The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  Perhaps, he thought, I’m on the wrong side of the building. On the other side there may be streets and roads and homes and shops.

  He turned back to the room and looked at it—the Earthlike furniture so quietly elegant that it almost shouted, the beautiful, veined marble fireplace, the shelves of books, the shine of old wood, the matchless paintings hanging on the wall, and the great cabinet that almost filled one end of the room.

  He wondered what the cabinet might be. It was a beautiful thing, with an antique look about it and it had a polish—not a wax, but a polish of human hands and time.

  He walked toward it.

  The cabinet said, “Drink, sir?”

  “I don’t mind if I do,” said Bishop, then stopped stock-still, realizing that the cabinet had spoken and he had answered it.

  A panel opened in the cabinet and the drink was there.

  “Music?” asked the cabinet.

  “If you please,” said Bishop.

  “Type?”

  “Type? Oh, I see. Something gay, but maybe just a little sadness too. Like the blue hour of twilight spreading over Paris. Who was it used that phrase? One of the old writers. Fitzgerald. I’m sure it was Fitzgerald.”

  The music told about the blue hour stealing over that city far away on Earth, and there was soft April rain and distant girlish laughter and the shine of the pavement in the slanting rain.

  “Is there anything else you wish, sir?” asked the cabinet.

  “Nothing at the moment.”

  “Very well, sir. You will have an hour to get dressed for dinner.”

  He left the room, sipping his drink as he went—and the drink had a certain touch to it.

  He went into the bedroom and tested the bed, and it was satisfactorily soft. He examined the dresser and the full-length glass and peeked into the bathroom and saw that it was equipped with an automatic shaver and massager, that it had a shower and tub, an exercising machine and a number of other gadgets that he couldn’t place.

  And the third room.

  It was almost bare by the standards of the other two. In the center of it stood a chair with great flat arms, and on each of the arms many rows of buttons.

  He approached the chair cautiously, wondering what it was—what kind of trap it was. Although that was foolish, for there were no traps on Kimon. This was Kimon, the land of opportunity, where a man might make a fortune and live in luxury and rub shoulders with an intelligence and a culture that was the best yet found in the galaxy.

  He bent down over the wide arms of the chair and found that each of the buttons was labeled. They were labeled “History,” “Poetry,” “Drama,” “Sculpture,” “Literature,” “Painting,” “Astronomy,” “Philosophy,” “Physics,” “Religions” and many other things. And there were several that were labeled with words he’d never seen and that had no meaning to him.

  He stood in the room and looked around at its starkness and saw for the first time that it had no windows, but was just a sort of box—a theater, he decided, or a lecture room. You sat in the chair and pressed a certain button and—

  But there was no time for that. An hour to dress for dinner, the cabinet had said, and some of that hour was already gone.

  The luggage was in the bedroom and he opened the bag that held his dinner clothes. The jacket was badly wrinkled.

  He stood with it in his hands, staring at it. Maybe the wrinkles would hang out. Maybe—

  But he knew they wouldn’t.

  The music stopped and the cabinet asked, “Is there something that you wish, sir?”

  “Can you press a dinner jacket?”

  “Surely, sir, I can.”

  “How soon?”

  “Five minutes,” said the cabinet. “Give me the trousers, too.”

  VI

  The bell rang and he went to the door.

  A man stood just outside.

  “Good evening,” said the man. “My name is Montague, but they call me Monty.”

  “Won’t you come in, Monty?”

  Monty came in and surveyed the room.

  “Nice place,” he said.

  Bishop nodded. “I didn’t ask for anything at all. They just gave it to me.”

  “Clever, these Kimonians,” said Monty. “Very clever, yes.”

  “My name is Selden Bishop.”

  “Just come in?” asked Monty.

  “An hour or so ago.”

  “All dewed up with what a great place Kimon is.”

  “I know nothing about it,” Bishop told him. “I studied it, of course.”

  “I know,” said Monty, looking at him slantwise. “Just being neighborly. New victim and all that, you know.”

  Bishop smiled because he didn’t quite know what else to do.

  “What’s your line?” asked Monty.

  “Business,” said Bishop. “Administration’s what I’m aiming at.”

  “Well, then,” Monty said, “I guess that lets you out. You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “In what?”

  “In football. Or baseball. Or cricket. Not the athletic type.”

  “Never had the time.”

  “Too bad,” Monty said. “You have the build for it.”

  The cabinet asked: “Would the gentleman like a drink?”

  “If you please,” said Monty.

  “And another one for you, sir?”

  “If you please,” said Bishop.

  “Go on and get dressed,” said Monty. “I’ll sit down and wait.”

  “Your jacket and trousers, sir,” said the cabinet.

  A door swung open and there they were, cleaned and pressed.

  “I didn’t know,” said Bishop, “that you went in for sports out here.”

  “Oh, we don’t,” said Monty. “This is a business venture.”

  “Business venture?”

  “Certainly. Give the Kimonians something to bet on. They might go for it. For a while, at least. You see, they can’t bet—”

  “I don’t see why not—”

  “Well, consider for a moment. They have no sports at all, you know. Wouldn’t be possible. Telepathy. They’d know three moves ahead what their opponents were about to do. Telekinesis. They could move a piece or a ball or a what-have-you without touching a finger to it. They—”

  “I think I see,” said Bishop.

  “So we plan to get up some teams and put on exhibition matches. Drum up as much enthusiasm as we can. They’ll come out in droves to see it. Pay admission. Place bets. We, of course, will play the bookies and rake off our commissions. It will be a good thing while it lasts.”

  “It won’t last, of course.”

  Monty gave Bishop a long look.

  “You catch on fast,” he said. “You’ll get along.”

  “Drinks, gentlemen,” the cabinet said.

  Bishop got the drinks, gave one of them to his visitor.

  “You better let me put you down,” said Monty. “Might as well rake in what you can. You don’t need to know too much about it.”

  “All right,” Bishop told him agreeably. “Go ahead and put me down.”

  “You haven’t got much money,” Monty said.

  “How did you know that?”

  “You’re scared about this room,” said Monty.

  “Telepathy?” asked Bishop.

  “You pick it up,” said Monty. “Just the fringes of it. You’ll never be as good as they are. Never. But you pick things up from time to time—a sort of sense that seeps into you. After you’ve been here long enough.”

  “I had hoped that no one noticed.”

  “A lot of them will notice, Bishop. Can’t help but notice, the way you’re broadcasting. But don’t let it worry you. We are all friends. Banded against the common enemy, you might say. If
you need a loan—”

  “Not yet,” said Bishop. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Me,” said Monty. “Me or anyone. We are all friends. We got to be.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Not at all. Now you go ahead and dress. I’ll sit and wait for you. I’ll bear you down with me. Everyone’s waiting to meet you.”

  “That’s good to know,” said Bishop. “I felt quite a stranger.”

  “Oh, my, no,” said Monty. “No need to. Not many come, you know. They’ll all want to know of Earth.”

  He rolled the glass between his fingers.

  “How about Earth?” he asked.

  “How about—”

  “Yes, it is still there, of course. How is it getting on? What’s the news?”

  VII

  He had not seen the hotel before. He had caught a confused glimpse of it from the alcove off the lobby, with his luggage stacked up beside him, before the bell captain had showed up and whisked him to his rooms.

  But now he saw that it was a strangely substantial fairyland, with fountains and hidden fountain music, with the spidery tracery of rainbows serving as groins and arches, with shimmery columns of glass that caught and reflected and duplicated many times the entire construction of the lobby so that one was at once caught up in the illusion that here was a place that went on and on forever, and at the same time you could cordon off a section of it in your mind as an intimate corner for a group of friends.

  It was illusion and substantiality, beauty and a sense of home—it was, Bishop suspected, all things to all men and what you wished to make it. A place of utter magic that divorced one from the world and the crudities of the world, with a gaiety that was not brittle and a sentimentality that stopped short of being cheap, and that transmitted a sense of well-being and of self-importance from the very fact of being a part of such a place.

  There was no such place on Earth, there could be no such place on Earth, for Bishop suspected that something more than human planning, more than human architectural skill, had gone into its building. You walked in an enchantment and you talked with magic and you felt the sparkle and the shine of the place live within your brain.

  “It gets you,” Monty said. “I always watch the faces of the newcomers when they first walk in it.”

  “It wears off after a time,” said Bishop, not believing it.

  Monty shook his head. “My friend, it does not wear off. It doesn’t surprise you quite so much, but it stays with you all the time. A human does not live long enough for a place like this to wear thin and commonplace.”

  He had eaten dinner in the dining room, which was old and solemn, with an ancient other-worldness and a hushed, tiptoe atmosphere, with Kimonian waiters at your elbow, ready to recommend a certain dish or a vintage as one that you should try.

  Monty had coffee while he ate and there had been others who had come drifting past to stop a moment and welcome him and ask him of Earth, always using a studied casualness, always with a hunger in their eyes that belied the casualness.

  “They make you feel at home,” said Monty, “and they mean it. They are glad when a new one comes.”

  He did feel at home—more at home than he had ever felt in his life before, as if already he was beginning to fit in. He had not expected to fit in so quickly and he was slightly astonished at it—for here were all the people he had dreamed of being with, and he finally was with them. You could feel the magnetic force of them, the personal magnetism that had made them great, great enough to be Kimon-worthy, and looking at them he wondered which of them he would get to know, which would be his friends.

  He was relieved when he found that he was not expected to pay for his dinner or his drinks, but simply sign a chit, and once he’d caught onto that, everything seemed brighter, for the dinner of itself would have taken quite a hole out of the twenty nestling in his pocket.

  With dinner over and with Monty gone somewhere into the crowd, he found himself in the bar, sitting on a stool and nursing a drink that the Kimonian bartender had recommended as being something special.

  The girl came out of nowhere and floated up to the stool beside him and she said:

  “What’s that you’re drinking, friend?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bishop. He made a thumb toward the man behind the bar. “Ask him to make you one.”

  The bartender heard and got busy with the bottles and the shaker.

  “You’re fresh from Earth,” said the girl.

  “Fresh is the word,” said Bishop.

  “It’s not so bad,” she said. “That is, if you don’t think about it.”

  “I won’t think about it,” Bishop promised. “I won’t think of anything.”

  “Of course, you do get used to it,” she said. “After a while you don’t mind the faint amusement. You think, what the hell, let them laugh all they want to so long as I have it good. But the day will come—”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Bishop. “Here’s your drink. Dip your muzzle into that and—”

  “The day will come when we are old to them, when we don’t amuse them any longer. When we become passé. We can’t keep thinking up new tricks. Take my painting, for example—”

  “See here,” said Bishop. “You’re talking way above my head.”

  “See me a week from now,” she said. “The name’s Maxine. Just ask to see Maxine. A week from now, we can talk together. So long, Buster.”

  She floated off the stool and suddenly was gone.

  She hadn’t touched her drink.

  VIII

  He went up to his rooms and stood for a long time at a window, staring out into the featureless landscape lighted by a moon.

  Wonder thundered in his brain, the wonder and the newness and the many questions, the breathlessness of finally being here, of slowly coming to a full realization of the fact that he was here, that he was one of the glittering, fabulous company he had dreamed about for years.

  The long grim years peeled off him, the years of books and study, the years of determined driving, the hungry, anxious, grueling years when he had lived a monkish life, mortifying body and soul to drive his intellect.

  The years fell off and he felt the newness of himself as well as the newness of the scene. A cleanness and a newness and the sudden glory.

  The cabinet finally spoke to him.

  “Why don’t you try the live-it, sir?”

  Bishop swung sharply around.

  “You mean—?”

  “The third room,” said the cabinet. “You’ll find it most amusing.”

  “The live-it!”

  “That’s right,” said the cabinet. “You pick it and you live it.”

  Which sounded like something out of the Alice books.

  “It’s safe,” said the cabinet. “It’s perfectly safe. You can come back any time you wish.”

  “Thank you,” said Bishop.

  He went into the room and sat down in the chair and studied the buttons on the arms.

  History?

  Might as well, he told himself. He knew a bit of history. He’d been interested in it and had taken several courses and done a lot of supplemental reading.

  He punched the “History” button.

  A panel in the wall before the chair lit up and a face appeared—the face of a Kimonian, the bronzed and golden face, the classic beauty of the race.

  Aren’t any of them homely? Bishop wondered. None of them ugly or crippled, like the rest of humanity?

  “What type of history, sir?” the face in the screen asked him.

  “Type?”

  “Galactic, Kimonian, Earth—almost any place you wish.”

  “Earth, please,” said Bishop.

  “Specifications?”

  “England,” said Bishop. “October 14, 1066. A place called S
enlac.”

  And he was there.

  He was no longer in the room with its single chair and its four bare walls, but he stood upon a hill in sunny autumn weather with the gold and red of trees and the blueness of the haze and the shouts of men.

  He stood rooted in the grass that blew upon the hillside and saw that the grass had turned to hay with its age and sunshine—and out beyond the grass and hill, grouped down on the plain, was a ragged line of horsemen, with the sun upon their helmets and flashing on their shields, with the leopard banners curling in the wind.

  It was October 14th and it was Saturday and on the hill stood Harold’s hosts behind their locked shield wall, and before the sun had set new forces would have been put in motion to shape the course of empire.

  Taillefer, he thought. Taillefer will ride in the fore of William’s charge, singing the “Chanson de Roland” and wheeling his sword into the air so that it becomes a wheel of fire to lead the others on.

  The Normans charged and there was no Taillefer. There was no one who wheeled his sword into the air, there was no singing. There was merely shouting and the hoarse crying of men riding to their death.

  The horsemen were charging directly at him and he wheeled and tried to run, but he could not outrun them and they were upon him. He saw the flash of polished hoofs and the cruel steel of the shoes upon the hoofs, the glinting lance point, the swaying, jouncing scabbard, the red and green and yellow of the cloaks, the dullness of the armor, the open roaring mouths of men—and they were upon him. And passing through him and over him as if he were not there.

  He stopped stock-still, heart hammering in his chest, and, as if from somewhere far off, he felt the wind of the charging horses that were running all around him.

  Up the hill there were hoarse cries of “Ut! Ut!” and the high, sharp ring of steel. Dust was rising all around him and somewhere off to the left a dying horse was screaming. Out of the dust a man came running down the hill. He staggered and fell and got up and ran again and Bishop could see that blood poured out of the ripped armor and washed down across the metal, spraying the dead, sere grass as he ran down the hill.

  The horses came back again, some of them riderless, running with their necks outstretched, with the reins flying in the wind, with foam dashing from their mouths.