The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  A path ran along the stream and up the incline down which the waterfall came tumbling and there was a blowing wind that carried music and perfume.

  A girl came down the path and she was Kimonian, but she didn’t seem as tall as the others he had seen and there was something a little less goddesslike about her.

  He caught his breath and watched her and for a moment he forgot that she was Kimonian and thought of her only as a pretty girl who walked a woodland path. She was beautiful, he told himself—she was lovely.

  She saw him and clapped her hands.

  “You must be he,” she said.

  He stepped out of the cubicle.

  “We have been waiting for you,” she told him. “We hoped there’d be no delay, that they’d send you right along.”

  “My name,” said Bishop, “is Selden Bishop and I was told—”

  “Of course you are the one,” she said. “You needn’t even tell me. It’s lying in your mind.”

  She waved an arm about her.

  “How do you like your house?” she asked.

  “House?”

  “Of course, silly. This. Naturally, it’s only the living-room. Our bedrooms are up in the mountains. But we changed this just yesterday. Everyone worked so hard at it. I do hope you like it. Because, you see, it is from your planet. We thought it might make you feel at home.”

  “House,” he said again.

  She reached out a hand and laid it on his arm.

  “You’re all upset,” she said. “You don’t begin to understand.”

  Bishop shook his head. “I just arrived the other day.”

  “But you do like it?”

  “Of course I do,” said Bishop. “It’s something out of the old Arthurian legend. You’d expect to see Lancelot or Guinevere or some of the others riding through the woods.”

  “You know the stories?”

  “Of course I know the stories. I read my Tennyson.”

  “And you will tell them to us.”

  He looked at her, a little startled.

  “You mean you want to hear them?”

  “Why, yes, of course we do. What did we get you for?”

  And that was it, of course.

  What had they got him for?

  “You want me to begin right now?”

  “Not now,” she said. “There are the others you must meet. My name is Elaine. That’s not exactly it, of course. It is something else, but Elaine is as close as you’ll ever come to saying it.”

  “I could try the other name. I’m proficient at the languages.”

  “Elaine is good enough,” she said carelessly. “Come along.”

  He fell in behind her on the path and followed up the incline.

  And as he walked along, he saw that it was indeed a house—that the trees were pillars holding up an artificial sky that somehow failed to look very artificial and that the aisles between the trees ended in great windows which looked out on the barren plain.

  But the grass and flowers, the moss and ferns, were real and he had a feeling that the trees must be real as well.

  “It doesn’t matter if they’re real or not,” said Elaine. “You couldn’t tell the difference.”

  They came to the top of the incline into a parklike place, where the grass was cut so closely and looked so velvety that he wondered for a moment if it were really grass.

  “It is,” Elaine told him.

  “You catch everything I think,” he said. “Isn’t—?”

  “Everything,” said Elaine.

  “Then I mustn’t think.”

  “Oh, but we want you to,” she told him. “That is part of it.”

  “Part of what you got me for?”

  “Exactly,” said the girl.

  In the middle of the parklike area was a sort of pagoda, a flimsy thing that seemed to be made out of light and shadow rather than anything with substance, and around it were half a dozen people.

  They were laughing and chatting and the sound of them was like the sound of music—very happy, but at the same time sophisticated, music.

  “There they are,” cried Elaine.

  “Come along,” she said.

  She ran and her running was like flying and his breath caught in his throat at the slimness and the grace of her.

  He ran after her and there was no grace in his running. He could feel the heaviness of it. It was a gambol rather than a run, an awkward lope in comparison to the running of Elaine.

  Like a dog, he thought. Like an overgrown puppy trying to keep up, falling over his own feet, with its tongue hanging out and panting.

  He tried to run more gracefully and he tried to erase the thinking from his mind.

  Mustn’t think. Mustn’t think at all. They catch everything. They will laugh at you.

  They were laughing at him.

  He could feel their laughter, the silent, gracious amusement that was racing in their minds.

  She reached the group and waited.

  “Hurry up,” she called and while her words were kindly, he could feel the amusement in the words.

  He hurried. He pounded down upon them. He arrived somewhat out of breath. He felt winded and sweaty and extremely uncouth.

  “This is the one they sent us,” said Elaine. “His name is Bishop. Is that not a lovely name?”

  They watched him, nodding gravely.

  “He will tell us stories,” said Elaine. “He knows the stories that go with a place like this.”

  They were looking kindly at him, but he could sense the covert amusement, growing by the moment.

  She said to Bishop: “This is Paul. And that one over there is Jim. Betty. Jane. George. And the one on the end is Mary.”

  “You understand,” said Jim, “those are not our names.”

  “They are approximations,” said Elaine. “The best that I could do.”

  “They are as close,” said Jane, “as he can pronounce them.”

  “If you’d only give me a chance,” said Bishop, then stopped short.

  That was what they wanted. They wanted him to protest and squirm. They wanted him to be uncomfortable.

  “But of course we don’t,” said Elaine.

  Mustn’t think. Must try to keep from thinking. They catch everything.

  “Let’s all sit down,” said Betty. “Bishop will tell us stories.”

  “Perhaps,” Jim said to him, “you will describe your life on Earth. I should be quite interested.”

  “I understand you have a game called chess,” said George. “We can’t play games, of course. You know why we can’t. But I’d be very interested in discussing with you the technique and philosophy of chess.”

  “One at a time,” said Elaine. “First he will tell us stories.”

  They sat down on the grass, in a ragged circle.

  All of them were looking at him, waiting for him to start.

  “I don’t quite know where to start,” he said.

  “Why, that’s obvious,” said Betty. “You start at the beginning.”

  “Quite right,” said Bishop.

  He took a deep breath.

  “Once, long ago, in the island of Britain, there was a great king, whose name was Arthur—”

  “Yclept,” said Jim.

  “You’ve read the stories?”

  “The word was in your mind.”

  “It’s an old word, an archaic word. In some versions of the tales—”

  “I should be most interested sometime to discuss the word with you,” said Jim.

  “Go on with your story,” said Elaine.

  He took another deep breath.

  “Once, long ago, in the island of Britain, there was a great king whose name was Arthur. His queen was Guinevere and Lancelot was his staunchest knight
—”

  He found the writer in the desk in the living room and pulled it out. He sat down to write a letter.

  He typed the salutation:

  Dear Morley:

  He got up and began pacing up and down the room.

  What would he tell him?

  What could he tell him?

  That he had safely arrived and he had a job?

  That the job paid a hundred credits a day—ten times more than a man in his position could earn at any Earth job?

  He went back to the writer again.

  He wrote:

  Just a note to let you know that I arrived here safely and already have a job. Not too good a job, perhaps, but it pays a hundred a day and that’s better than I could have done on Earth.

  He got up and walked again.

  There had to be more than that. More than just a paragraph.

  He sweated as he walked.

  What could he tell him?

  He went back to the writer again:

  In order to learn the conditions and the customs more quickly have taken a job which will keep me in touch with the Kimonians. I find them to be a fine people, but sometimes a little hard to understand. I have no doubt that before too long I shall get to understand them and have a genuine liking for them.

  He pushed back his chair and stared at what he’d written.

  It was, he told himself, like any one of a thousand other letters he had read.

  He pictured in his mind those other thousand people, sitting down to write their first letter from Kimon, searching in their mind for the polite little fables, for the slightly colored lie, for the balm that would salve their pride. Hunting for the words that would not reveal the entire truth:

  I have a job of entertaining and amusing a certain family. I tell them stories and let them laugh at me. I do this because I will not admit that the fable of Kimon is a booby trap and that I’ve fallen into it—

  No, it would never do to write like that.

  Nor to write:

  I’m sticking on in spite of them. So long as I make a hundred a day, they can laugh as much as they want to laugh. I’m staying here and cleaning up no matter what—

  Back home he was one of a thousand. Back home they talked of him in whispers because he made the grade.

  And the businessmen on board the ship, saying to him: “The one who cracks this Kimon business is the one who’ll have it big,” and talking in terms of billions if he ever needed backing.

  He remembered Morley pacing up and down the room. A foot in the door, he’d said: “Some way to crack them. Some way to understand them. Some little thing—no big thing, but some little thing. Anything at all except the deadpan face that Kimon turns toward us.”

  Somehow he had to finish the letter. He couldn’t leave it hanging and he had to write it.

  He turned back to the writer:

  I’ll write you later at a greater length. At the moment I’m rushed.

  He frowned at it.

  But whatever he wrote, it would be wrong. This was no worse than any of another dozen things that he might write.

  Must rush off to a conference.

  Have an appointment with a client.

  Some papers to go through.

  All of them were wrong.

  What was a man to do?

  He wrote:

  Think of you often. Write me when you can.

  Morley would write him. An enthusiastic letter, a letter with a fine shade of envy tingeing it, the letter of a man who wanted to be, but couldn’t be, on Kimon.

  For everyone wanted to go to Kimon. That was the hell of it.

  You couldn’t tell the truth, when everyone would give their good right arm to go.

  You couldn’t tell the truth when you were a hero and the truth would turn you into a galactic heel.

  And the letters from home, the prideful letters, the envious letters, the letters happy with the thought you were doing so well—all of these would be only further chains to bind you to Kimon and to the Kimon lie.

  He said to the cabinet, “How about a drink?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the cabinet. “Coming right up, sir.”

  “A long one,” said Bishop. “And a strong one.”

  “Long and strong it is, sir.”

  XIV

  He met her in the bar.

  “Why, if it isn’t Buster!” she said, as though they met there often.

  He sat on the stool beside her.

  “That week is almost up,” he said.

  She nodded. “We’ve been watching you. You’re standing up real well.”

  “You tried to tell me.”

  “Forget it,” said the girl. “Just a mistake of mine. It’s a waste of time telling any of them. But you looked intelligent and not quite dry behind the ears. I took pity on you.”

  She looked at him over the rim of her glass.

  “I shouldn’t have,” she said.

  “I should have listened.”

  “They never do,” said Maxine.

  “There’s another thing,” he said. “Why hasn’t it leaked out? Oh, sure, I have written letters, too. I didn’t admit what it was like. Neither did you. Nor the man next to you. But someone, in all the years we’ve been here—”

  “We are all alike,” she said. “Alike as peas in the pod. We are the anointed, the hand-picked, stubborn, vanity-stricken, scared. All of us got here. In spite of hell and high water we got here. We let nothing stand in our way and we made it. We beat the others out. They’re waiting back there on Earth—the ones that we beat out. They’ll never be quite the same again. Don’t you understand it? They had pride, too, and it was hurt. There’s nothing they would like better than to know what it’s really like. That’s what all of us think of when we sit down to write a letter. We think of the belly laughs by those other thousands. The quiet smirks. We think of ourselves skulking, making ourselves small so no one will notice us—”

  She balled a fist and rapped against his shirt front.

  “That’s the answer, Buster. That’s why we never write the truth. That’s why we don’t go back.”

  “But it’s been going on for years. For almost a hundred years. In all that time someone should have cracked—”

  “And lost all this?” she asked. “Lost the easy living. The good drinking. The fellowship of lost souls. And the hope. Don’t forget that. Always the hope that Kimon can be cracked.”

  “Can it?”

  “I don’t know. But if I were you, Buster, I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “But it’s no kind of life for decent—”

  “Don’t say it. We aren’t decent people. We are scared and weak, every one of us. And with good reason.”

  “But the life—”

  “You don’t live a decent life, if that was what you were about to say. There’s no stability in us. Children? A few of us have children and it’s not so bad for the children as it is for us, because they know nothing else. A child who is born a slave is better off, mentally, than a man who once knew freedom.”

  “We aren’t slaves,” said Bishop.

  “Of course not,” Maxine said. “We can leave any time we want to. All we got to do is walk up to a native and say, ‘I want to go back to Earth.’ That’s all you need to do. Any single one of them could send you back—swish—just as they send the letters, just like they whisk you to your work or to your room.”

  “But no one has gone back.”

  “Of course no one has,” she said.

  They sat there, sipping at their drinks.

  “Remember what I told you,” she said. “Don’t think. That’s the way to beat it. Never think about it. You got it good. You never had it so good. Soft living. Easy living. Nothing to worry about. They best kind of life there is.”


  “Sure,” said Bishop. “Sure, that’s the way to do it.”

  She slanted her eyes at him.

  “You’re catching on,” she said.

  They had another round.

  Over in the corner a group had got together and was doing some impromptu singing. A couple were quarreling a stool or two away.

  “It’s too noisy in this place,” Maxine said. “Want to see my paintings?”

  “Your paintings?”

  “The way I make a living. They are pretty bad, but no one knows the difference.”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  “Grab hold then.”

  “Grab—”

  “My mind, you know. Nothing physical about it. No use riding elevators.”

  He gaped at her.

  “You pick it up,” said Maxine. “You never get too good. But you pick up a trick or two.”

  “But how do I go about it?”

  “Just let loose,” she said. “Dangle. Mentally, that is. Try to reach out to me. Don’t try to help. You can’t.”

  He dangled and reached out, wondering if he was doing it the way it should be done.

  The universe collapsed and then came back together.

  They were standing in another room.

  “That was a silly thing for me to do,” Maxine said. “Some day I’ll slip a cog and get stuck in a wall or something.”

  Bishop drew a deep breath.

  “Monty could read me just a little,” he said. “Said you picked it up—just at the fringes.”

  “You never get too good,” said Maxine. “Humans aren’t … well, aren’t ripe for it, I guess. It takes millennia to develop it.”

  He looked around him and whistled.

  “Quite a place,” he said.

  It was all of that.

  It didn’t seem to be a room at all, although it had furniture. The walls were hazed in distance and to the west were mountains peaked with snow, and to the east a very sylvan river and there were flowers and flowering bushes everywhere, growing from the floor. A deep blue dusk filled the room and somewhere off in the distance there was an orchestra.