The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

And that, of course, was the question. Would he?

  I don’t care, the senator cried desperately. I don’t care what happens. They played a lousy trick on me. They can’t get away with it. I’ll fix their clocks for them. I’ll—

  Sure, you will, said the voice, mocking.

  Go away, shrieked the senator. Go away and leave me. Let me be alone.

  You are alone, said the thing in the corner. You are more alone than any man has ever been before.

  Chairman Leonard: You represent an insurance company, do you not, Mr. Markely? A big insurance company.

  Mr. Markely: That is correct.

  Chairman Leonard: And every time a person dies, it costs your company money?

  Mr. Markely: Well, you might put it that way if you wished, although it is scarcely the case—

  Chairman Leonard: You do have to pay out benefits on deaths, don’t you?

  Mr. Markely: Why, yes, of course we do.

  Chairman Leonard: Then I can’t understand your opposition to life continuation. If there were fewer deaths, you’d have to pay fewer benefits.

  Mr. Markely: All very true, sir. But if people had reason to believe they would live virtually forever, they’d buy no life insurance.

  Chairman Leonard: Oh, I see. So that’s the way it is.

  —From the records of a hearing before the science subcommittee of the public policy committee of the World House of Representatives.

  The senator awoke. He had not been dreaming, but it was almost as if he had awakened from a bad dream—or awakened to a bad dream—and he struggled to go back to sleep again, to gain the Nirvana of unawareness, to shut out the harsh reality of existence, to dodge the shame of knowing who and what he was.

  But there was someone stirring in the room, and someone spoke to him and he sat upright in bed, stung to wakefulness by the happiness and something else that was almost worship which the voice held.

  “It’s wonderful, sir,” said Otto. “There have been phone calls all night long. And the telegrams and radiograms still are stacking up.”

  The senator rubbed his eyes with pudgy fists.

  “Phone calls, Otto? People sore at me?”

  “Some of them were, sir. Terribly angry, sir. But not too many of them. Most of them were happy and wanted to tell you what a great thing you’d done. But I told them you were tired and I could not wake you.”

  “Great thing?” said the senator. “What great thing have I done?”

  “Why, sir, giving up life continuation. One man said to tell you it was the greatest example of moral courage the world had ever known. He said all the common people would bless you for it. Those were his very words. He was very solemn, sir.”

  The senator swung his feet to the floor, sat on the edge of the bed, scratching at his ribs.

  It was strange, he told himself, how a thing would turn out sometimes. A heel at bedtime and a hero in the morning.

  “Don’t you see, sir,” said Otto, “you have made yourself one of the common people, one of the short-lived people. No one has ever done a thing like that before.”

  “I was one of the common people,” said the senator, “long before I wrote that statement. And I didn’t make myself one of them. I was forced to become one of them, much against my will.”

  But Otto, in his excitement, didn’t seem to hear.

  He rattle on: “The newspapers are full of it, sir. It’s the biggest news in years. The political writers are chuckling over it. They’re calling it the smartest political move that was ever pulled. They say that before you made the announcement you didn’t have a chance of being re-elected senator and now, they say, you can be elected president if you just say the word.”

  The senator sighed. “Otto,” he said, “please hand me my pants. It is cold in here.”

  Otto handed him his trousers. “There’s a newspaperman waiting in the study, sir. I held all the others off, but this one sneaked in the back way. You know him, sir, so I let him wait. He is Mr. Lee.”

  “I’ll see him,” said the senator.

  So it was a smart political move, was it? Well, maybe so, but after a day or so, even the surprised political experts would begin to wonder about the logic of a man literally giving up his life to be re-elected to a senate seat.

  Of course the common herd would love it, but he had not done it for applause. Although, so long as the people insisted upon thinking of him as great and noble, it was all right to let them go on thinking so.

  The senator jerked his tie straight and buttoned his coat. He went into the study and Lee was waiting for him.

  “I suppose you want an interview,” said the senator. “Want to know why I did this thing.”

  Lee shook his head. “No, senator, I have something else. Something you should know about. Remember our talk last week? About the disappearances?”

  The senator nodded.

  “Well, I have something else. You wouldn’t tell me anything last week, but maybe now you will. I’ve checked, senator, and I’ve found this—the health winners are disappearing, too. More than eighty percent of those who participated in the finals of the last ten years have disappeared.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the senator.

  “They’re going somewhere,” said Lee. “Something’s happening to them. Something’s happening to two classes of our people—the continuators and the healthiest youngsters.”

  “Wait a minute,” gasped the senator. “Wait a minute, Mr. Lee.”

  He groped his way to the desk, grasped its edge and lowered himself into a chair.

  “There is something wrong, senator?” asked Lee.

  “Wrong?” mumbled the senator. “Yes, there must be something wrong.”

  “They’ve found living space,” said Lee, triumphantly. “That’s it, isn’t it? They’ve found living space and they’re sending out the pioneers.”

  The senator shook his head. “I don’t know, Lee. I have not been informed. Check Extrasolar Research. They’re the only ones who know—and they wouldn’t tell you.”

  Lee grinned at him. “Good day, senator,” he said. “Thanks so much for helping.”

  Dully, the senator watched him go.

  Living space? Of course, that was it.

  They had found living space and Extrasolar Research was sending out handpicked pioneers to prepare the way. It would take years of work and planning before the discovery could be announced. For once announced, world government must be ready to confer immortality on a mass production basis, must have ships available to carry out the hordes to the far, new worlds. A premature announcement would bring psychological and economic disruption that would make the government a shambles. So they would work very quietly, for they must work quietly.

  His eyes found the little stack of letters on one corner of the desk and he remembered, with a shock of guilt, that he had meant to read them. He had promised Otto that he would and then he had forgotten.

  I keep forgetting all the time, said the senator. I forget to read my paper and I forget to read my letters and I forget that some men are loyal and morally honest instead of slippery and slick. And I indulge in wishful thinking and that’s the worst of all.

  Continuators and health champions disappearing. Sure, they’re disappearing. They’re headed for new worlds and immortality.

  And I … I … if only I had kept my big mouth shut—

  The phone chirped and he picked it up.

  “This is Sutton at Extrasolar Research,” said an angry voice.

  “Yes, Dr. Sutton,” said the senator. “It’s nice of you to call.”

  “I’m calling in regard to the invitation that we sent you last week,” said Sutton. “In view of your statement last night, which we feel very keenly is an unjust criticism, we are withdrawing it.”

  “Invitation,” said the senator. �
�Why, I didn’t—”

  “What I can’t understand,” said Sutton, “is why, with the invitation in your pocket, you should have acted as you did.”

  “But,” said the senator, “but, doctor—”

  “Good-by, senator,” said Sutton.

  Slowly the senator hung up. With a fumbling hand, he reached out and picked up the stack of letters.

  It was the third one down. The return address was Extrasolar Research and it had been registered and sent special delivery and it was marked both PERSONAL and IMPORTANT.

  The letter slipped out of the senator’s trembling fingers and fluttered to the floor. He did not pick it up.

  It was too late now, he knew, to do anything about it.

  Immigrant

  The story “Immigrant” was entitled “Emigrant” when Cliff sent it to John W. Campbell Jr. in May of 1953. Campbell returned it for revision; but whatever revision was required, Cliff got it back to the editor in less than a week, and received, in just a few weeks, $700 (it’s a long one). The story then appeared as the cover story in the March 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction (except that someone listed the story, on the issue’s cover, as “Immigration”).

  The cover painting was by Kelly Freas, who, Cliff told me, had originally presented Campbell with a surrealistic silver-gray painting to be that cover. Campbell handed it back and told Kelly that it needed grass. Kelly went home furious, Cliff said, telling his wife that if John wanted grass, he’d get grass—he was angry, but needed the money, so he spent the evening laying down, blade by tiny blade, an image of a large lawn. But later he got up in the middle of the night, looked at what he’d done, and said ‘By God, it did need grass!’

  It got grass, lots of grass filling the expanse of a great lawn that stretched to a distant starship, standing under a vast black sky—with a variety of children’s toys abandoned on the lawn.

  The painting grabbed Cliff when he saw it, and he wrote Kelly, explaining he didn’t have much money but would like the painting. Kelly wrote back to say he had a rule never to give away his work—but he would sell it for a dollar and an autographed copy of City. Cliff went out and got the newest silver dollar he could find, then had his bank get him the oldest one it could find (which turned out to be from the 1880s); and he sent Kelly the book and, under separate cover, the dollars, explaining that a dollar was no good unless you had a second one to clink it against … By the time Cliff told me the story, he was able to say, with a certain pride, that the City volume was probably pretty valuable, and the dollars, too—so he had given Kelly value, after all.

  —dww

  He was the only passenger for Kimon and those aboard the ship lionized him because he was going there.

  To land him at his destination the ship went two light-years out of its way, an inconvenience for which his passage money, much as it had seemed to him when he’d paid it back on Earth, did not compensate by half.

  But the captain did not grumble. It was, he told Selden Bishop, an honor to carry a passenger for Kimon.

  The businessmen aboard sought him out and bought him drinks and lunches and talked expansively of the markets opening up in the new-found solar systems.

  But despite their expansive talk, they looked at Bishop with half-veiled envy in their eyes and they said to him: “The man who cracks this Kimon situation is the one who’ll have it big.”

  One by one, they contrived to corner him for private conversations, and the talk, after the first drink, always turned to billions if he ever needed backing.

  Billions—while he sat there with less than twenty credits in his pocket, living in terror against the day when he might have to buy a round of drinks. For he wasn’t certain that his twenty credits would stretch to a round of drinks.

  The dowagers towed him off and tried to mother him; the young things lured him off and did not try to mother him. And everywhere he went, he heard the whisper behind the half-raised hand:

  “To Kimon!” said the whispers. “My dear, you know what it takes to go to Kimon! An I.Q. rating that’s positively fabulous and years and years of study and an examination that not one in a thousand passes.”

  It was like that all the way to Kimon.

  II

  Kimon was a galactic El Dorado, a never-never land, the country at the rainbow’s foot. There were few who did not dream of going there, and there were many who aspired, but those who were chosen were a very small percentage of those who tried to make the grade and failed.

  Kimon had been reached—either discovered or contacted would be the wrong word to use—more than a hundred years before by a crippled spaceship out of Earth which landed on the planet, lost and unable to go farther.

  To this day no one knew for sure exactly what had happened, but it is known that in the end the crew destroyed the ship and settled down on Kimon, and wrote letters home saying they were staying.

  Perhaps the delivery of those letters, more than anything else, convinced the authorities of Earth that Kimon was the kind of place the letters said it was—although later on there was other evidence which weighed as heavily in the balance.

  There was, quite naturally, no mail service between Kimon and Earth, but the letters were delivered, and in a most fantastic, although when you think about it, a most logical way. They were rolled into a bundle and placed in a sort of tube, like the pneumatic tubes that are used in industry for interdepartmental communication, and the tube was delivered, quite neatly, on the desk of the World Postal chief in London. Not on the desk of a subordinate, mind you, but on the desk of the chief himself. The tube had not been there when he went to lunch; it was there when he came back, and so far as could be determined, despite a quite elaborate investigation, no one had been seen to place it there.

  In time, still convinced that there had been some sort of hoax played, the postal service delivered the letters to the addresses by special messengers who in their more regular employment were operatives of the World Investigation Bureau.

  The addressees were unanimous in their belief the letters were genuine, for in most cases the handwriting was recognized and in every letter there were certain matters in the context which seemed to prove that they were bona fide.

  So each of the addressees wrote a letter in reply and these were inserted in the tube in which the original letters had arrived and the tube was placed meticulously in the exact spot where it had been found on the desk of the postal chief.

  Then everyone watched and nothing happened for quite some time, but suddenly the tube was gone and no one had seen it go—it had been there one moment and not there the next.

  There remained one question and that one soon was answered. In the matter of a week or two the tube reappeared again, just before the end of office hours. The postal chief had been working away, not paying much attention to what was going on, and suddenly he saw that the tube had come back again.

  Once again it held letters and this time the letters were crammed with sheafs of hundred-credit notes, a gift from the marooned spacemen to their relatives, although it should be noted immediately that the spacemen themselves probably did not consider that they were marooned.

  The letters acknowledged the receipt of the replies that had been sent from Earth and told more about the planet Kimon and its inhabitants.

  And each letter carefully explained how they had hundred-credit notes on Kimon. The notes as they stood, the letters said, were simply counterfeits, made from bills the spacemen had in their pockets, although when Earth’s fiscal experts and the Bureau of Investigation men had a look at them there was no way in which you could tell them from the real thing.

  But, the letters said, the Kimonian government wished to make right the matter of counterfeiting. To back the currency the Kimonians, within the next short while, would place on deposit with the World Bank materials not only equivalent to their value, but enough addit
ional to set up a balance against which more notes could be issued.

  There was, the letters explained, no money as such on Kimon, but since Kimon was desirous of employing the men from Earth, there must be some way to pay them, so if it was all right with the World Bank and everyone else concerned …

  The World Bank did a lot of hemming and hawing and talked about profound fiscal matters and deep economic principles, but all this talk dissolved to nothing when in the matter of a day or two several tons of carefully shielded uranium and a couple of bushels of diamonds were deposited, during the afternoon coffee hour, beside the desk of the bank’s president.

  With evidence of this sort, there was not much that Earth could do except accept the fact that the planet Kimon was a going concern and that the Earthmen who had landed there were going to stay, and take the entire situation at face value.

  The Kimonians, the letters said, were humanoid and had parapsychic powers and had built a culture which was miles ahead of Earth or any other planet so far discovered in the galaxy.

  Earth furbished up a ship, hand-picked a corps of its most persuasive diplomats, loaded down the hold with expensive gifts, and sent the whole business out to Kimon.

  Within minutes after landing, the diplomats had been quite undiplomatically booted off the planet. Kimon, it appeared, had no desire to ally itself with a second-rate, barbaric planet. When it wished to establish diplomatic relationships it would say so. Earth people might come to Kimon if they wished and settle there, but not just any Earth person. To come to Kimon, the individual would have to possess not only a certain minimum I.Q., but must also have an impressive scholastic record.

  And that was the way it was left.

  You did not go to Kimon simply because you wished to go there; you worked to go to Kimon.

  First of all, you had to have the specified I.Q. rating, and that ruled out ninety-nine per cent or better of Earth’s population. Once you had passed the I.Q. test, you settled down to grueling years of study, and at the end of the years of study you wrote an examination and, once again, most of the aspirants were ruled out. Not more than one in a thousand who took the examination passed.