The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  For a moment Blair’s man stood outlined against the rock, back to the outer space, facing the yellow fury that crouched before him, tensed for a vicious spring. For a moment the man’s hands pawed air as he sought to keep his footing, to regain his balance.

  And then, slowly, deliberately, as if he were doing it of his own volition, he tumbled backward, off the ledge. He pinwheeled, end-over-end, white bandage flashing in the sun. A drawn-out shriek sounded, seemed to go on and on, but actually it lasted for no more than clipped seconds….

  Mind still stunned by horror, Fletcher turned. Blair jerked his eyes away and his gun came up. Fletcher, charging in, head down, arms outstretched, saw the red coughing of the gun in front of him, felt the stinging fire that slashed across his shoulder.

  His left hand lashed out even as he rushed, his fingers wrapped with a grip of steel around the wrist that held the gun. His body smashed into Blair’s and he jerked the gun arm up with a savage yank.

  Blair’s gun arm gave beneath the pressure, folded back. The gun dropped free and Fletcher kicked it away.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Blair came rushing in, his head down. Dancing back, Fletcher slammed for the head.

  A fist sank into his belly. He reeled back, sickness wrenching at his stomach.

  Another blow was coming and Fletcher lifted arms that seemed to weigh a ton, caught it on his left wrist, blocked it.

  The sickness was fading from his stomach, now, and his head was clearer. Blair was charging in again, head still lowered. Fletcher stepped back and then lunged in, right fist traveling from his knee. It caught Blair on the forehead, stopped him, straightened him. Fletcher struck with his left—and then the right came again.

  He saw Blair’s face, drew back his fist and targeted it toward the mouth. Pain grated across his knuckles and the face was still there. The left this time. And then the right again. The face was gone.

  Fletcher stood on widespread legs, shook his head to clear away the fog.

  A soft, wet nose nuzzled and sniffed at Fletcher’s hand. He reached back the hand and patted the yellow dog. Cynthia Thornton stood beside her horse. “Shane,” her voice choked, “Shane, did you see what the dog did?”

  Fletcher nodded. “That was for Duff,” he said. “The man on the cliff must have been one of the men who killed his master. He remembered, you see.”

  Cynthia Thornton walked quickly forward, dabbed with a handkerchief at Fletcher’s face. “You’re a sight,” she said.

  Hoofbeats interrupted her. A group of mounted men swung out of a canyon. The riders pulled up.

  Zeb White rose in his stirrups and raised his hat. “Howdy ma’m,” he said to Cynthia.

  “Hello, Mr. White.”

  “I see you got him,” said White.

  “For a while he had me,” Fletcher told him. “But Miss Thornton came along and created a sort of diversion, you might say.”

  Cynthia shook her head. “Just out for a ride, Mr. White, and had my gun along to do some target practice. Then, when I saw Shane all trussed up like a turkey for the pan, I decided to do something about it.”

  Another of the riders spoke up. “We heard some shooting.”

  Fletcher nodded. “There was a little shooting, I guess.”

  The man looked at Blair. “Must of shot him up considerable,” he guessed. In reply Fletcher raised his bloody knuckles.

  “Find the money on him?” asked White.

  “It’s over by the fire. He was bringing it back. Bringing me with it. Was going to claim I was the one who robbed the bank and killed Childress.”

  “He can’t claim that, nohow,” said White. “He was the only one that was using a thirty-eight. The rest of you jaspers mixed up in the deal had forty-fives.”

  “And a thirty-eight killed Childress,” said one of the other men. “Doc dug the slug out of him.”

  “We better be getting back to town,” said White. “Some of you hombres catch up them horses over there and gather up things, includin’ Blair. And that thing over there in the blanket, whatever ‘tis.”

  “That’s Blind Johnny,” Fletcher told him.

  “Dead?”

  Fletcher nodded. “One of the boys had better ride over to Antelope and tell the preacher we’ll be needing him.”

  “Sure,” agreed White, heartily. “We got to give Johnny a proper plantin’.” He looked from Fletcher to Cynthia, back again. “Maybe you two might be wantin’ a preacher, too.”

  Fletcher grinned. “After awhile, maybe. I’m not making enough to keep myself right now.”

  “Shucks,” said White, “I forgot to tell you. We ain’t got no bank now since Childress was gunned. So we’re organizing another one. Need a man we can trust to run it.”

  The men sat silent on their horses, watching Fletcher. “We were sort of considerin’ you,” White told him.

  Suddenly Fletcher remembered. He put his hand in his inside coat pocket, drew out a bundle of papers. He riffled through them. He grinned at White. “Guess I had a wrong hunch on these,” he said. “I didn’t need them after all.”

  “Put them back in your pocket,” White told him. “Collecting them will be part of your new job.”

  Cynthia linked her arm through Fletcher’s, smiled at White. “Perhaps,” she said, “we can use that preacher, after all.”

  How-2

  “How-2” is not the sort of name Clifford Simak would have put on a story, and I suspect that someone in the offices of Galaxy Science Fiction eventually came up with that title. Cliff’s journals seem to show that he sent a story entitled “Let Freedom Ring” to Galaxy’s editor, Horace Gold, early in 1954, and a different entry shows that Cliff was paid $600 that same year for a story entitled “Make It Yourself”—I think those entries both refer to this story (which in any case first appeared in the November 1954 issue of Galaxy.

  With this story, Cliff Simak married the concept of artificial intelligence to the concepts of civil rights—and ended up raising questions about slavery.

  (It seems ironic that in this story, there is brief mention that a Broadway play was written about the goings-on in the story, and that after this story’s publication, a play was written based on this story—sadly, the real-life play, after opening off-Broadway under the title How to Make a Man, closed after only a single night on the Great White Way.)

  —dww

  Gordon Knight was anxious for the five-hour day to end so he could rush home. For this was the day he should receive the How-2 Kit he’d ordered and he was anxious to get to work on it.

  It wasn’t only that he had always wanted a dog, although that was more than half of it—but, with this kit, he would be trying something new. He’d never handled any How-2 Kit with biologic components and he was considerably excited. Although, of course, the dog would be biologic only to a limited degree and most of it would be packaged, anyhow, and all he’d have to do would be assemble it. But it was something new and he wanted to get started.

  He was thinking of the dog so hard that he was mildly irritated when Randall Stewart, returning from one of his numerous trips to the water fountain, stopped at his desk to give him a progress report on home dentistry.

  “It’s easy,” Stewart told him. “Nothing to it if you follow the instructions. Here, look—I did this one last night.”

  He then squatted down beside Knight’s desk and opened his mouth, proudly pulling it out of shape with his fingers so Knight could see.

  “Thish un ere,” said Stewart, blindly attempting to point, with a wildly waggling finger, at the tooth in question.

  He let his face snap back together.

  “Filled it myself,” he announced complacently. “Rigged up a series of mirrors to see what I was doing. They came right in the kit, so all I had to do was follow the instructions.”

  He reached a finger deep i
nside his mouth and probed tenderly at his handiwork. “A little awkward, working on yourself. On someone else, of course, there’d be nothing to it.”

  He waited hopefully.

  “Must be interesting,” said Knight.

  “Economical, too. No use paying the dentists the prices they ask. Figure I’ll practice on myself and then take on the family. Some of my friends, even, if they want me to.”

  He regarded Knight intently.

  Knight failed to rise to the dangling bait.

  Stewart gave up. “I’m going to try cleaning next. You got to dig down beneath the gums and break loose the tartar. There’s a kind of hook you do it with. No reason a man shouldn’t take care of his own teeth instead of paying dentists.”

  “It doesn’t sound too hard,” Knight admitted.

  “It’s a cinch,” said Stewart. “But you got to follow the instructions. There’s nothing you can’t do if you follow the instructions.”

  And that was true, Knight thought. You could do anything if you followed the instructions—if you didn’t rush ahead, but sat down and took your time and studied it all out.

  Hadn’t he built his house in his spare time, and all the furniture for it, and the gadgets, too? Just in his spare time—although God knew, he thought, a man had little enough of that, working fifteen hours a week.

  It was a lucky thing he’d been able to build the house after buying all that land. But everyone had been buying what they called estates, and Grace had set her heart on it, and there’d been nothing he could do.

  If he’d had to pay carpenters and masons and plumbers, he would never have been able to afford the house. But by building it himself, he had paid for it as he went along. It had taken ten years, of course, but think of all the fun he’d had!

  He sat there and thought of all the fun he’d had, and of all the pride. No, sir, he told himself, no one in his circumstances had a better house.

  Although, come to think of it, what he’d done had not been too unusual. Most of the men he knew had built their homes, too, or had built additions to them, or had remodeled them.

  He had often thought that he would like to start over again and build another house, just for the fun of it. But that would be foolish, for he already had a house and there would be no sale for another one, even if he built it. Who would want to buy a house when it was so much fun to build one?

  And there was still a lot of work to do on the house he had. New rooms to add—not necessary, of course, but handy. And the roof to fix. And a summer house to build. And there were always the grounds. At one time he had thought he would landscape—a man could do a lot to beautify a place with a few years of spare-time work. But there had been so many other things to do, he had never managed to get around to it.

  Knight and Anson Lee, his neighbor, had often talked about what could be done to their adjoining acreages if they ever had the time. But Lee, of course, would never get around to anything. He was a lawyer, although he never seemed to work at it too hard. He had a large study filled with stacks of law books and there were times when he would talk quite expansively about his law library, but he never seemed to use the books. Usually he talked that way when he had half a load on, which was fairly often, since he claimed to do a lot of thinking and it was his firm belief that a bottle helped him think.

  After Stewart finally went back to his desk, there still remained more than an hour before the working day officially ended. Knight sneaked the current issue of a How-2 magazine out of his briefcase and began to leaf through it, keeping a wary eye out so he could hide it quickly if anyone should notice he was loafing.

  He had read the articles earlier, so now he looked at the ads. It was a pity, he thought, a man didn’t have the time to do all there was to do.

  For example:

  Fit your own glasses (testing material and lens-grinding equipment included in the kit).

  Take out your own tonsils (complete directions and all necessary instruments).

  Fix up an unused room as your private hospital (no sense in leaving home when you’re ill, just at the time when you most need its comfort and security).

  Grow your own medicines and drugs (starts of 50 different herbs and medicinal plants, with detailed instructions for their cultivation and processing).

  Grow your wife’s fur coat (a pair of mink, one ton of horse meat, furrier tools).

  Tailor your own suits and coats (50 yards of wool yardgoods and lining material).

  Build your own TV set.

  Bind your own books.

  Build your own power plant (let the wind work for you).

  Build your own robot (a jack of all trades, intelligent, obedient, no time off, no overtime, on the job 24 hours a day, never tired, no need for rest or sleep, do any work you wish).

  Now there, thought Knight, was something a man should try. If a man had one of those robots, it would save a lot of labor. There were all sorts of attachments you could get for it. And the robots, the ad said, could put on and take off all these attachments just as a man puts on a pair of gloves or takes off a pair of shoes.

  Have one of those robots and, every morning, it would sally out into the garden and pick all the corn and beans and peas and tomatoes and other vegetables ready to be picked and leave them all neatly in a row on the back stoop of the house. Probably would get a lot more out of a garden that way, too, for the grading mechanism would never select a too-green tomato nor allow an ear of corn to go beyond its prime.

  There were cleaning attachments for the house and snowplowing attachments and housepainting attachments and almost any other kind one could wish. Get a full quota of attachments, then lay out a work program and turn the robot loose—you could forget about the place the year around, for the robot would take care of everything.

  There was only one hitch. The cost of a robot kit came close to ten thousand dollars and all the available attachments could run to another ten.

  Knight closed the magazine and put it into the briefcase.

  He saw there were only fifteen minutes left until quitting time and that was too short a time to do anything, so Knight just sat and thought about getting home and finding the kit there waiting for him.

  He had always wanted a dog, but Grace would never let him have one. They were dirty, she said, and tracked up the carpeting, they had fleas and shed hair all over everything—and, besides, they smelled.

  Well, she wouldn’t object to this kind of dog, Knight told himself.

  It wouldn’t smell and it was guaranteed not to shed hair and it would never harbor fleas, for a flea would starve on a half-mechanical, half-biologic dog.

  He hoped the dog wouldn’t be a disappointment, but he’d carefully gone over the literature describing it and he was sure it wouldn’t. It would go for a walk with its owner and would chase sticks and smaller animals, and what more could one expect of any dog? To insure realism, it saluted trees and fence-posts, but was guaranteed to leave no stains or spots.

  The kit was tilted up beside the hangar door when he got home, but at first he didn’t see it. When he did, he craned his neck out so far to be sure it was the kit that he almost came a cropper in the hedge. But, with a bit of luck, he brought the flier down neatly on the gravel strip and was out of it before the blades had stopped whirling.

  It was the kit, all right. The invoice envelope was tacked on top of the crate. But the kit was bigger and heavier than he’d expected and he wondered if they might not have accidentally sent him a bigger dog than the one he’d ordered.

  He tried to lift the crate, but it was too heavy, so he went around to the back of the house to bring a dolly from the basement.

  Around the corner of the house, he stopped a moment and looked out across his land. A man could do a lot with it, he thought, if he just had the time and the money to buy the equipment. He could turn the acreage into one vast g
arden. Ought to have a landscape architect work out a plan for it, of course—although, if he bought some landscaping books and spent some evenings at them, he might be able to figure things out for himself.

  There was a lake at the north end of the property and the whole landscape, it seemed to him, should focus upon the lake. It was rather a dank bit of scenery at the moment, with straggly marsh surrounding it and unkempt cattails and reeds astir in the summer wind. But with a little drainage and some planting, a system of walks and a picturesque bridge or two, it would be a thing of beauty.

  He started out across the lake to where the house of Anson Lee sat upon a hill. As soon as he got the dog assembled, he would walk it over to Lee’s place, for Lee would be pleased to be visited by a dog. There had been times, Knight felt, when Lee had not been entirely sympathetic with some of the things he’d done. Like that business of helping Grace build the kilns and the few times they’d managed to lure Lee out on a hunt for the proper kinds of clay.

  “What do you want to make dishes for?” he had asked. “Why go to all the trouble? You can buy all you want for a tenth of the cost of making them.”

  Lee had not been visibly impressed when Grace explained that they weren’t dishes. They were ceramics, Grace had said, and a recognized form of art. She got so interested and made so much of it—some of it really good—that Knight had found it necessary to drop his model railroading project and tack another addition on the already sprawling house, for stacking, drying and exhibition.

  Lee hadn’t said a word, a year or two later, when Knight built the studio for Grace, who had grown tired of pottery and had turned to painting. Knight felt, though, that Lee had kept silent only because he was convinced of the futility of further argument.

  But Lee would approve of the dog. He was that kind of fellow, a man Knight was proud to call a friend—yet queerly out of step. With everyone else absorbed in things to do, Lee took it easy with his pipe and books, though not the ones on law.

  Even the kids had their interests now, learning while they played.