The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  “No!” rasped Sherwood, his breath strangling in this throat. “No, not me!”

  “Who else?” asked the Ship. “I have searched for years and you are the first who fitted.”

  “Fitted!” Sherwood screamed.

  “Why, of course,” the Ship said calmly, happily. “A man who would not be missed. No one knowing where you were. No one hunting for you. No one who will miss you. I had hunted for someone like you and had despaired of finding one. For I am humane. I would cause no one grief or sadness.”

  The walls kept closing in.

  The Ship seemed to sigh in metallic contentment.

  “Believe me, Mr. Sherwood,” it said, “finding you was a very miracle.”

  Rim of the Deep

  Clifford D. Simak’s few surviving journals do not make it clear just when he wrote this story; but the fact that he sent it to John W. Campbell Jr., the relatively new editor of Astounding Science Fiction, in September 1939 suggests he may have begun writing it soon after June 16 of that year, when he ended the nomadic stage of his newspaper career by joining the staff of Minnesota’s Minneapolis Star (and I speculate that the fact that Cliff found himself working downtown in the biggest city he had ever lived or worked in, along with several years of listening to the radio plays so often broadcast across the country in the evenings, led him to the unusual “gangster” style he used in this and a few other stories written during this period).

  Campbell bought the story for $125, and it appeared in the May 1940 issue of his magazine.

  Like other Simak stories from that era, the efforts of private commerce, in this case to colonize the ocean floors, and a secret incursion from outer space, seem not to lead anyone to think about getting the government involved—to modern eyes that seems unthinkable, but clearly, Cliff, product of rural American life in the early Twentieth Century, had not thought of society going in that direction … after all, World War II had not yet begun.

  Cliff used a lot of his favorite devices in his story: the name of his protagonist, Grant, was used more frequently than any other name in Cliff’s stories (it happened to have been the name of the Wisconsin country in which Cliff was born). Grant is a newspaperman (in fact, he works for the Evening Rocket, a newspaper prominent in a number of stories Cliff wrote during that period); and Grant names the paper’s copyboy as “Lightnin’,” a hoary piece of newspaper humor than never fails to make me smile …

  —dww

  The Rat slouched into the Venus Flower and over to the table where Grant Nagle was settling down to the serious business of getting drunk.

  The newspaperman eyed the Rat with unconcealed loathing. But the Rat didn’t seem to mind. He pushed his cap farther over his left eye and talked out of the corner of his mouth, his words hissing out alongside the smoke-trickling cigarette.

  “I got a message for you,” he declared.

  “Let’s have it,” said Grant. “Then get the hell out of my sight.”

  “Hellion Smith is loose,” said the Rat.

  Grant started, but his face didn’t change. He stared at the other icily and said nothing.

  “He left word two years ago,” explained the Rat, “that when he cracked the crib I was to bring you a message. I’m bringing it, see?”

  “Yes?”

  “It was this. Hellion said he was going to get you. Himself, personal, see? Some of us boys offered to do the job for him, but he said no, he was saving you for himself. The chief is funny that way.”

  “Why?” asked Grant.

  The question took the Rat by surprise. His cigarette drooped suddenly, almost fell from his mouth. His watery eyes blinked. But he recovered his composure and hunched farther across the table.

  “That’s a funny question, Nagle. Funny question for you to be asking. When you put the chief out in the Alcatraz of Ganymede.”

  “I didn’t put him there,” said the newsman. “All if did was write a story. That’s my job. I found out Hellion was hiding on Ceres with a bunch of assorted cutthroats, waiting for the heat to let up. And I wrote a story about it. Can I help it if the police read the Evening Rocket?”

  The Rat eyed the reporter furtively.

  “You’re smart, Nagle,” he said. “Too damn smart. Someday you’ll write yourself into a jam you can’t get out of. Maybe you done that already.”

  “Look here,” asked Grant, “why did the chief send you around? Why didn’t he come himself? If Hellion’s got business with me, he knows where he can find me.”

  “He can’t come now,” said the Rat. “He’s got to lay low for a while. And this time he’s got a place where no snooping reporter is going to find him.”

  “Rat,” warned Grant coldly, “someday you’re going to talk yourself into a jam. I don’t know what your game is, but it is a game of some sort. Because Hellion can’t get out of the prison on Ganymede. No man ever has gotten out of it. When a man goes there, he stays there. When he come out he’s either served his sentence or he comes out feet first. Nobody escapes from Ganymede.”

  The Rat smiled bleakly, drew a paper from his hip pocket and spread it on the table. It was an Evening Rocket, the ink still damp.

  The banner screamed:

  HELLION ESCAPES

  “That,” said the Rat, tapping the paper, “should tell you what the score is. I ain’t talking through my hat.”

  Grant stared at the paper. It was the five-star edition, the final for the day. And there it was in black and white. Hellion Smith had escaped from the impregnable Alcatraz on the airless, bitter, frigid plains of Ganymede. A mauve-tinted likeness of Hellion’s ugly mug stared back at him from the page.

  “So what you told me is true,” said Grant softly. “Hellion has really escaped. And the message is the goods.”

  “When Hellion says something he means it,” sneered the Rat.

  “So do I,” declared Grant grimly. “And I got a message for you to take back to Hellion, if you can find hm. You tell him I only did my duty as a newspaperman before—nothing personal about it at all. But if he comes messing around again I’ll take a sort of interest in him. I’ll really put some heart into it, you understand. You tell Hellion that if he tries to carry out his threat I’ll rip him up by the roots and crucify him.”

  The Rat stared at him with watery eyes.

  Grant lifted the bottle off the table and filled his glass.

  “Get the hell out of here!” he roared at the man across the table. “Just looking at you makes me want to gag.”

  The copy boy found Grant at the table, twirling the liquor in his glass. He shuffled across the floor toward him.

  Grant looked up and recognized him. “Hello, Lightnin’. Have a snort.”

  Lightnin’ shook his head. “I can’t. The boss sent me to get you. He wants to see you.”

  “He did, did he?” asked Grant. “Well, you go back and tell the boss I’m busy. Tell him I can’t be bothered. Tell him to cover over and see me if he’s in a rush.”

  Lightin’ scuffed his feet uneasily, caught between two fires.

  “It’s important,” he persisted.

  “Hell,” said Grant. “There’s nothing important. Sit down, Lightnin’, and rest your feet.”

  “Look,” said Lightnin’, pleadingly, “if you don’t come, the boss will give me hell. He said not to let you talk me out of it.”

  “Oh, well,” said Grant. He tossed off the liquor and pocketed the bottle.

  “Lead on, Lightnin’,” he said.

  On the street outside the mechanical newsboys blatted their cries.

  “Hellion Smith escapes. Hellion Smith escapes from Ganymede. Police baffled.”

  “They’re always baffled,” said Grant.

  Soft lights glowed in the gathering dusk. Smoothly operating street traffic slid silently along. Overhead the air lanes murmured softly. The city skyl
ine was a blaze of vivid color.

  Arthur Hart beamed at Grant. “I got a little assignment lined up for you,” he said. “One that will be a sort of vacation. You’ve been working hard and I thought a change might do you good.”

  “Go on,” said Grant. “Go on and give it to me both barrels. When bad news is coming I like to meet it face to face. The last time you got all bloated up with kindness you sent me off to Venus and I spent two months there, smelling those stinking seas, wading around in swamps, interviewing those damn fish men.”

  “It was a good idea,” Hart protested. “There was every reason to believe—still is—that the Venusians are a damn sight smarter than we think they are. They have big cities built down under those seas and just because they’ve never told us they didn’t have spaceships is no reason to believe they haven’t. For all we know, they may have visited Earth long before Earthmen flew to Venus.”

  “It’s all over now,” said Grant, “but it still sounds screwy to me. What is it this time? Mars or Venus?”

  “Neither one,” said Hart smoothly. “This time it really will be a little vacation jaunt. Down to sea bottom. I got it all fixed up. You’ll take a sub tonight down to Coral City and from there you’ll go to Deep End.”

  “Deep End!” Grant protested. “That’s the jumping-off place. Right on the rim of the deep.”

  “Sure,” snapped Hart. “What’s wrong with that?”

  Grant shook his head sadly. “I don’t like it. I’m a claustrophobiac. Can’t stand being shut up in a room. And down there you got to wear steel armor. Take Coral City, now. That’s not a bad place. Only a couple hundred feet under and you meet nice people.”

  “Nice bars, too,” suggested Hart.

  “Bet your neck there are,” Grant agreed. “Now, I could go for a couple of weeks in Coral City.”

  “You’ll go for Deep End, too,” declared Hart grimly.

  Grant shrugged wearily, felt the comforting bulge of the bottle in his pocket.

  “All right,” he said. “What’s the brainstorm this time?”

  “There’s some sort of trouble down there on The Bottom,” said Hart. “Rumors, unconfirmed reports, nothing we’ve been able to get our teeth into. Seems the glass and quartz used in suits and domes hasn’t been standing up. There have been tragedies. Entire communities wiped out. A story here, a story there, over the period of months, from all parts of The Bottom. You’ve read them yourself. Inquiries that have gotten nowhere.”

  “Forget it,” said Grant. “That’s only what’s to be expected. Any damn fool that goes down a half mile underwater and lives under a quartz dome is asking for trouble. When it comes he hasn’t got anybody but himself to blame. When you go monkeying around with pressures amounting to thousands of pounds per square inch you’re fooling around with dynamite.”

  “But the point,” said Hart, “is that every catastrophe so far reported has occurred where one manufacturer’s quartz is being used. Snider quartz. You’ve heard of it.”

  “Sure,” said Grant, unimpressed, “but that don’t add up to anything. Most of the quartz used down there is Snider stuff. It’s no secret Snider has a pull with the Underocean Colonization Board.” He looked at Hart squarely. “You aren’t figuring on sending me out on a one-man crusade against Snider quartz, are you?”

  Hart stirred uneasily.

  “Not exactly,” he parried. “You won’t be working alone. The Evening Rocket will be behind you.”

  “Behind me is right,” snorted Grant. “A long ways behind. A hell of a lot of good the Evening Rocket will do me if I get into a jam a half mile down.”

  Hart tilted forward in his chair. “The point is this,” he said. “If we can find there’s something wrong with Snider quartz, we’ll put the heat on Snider. And if we find the UCB has been winking at Snider stuff when they know it’s wrong, we’ll have them across the barrel, too.”

  “What a sweet nature you have,” said Grant. “The sort of a guy that would send his old grandma to the gallows for a ninety-six-point streamer.”

  “We have a duty to the public,” said Hart solemnly, looking almost like an owl. “It’s our duty to work for the common good of mankind.”

  “And for the good of the dear old Evening Rocket,” said Grant. “Up goes the circulation list. Full-page ads telling the readers how we exposed the dirty crooks. And maybe, after we smack Snider quartz flat, there’ll be another quartz company just dying to insert about a million bucks’ worth of advertising in our columns.”

  “It isn’t that,” snarled Hart, “and you know it isn’t.” He became oratorical. “Out there is a great empire to be conquered. The ocean bottom. An area two and one half times as great as all the land areas on the Earth. A great new frontier. We’ve made a start at conquering it. Out there are pioneers—”

  Grant waved him to silence. “I know,” he said. “Vast riches. Great fields for exploitation. A heritage for the future. I know it. But save it for an editorial.”

  Hart leaned back in his chair. “The latest reports of quartz failure come from the rim of the Puerto Rico deep,” he said. “You job will be to find what’s in the cards.”

  “I warn you,” said Grant. “When I get back from this one I’m going to get drunk and stay drunk for a month.”

  Hart reached into his desk and drew out an envelope. “Your tickets for the sub,” he said. “The bank at Coral City will have instructions to let you draw expenses.”

  “O.K.,” said Grant. “I’ll catch you an octopus for a pet.”

  The water was blue, shading to violet—a dusky blue like the deeper shade of twilight but still with a faintly luminous quality about it. Long ago the more showy seaweed beds had been left behind and the character of the sea bed had changed. No more beautiful stretches of sand with vegetation and fishes of unearthly colors, delicate and shifting. No more waving sea plumes or golden sea fans. No more unbelievable brilliancy of color.

  Now one seemed to be moving into the maws of night. The blue of the water deepened and blurred only a short distance away and even the powerful light of the underwater tank penetrated for only a hundred yards or so.

  There was muck underneath, muck and ooze that was deepening as Grant followed the contour of the bottom down toward the deep. Once the tank floundered into a muck trap with its treads spinning helplessly, and he had been forced to use the retractable gear to lift it out—the gear acting like legs, searching for and getting solid footing, heaving the massive tank along.

  The character and pattern of life was changing down here, too. Changing to a grimmer pattern—a more ferocious, unrelenting life.

  A thing, that was little more than a living mouth, swam across the vision panel, turned back, pressing its blunt face against the glass, mighty mouth agape, wicked fangs shining. A dark shape slithered by, just outside the beam of light.

  Grant dropped his eyes to the instruments. Five hundred and fifty feet down. Pressure two hundred fifty-three pounds per square inch.

  The other instruments were shivering slightly, but all read correctly. Everything was going fine.

  Grant wiped perspiration from his face. “Running this damn tub gets on my nerves,” he told himself, but instantly was reassured with the thought of the massive steel walls, constructed to maintain a maximum of resistance to buckling and bending, of the ports of shatter-proof quartz, laminated, one with the rest of the construction.

  But quartz sometimes didn’t stand up—that was what had brought him here. Quartz sometimes went haywire and when it did men died, men who had put their trust in it—men who otherwise could not have hurled their challenge into the teeth of The Bottom with its chilly depths, its monstrous pressure.

  The thing that was all mouth had retreated from the vision glass, but another nightmare of the twilight zone had replaced it—a grotesque thing that resembled nothing that ever should have lived.
r />   Grant cursed at it—swung the spotlight back and forth, trying to pick out landmarks. But there was nothing—he was moving across what appeared to be a murky plain, although the indicator showed it had a decided downward slope.

  Down there, somewhere ahead, was the Puerto Rico deep, one of the deepest—five and a half miles down. Down there the pressure ranged around six and a half tons a square inch. Too deep for man as yet. Conquest under the four-mile mark would have to await work in the industrial laboratories, would have to wait on man’s ingenuity to build steel and glass that was a little stronger, man’s ability to design new engineering kinks that would give greater strength—or perhaps the construction of a force screen or some other approach as yet merely speculative.

  Grant studied his chart. He had kept the course the communications-bureau back at Deep End had outlined for him, but as yet there was no sign of the man he sought. Old Gus, they called him, and it seemed he was a sort of local legend.

  “A queer old coot,” the dapper little communications-bureau head had told him. “Depth dippy, I guess. He’s been out there for years, prospecting, fooling around. Couldn’t make him leave now. The Bottom gets in your blood, I guess, if you stay there long enough.”

  Grant swept the light back and forth again, but still there was nothing.

  Half an hour later the light picked up the dome crouched under a sudden upsoaring of black rock, rising abruptly from the sea floor.

  Running the tank in close to the cliff, Grant stopped it and entered the airlock.

  Clambering into the mechanical suit, he tightened the lock and slid into the small operator’s chamber with its nightmare of controls. Clumsily, as yet unused to the operation of the suit, he opened the outer lock control.

  Outside it was easier and the suit ambled jerkily along, shaking him at every stride. He was within only a short distance of the dome when a shadow detached itself from the cliff and dropped upon him. Grant felt the thud of its impact, saw waving tentacles crawl across the plate, white gristle suction cups seeking to get a hold.