly that I never would suspect that it was gone until it was too late to do anything to save it.

Frantically, with panic rising in me, I went hunting down inside myself, scrabbling like a dog digging out a gopher, seeking for any fragment of humanity that might be left to me. Down into the dark, sniffing out the secret places where a fragmented piece of humanity might hide.

And I found it! A nasty piece of me hiding deep and dark, and yet a piece of me that was quite familiar, that I was well acquainted with, that in other times I had hugged close against me for the vicious comfort it had given me.

I found hatred.

It was tough and hard to kill. It resisted routing out. It still clung tenaciously.

As I clasped it hard inside my mind and hugged it close against me, as an old friend, an ancient weapon, I wondered vaguely if the reason it had been left was that the race of lobsters had no concept of hatred, that it might be something of which they were unaware, that what they had done to me might have been done for many reasons, but that hatred of me for what I meant to do to them was not one of the reasons.

That made me one up on them, I thought fiercely as I clutched the hatred at the core of me. It gave me an advantage they would never guess. With hatred to bolster and sustain me, I could hope and wait and plan and the time would never seem too long if revenge could be at the end of it.

They’d taken away my body, my motives, almost all my humanity. They had tinkered with my thinking and my values and my viewpoints. They had taken me; they had taken me but good. They had outfoxed me on every point but one and on that one point they had, unknowingly, outfoxed themselves as badly. Maybe they had seen that little piece of hatred as no more than a minor biochemical imperfection. After all, as the lobster had pointed out, I had been badly made. But in mistaking it, or neglecting it, they had fouled up their project. With a piece of hatred still left in him, a man would never utterly lose his hold upon humanity. What a wondrous thing it is to be a hating creature!

I held the hatred and could feel it turning cold—and cold hatred is the best of all. I know. It drives you, it never lets you be, it keeps on nagging you. Hot hatred flashes up and is over in a moment, but cold hatred lies there, at the heart and gut of you, and you know it all the time. It niggles at your brain and it clenches up your fists even when there is no one there to hit.

But I hadn’t any fists, I thought, I hadn’t any arms. I was just an armor-plated oval with silly caterpillar legs and eyestalks sticking up into the air.

Then, on schedule, as if there might be some sort of biological computer tucked away inside me, feeding in the data that was me, feeding it in slowly so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by a rush of data, not overloading me, I knew about the arms.

I didn’t have them yet and I wouldn’t have them for a while. But they were there and growing underneath my shell, waiting to be freed. I would have to moult before I had the arms. It wasn’t only arms. There were other things as well—other appendages, other budding senses, other extensions of new abilities, all of them only dimly sensed, fogged in the mist of things-to-come. But the arms I knew about because arms were not new to me. I had had arms before and I knew about them. These other things I didn’t know about, but in time I would. Marvelous additional adjuncts to the performance of a life form’s full abilities, planned most carefully by the lobsters, to be tried out in an experimental model before the lobsters made such bodies for themselves.

They had planned long and hard. They had figured out the angles and then had engineered them. They were aiming at an ideal body. And I would take all that planning and all the engineering and all their dirty scheming and I’d shove it down their throats. As soon as I had arms and all those other appendages and senses and God knows what, I’d cram it down their throats.

I couldn’t go back to the human race, nor to women, nor to money, nor to food and drink. But I didn’t need them any more. I had never needed them—really needed them. The one thing I did need I had, the one last thing that was left to me. It seemed sheer cosmic justice that the one thing that I needed was the one thing I had left—the capacity to get even with the ones who’d done me dirt, to cram it down their throats, to make them mourn the day that saw their spawning.

I was different and I would be more different still. I would, in the end, be human in only one regard. And the important thing, the most important thing of all, was that in this one regard my one remnant of humanity was stronger than all the rest of it. It had come from the bowels of time. It came from that never-dated day when a certain little primate, with a new-found cunning that was stronger than the jungle’s tooth-and-claw, remembered an anger that should have been over in a moment and had waited for a chance to act upon that remembered anger, nursing that cooling anger as a comfort and a prop to dignity, changing it from anger into hatred. Long before anything that could have been called Australopithecine walked the earth, the concept of revenge had been forged and in those millennia it had served the vicious little strain of primates well. It had made them the most deadly creatures that had ever come to life.

It would serve me well, I told myself. I would make it serve me well. It would give me purpose and a certain kind of dignity and self-respect.

A figure came to mind, another piece of information spewed into me from the biochemical computer. A thousand years, it said. A thousand years to moult. A thousand years to wait.

A long time. Ten centuries. Thirty human generations. Empires rose and fell in a thousand years. Were forgotten in another thousand. A thousand years would give me time to think and plan, to harden the coldness of the hatred, to realize and examine the new abilities and capacities that would evolve with moulting.

It called for planning. No simple, easy revenge. No mere physical torture, no killing. By the time I got through with them death would be the height of kindness, physical torture a mere inconvenience. Nor would it merely be an exploitation of them to harvest the resources of the planet. It was the worst day they’d ever known when they had taken from me the need (or desire) for those resources. If I still held that need, normal human greed might have stayed my hand. But now, nothing would stay my hand.

I had them, I thought. Thinking coldly and with calculation. With no anger. With no urgency. With no mercy in me. Mercy was a human trait made to balance revenge and now the balance had been wiped out and I had only hatred left.

How it might be done I did not know. I would not know until I had explored to the limit the capacity of the abilities that waited upon moulting. But I knew this: they would live out their lives in ever-mounting terror; they would seek for hiding places and there’d be no hiding places; each day they would face new horrors and their nerves would strain and their brains would turn to water, then congeal again to face another fear. They would be allowed, at times, a slender hope so the agony would be the greater when the tiny hope had failed. They would run in the hopeless circles of their panic, they would squeal with an insanity which would never reach the point where it might offer refuge, and while they might pray for surcease, I would most tenderly see that they stayed alive and capable of fear. Not just a few of them, but all of them, every stinking soul of them. And I would keep it up, I would never tire. I would never have enough, I would feed upon my hatred of them. It would be the breath of life to me. It would be my only purpose, taking the place of all the other purposes they had taken from me. It was the one last shred of humanity I had left and I would never let it go.

I hugged the hatred and thought of a thousand years. A long, long time. Empires totter, technologies change, religions shift their forms, social mores undergo revisions, ideas blossom and have their day and die, stars slide down just a little toward stellar death, light travels a hundredth of the way across the galaxy. So long a span of time that the mind of man quails before the prospect of it.

But not me. I do not quail before a thousand years.

I can use those thousand years. I can study the lobsters and see what makes them tick. I can learn their purposes, their philosophies, their dreams—learning all the things to strip away from them, giving them instead the things they fear and loathe and sicken at the sight and feel of.

I’ll enjoy it, every minute of it.

I am in no hurry.

I can wait.

The alien wind blows cool and sweet around Charlie Tierney as he sits drinking sunlight. He remembers and remembers, playing it over and over in his mind: a mind growing more acute every moment. He clings to the last vestige of his humanity, the greatest gift handed down to him from his ape ancestors: a desire for killing, torturing, never-ending revenge. He sits and is content in his hatred. It will sustain him.

It will keep him in check, as no bonds or fetters ever could.

The lobster creatures in their burrows understood that from the moment they rebuilt him. Necessary, yes, very necessary for Charlie Tierney to stay the thousand years, to evolve through those thousand years so they could evaluate the viability of what they had created, for their own purposes. But without something to distract him, with only the helplessness and despair of knowing he would never again be human, Charlie Tierney might have destroyed himself. And that they could not permit. The experiment had to run its course.

They had left him a distraction, something useless he could hold close to placate him while the evolutionary experiment ran its course. A thousand-year toy for an alert laboratory animal.

Charlie Tierney holds close the hatred, examines with pathological attention the concept of revenge. He can wait. He has a thousand years to grow until he can wreak revenge on the damned lobster things.

What he does not know is that even before he came to them, the lobster creatures had learned all there was to know about waiting. They had waited for a Charlie Tierney, and now they could wait for the results of the experiment.

And they had no need of thousand-year toys.