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The Shipshape Miracle
And Other Stories
The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Ten
Introduction by David W. Wixon
Contents
Introduction
The Money Tree
Shotgun Cure
Paradise
The Gravestone Rebels Ride by Night!0
How-2
The Shipshape Miracle
Rim of the Deep
Eternity Lost
Immigrant
Introduction
Little Things: The Way Clifford D. Simak Wrote
“The desk was scarred and battered, unlike the man himself. It was almost as if the desk, in the course of years, might have intervened itself to take the blows aimed at the man behind it.”
—Clifford D. Simak, in “Worlds Without End”
In 1976, when Clifford D. Simak was in the process of retiring from his long career with the Minneapolis Star/Tribune, he told an interviewer that he had “always wanted to be a newspaperman, but realized my creative urges could not be satisfied by writing news.”
The result was that Cliff had two careers—careers that ran in tandem for more than forty years, causing Robert A. Heinlein to marvel, knowing—as he said—that the two types of writing required were vastly different.
Among other things, this meant that Cliff Simak’s newspaper training strongly influenced his fiction. Some would come to criticize his literary style as a “lack of style” (thus betraying a preoccupation with form over substance); but it seems clear that, like the professional newspaperman he was, Simak tried to avoid allowing stylistic flourishes to get in the way of his exposition of the facts of the story—prose, he believed, is not supposed to distract from the plot (well, that was the theory, but once in a while, perhaps unable to stop himself, he would drop in a gem of a line). Robert Silverberg saw this, and described Simak’s work as having a “clear, precise, straightforward narrative style.”
Even before I met him, Clifford D. Simak had become a legendary figure in science fiction, and readers who never had a chance to know him in person are now discovering his work. And I find that in doing so, they become very interested in him—not only in his writing but also in details of his life that might help color in the picture of this beloved Grand Master. So let me tell you a little about how Cliff did his work of writing fiction.
Clifford D. Simak never used a pseudonym, and he engaged in collaborations on only three occasions. In the first of those, he worked with a fellow Twin Cities writer, Carl Jacobi, to produce a story that was first published as “The Street That Wasn’t There” (later reprinted at times as “The Lost Street”). The collaboration does not seem to have been a pleasant experience; Cliff would later say that he and Carl “fought like hell for the weeks it took to write it.” (The two of them tried it a second time, producing a story called “The Cat That Had Nine Lives”; that story also sold, but it was never published because the magazine that bought it—Comet—folded.)
The third of Cliff’s collaborations was with his son, Richard, and together they produced a story called “Unsilent Spring,” which turned out well. Dick (known in the family as “Scott”) was a government chemist, and Cliff would later insist that his contribution to the story was more than just the science, and was essential.
My belief is that Cliff Simak’s aversion to collaboration was closely related to the fact that he simply did not like to talk about a work in progress. “To me,” he said, “writing is intensely private. If I talk to anyone, I feel the story is not entirely mine any more. I lose the magic.”
(In the novel All Flesh Is Grass, one of Cliff’s characters, Nancy, who was a writer herself, would say of that profession: “It’s a thing you don’t talk about—not until you’re well along with it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don’t want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start.”
(“You have to have a hunger,” Nancy would add, “a different kind of hunger, to finish up a book.”)
Cliff’s way was to spend time thinking about his next story, plotting it out in his head; but once he had it mostly plotted out—when he began to actually put words on paper—it was not unusual for the story to “take off” on him. And he loved it when that happened, when he found himself putting words on the paper without knowing where they were leading him. He found the process incredible; to him, that was the best kind of writing, because it meant he was writing from—well, he called it his gut, or he called it his nerve endings—but I’d say it was from the world underneath the top of his mind.
The process, again, reflected the author’s newspaper training: he began by making notes, often starting by asking himself a question, then answering it, and then beginning to build the stories from pieces he created, trying out alternative beginnings and endings. Sometimes he became so caught up in his creating that he made lists of the names of characters who might be somehow involved—characters who sometimes never even made it into the story.
For the most part, once Cliff had a story worked out in his head, he would begin by using a pencil to compose onto paper. He went to his typewriter only when he thought he had the story worked out to an end in his scrawling longhand, and he used the process of typing it to polish it.
After that, he would—when he could afford it—have someone else retype the finished product for submission. Early in his career (which began around the time his marriage was new), his wife, Kay, would do that retyping—but once he became able to afford to hire a professional typist, Kay, who never liked science fiction, would not get involved.
It’s not that Cliff could not have typed the finished manuscript—he did so, when times required it; but once he had finished a story in his mind, he did not want to go back to it…the urge to rewrite, he knew, would always rise up, and he wanted to resist that: having finished a story, it was a done thing, and he preferred to let it lie.
He made some exceptions to that rule: In his journal entry for February 7, 1957, Cliff, speaking of a story he was then calling “Who Cares for Shadows?” noted that “the end is still to write, but maybe by the time I get to that I’ll know” where “I want to go.” (However that worked, he did finish the story, and sent it to Horace Gold at Galaxy … but after Gold asked for revisions, Cliff complied, even though he often refused to do that for editors. I suspect that this time it was palatable because whatever changes were needed to make the story something Horace wanted, Cliff was able to do it in less than a week (working only in the evenings, after work). Gold accepted the revised story just five days after Cliff sent him the revised version. It would be published later that same year as “Shadow World.”)
When I mentioned above that Cliff took part in only three collaborations, I was purposely passing over a short novel called Empire. I did so because that story was one that Cliff wished he had never worked on.
Late in the 1930s, John W. Campbell, the new editor of Astounding Tales, who had recently talked Cliff into writing him a novel he cou
ld serialize—and who had very much liked the story he received, Cosmic Engineers—dug out a short novel he had written at the age of eighteen, called Empire. Cliff would later say that he “gagged” when he read the story, but he worked on it, making it, as he said, “somewhat better,” but “still pretty bad.”
Campbell himself was still not willing to publish the story, and Cliff, as he said, simply “threw it on a shelf.” Years later, when Horace Gold created a new line of science fiction novels that were to be published in digest-size as the “Galaxy Novels” (some very great stories would first be published in that line), he found himself desperately short of material and called Cliff to beg for anything he might be able to get quickly. Feeling a certain obligation to a man who was now publishing a lot of his work, Cliff sent it to him.
Gold published Empire, but Cliff never read it in its published form and would not allow it to be republished—in fact, he refused to even renew the story’s copyright.
David W. Wixon
The Money Tree
Although Cliff Simak noted in his journal that he had begun “plotting” “The Money Tree” on June 10, 1957, he got involved in other things—including going down to Iowa to attend a funeral and considering whether to apply for a managing editor job in Ames. But he quickly decided not to apply for that job, and by July 26, he reported that he had given up “momentarily” on “The Money Tree.” Thereafter, he and his family left on a trip to the Black Hills in the middle of August, and he made no further mention of “The Money Tree” until September 8, when he reported, rather laconically, that he had finished the story “last week.” Before long he noted that he had sent it to Horace Gold, but Gold rejected it, as did Campbell (“first thing I’ve sent him for several years,” Cliff told his journal).
In March 1958, the story was accepted by Bob Mills, and it would appear in the July 1958 issue of Venture Science Fiction. Also in March, Cliff and Kay were involved in having a new house built, Cliff was signed up to give a speech on television, and the entire family got the ‘flu, serially—all while Cliff was, a little excitedly, finishing up the story that would become “The Big Front Yard.”
—dww
I
Chuck Doyle, loaded with his camera equipment, was walking along the high brick wall which sheltered the town house of J. Howard Metcalfe from vulgar public contact when he saw the twenty-dollar bill blow across the wall.
Now, Doyle was well dried behind the ears—he had cut his eyeteeth on the crudities of the world and while no one could ever charge him with being a sophisticate, neither was he anybody’s fool. And yet there was no question, either, about his quick, positive action when there was money to be picked up off the street.
He looked around to see if anyone might be watching—someone, for example, who might be playing a dirty joke on him, or, worse yet, someone who might appear to claim the bill once he had retrieved it.
There was small chance there would be anyone, for this was the snooty part of town, where everyone minded his own business and made sure that any uncouth intruders would mind theirs as well—an effect achieved in most cases by high walls or dense hedges or sturdy ornamental fences. And the street on which Doyle now prepared to stalk a piece of currency was by rights no proper street at all. It was an alley that ran between the brick walls of the Metcalfe residence and the dense hedge of Banker J. S. Gregg—Doyle had parked his car in there because it was against traffic regulations to park on the boulevard upon which the houses fronted.
Seeing no one, Doyle set his camera equipment down and charged upon the bill, which was fluttering feebly in the alley. He scooped it up with the agility of a cat grabbing off a mouse and now he saw, for the first time, that it was no piddling one-dollar affair, or even a five-spot, but a twenty. It was crinkly and so new that it fairly gleamed, and he held it tenderly in his fingertips and resolved to retire to Benny’s Place as soon as possible, and pour himself a libation or two to celebrate his colossal good luck.
There was a little breeze blowing down the alley and the leaves of the few fugitive trees that lined the alley and the leaves of the many trees that grew in the stately lawns beyond the walls and hedges were making a sort of subdued symphonic sound. The sun was shining brightly and there was no hint of rain and the air was clean and fresh and the world was a perfect place.
It was becoming more perfect by the moment.
For over the Metcalfe wall, from which the first bill had fluttered, other bills came dancing merrily in the impish breeze, swirling in the alley.
Doyle saw them and stood for a frozen instant, his eyes bugging out a little and his Adam’s apple bobbing in excitement. Then he was among the bills, grabbing right and left and stuffing them in his pockets, gulping with the fear that one of them might somehow escape him, and ridden by the conviction that once he had gathered them he should get out of there as fast as he could manage.
The money, he knew, must belong to someone and there was no one, he was sure, not even on this street, who was so contemptuous of cash as to allow it to blow away without attempting to retrieve it.
So he gathered the bills with the fervor of a Huck Finn going through a blackberry patch and with a last glance around to be sure he had missed none, streaked for his car.
A dozen blocks away, in a less plush locality, he wheeled the car up to the curb opposite a vacant lot and furtively emptied his pockets, smoothing out the bills and stacking them neatly on the seat beside him. There were a lot of them, many more than he had thought there were, and his breath whistled through his teeth.
He picked up the pile of currency preparatory to counting it and something, some little stick-like thing was sticking out of it. He flicked it to knock it away and it stayed where it was. It seemed to be stuck to one of the bills. He seized it to pull it loose. It came and the bill came with it.
It was a stem, like an apple stem, like a cherry stem—a stem attached quite solidly and naturally to one corner of a twenty-dollar bill!
He dropped the pile of bills upon the seat and held up the stem and the bill hung from the stem, as if it were growing from the stem, and it was clear to see that the stem not long before had been fastened to a branch, for the mark of recent separation was plainly visible.
Doyle whistled softly.
A money tree! he thought.
But there was no such a thing as a money tree. There’d never been a money tree. There never would be a money tree.
“I’m seeing things,” said Doyle, “and I ain’t had a drink in hours.”
He could shut his eyes and there it was—a mighty tree, huge of boll and standing true and straight and high, with spreading branches fully leafed and every leaf a twenty-dollar bill. The wind would rustle all the leaves and would make money-music and a man could lie in the shade of such a tree and not have a worry in the world, just waiting for the leaves to drop so he could pick them up and put them in his pocket.
He tugged at the stem a bit and it still clung to the bill, so he folded the whole thing up as neatly as he could and stuck it in the watch pocket of his trousers. Then he picked up the rest of the bills and stuffed them in another pocket without counting them.
Twenty minutes later he walked into Benny’s Bar. Benny was mopping the mahogany. One lone customer was at the far end of the bar working through a beer.
“Gimme bottle and a glass,” said Doyle.
“Show me cash,” said Benny.
Doyle gave him one of the twenty-dollar bills. It was so fresh and new and crisp that its crinkling practically thundered in the silence of the place. Benny looked it over with great care.
“Got someone making them for you?” he asked.
“Naw,” said Doyle. “I pick them off the street.”
Benny handed across a bottle and a glass.
“You through work,” he asked, “or are you just beginning?”
“I put in m
y day,” said Doyle. “I been shooting old J. Howard Metcalfe. Magazine in the east wanted pictures of him.”
“You mean the racketeer?”
“He ain’t no racketeer. He went legitimate four or five years ago. He’s a magnate now.”
“You mean tycoon. What kind of tycoon is he?”
“I don’t know. But whatever kind it is, it sure pays off. He’s got a fancy-looking shack up on the hill. But he ain’t so much to look at. Don’t see why this magazine should want a picture of him.”
“Maybe they’re running a story about how it pays to go straight.”
Doyle tipped the bottle and sloshed liquor in his glass.
“It ain’t no skin off me,” he declared philosophically. “I’d go take pictures of an angleworm if they paid me for it.”
“Who would want pictures of any angleworm?”
“Lots of crazy people in the world,” said Doyle. “Might want anything. I don’t ask no questions. I don’t venture no opinions. People want pictures taken, I take them. They pay me for it, that is all right by me.”
Doyle drank appreciatively and refilled the glass.
“Benny,” he asked, “you ever hear of money growing on a tree?”
“You got it wrong,” said Benny. “Money grows on bushes.”
“If it grows on bushes, then it could grow on trees. A bush ain’t nothing but a little tree.”
“No, no,” protested Benny, somewhat alarmed. “Money don’t really grow on bushes. That is just a saying.”
The telephone rang and Benny went to answer it. “It’s for you,” he said.
“Now how would anyone think of looking for me here?” asked Doyle, astounded.
He picked up the bottle and shambled down the bar to where the phone was waiting.
“All right,” he told the transmitter. “You’re the one who called. Start talking.”
“This is Jake.”
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