The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  Webster slid back his chair, opened a desk drawer, took out a sheaf of papers.

  One eye on the televisor plate, he snapped over the toggle that called his secretary.

  “Yes, Mr. Webster.”

  “I’m going to call on Mr. Fowler,” said Webster. “If a call comes through—”

  The secretary’s voice shook just a little. “If one does, sir, I’ll contact you right away.”

  “Thanks,” said Webster.

  He snapped the toggle back.

  They’ve heard of it already, he thought. Everyone in the whole building is standing around with their tongues hanging out, waiting for the news.

  Kent Fowler lounged in a chair in the garden outside his room, watching the little black terrier dig frantically after an imagined rabbit.

  “You know, Rover,” said Fowler, “you aren’t fooling me.”

  The dog stopped digging, looked over his shoulder with grinning teeth, barked excitedly. Then went back to digging.

  “You’ll slip up one of these days,” Fowler told him, “and say a word or two and I’ll have you dead to rights.”

  Rover went on digging.

  Foxy little devil, thought Fowler. Smarter than a whip. Webster sicked him on me and he’s played the part, all right. He’s dug for rabbits and he’s been disrespectful to the shrubs and he’s scratched for fleas—the perfect picture of a perfect dog. But I’m on to him. I’m on to all of them.

  A foot crunched in the grass and Fowler looked up.

  “Good evening,” said Tyler Webster.

  “I’ve been wondering when you’d come,” said Fowler shortly. “Sit down and give it to me—straight. You don’t believe me, do you?”

  Webster eased himself into the second chair, laid the sheaf of papers in his lap.

  “I can understand how you feel,” he said.

  “I doubt if you can,” snapped Fowler. “I came here, bringing news that I thought was important. A report that had cost me more than you can imagine.”

  He hunched forward in his chair. “I wonder if you can realize that every hour I’ve spent as a human being has been mental torture.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Webster. “But we had to be sure. We had to check your reports.”

  “And make certain tests?”

  Webster nodded.

  “Like Rover over there?”

  “His name isn’t Rover,” said Webster, gently. “If you’ve been calling him that, you’ve hurt his feelings. All the dogs have human names. This one’s Elmer.”

  Elmer had stopped his digging, was trotting toward them. He sat down beside Webster’s chair, scrubbed at his dirt-filled whiskers with a clay-smeared paw.

  “What about it, Elmer?” asked Webster.

  “He’s human, all right,” said the dog, “but not all human. Not a mutant, you know. But something else. Something alien.”

  “That’s to be expected,” said Fowler. “I was a Loper for five years.”

  Webster nodded. “You’d retain part of the personality. That’s understandable. And the dog would spot it. They’re sensitive to things like that. Psychic, almost. That’s why we put them on the mutants. They can sniff one out no matter where he is.”

  “You mean that you believe me?”

  Webster rustled the papers in his lap, smoothed them out with a careful hand. “I’m afraid I do.”

  “Why afraid?”

  “Because,” Webster told him, “you’re the greatest threat mankind’s ever faced.”

  “Threat! Man, don’t you understand? I’m offering you… offering you—”

  “Yes, I know,” said Webster. “The word is Paradise.”

  “And you’re afraid of that?”

  “Terrified,” said Webster. “Just try to envision what it would mean if we told the people and the people all believed. Everyone would want to go to Jupiter and become a Loper. The very fact that the Lopers apparently have life spans running into thousands of years would be reason enough if there were no others.

  “We would be faced by a system-wide demand that everyone immediately be sent to Jupiter. No one would want to remain human. In the end there would be no humans—all the humans would be Lopers. Had you thought of that?”

  Fowler licked his lips with a nervous tongue. “Certainly. That is what I had expected.”

  “The human race would disappear,” said Webster, speaking evenly. “It would be wiped out. It would junk all the progress it has made over thousands of years. It would disappear just when it is on the verge of its greatest advancement.”

  “But you don’t know,” protested Fowler. “You can’t know. You’ve never been a Loper. I have.” He tapped his chest. “I know what it is like.”

  Webster shook his head. “I’m not arguing on that score. I’m ready to concede that it may be better to be a Loper than a human. What I can’t concede is that we would be justified in wiping out the human race—that we should trade what the human race has done and will do for what the Lopers might do. The human race is going places. Maybe not so pleasantly nor so clear-headedly nor as brilliantly as your Lopers, but in the long run I have a feeling that it will go much farther. We have a racial heritage and a racial destiny that we can’t throw away.”

  Fowler leaned forward in his chair. “Look,” he said, “I’ve played this fair. I came straight to you and the World Committee. I could have told the press and radio and forced your hand, but I didn’t do it.”

  “What you’re getting at,” suggested Webster, “is that the World Committee doesn’t have the right to decide this thing themselves. You’re suggesting that the people have their say about it.”

  Fowler nodded, tight-lipped.

  “Frankly,” said Webster, “I don’t trust the people. You’d get mob reaction. Selfish response. Not a one of them would think about the race, but only of themselves.”

  “Are you telling me,” asked Fowler, “that I’m right, but you can’t do a thing about it?”

  “Not exactly. We’ll have to work out something. Maybe Jupiter could be made a sort of old folks’ home. After a man had lived out a useful life—”

  Fowler made a tearing sound of disgust deep inside his throat. “A reward,” he snapped. “Turning an old horse out to pasture. Paradise by special dispensation.”

  “That way,” Webster pointed out, “we’d save the human race and still have Jupiter.”

  Fowler came to his feet in a swift, lithe motion. “I’m sick of it,” he shouted. “I brought you a thing you wanted to know. A thing you spent billions of dollars and, so far as you knew, hundreds of lives, to find out. You set up reconversion stations all over Jupiter and you sent out men by dozens and they never came back and you thought that they were dead and still you sent out others. And none of them came back—because they didn’t want to come back, because they couldn’t come back, because they couldn’t stomach being men again. Then I came back and what does it amount to? A lot of high-flown talk … a lot of quibbling … questioning me and doubting me. Then finally saying I am all right, but that I made a mistake in coming back at all.”

  He let his arms fall to his side and his shoulders drooped.

  “I’m free, I suppose,” he said. “I don’t need to stay here.”

  Webster nodded slowly. “Certainly, you are free. You were free all the time. I only asked that you stay until I could check.”

  “I could go back to Jupiter?”

  “In the light of the situation,” said Webster, “that might be a good idea.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t suggest it,” said Fowler, bitterly. “It would be an out for you. You could file away the report and forget about it and go on running the Solar System like a child’s game played on a parlor floor. Your family has blundered its way through centuries and the people let you come back for more. One of your ancestors lo
st the world the Juwain philosophy and another blocked the effort of the humans to co-operate with the mutants—”

  Webster spoke sharply. “Leave me and my family out of this, Fowler! It is a thing that’s bigger—”

  But Fowler was shouting, drowning out his words. “And I’m not going to let you bungle this. The world has lost enough because of you Websters. Now the world’s going to get a break. I’m going to tell the people about Jupiter. I’ll tell the press and radio. I’ll yell it from the housetops. I’ll—”

  His voice broke and his shoulders shook.

  Webster’s voice was cold with sudden rage. “I’ll fight you, Fowler. I’ll go on the beam against you. I can’t let you do a thing like this.”

  Fowler had swung around, was striding toward the garden gate.

  Webster, frozen in his chair, felt the paw clawing at his leg.

  “Shall I get him, Boss?” asked Elmer. “Shall I go and get him?”

  Webster shook his head. “Let him go,” he said. “He has as much right as I have to do the thing he wishes.”

  A chill wind came across the garden wall and rustled the cape about Webster’s shoulders.

  Words beat in his brain—words that had been spoken here in this garden scant seconds ago, but words that came from centuries away. One of your ancestors lost the Juwain philosophy. One of your ancestors—

  Webster clenched his fists until the nails dug into his palms.

  A jinx, thought Webster. That’s what we are. A jinx upon humanity. The Juwain philosophy. And the mutants. But the mutants had had the Juwain philosophy for centuries now and they had never used it. Joe had stolen it from Grant and Grant had spent his life trying to get it back. But he never had.

  Maybe, thought Webster, trying to console himself, it really didn’t amount to much. If it had, the mutants would have used it. Or maybe—just maybe—the mutants had been bluffing. Maybe they didn’t know any more about it than the humans did.

  A metallic voice coughed softly and Webster looked up. A small gray robot stood just outside the doorway.

  “The call, sir,” said the robot. “The call you’ve been expecting.”

  Jenkins’ face came into the plate—an old face, obsolete and ugly. Not the smooth, lifelike face boasted by the latest model robots.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” he said, “but it is most unusual. Joe came up and asked to use our visor to put in a call to you. Won’t tell me what he wants, sir. Says it’s just a friendly call to an old-time neighbor.”

  “Put him on,” said Webster.

  “He went at it most unusual, sir,” persisted Jenkins. “He came up and sat around and chewed the fat for an hour or more before he asked to use it. I’d say, if you’d pardon me, that it’s most peculiar.”

  “I know,” said Webster. “Joe is peculiar, in a lot of ways.”

  Jenkins’ face faded from the screen and another face came in—that of Joe, the mutant. It was a strong face with a wrinkled, leathery skin and blue-gray eyes that twinkled, hair that was just turning salt and pepper at the temples.

  “Jenkins doesn’t trust me, Tyler,” said Joe, and Webster felt his hackles rising at the laughter that lurked behind the words.

  “For that matter,” he told him bluntly, “neither do I.”

  Joe clucked with his tongue. “Why, Tyler, we’ve never given you a single minute’s trouble. Not a single one of us. You’ve watched us and you’ve worried and fretted about us, but we’ve never hurt you. You’ve had so many of the dogs spying on us that we stumble over them everywhere we turn and you’ve kept files on us and studied us and talked us up and down until you must be sick to death of it.”

  “We know you,” said Webster, grimly. “We know more about you than you know about yourselves. We know how many there are of you and we know each of you personally. Want to know what any one of you were doing at any given moment in the last hundred years or so? Ask us and we’ll tell you.”

  Butter wouldn’t have melted in Joe’s mouth. “And all the time,” he said, “we were thinking kindly of you. Figuring out how sometime we might want to help you.”

  “Why didn’t you do it, then?” snapped Webster. “We were ready to work with you at first. Even after you stole the Juwain philosophy from Grant—”

  “Stole it?” asked Joe. “Surely, Tyler, you must have that wrong. We only took it so we could work it out. It was all botched up, you know.”

  “You probably figured it out the day after you had your hands on it,” Webster told him, flatly. “What were you waiting for? Any time you had offered that to us we’d known that you were with us and we’d have worked with you. We’d have called off the dogs, we’d have accepted you.”

  “Funny thing,” said Joe. “We never seemed to care about being accepted.”

  And the old laughter was back again, the laughter of a man who was sufficient to himself, who saw the whole fabric of the human community of effort as a vast, ironic joke. A man who walked alone and liked it. A man who saw the human race as something that was funny and probably just a little dangerous—but funnier than ever because it was dangerous. A man who felt no need of the brotherhood of man, who rejected that brotherhood as a thing as utterly provincial and pathetic as the twentieth century booster clubs.

  “O.K.,” said Webster sharply. “If that’s the way you want it. I’d hoped that maybe you had a deal to offer—some chance of conciliation. We don’t like things as they are—we’d rather they were different. But the move is up to you.”

  “Now, Tyler,” protested Joe, “no use in flying off the handle. I was thinking maybe you’d ought to know about the Juwain philosophy. You’ve sort of forgotten about it now, but there was a time when the System was all stirred up about it.”

  “All right,” said Webster, “go ahead and tell me.” The tone of his voice said he knew Joe wouldn’t.

  “Basically,” said Joe, “you humans are a lonely lot of folks. You never have known your fellow-man. You can’t know him because you haven’t the common touch of understanding that makes it possible to know him. You have friendships, sure, but those friendships are based on pure emotions, never on real understanding. You get along together, sure. But you get along by tolerance rather than by understanding. You work out your problems by agreement, but that agreement is simply a matter of the stronger-minded among you beating down the opposition of the weaker ones.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Why, everything,” Joe told him. “With the Juwain philosophy you’d actually understand.”

  “Telepathy?” asked Webster.

  “Not exactly,” said Joe. “We mutants have telepathy. But this is something different. The Juwain philosophy provides an ability to sense the viewpoint of another. It won’t necessarily make you agree with that viewpoint, but it does make you recognize it. You not only know what the other fellow is talking about, but how he feels about it. With Juwain’s philosophy you have to accept the validity of another man’s ideas and knowledge, not just the words he says, but the thought back of the words.”

  “Semantics,” said Webster.

  “If you insist on the term,” Joe told him. “What it really means is that you understand not only the intrinsic meaning, but the implied meaning of what someone else is saying. Almost telepathy, but not quite. A whole lot better, some ways.”

  “And Joe, how do you go about it? How do you—”

  The laughter was back again. “You think about it a while, Tyler … find out how bad you want it. Then maybe we can talk.”

  “Horse trading,” said Webster.

  Joe nodded.

  “Booby-trapped, too, I suppose,” said Webster.

  “Couple of them,” said Joe. “You find them and we’ll talk about that, too.”

  “What are you fellows going to want?”

  “Plenty,” Joe t
old him, “but maybe it’ll be worth it.”

  The screen went dead and Webster sat staring at it with unseeing eyes. Booby-trapped? Of course it was. Clear up to the hilt.

  Webster screwed his eyes shut and felt the blood pounding in his brain.

  What was it that had been claimed for the Juwain philosophy in that far-gone day when it had been lost? That it would have put mankind a hundred thousand years ahead in two short generations. Something like that.

  Maybe stretching it a bit—but not too much. A little justified exaggeration, that was all.

  Men understanding one another, accepting one another’s ideas at face value, each man seeing behind the words, seeing the thing as someone else would see it and accepting that concept as if it were his own. Making it, in fact, part of his own knowledge that could be brought to bear upon the subject at hand. No misunderstanding, no prejudice, no bias, no jangling—but a clear, complete grasp of all the conflicting angles of any human problem. Applicable to anything, to any type of human endeavor. To sociology, to psychology, to engineering, to all the various facets of a complex civilization. No more bungling, no more quarrelling, but honest and sincere appraisal of the facts and the ideas at hand.

  A hundred thousand years in two generations? Perhaps not too far off, at that.

  But booby-trapped? Or was it? Did the mutants really mean to part with it? For any kind of price? Just another bait dangled in front of mankind’s eyes while around the corner the mutants rolled with laughter.

  The mutants hadn’t used it. Of course, they hadn’t, for they had no real need of it. They already had telepathy and that would serve the purpose as far as the mutants were concerned. Individualists would have little use for a device which would make them understand one another, for they would not care whether they understood one another. The mutants got along together, apparently, tolerating whatever contact was necessary to safeguard their interests. But that was all. They’d work together to save their skins, but they found no pleasure in it.