The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

One man sagged in the saddle and fell off, but his foot caught in the stirrup and his horse, shying, dragged him sideways.

  Up on top of the hill the Saxon square was cheering and through the settling dust he saw the heap of bodies that lay outside the shield wall.

  Let me out of here! Bishop was screaming to himself. How do I get out of here! Let me out—

  He was out, back in the room again, with its single chair and the four blank walls.

  He sat there quietly and he thought: There was no Taillefer.

  No one who rode and sang and tossed the sword in the air.

  The tale of Taillefer was no more than the imagination of some copyist who had improved upon the tale to while away his time.

  But men had died. They had run down the hill, staggering with their wounds, and died. They had fallen from their horses and been dragged to death by their frightened mounts. They had come crawling down the hill, with minutes left of life and with a whimper in their throats.

  He stood up and his hands were shaking. He walked unsteadily into the next room.

  “You are going to bed, sir?” asked the cabinet.

  “I think I will,” said Bishop.

  “Very good, then, sir. I’ll lock up and put out.”

  “That’s very good of you.”

  “Routine, sir,” said the cabinet. “Is there anything you wish?”

  “Not a thing,” said Bishop. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” said the cabinet.

  IX

  In the morning he went to the employment agency which he found in one corner of the hotel lobby.

  There was no one around but a Kimonian girl, a tall, statuesque blonde, but with a grace to put to shame the most petite of humans. A woman, Bishop thought, jerked out of some classic Grecian myth, a blonde goddess come to life and beauty. She didn’t wear the flowing Grecian robe, but she could have. She wore, truth to tell, but little, and was all the better for it.

  “You are new,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Wait, I know,” she said. She looked at him. “Selden Bishop, age twenty-nine Earth years, I.Q., 160.”

  “Yes, ma’m,” he said.

  She made him feel as if he should bow and scrape.

  “Business administration, I understand,” she said.

  He nodded bleakly.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Bishop, and we will talk this over.”

  He sat down and he was thinking: It isn’t right for a beautiful girl to be so big and husky. Nor so competent.

  “You’d like to get started doing something,” said the girl.

  “That’s the thought I had.”

  “You specialized in business administration. I’m afraid there aren’t many openings in that particular field.”

  “I wouldn’t expect too much to start with,” Bishop told her with what he felt was a becoming modesty and a realistic outlook. “Almost anything at all, until I can prove my value.”

  “You’d have to start at the very bottom. And it would take years of training. Not in method only, but in attitude and philosophy.”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  He hesitated. He had meant to say that he wouldn’t mind. But he would mind. He would mind a lot.

  “But I spent years,” he said. “I know—”

  “Kimonian business?”

  “Is it so much different?”

  “You know all about contracts, I suppose.”

  “Certainly I do.”

  “There is no such thing as a contract on all of Kimon.”

  “But—”

  “There is no need of any.”

  “Integrity?”

  “That, and other things as well.”

  “Other things?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “It would be useless, Mr. Bishop. New concepts entirely so far as you’re concerned. Of behavior. Of motives. On Earth, profit is the motive—”

  “Isn’t it here?”

  “In part. A very small part.”

  “The other motives—”

  “Cultural development for one. Can you imagine an urge to cultural development as powerful as the profit motive?”

  Bishop was honest about it. “No, I can’t,” he said.

  “Here,” she said, “it is the more powerful of the two. But that’s not all. Money is another thing. We have no actual money. No coin that changes hands.”

  “But there is money. Credit notes.”

  “For the convenience of your race alone,” she said. “We created your money values and your evidence of wealth so that we could hire your services and pay you—and I might add that we pay you well. We have gone through all the motions. The currency that we create is as valid as anywhere else in the galaxy. It’s backed by deposits in Earth’s banks and it is legal tender so far as you’re concerned. But Kimonians themselves do not employ money.”

  Bishop floundered. “I can’t understand,” he said.

  “Of course you can’t,” she said. “It’s an entirely new departure for you. Your culture is so constituted that there must be a certain physical assurance of each person’s wealth and worth. Here we do not need that physical assurance. Here each person carries in his head the simple bookkeeping of his worth and debts. It is there for him to know. It is there for his friends and business associates to see at any time they wish.”

  “It isn’t business, then,” said Bishop. “Not business as I think of it.”

  “Exactly,” said the girl.

  “But I am trained for business, I spent—”

  “Years and years of study. But on Earth’s methods of business, not on Kimon’s.”

  “But there are businessmen here. Hundreds of them.”

  “Are there?” she asked.

  She was smiling at him. Not a superior smile, nor a taunting one—just smiling at him.

  “What you need,” she said, “is contact with Kimonians. A chance to get to know your way around. An opportunity to appreciate our point of view and get the hang of how we do things.”

  “That sounds all right,” said Bishop. “How do I go about it?”

  “There have been instances,” said the girl, “when Earth people sold their services as companions.”

  “I don’t think I’d care much for that. It sounds…well, like baby sitting or reading to old ladies or…”

  “Can you play an instrument or sing?”

  Bishop shook his head.

  “Paint? Draw? Dance?”

  He couldn’t do any of them.

  “Box, perhaps,” she said. “Physical combat. That is popular at times, if it’s not overdone.”

  “You mean prize fighting?”

  “I think that is one way you describe it.”

  “No, I can’t,” said Bishop.

  “That doesn’t leave much,” she said as she picked up some papers.

  “Transportation?” he asked.

  “Transportation is a personal matter.”

  And of course it was, he told himself. With telekinesis you could transport yourself or anything you might have a mind to move—without mechanical aid.

  “Communications,” he said weakly. “I suppose that is the same?”

  She nodded.

  With telepathy, it would be.

  “You know about transportation and communications, Mr. Bishop?”

  “Earth variety,” said Bishop. “No good here, I gather.”

  “None at all,” she said. “Although we might arrange a lecture tour. Some of us would help you put your material together.”

  Bishop shook his head. “I can’t talk,” he said.

  She got up.

  “I’ll check around,” she said. “Drop in again. We’ll find s
omething that you’ll fit.”

  “Thanks,” he said and went back to the lobby.

  X

  He went for a walk.

  There were no roads or paths.

  There was nothing.

  The hotel stood on the plain and there was nothing else.

  No buildings around it. No village. No roads. Nothing.

  It stood there, huge and ornate and lonely, like a misplaced thing.

  It stood stark against the skyline, for there were no other buildings to blend into it and soften it and it looked like something that someone in a hurry had dumped down and left.

  He struck out across the plain toward some trees that he thought must mark a watercourse and he wondered why there were no paths or roads, but suddenly he knew why there were no paths or roads.

  He thought about the years he had spent cramming business administration into his brain and he remembered the huge book of excerpts from the letters written home from Kimon hinting at big business deals, at responsible positions.

  And the thought struck him that there was one thing in common in all of the excerpts in the book—that the deals and positions were always hinted at, that no one had ever told exactly what he did.

  Why did they do it? he asked himself. Why did they fool us all?

  Although, of course, there might be more to it than he knew. He had been on Kimon for somewhat less than a full day’s time. I’ll look around, the Grecian blonde had said—I’ll look around, we’ll find something that you fit.

  He went on across the plain and reached the line of trees and found the stream. It was a prairie stream, a broad, sluggish flow of crystal water between two grassy banks. Lying on his stomach to peer into the depths, he saw the flash of fishes far below him.

  He took off his shoes and dangled his feet in the water and kicked a little to make the water splash, and he thought:

  They know all about us. They know about our life and culture. They know about the leopard banners and how Senlac must have looked on Saturday, October 14, 1066, with the hosts of England massed upon the hilltop and the hosts of William on the plain below.

  They know what makes us tick and they let us come and because they let us come, there must be some value in us.

  What had the girl said, the girl who had floated to the stool and then left with her drink still standing and untouched. Faint amusement, she had said. You get used to it, she had said. If you don’t think too much about it, you get used to it.

  See me in a week, she had said. In a week you and I can talk. And she had called him Buster.

  Well, maybe she had a right to call him that. He had been starry-eyed and a sort of eager beaver. And probably ignorant-smug.

  They know about us and how do they know about us?

  Senlac might have been staged, but he didn’t think so—there was a strange, grim reality about it that got under your skin, a crawling sort of feeling that told you it was true, that that was how it had happened and had been. That there had been no Taillefer and that a man had died with his guts dragging in the grass and that the Englishmen had cried “Ut! Ut!” which might have meant almost anything at all or nothing just as well, but probably had meant “Out.”

  He sat there, cold and lonely, wondering how they did it. How they had made it possible for a man to punch a button and live a scene long dead, to see the death of men who had long been dust mingled with the earth.

  There was no way to know, of course.

  There was no use to guess.

  Technical information, Morley Reed had said, that would revolutionize our entire economic pattern.

  He remembered Morley pacing up and down the room and saying: “We must find out about them. We must find out.”

  And there was a way to find out.

  There was a splendid way.

  He took his feet out of the water and dried them with handfuls of grass. He put his shoes back on and walked back to the hotel sitting by itself.

  The blond goddess was still at her desk in the Employment Bureau.

  “About that baby-sitting job,” he said.

  She looked startled for a moment—terribly, almost childishly startled; but her face slid swiftly back to its goddess-mask.

  “Yes, Mr. Bishop.”

  “I’ve thought it over,” he said. “If you have that kind of job I’ll take it.”

  XI

  He lay in bed, sleepless, for a long time that night and took stock of himself and of the situation and he came to a decision that it might not be as bad as he thought it was.

  There were jobs to be had, apparently. The Kimonians even seemed anxious that you should get a job. And even if it weren’t the kind of work a man might want, or the kind that he was fitted for, it at least would be a start. From that first foothold a man could go up—a clever man, that is. And all the men and women, all the Earthians on Kimon, certainly were clever. If they weren’t clever, they wouldn’t be there to start with.

  All of them seemed to be getting along. He had not seen either Monty or Maxine that evening but he had talked to others and all of them seemed to be satisfied—or at least keeping up the appearance of being satisfied. If there were general dissatisfaction, Bishop told himself, there wouldn’t even be the appearance of being satisfied, for there is nothing that an Earthian likes better than some quiet and mutual griping. And he had heard none of it—none of it at all.

  He had heard some more talk about the starting of the athletic teams and had talked to several men who had been enthusiastic about it as a source of revenue.

  He had talked to another man named Thomas who was a gardening expert at one of the big Kimonian estates and the man had talked for an hour or more on the growing of exotic flowers. There had been a little man named Williams who had sat in the bar beside him and had told him enthusiastically of his commission to write a book of ballads based on Kimonian history and another man named Jackson who was executing a piece of statuary for one of the native families.

  If a man could get a satisfactory job, Bishop thought, life could be pleasant here on Kimon.

  Take the rooms he had. Beautiful appointments, much better than he could expect at home. A willing cabinet-robot who dished up drinks and sandwiches, who pressed clothes, turned out and locked up, and anticipated your no-more-than-half-formed wish. And the room—the room with the four blank walls and the single chair with the buttons on its arm. There, in that room, was instruction and entertainment and adventure. He had made a bad choice in picking the battle of Hastings for his first test of it, he knew now. But there were other places, other times, other more pleasant and less bloody incidents that one could experience.

  It was experience, too—and not merely seeing. He had really been walking on the hilltop. He had tried to dodge the charging horses, although there’d been no reason to, for apparently, even in the midst of a happening, you stood by some special dispensation as a thing apart, as an interested but unreachable observer.

  And there were, he told himself, many happenings that would be worth observing. One could live out the entire history of mankind, from the prehistoric dawnings to the day before yesterday—and not only the history of mankind, but the history of other things as well, for there had been other categories of experience offered—Kimonian and Galactic—in addition to Earth.

  Some day, he thought, I will walk with Shakespeare. Some day I’ll sail with Columbus. Or travel with Prester John and find the truth about him.

  For it was truth. You could sense the truth.

  And how the truth?

  That he could not know.

  But it all boiled down to the fact that while conditions might be strange, one still could make a life of it.

  And conditions would be strange, for this was an alien land and one that was immeasurably in advance of Earth in culture and in its technology. Here there was no need
of artificial communications nor of mechanical transportation. Here there was no need of contracts; since the mere fact of telepathy would reveal one man to another, there’d be no need of contracts.

  You have to adapt, Bishop told himself.

  You have to adapt to play the Kimon game, for they were the ones who would set the rules. Unbidden he had entered their planet and they had let him stay and, staying, it followed that he must conform.

  “You are restless, sir,” said the cabinet from the other room.

  “Not restless,” Bishop said. “Just thinking.”

  “I can supply you with a sedative. A very mild and pleasant sedative.”

  “Not a sedative,” said Bishop.

  “Then, perhaps,” the cabinet said, “you would permit me to sing you a lullaby.”

  “By all means,” said Bishop. “A lullaby is just the thing I need.”

  So the cabinet sang him a lullaby and after a time Bishop went to sleep.

  XII

  The Kimonian goddess at the Employment Bureau told him next morning that there was a job for him.

  “A new family,” she said.

  Bishop wondered if he should be glad that it was a new family or if it would have been better if it had been an old one.

  “They’ve never had a human before,” she said.

  “It’s fine of them,” said Bishop, “to finally take one in.”

  “The salary,” said the goddess, “is one hundred credits a day.”

  “One hundred—”

  “You will only work during days,” she said. “I’ll teleport you there each morning and in the evening they’ll teleport you back.”

  Bishop gulped. “One hundred—What am I to do?”

  “A companion,” said the goddess. “But you needn’t worry. We’ll keep an eye on them and if they mistreat you—”

  “Mistreat me?”

  “Work you too hard or—”

  “Miss,” said Bishop, “for a hundred bucks a day I’d—”

  She cut him short. “You will take the job?”

  “Most gladly,” Bishop said.

  “Permit me—” The universe came unstuck, then slapped back together.

  He was standing in an alcove and in front of him was a woodland glen with a waterfall and from where he stood he could smell the cool, mossy freshness of the tumbling water. There were ferns and trees, huge trees like the gnarled oaks the illustrators like to draw to illustrate King Arthur and Robin Hood and other tales of very early Britain—the kind of oaks from which the Druids had cut the mistletoe.