The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  An honest offer? A bait, a lure to hold man’s attention in one quarter while a dirty deal was being pulled off in another? A mere ironic joke? Or an offer that had a stinger in it?

  Webster shook his head. There was no telling. No way to gauge a mutant’s motives or his reason.

  Soft, glowing light had crept into the walls and ceiling of the office with the departing of the day, the automatic, hidden light growing stronger as the darkness fell. Webster glanced at the window, saw that it was an oblong of blackness, dotted by the few advertising signs that flared and flickered on the city’s skyline.

  He reached out, thumbed over a tumbler, spoke to the secretary in the outer office.

  “I’m sorry I kept you so long. I forgot the time.”

  “That’s all right, sir,” said the secretary. “There’s a visitor to see you. Mr. Fowler.”

  “Fowler?”

  “Yes, the gentleman from Jupiter.”

  “I know,” said Webster, wearily. “Ask him to come in.”

  He had almost forgotten Fowler and the threat the man had made.

  He stared absent-mindedly at his desk, saw the kaleidoscope lying where he’d left it. Funny toy, he thought. Quaint idea. A simple thing for the simple minds of long ago. But the kid would get a boot out of it.

  He reached out a hand and grasped it, lifted it to his eyes. The transmitted light wove a pattern of crazy color, a geometric nightmare. He twirled the tube a bit and the pattern changed. And yet again—

  His brain wrenched with a sudden sickness and the color burned itself into his mind in a single flare of soul-twisting torture.

  The tube dropped and clattered on the desk. Webster reached out with both hands and clutched at the desk edge.

  And through his brain went the thought of horror: What a toy for a kid!

  The sickness faded and he sat stock-still, brain clear again, breath coming regularly.

  Funny, he thought. Funny that it should do a thing like that. Or could it have been something else and not the kaleidoscope at all? A seizure of some sort. Heart acting up. A bit too young for that and he’d been checked just recently.

  The door clicked and Webster looked up.

  Fowler came across the room with measured step, slowly, until he stood across from the desk.

  “Yes, Fowler?”

  “I left in anger,” Fowler said, “and I didn’t want it that way. You might have understood, but again you might not have. It was just that I was upset, you see. I came from Jupiter, feeling that finally all the years I’d spent there in the domes had been justified, that all the anguish I had felt when I saw the men go out somehow had paid off. I was bringing news, you understand, news that the world awaited. To me it was the most wonderful thing that could have happened and I thought you’d see it, too. I thought the people would see it. It was as if I had been bringing them word that Paradise was just around the corner. For that is what it is, Webster… that is what it is.”

  He put his hands flat upon the desk and leaned forward, whispering.

  “You see how it is, don’t you, Webster? You understand a bit.”

  Webster’s hands were shaking and he laid them in his lap, clenched them together until the fingers hurt.

  “Yes,” he whispered back. “Yes, I think I know.”

  For he did know.

  Knew more than the words had told him. Knew the anguish and the pleading and bitter disappointment that lay behind the words. Knew them almost as if he’d said the words himself—almost as if he were Fowler.

  Fowler’s voice broke in alarm. “What’s the matter, Webster? What’s the trouble with you?”

  Webster tried to speak and the words were dust. His throat tightened until there was a knot of pain above his Adam’s apple.

  He tried again and the words were low and forced. “Tell me, Fowler. Tell me something straight. You learned a lot of things out there. Things that men don’t know or know imperfectly. Like high grade telepathy, maybe … or… or—”

  “Yes,” said Fowler, “a lot of things. But I didn’t bring them back with me. When I became a man again, that was all I was. Just a man, that’s all. None of it came back. Most of it is just hazy memories and a … well, you might call it yearning.”

  “You mean that you haven’t a one of the abilities you had when you were a Loper?”

  “Not a single one.”

  “You couldn’t, by chance, be able to make me understand a thing you wanted me to know. Make me feel the way you feel.”

  “Not a chance,” said Fowler.

  Webster reached out a hand, pushed the kaleidoscope gently with his finger. It rolled forward a ways, then came to rest again.

  “What did you come back for?” asked Webster.

  “To square myself with you,” said Fowler. “To let you know I wasn’t really sore. To try to make you understand that I had a side, too. Just a difference of opinion, that’s all. I thought maybe we might shake on it.”

  “I see. And you’re still determined to go out and tell the people?”

  Fowler nodded. “I have to, Webster. You must surely know that. It’s… it’s… well, almost a religion with me. It’s something I believe in. I have to tell the rest of them that there’s a better world and a better life. I have to lead them to it.”

  “A messiah,” said Webster.

  Fowler straightened. “That’s one thing I was afraid of. Scoffing isn’t—”

  “I wasn’t scoffing,” Webster told him, almost gently.

  He picked up the kaleidoscope, polishing its tube with the palm of his hand, considering. Not yet, he thought. Not yet. Have to think it out. Do I want him to understand me as well as I understand him?

  “Look, Fowler,” he said, “lay off a day or two. Wait a bit. Just a day or two. Then let us talk again.”

  “I’ve waited long enough already.”

  “But I want you to think this over: A million years ago man first came into being—just an animal. Since that time he had inched his way up a cultural ladder. Bit by painful bit he has developed a way of life, a philosophy, a way of doing things. His progress has been geometrical. Today he does much more than he did yesterday. Tomorrow he’ll do even more than he did today. For the first time in human history, Man is really beginning to hit the ball. He’s just got a good start, the first stride, you might say. He’s going a lot farther in a lot less time than he’s come already.

  “Maybe it isn’t as pleasant as Jupiter, maybe not the same at all. Maybe humankind is drab compared with the life forms of Jupiter. But it’s man’s life. It’s the thing he’s fought for. It’s the thing he’s made himself. It’s a destiny he has shaped.

  “I hate to think, Fowler, that just when we’re going good we’ll swap our destiny for one we don’t know about, for one we can’t be sure about.”

  “I’ll wait,” said Fowler. “Just a day or two. But I’m warning you. You can’t put me off. You can’t change my mind.”

  “That’s all I ask,” said Webster. He rose and held out his hand. “Shake on it?” he asked.

  But even as he shook Fowler’s hand, Webster knew it wasn’t any good. Juwain philosophy or not, mankind was heading for a showdown. A showdown that would be even worse because of the Juwain philosophy. For the mutants wouldn’t miss a bet. If this was to be their joke, if this was their way of getting rid of the human race, they wouldn’t overlook a thing. By tomorrow morning every man, woman and child somehow or other would have managed to look through a kaleidoscope. Or something else. Lord only knew how many other ways there were.

  He watched until Fowler had closed the door behind him, then walked to the window and stared out. Flashing on the skyline of the city was a new advertising sign—one that had not been there before. A crazy sign that made crazy colored patterns in the night. Flashing on and off as if one were turning a kaleidoscope.r />
  Webster stared at it, tight-lipped.

  He should have expected it.

  He thought of Joe with a flare of murderous fury surging through his brain. For that call had been a cackling chortle behind a covering hand, a smart-Aleck gesture designed to let man know what it was all about, to let him know after he was behind the eight-ball and couldn’t do a thing about it.

  We should have killed them off, thought Webster, and was surprised at the calm coldness of the thought. We should have stamped them out like we would a dangerous disease.

  But man had forsaken violence as a world and individual policy. Not for one hundred twenty-five years had one group been arrayed against another group in violence.

  When Joe had called, the Juwain philosophy had lain on the desk. I had only to reach out my hand and touch it, Webster thought.

  He stiffened with the realization of it. I had only to reach out my hand and touch it. And I did just that!

  Something more than telepathy, something more than guessing. Joe knew he would pick up the kaleidoscope—must have known it. Foresight—an ability to roll back the future. Just an hour or so, perhaps, but that would be enough.

  Joe—and the other mutants, of course—had known about Fowler. Their probing, telepathic minds could have told them all that they wished to know. But this was something else, something different.

  He stood at the window, staring at the sign. Thousands of people, he knew, were seeing it. Seeing it and feeling that sudden sick impact in their mind.

  Webster frowned, wondering about the shifting pattern of the lights. Some physiological impact upon a certain center of the human brain, perhaps. A portion of the brain that had not been used before—a portion of the brain that in due course of human development might naturally have come into its proper function. A function now that was being forced.

  The Juwain philosophy, at last! Something for which men had sought for centuries, now finally come to pass. Given man at a time when he’d have been better off without it.

  Fowler had written in his report: I cannot give a factual account because there are no words for the facts that I want to tell. He still didn’t have the words, of course, but he had something else that was even better—an audience that could understand the sincerity and the greatness which lay beneath the words he did have. An audience with a new-found sense which would enable them to grasp some of the mighty scope of the thing Fowler had to tell.

  Joe had planned it that way. Had waited for this moment. Had used the Juwain philosophy as a weapon against the human race.

  For with the Juwain philosophy, man would go to Jupiter. Faced by all the logic in the world, he still would go to Jupiter. For better or for worse, he would go to Jupiter.

  The only chance there had ever been of winning against Fowler had been Fowler’s inability to describe what he saw, to tell what he felt, to reach the people with a clear exposition of the message that he brought. With mere human words that message would have been vague and fuzzy and while the people at first might have believed, they would have been shaky in their belief, would have listened to other argument.

  But now that chance was gone, for the words would be no longer vague and fuzzy. The people would know, as clearly and as vibrantly as Fowler knew himself, what Jupiter was like.

  The people would go to Jupiter, would enter upon a life other than the human life.

  And the Solar System, the entire Solar System, with the exception of Jupiter, would lie open for the new race of mutants to take over, to develop any kind of culture that they might wish—a culture that would scarcely follow the civilization of the parent race.

  Webster swung away from the window, strode back to the desk. He stooped and pulled out a drawer, reached inside. His hand came out clutching something that he had never dreamed of using—a relic, a museum piece he had tossed there years before.

  With a handkerchief, he polished the metal of the gun, tested its mechanism with trembling fingers.

  Fowler was the key. With Fowler dead—

  With Fowler dead and the Jupiter stations dismantled and abandoned, the mutants would be licked. Man would have the Juwain philosophy and would retain his destiny. The Centauri expedition would blast off for the stars. The life experiments would continue on Pluto. Man would march along the course that his culture plotted.

  Faster than ever before. Faster than anyone could dream.

  Two great strides. The renunciation of violence as a human policy—the understanding that came with the Juwain philosophy. The two great things that would speed man along the road to wherever he was going.

  The renunciation of the violence and the—

  Webster stared at the gun clutched in his hand and heard the roar of winds tumbling through his head.

  Two great strides—and he was about to toss away the first.

  For one hundred twenty-five years no man had killed another—for more than a thousand years killing had been obsolete as a factor in the determination of human affairs.

  A thousand years of peace and one death might undo the work. One shot in the night might collapse the structure, might hurl man back to the old bestial thinking.

  Webster killed—why can’t I? After all, there are some men who should be killed. Webster did right, but—he shouldn’t have stopped with only one. I don’t see why they’re hanging him, he’d ought to get a medal. We ought to start on the mutants first. If it hadn’t been for them—

  That was the way they’d talk.

  That, thought Webster, is the wind that’s roaring in my brain.

  The flashing of the crazy colored sign made a ghostly flicker along the walls and floor.

  Fowler is seeing that, thought Webster. He is looking at it and even if he isn’t, I still have the kaleidoscope.

  He’ll be coming in and we’ll sit down and talk. We’ll sit down and talk—

  He tossed the gun back into the drawer, walked toward the door.

  The Gravestone Rebels Ride by Night!

  As pulp magazines counted them, this story is a novel, one of two that led off the six stories and three “fact articles” included in the October 1944 issue of Big-Book Western Magazine, in which it appeared. Cliff Simak’s journals do not show that he wrote a story with this title, but they do show that he was paid $177, in 1944, for a story entitled “Sixguns Write the Law”—and the hero of this story was a frontier lawyer, so it seems reasonable to conclude that this is that story.

  I would presume that the size of the payment to the author reflected the length of the story …

  —dww

  Chapter I

  Death Comes to Town!

  Smoke still wisped from what had been a cabin crouched beneath the cottonwoods that grew above the spring. The embers, smothered in gray ash, still exuded a stifling heat. Flame-scarred, the cottonwoods themselves stood limp with withered leaf and drooping branch.

  But something else than cabin logs and homemade furniture had gone up in flames. Beneath two smoking timbers lay an outline, ash-covered, fire-blackened, that could be neither log nor furniture, steer-hide trunk nor sweat-stained saddle.

  Shane Fletcher tossed idly in one hand the things he had found upon the ground and stared at the shape beneath the timbers, wrinkling his nose against the stench that told him better than the shape itself, what lay there in the ashes.

  The things in his hand clinked as he tossed them.

  “Find something?” asked the man who sat bolt upright on the wagon seat, both hands grasping the cane planted stiffly before him.

  “Yes,” said Fletcher.

  “Cartridges?”

  “How did you know?”

  “My ears,” said Blind Johnny. “You’re tossing them. They clink.”

  “Three of them,” Fletcher told him. “Fired not long ago. Powder smell still on them.”

  “
Blood on the grass?” asked Johnny.

  Fletcher shook his head. “Nope. They got him near the door, yelled at him to come out and gunned him down when he stepped outside.”

  A dog came from the weeds down by the spring, snaked a frightened, apologetic course toward the wagon and the men, tail tucked tightly between his legs, eye-whites showing.

  Fletcher patted the animal. “Hello, there, pup!”

  A charred wooden bucket lay tilted on its side a few feet from the smoking heap that once had been a cabin. Part of a rude bench lay nearby. A tin wash basin gleamed in the smoky sunlight.

  Those, thought Fletcher, had been the things from which Harry Duff had washed his hands and face, dipped a drink of water. This was Harry’s dog, seeking human protection against the whiplash crack of rifles, the angry roar of flames that consumed the things which had been his home.

  The dog sat down and stared with eyes abrim with wonder and fear. Fletcher patted the yellow head, felt the quivering fright that ran along the body.

  “Tracks?” asked Blind Johnny.

  “Maybe,” Fletcher told him. “If there are, they’d head straight into the badlands.”

  Blind Johnny wagged his head. “Can’t figure why anyone would want to do something like that to a man like Harry. Never harmed a fly, Harry never did.”

  The blind man sat stiffly on the wagon seat, both hands clutching the cane, head unturning, as if he might be staring at the far horizon.

  Fletcher patted the yellow head and the dog moved closer, pressed tight against his legs.

  “It was just the other day that he was in to see me,” Fletcher said, staring at the ashy mound that lay twisted in the embers. “Happy as a bear knee-deep in honey. Seems an uncle died someplace in the east and left him a few hundred. Enough, he said, to pay off his debt and send back for his girl. Law firm that wrote the letter wanted some information, but he didn’t have it with him. Asked me to drop out again.”

  “What kind of debts?” demanded Johnny. “He didn’t drink and didn’t gamble.”

  “Mentioned something about a mortgage,” Fletcher said.