The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  “An octopus,” said Grant disgustedly.

  The cephalopod threshed wildly, swinging its tentacles in mighty swipes and then slid off the suit, landing in front of it, hopping to one side. A moment later it scuttled out of the twilit gloom and humped along ahead of Grant.

  “I’d like to take a swift kick at you,” Grant told the octopus, “but if I did, I’d lose my balance sure as hell, and a fellow would have to be a magician to get one of these tin cans right side up if it fell over.”

  The octopus was a monster. His body was as big as a good-sized watermelon and his eight tentacles would have spanned close to twenty feet.

  A suited figure was emerging from the air lock of the dome and Grant shoved a lever to swing his suit’s arm in greeting. The arm of the other suit raised in reply and hurried toward him.

  The octopus galloped forward, raising a cloud of murk in its path, and launched itself at the other suit. An expert arm flashed out and warded it off. Steel fingers closed on a tentacle and the suit marched forward, hauling a protesting, squirming octopus along by one of its eight long arms.

  “Howdy, stranger,” said the man inside the advancing suit. “Glad you happened along.”

  Grant spoke into his transmitter.

  “Glad to see you, too. I was looking for a man named Gus. Maybe you’re him.”

  “Sure am,” said the other. “I suppose Butch jumped on you.”

  “Butch?” asked Grant, bewildered.

  “Sure, Butch. Butch is my octopus. Raised him from a pup. Used to sit around inside the dome with me until he got too big and I had to shut him out. He still tries to sneak in on me every now and then.”

  Butch squatted to one side, his tentacle still clutched in the steel hand of his master’s suit. His eyes seemed to glint in the deep blue water.

  “Sometimes,” Old Gus went on, “he gets kind of gay and I’ve got to trim him down to his natural size. But he’s a pretty good octopus just the same.”

  “You mean,” asked Grant, slightly horrified, “you keep the thing for a pet.”

  “Sure,” declared Gus. “Safe enough as long as he can’t get at you. Another fellow up north a ways had one and he kind of noised it around his octopus could lick anything that swam, so I took Butch and went up to see him. That, stranger, was a brawl worth seeing. But Butch had it all over that other octopus. Polished him off inside of fifteen minutes and then wouldn’t give up the corpse. Lugged it around for days, taking lunches off of it.”

  “Sort of a tough citizen,” suggested Grant.

  “Butch,” said Old Gus pridefully, “can be downright ornery when he takes a mind to be.”

  Old Gus talked as he brewed the coffee. “A man gets sort of lonesome down here once in a while,” he explained, “and you like some company, even if it ain’t nothing but a thing like Butch. Sharks, now, are downright friendly once you get to know them, but they ain’t no account as pets. They wander too much. You never know where they are. But octopuses are home bodies. Butch lairs out in the cliff back there and comes a-humping every time he sees me.”

  “How long have you been here?” asked Grant.

  “Only four or five years here,” said Gus. “Used to live up around three hundred feet, but when they put out this improved quartz I moved down here. Like it better. But, all in all, I been living on The Bottom for nigh onto forty years. Last time I was up on the surface I got a terrible headache. Too many bright colors. Greens and blues and reds and yellows. All you get down here is blue, more of a violet really. It’s restful.”

  The coffeepot sent out tantalizing odors. The electrolysis plant chuckled. The heat grids sang softly.

  Outside the dome, Butch squatted dolefully.

  “This a Snider dome?” asked Grant.

  “Yep,” said Gus. “Set me back a couple thousand bucks. And then I had to pay to get it hauled down here. Thought I could do it with my old tub, but it was too risky.”

  “I hear some of the Snider domes aren’t working out too well,” said Grant. “Breaking down under pressure. Maybe something wrong with their construction.”

  The old man lifted the coffeepot off the stove, poured coffee into the cups.

  “There’s been a lot of failures,” he said, “but I ain’t had no trouble. Don’t think it’s the fault of the glass at all. Something else. Something funny about it. Some of the boys around here have been talking of getting up a vigilante party.”

  Grant had his cup half lifted to his lips, but set it down suddenly. “Vigilante party?” he asked. “Why a vigilante party?”

  Old Gus leaned across the table, lowered his voice dramatically. “Ever hear of Robber’s Deep?” he asked.

  “No,” said Grant. “I don’t believe I ever have.”

  The old man settled back. “A little over a half mile down,” he declared. “A sort of little depression. Bad country. Too rough for tanks. Got to go on foot to reach it.”

  He sipped the steaming coffee noisily, wiped his whiskers with a horny hand.

  Grant waited, sipping his own coffee. Butch, he saw, was swarming up the dome’s curving side.

  “There’s been too dang many robberies,” said Old Gus. “Too much helling around. This country is getting sort of civilized now and we ain’t going to stand for it much longer.”

  “You think there’s a gang of robbers down in that deep?” asked Grant.

  “That’s the only place they could be,” said Gus. “It’s bad country and hard to get around in. Lots of caves and a couple of canyons that run down to the Big Deep. Dozens of places where a gang could hide.”

  Gus sipped gustily at the coffee. “It used to be right peaceable down here,” he mourned. “A man could find him a bed of clams and post the place and know it was his. Nobody would touch it. Or you could stake out a radium workings and know that your stakes wouldn’t be pulled up. And if you found an old ship you just slapped up a notice on it saying you had found it and nobody would take so much as a single plank away. But it ain’t that way no more. There’s been a lot of claim jumping and clam beds have been robbed. We kind of figure we’ll have to put a stop to it.”

  “Look,” said Grant, “the Evening Rocket sent me out here to find out why so many domes were failing—why there were so many catastrophes on The Bottom. You tell me robbers are responsible—desperadoes of the deep. Would they go to the length of smashing a man’s dome to get what little treasure he might have inside?”

  Old Gus snorted. “Why not?” he asked. “Up on the surface your thugs kill a man, shoot him down in cold blood, to get the little money he might have in his pocket. Down here there are fortunes in some of the domes. Radium and pearls and priceless treasure salvaged from old wrecks.”

  Grant nodded. “I suppose so. But it’s not only here it’s happening. Domes are failing all over. On all parts of The Bottom.”

  “I don’t know about them other places,” said Old Gun brusquely, “but I know out here most of the failures ain’t the fault of the glass. It’s the fault of a bunch of thieving cutthroats and it it keeps on we’ll sure make them hard to catch.”

  The old man sloshed the last of the coffee down his throat and rattled the cup down on the table. “I got a bed of clams posted not very far from here and if them fellows get into that bed I’ll just naturally go on the warpath all by myself.”

  He stopped and looked at Grant. “Say,” he asked, “have you ever seen a real clam bed?”

  Grant shook his head.

  “If you can stay,” said Old Gus, “I’ll show you one tomorrow that’ll make your eyes pop. Some of them five feet across, and if one old girl is open I’ll show you a pearl as big as your hat. It isn’t quite as perfect as it should be yet, but given a little more time it will be. The old girl is working on it and I’m watching it. But I haven’t been over there for a month or so.”

  He shook his head. �
��I sure hope them Robber’s Deep fellows ain’t found her,” he said. “If they ever touch that pearl I’m going to declare me a war right then and there.”

  Butch lolloped happily along ahead of them, soaring awkwardly over occasional boulders and making furtive side trips into the deep-blue darkness on either side.

  “Just like a dog,” said Old Gus. “He gets cantankerous at times and I have to give him a good whaling to cool him down, but he seems to like me anyhow. But to anyone but me he’s meaner than poison. That’s his nature and he can’t help it.”

  They plodded on. Grant was having less difficulty working his suit.

  “The clam bed,” said Old Gus, “is just up this way a piece. Robber’s Deep is down in that direction.” He swung his arm toward the down slope, half turning his suit. He did not turn back again. “Nagle”—his voice was a husky whisper—“I don’t remember ever seeing that before.”

  Grant turned and through the haze of the water he saw a queer formation, a shady thing rising out of the ocean bed.

  “What is it?” he asked. “It looks—Damned if it don’t look almost like a piece of machinery.”

  “I don’t know,” said Gus softly, “but, by the good Lord Harry, we’re going to find out.”

  They moved forward slowly, cautiously. Grant felt an unaccountable prickling at the back of his neck—an eerie sense of danger.

  Butch gamboled ahead of them. Suddenly he stopped, stood stiff-legged, almost bristling. He pranced forward a few steps and waved his tentacles. Then he became a bundle of unseemly rage, rushing about, his eyes red, his body color changing from black to pink, to violet and finally to a dull brick-red.

  “Butch sure has got his dander up,” said Old Gus, half fearfully.

  The octopus ceased his demonstration of rage almost as suddenly as it had started and headed straight for the hazy mass before them. Old Gus broke into a sprint and Grant followed.

  The towering mass was machinery, Grant saw. Two great cylinders standing close together, with a massive squat machine between them, connected to both of the cylinders by heavy pipes.

  The muck and ooze had been scraped away for some distance around the cylinders and machine, probably to make way for secure anchorage, and a mighty hole had been blasted in the sea-bed rock.

  There was no sign of life around the cylinders or the machine, but the machine was operating.

  Butch reached the cylinders and whipped around them and the next instant something that looked like a merman shot out from behind the cylinders, with Butch in close pursuit.

  The manlike thing flashed through the water with astonishing ease, but Butch was out for blood. With a tremendous burst of speed he drew nearer to the fleeing thing, launched his body in a great leap and closed in, tentacles flailing.

  Old Gus was running now, yelling at the octopus. “Damn you, Butch; you stop that!”

  But, by the time Grant reached them, it was all over. Old Gus, still furious, was prying an angry Butch from his prey, which the octopus still held in the death-grip of his tentacles.

  “Someday,” Old Gus was saying, “I’m going to plumb lose patience with you, Butch.”

  But Butch wasn’t worrying much about that. His one thought at the moment was to retain the choice morsel he had picked up. He clung stubbornly, but finally Gus hauled him loose. He tried to charge in again, but Gus booted him away and at that he withdrew, squatting at the base of one of the cylinders, fairly jigging with rage.

  Grant was staring down at the thing on the bare rock. “Gus,” he said, “do you know what this is?”

  “Danged if I do,” said Gus. “I’ve heard of mermen and mermaids, but I never did set no stock by them. I been roaming these ocean beds for nigh forty years and I never seen one yet.” He moved close, touched the body with the toe of his suit. “But,” he declared, “this is the spitting image of those old pictures of them.”

  “That,” said Grant, “is a Venusian. A native of Venus. A fish man. The boss sent me to Venus a couple years ago to find out what I could about them. He had a screwy idea they were further advanced in science than they ever let the Earth people suspect. But I couldn’t do much about it, for it would be sheer suicide for a man to venture into a Venusian sea. The seas are unstable chemically. Always with more or less acid—lots of chlorine. They stink like hell, but these fellows seem to like it. The acid and pressure and chemical changes don’t seem to harm them and maybe the stink smells good to them.”

  “If this is a Venusian, how did he get here?” asked Gus suspiciously.

  “I don’t know,” said Grant, “but I aim to find out. To my knowledge a Venusian has never visited Earth. They can stand almost any pressure under the water, but they don’t like open air, even the Venusian air and that’s half water most of the time.”

  “Maybe you’re mistaken,” suggested Gus. “Maybe this ain’t a Venusian but something almost like one.”

  Grant shook his head behind the plate. “No, I’m not mistaken. There are too many identifying marks. Look at the gills—feathered. And the hide. Almost like steel. Really a shell—an outside skeleton.”

  The newsman turned around and stared at the cylinders, then shifted his gaze to the machine squatting between them. It was operating smoothly and silently. Several large blocks of stone lay in front of it, and several similar blocks protruded from a hopperlike arrangement which surmounted the machine. The dangling jaws of a crane showed how the blocks had been lifted into the hopper. To one side of the machine were a number of small jugs.

  “Gus,” Grant asked, “what kind of rock is this?”

  The old man scooped up a couple of splinters and held them before his vision glass. The suit’s spotlight caught the splinters and they blazed with sudden moving light.

  “Fluorite,” said Gus. “Crystals embedded all through this stuff.” He flung the splinters away. “The rock itself,” he said, “is old; older than hell. Probably Archean.”

  “You’re sure about the fluorite?” asked Grant.

  “Sure, it’s fluorite,” sputtered the old man. “The rock is lousy with it. You find lots of it on The Bottom. Lots of old rock here, and that’s where you find it mostly.”

  Grant dismissed the subject of the rock and turned his attention to the engine and the tanks. The engine seemed simple in its operation—little more than a piston and a wheel—but it seemed without controls and it ran without visible source of power.

  The hopper was a hopper and that was all. Across its throat flashed a ripple of fiery flame that ate swiftly at the block of stone, breaking it up and feeding it into the maw of the machine below.

  Grant rapped against one of the tanks with his steel fist and it gave back a dead clicking sound unlike the ring of steel.

  “Would you know what those tanks are made of?” he demanded of Gus.

  The old man shook his head. “It’s got me all bogged down,” he confessed. “I seen some funny things in forty years down here, but nothing like this. A Venusian feeding rock into a machine of some sort. It just don’t add up.”

  “It adds up to a hell of a lot more than we think,” said Grant gravely.

  He picked up one of the jugs and rapped it. It gave back the same clicking sound. Carefully he worked the stopper out and from the neck of the jug spouted a puff of curling, deadly-appearing greenish yellow. Swiftly he jabbed the stopper in again and stepped back quickly.

  “What is that stuff?” Gus shrieked at him, his blue eyes wide behind the plate of quartz.

  “Hydrofluoric acid,” said Grant, a strange tenseness in his voice. “The only acid known that will attack glass!”

  “Well, I be damned,” said Old Gus weakly. “Well, I be damned.”

  “Gus,” said Grant, “I won’t be able to look at those clams today. I’ve got to get back to Deep End. I have a message to send.”

  Gus looked gravely at
the cylinders, at the body of the Venusian. “Yes, I guess you have,” he said.

  “Maybe you’d like to go with me. I’ll come right back again.”

  Gus shook his head. “Nope, I’ll stick around. But you might bring me back a couple pounds of coffee and some sugar.”

  Out of the twilit waters came a charging black streak. It was Butch. He had made a flanking movement and now was coming in to get the dead Venusian.

  His strategy succeeded. Gus rushed at him roaring, but Butch, hugging the body, squirted himself upward at a steep angle and disappeared.

  Gus shook a fist after him.

  “Someday,” he yelped, “I’ll give that danged octopus a trimming down that he’ll remember.”

  Hart had been wrong, apparently, about the Snider glass, but he had been right, that time before, about the Venusians. For there could be no doubt of it. The Venusians were coming to Earth—might have been coming to Earth these many years, roaring down out of the sky in their ships, diving into the ocean, their natural habitat—quietly taking over Earth’s oceans without making any sort of fuss.

  And then Man, pressed by economic necessity, by the love of adventure, by the lure of wealth, spurred on by scientific and engineering developments, had invaded the sea himself. For centuries he had ridden on it and flown over it, and now he had walked into it, embarking upon the last great venture, invading the last frontier little old Earth had to offer.

  Strange tales of flashing things that dropped into the sea—strange reports of mystery planes sighted in midocean, planes that had a strange look about them. Planes tearing upward into space or dropping like a flash into the water. For years those reports had been heard—way back in the twentieth century—even in some instances in the nineteenth century, when planes were yet a thing unheard of.

  And tales much older yet—tales from antiquity—from the old days when men first pushed outward from the shore, talks of mermaids and mermen.