The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  Mary, before she got married, had been interested in growing things. The greenhouse stood just down the slope, and Knight regretted that he had not been able to continue with her work. Only a few months before, he had dismantled her hydroponic tanks, a symbolic admission that a man could only do so much.

  John, quite naturally, had turned to rockets. For years, he and his pals had shot up the neighborhood with their experimental models. The last and largest one, still uncompleted, towered back of the house. Someday, Knight told himself, he’d have to go out and finish what the youngster had started. In university now, John still retained his interests, which now seemed to be branching out. Quite a boy, Knight thought pridefully. Yes, sir, quite a boy.

  He went down the ramp into the basement to get the dolly and stood there a moment, as he always did, just to look at the place—for here, he thought, was the real core of his life. There, in that corner, the workshop. Over there, the model railroad layout on which he still worked occasionally. Behind it, his photographic lab. He remembered that the basement hadn’t been quite big enough to install the lab and he’d had to knock out a section of the wall and build an addition. That, he recalled, had turned out to be a bigger job than he had bargained for.

  He got the dolly and went out to the hangar and loaded on the kit and wrestled it into the basement. Then he took a pinchbar and started to uncrate it. He worked with knowledge and precision, for he had unpacked many kits and knew just how to go about it.

  He felt a vague apprehension when he lifted out the parts. They were neither the size nor the shape he had expected them to be.

  Breathing a little heavily from exertion and excitement, he went at the job of unwrapping them. By the second piece, he knew he had no dog. By the fifth, he knew beyond any doubt exactly what he did have.

  He had a robot—and if he was any judge, one of the best and most expensive models!

  He sat down on one corner of the crate and took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. Finally, he tore the invoice letter off the crate, where it had been tacked.

  To Mr. Gordon Knight, it said, one dog kit, paid in full.

  So far as How-2 Kits, Inc., was concerned, he had a dog. And the dog was paid for—paid in full, it said.

  He sat down on the crate again and looked at the robot parts.

  No one would ever guess. Come inventory time, How-2 Kits would be long one dog and short one robot, but with carloads of dog kit orders filled and thousands of robots sold, it would be impossible to check.

  Gordon Knight had never, in all his life, done a consciously dishonest thing. But now he made a dishonest decision and he knew it was dishonest and there was nothing to be said in defense of it. Perhaps the worst of all was that he was dishonest with himself.

  At first, he told himself that he would send the robot back, but—since he had always wanted to put a robot together—he would assemble this one and then take it apart, repack it and send it back to the company. He wouldn’t activate it. He would just assemble it.

  But all the time he knew that he was lying to himself, realized that the least he was doing was advancing, step by evasive step, toward dishonesty. And he knew he was doing it this way because he didn’t have the nerve to be forthrightly crooked.

  So he sat down that night and read the instructions carefully, identifying each of the parts and their several features as he went along. For this was the way you went at a How-2. You didn’t rush ahead. You took it slowly, point by point, got the picture firmly in your mind before you started to put the parts together. Knight, by now, was an expert at not rushing ahead. Besides, he didn’t know when he would ever get another chance at a robot.

  II

  It was the beginning of his four days off and he buckled down to the task and put his heart into it. He had some trouble with the biologic concepts and had to look up a text on organic chemistry and try to trace some of the processes. He found the going tough. It had been a long time since he had paid any attention to organic chemistry, and he found that he had forgotten the little he had known.

  By bedtime of the second day, he had fumbled enough information out of the textbook to understand what was necessary to put the robot together.

  He was a little upset when Grace, discovering what he was working on, immediately thought up household tasks for the robot. But he put her off as best he could and, the next day, he went at the job of assembly.

  He got the robot together without the slightest trouble, being fairly handy with tools—but mostly because he religiously followed the first axiom of How-2ism by knowing what he was about before he began.

  At first, he kept assuring himself that as soon as he had the robot together, he would disassemble it. But when he was finished, he just had to see it work. No sense putting in all that time and not knowing if he had gotten it right, he argued. So he flipped the activating switch and screwed in the final plate.

  The robot came alive and looked at Knight.

  Then it said, “I am a robot. My name is Albert. What is there to do?”

  “Now take it easy, Albert,” Knight said hastily. “Sit down and rest while we have a talk.”

  “I don’t need to rest,” it said.

  “All right, then, just take it easy. I can’t keep you, of course. But as long as you’re activated, I’d like to see what you can do. There’s the house to take care of, and the garden and the lawn to mind, and I’d been thinking about the landscaping …”

  He stopped then and smote his forehead with an open palm. “Attachments! How can I get hold of the attachments?”

  “Never mind,” said Albert. “Don’t get upset. Just tell me what’s to be done.”

  So Knight told him, leaving the landscaping till the last and being a bit apologetic about it.

  “A hundred acres is a lot of land and you can’t spend all your time on it. Grace wants some housework done, and there’s the garden and the lawn.”

  “Tell you what you do,” said Albert. “I’ll write a list of things for you to order and you leave it all to me. You have a well-equipped workshop, I’ll get along.”

  “You mean you’ll build your own attachments?”

  “Quit worrying,” Albert told him. “Where’s a pencil and some paper?”

  Knight got them for him and Albert wrote down a list of materials—steel in several dimensions and specifications, aluminum of various gauges, copper wire and a lot of other items.

  “There!” said Albert, handing him the paper. “That won’t set you back more than a thousand and it’ll put us in business. You better call in the order so we can get started.”

  Knight called in the order and Albert began nosing around the place and quickly collected a pile of junk that had been left lying around.

  “All good stuff,” he said.

  Albert picked out some steel scrap and started up the forge and went to work. Knight watched him for a while, then went up to dinner.

  “Albert is a wonder,” he told Grace. “He’s making his own attachments.”

  “Did you tell him about the jobs I want done?”

  “Sure. But first he’s got to get the attachments made.”

  “I want him to keep the place clean,” said Grace, “and there are new drapes to be made, and the kitchen to be painted, and all those leaky faucets you never had the time to fix.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “And I wonder if he could learn to cook.”

  “I didn’t ask him, but I suppose he could.”

  “He’s going to be a tremendous help to me,” said Grace. “Just think, I can spend all my time at painting!”

  Through long practice, he knew exactly how to handle this phase of the conversation. He simply detached himself, split himself in two. One part sat and listened and, at intervals, made appropriate responses, while the other part went on thinking about more important matte
rs.

  Several times, after they had gone to bed, he woke in the night and heard Albert banging away in the basement workshop and was a little surprised until he remembered that a robot worked around the clock, all day, every day. Knight lay there and stared up at the blackness of the ceiling and congratulated himself on having a robot. Just temporarily, to be sure—he would send Albert back in a day or so. There was nothing wrong in enjoying the thing for a little while, was there?

  The next day, Knight went into the basement to see if Albert needed help, but the robot affably said he didn’t. Knight stood around for a while and then left Albert to himself and tried to get interested in a model locomotive he had started a year or two before, but had laid aside to do something else. Somehow, he couldn’t work up much enthusiasm over it any more, and he sat there, rather ill at ease, and wondered what was the matter with him. Maybe he needed a new interest. He had often thought he would like to take up puppetry and now might be the time to do it.

  He got out some catalogues and How-2 magazines and leafed through them, but was able to arouse only mild and transitory interest in archery, mountain-climbing and boat-building. The rest left him cold. It seemed he was singularly uninspired this particular day.

  So he went over to see Anson Lee.

  He found Lee stretched out in a hammock, smoking a pipe and reading Proust, with a jug set beneath the hammock within easy reaching distance.

  Lee laid aside the book and pointed to another hammock slung a few feet from where he lay. “Climb aboard and let’s have a restful visit.”

  Knight hoisted himself into the hammock, feeling rather silly.

  “Look at that sky,” Lee said. “Did you ever see another so blue?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Knight told him. “I’m not an expert on meteorology.”

  “Pity,” Lee said. “You’re not an expert on birds, either.”

  “For a time I was a member of a bird-watching club.”

  “And worked at it so hard, you got tired and quit before the year was out. It wasn’t a bird-watching club you belonged to—it was an endurance race. Everyone tried to see more birds than anyone else. You made a contest of it. And you took notes, I bet.”

  “Sure we did. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Not a thing,” said Lee, “if you hadn’t been quite so grim about it.”

  “Grim? How would you know?”

  “It’s the way you live. It’s the way everyone lives now. Except me, of course. Look at that robin, that ragged-looking one in the apple tree. He’s a friend of mine. We’ve been acquainted for all of six years now. I could write a book about that bird—and if he could read, he’d approve of it. But I won’t, of course. If I wrote the book, I couldn’t watch the robin.”

  “You could write it in the winter, when the robin’s gone.”

  “In wintertime,” said Lee, “I have other things to do.”

  He reached down, picked up the jug and passed it across to Knight.

  “Hard cider,” he explained. “Make it myself. Not as a project, not as a hobby, but because I happen to like cider and no one knows any longer how to really make it. Got to have a few worms in the apples to give it a proper tang.”

  Thinking about the worms, Knight spat out a mouthful, then handed back the jug. Lee applied himself to it wholeheartedly.

  “First honest work I’ve done in years.” He lay in the hammock, swinging gently, with the jug cradled on his chest. “Every time I get a yen to work, I look across the lake at you and decide against it. How many rooms have you added to that house since you got it built?”

  “Eight,” Knight told him proudly.

  “My God! Think of it—eight rooms!”

  “It isn’t hard,” protested Knight, “once you get the knack of it. Actually, it’s fun.”

  “A couple of hundred years ago, men didn’t add eight rooms to their homes. And they didn’t build their own houses to start with. And they didn’t go in for a dozen different hobbies. They didn’t have the time.”

  “It’s easy now. You just buy a How-2 Kit.”

  “So easy to kid yourself,” said Lee. “So easy to make it seem that you are doing something worthwhile when you’re just piddling around. Why do you think this How-2 thing boomed into big business? Because there was a need of it?”

  “It was cheaper. Why pay to have a thing done when you can do it yourself?”

  “Maybe that is part of it. Maybe, at first, that was the reason. But you can’t use the economy argument to justify adding eight rooms. No one needs eight extra rooms. I doubt it, even at first, economy was the entire answer. People had more time than they knew what to do with, so they turned to hobbies. And today they do it not because they need all the things they make, but because the making of them fills an emptiness born of shorter working hours, of giving people leisure they don’t know how to use. Now, me,” he said. “I know how to use it.”

  He lifted the jug and had another snort and offered it to Knight again. This time, Knight refused.

  They lay there in their hammocks, looking at blue sky and watching the ragged robin. Knight said there was a How-2 Kit for city people to make robot birds and Lee laughed pityingly and Knight shut up in embarrassment.

  When Knight went back home, a robot was clipping the grass around the picket fence. He had four arms, which had clippers attached instead of hands, and he was doing a quick and efficient job.

  “You aren’t Albert, are you?” Knight asked, trying to figure out how a strange robot could have strayed onto the place.

  “No,” the robot said, keeping right on clipping. “I am Abe. I was made by Albert.”

  “Made?”

  “Albert fabricated me so that I could work. You didn’t think Albert would do work like this himself, did you?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Knight.

  “If you want to talk, you’ll have to move along with me. I have to keep on working.”

  “Where is Albert now?”

  “Down in the basement, fabricating Alfred.”

  “Alfred? Another robot?”

  “Certainly. That’s what Albert’s for.”

  Knight reached out for a fencepost and leaned weakly against it.

  First there was a single robot and now there were two, and Albert was down in the basement working on a third. That, he realized, had been why Albert wanted him to place the order for the steel and other things—but the order hadn’t arrived as yet, so he must have made this robot—this Abe—out of the scrap he had salvaged!

  Knight hurried down into the basement and there was Albert, working at the forge. He had another robot partially assembled and he had parts scattered here and there.

  The corner of the basement looked like a metallic nightmare.

  “Albert!”

  Albert turned around.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “I’m reproducing,” Albert told him blandly.

  “But …”

  “They built the mother-urge in me. I don’t know why they called me Albert. I should have a female name.”

  “But you shouldn’t be able to make other robots!”

  “Look, stop your worrying. You want robots, don’t you?”

  “Well—yes, I guess so.”

  “Then I’ll make them. I’ll make you all you need.”

  He went back to his work.

  A robot who made other robots—there was a fortune in a thing like that! The robots sold at a cool ten thousand and Albert had made one and was working on another. Twenty thousand, Knight told himself.

  Perhaps Albert could make more than two a day. He had been working from scrap metal and maybe, when the new material arrived, he could step up production.

  But even so, at only two a day—that would be half a million dollars’ worth of robots every month! Six m
illion a year!

  It didn’t add up, Knight sweatily realized. One robot was not supposed to be able to make another robot. And if there were such a robot, How-2 Kits would not let it loose.

  Yet, here Knight was, with a robot he didn’t even own, turning out other robots at a dizzy pace.

  He wondered if a man needed a license of some sort to manufacture robots. It was something he’d never had occasion to wonder about before, or to ask about, but it seemed reasonable. After all, a robot was not mere machinery, but a piece of pseudo-life. He suspected there might be rules and regulations and such matters as government inspection and he wondered, rather vaguely, just how many laws he might be violating.

  He looked at Albert, who was still busy, and he was fairly certain Albert would not understand his viewpoint.

  So he made his way upstairs and went to the recreation room, which he had built as an addition several years before and almost never used, although it was fully equipped with How-2 ping-pong and billiard tables. In the unused recreation room was an unused bar. He found a bottle of whiskey. After the fifth or sixth drink, the outlook was much brighter.

  He got paper and pencil and tried to work out the economics of it. No matter how he figured it, he was getting rich much faster than anyone ever had before.

  Although, he realized, he might run into difficulties, for he would be selling robots without apparent means of manufacturing them and there was that matter of a license, if he needed one, and probably a lot of other things he didn’t even know about.

  But no matter how much trouble he might encounter, he couldn’t very well be despondent, not face to face with the fact that, within a year, he’d be a multi-millionaire. So he applied himself enthusiastically to the bottle and got drunk for the first time in almost twenty years.

  III

  When he came home from work the next day, he found the lawn razored to a neatness it had never known before. The flower beds were weeded and the garden had been cultivated. The picket fence was newly painted. Two robots, equipped with telescopic extension legs in lieu of ladders, were painting the house.

  Inside, the house was spotless and he could hear Grace singing happily in the studio. In the sewing room, a robot—with a sewing-machine attachment sprouting from its chest—was engaged in making drapes.