I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

plus a mass of planetary facts.”
    He unlocked another of the boxes and flipped back the lid.
    â€œShall we get on with it?” he asked.
    â€œLet’s get going,” demanded Reuben. “I’m tired of this spacehand transmog.”
    Sheridan made the rounds, with Hezekiah carrying the boxes for him.
    Back at his starting point, he shoved aside the boxes, filled now with spacehand and other assorted transmogs. He faced the crew of salesmen.
    â€œHow do they feel?” he asked.
    â€œThey feel okay,” said Lemuel. “You know, Steve, I never realized until now how dumb a spacehand is.”
    â€œPay no attention to him,” Abraham said, disgusted. “He always makes that crack.”
    Maximilian said soberly: “It shouldn’t be too bad. These people have been acclimated to the idea of doing business with us. There should be no initial sales resistance. In fact, they may be anxious to start trading.”
    â€œAnother thing,” Douglas pointed out. “We have the kind of merchandise they’ve evinced interest in. We won’t have to waste our time in extensive surveys to find out what they want.”
    â€œThe market pattern seems to be a simple one,” said Abraham judiciously. “There should be no complications. The principal thing, it would appear, is the setting of a proper rate of exchange—how many podars they must expect to pay for a shovel or a hoe or other items that we have.”
    â€œThat will have to come,” said Sheridan, “by a process of trial and error.”
    â€œWe’ll have to bargain hard,” Lemuel said, “in order to establish a fictitious retail price, then let them have it wholesale. There are many times when that works effectively.”
    Abraham rose from his chair. “Let’s get on with it. I suppose, Steve, that you will stay in camp.”
    Sheridan nodded. “I’ll stay by the radio. I’ll expect reports as soon as you can send them.”
    The robots got on with it. They scrubbed and polished one another until they fairly glittered. They brought out fancy dress hardware and secured it to themselves with magnetic clamps. There were colorful sashes and glistening rows of medals and large chunks of jewelry not entirely in the best of taste, but designed to impress the natives.
    They got out their floaters and loaded up with samples from the cargo dump. Sheridan spread out a map and assigned each one a village. They checked their radios. They made sure they had their order boards.
    By noon, they all were off.
    Sheridan went back to the tent and sat down in his camp chair. He stared down the shelving beach to the lake, sparkling in the light of the noon-high sun.
    Napoleon brought his lunch and hunkered down to talk, gathering his white cook’s apron carefully in his lap so it would not touch the ground. He pushed his tall white cap to a rakish angle.
    â€œHow you got it figured, Steve?”
    â€œYou can never figure one beforehand,” Sheridan told him. “The boys are all set for an easy time and I hope they have it. But this is an alien planet and I never bet on aliens.”
    â€œYou look for any trouble?”
    â€œI don’t look for anything. I just sit and wait and hope feebly for the best. Once the reports start coming in …”
    â€œIf you worry so much, why not go out yourself?”
    Sheridan shook his head. “Look at it this way, Nappy. I am not a salesman and this crew is. There’d be no sense in my going out. I’m not trained for it.”
    And, he thought, the fact of the matter was that he was not trained for anything. He was not a salesman and he was not a spacehand; he was not any of the things that the robots were or could be.
    He was just a human, period, a necessary cog in a team of robots.
    There was a law that said no robot or no group of robots could be assigned a task without human supervision, but that was not the whole of