Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

A man could manage to get through them. They could be kicked aside and trampled down, but some of them would be bound to peg a man and by the time one got out of there he’d have plenty welts.

And did he, at the moment, really want to get out of there?

He was, he told himself, no worse off than he had been before.

Better off, perhaps, for he was through the nettles. Better off, that is, if those stinking little rollas didn’t run and tattle on him.

There was no sense, he decided, in going through the nettles now. If he did, in just a couple of hours or so he’d have to wade back through them once again to reach the fence.

He couldn’t climb the fence until it was getting dark and he had no place else to go.

He took a good look at the fence and it would be a tough one to get over. It was a good eight feet of woven wire and atop that were three strands of barbed wire, attached to an arm-like bracket that extended outward beyond the woven fence.

Just beyond the fence stood an ancient oak tree and if he had had a rope he could make a lariat—but he had no rope, and if he wanted to get over the fence, he would somehow have to climb it.

He hunkered tight against the ground and felt downright miserable. His body was corrugated with mosquito lumps and the nettle welts on his hand had turned into blisters and he’d had a bit more sun than he was accustomed to. And now the upper molar on the left side of his jaw was developing a sort of galloping ache. All he needed.

He sneezed and it hurt his head to sneeze and the aching tooth gave a bounding leap.

Maybe, he figured, it was the pollen from those lousy nettles.

Never saw no nettles like them before, he told himself, eying them warily.

More than likely the rollas had a hand in growing them. The rollas were good with plants. They had developed the money trees and if they could develop money trees there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do with plants. He remembered how the nettles had fallen over to the left and right to make a path for him. It had been the rolla, he was sure, who had made them do that, for there hadn’t been enough wind to do it and even if there had been a wind, there wasn’t any wind that blew two ways at once.

There was nothing like the rollas in the world. And that might be exactly it. They’d said something about doing good on other worlds. But no matter what they’d done on other worlds, they’d sure been suckered here.

Do-gooders, he thought. Missionaries, maybe, from some other world, from some place out in space—a roving band of beings devoted to a cause. And trapped into a ridiculous situation on a planet that might have little, if anything, in common with any other world they’d ever seen.

Did they even, he wondered, understand what money was? Just what kind of story had Metcalfe palmed off on them?

They had arrived and Metcalfe, of all persons, had stumbled onto them and taken them in tow. Metcalfe, not so much a man as an organization that from long experience would know exactly how to exploit a situation such as the rollas offered. One man alone could not have handled it, could not have done all that needed to be done to set up the rollas for the kill. And only in an organization such as Metcalfe headed, long schooled in the essentials of self preservation, could there have been any hope of maintaining the essential secrecy.

The rollas had been duped—completely, absolutely fooled—and yet they were no fools. They had learned the language, not the spoken language only, but both the spoken and the written, and that spelled sharp intelligence. Perhaps more intelligence than was first apparent, for they did not make use of sound in their normal talk among themselves. But they had adapted readily, it seemed, to sound communication.

The sun long since had disappeared behind the nettles and now was just above the tree line of the bluffs. Dusk would be coming soon and then, Doyle told himself, he could get busy.

He debated once again which course he should take. By now the rollas might have told Metcalfe he was at the fence and Metcalfe might be waiting for him, although Metcalfe, if he knew, more than likely would not just wait, but would be coming out to get him. And as for the raid upon the orchard—he’d had trouble enough with just one rolla when he tried to rob a tree. He didn’t like to think what five might do to him.

Behind him the nettles began to rustle and he leaped to his feet. Maybe, he thought wildly, they were opening up the path again. Maybe the path was opened automatically, at regularly scheduled hours. Maybe the nettles were like four o’clocks or morning glories—maybe they were engineered by the rollas to open and to close the path so many times a day.

And what he imagined was the truth in part. A path, he saw, was opening. And waddling down the path was another rolla . The path opened in front of him and then closed as he passed.

The rolla came out into the trampled area and stood facing Doyle.

GOOD EVENING, HEEL, he said.

It couldn’t be the rolla locked in the trunk of the car down on the river road. It must, Doyle told himself, be one of the two that had walked out on the money project.

YOU SICK? the rolla asked.

“I itch just something awful and my tooth is aching and every time I sneeze the top of my head comes off.”

COULD FIX.

“Sure, you could grow a drug-store tree, sprouting linaments and salves and pills and all the other junk.”

SIMPLE, spelled the rolla .

“Well, now,” said Doyle and then tried to say no more. For suddenly it struck him that it would be as the rolla said—very, very simple.

Most medicines came from plants and there wasn’t anyone or anything that could engineer a plant the way the rollas could.

“You’re on the level there,” said Doyle enthusiastically. “You would be able to cure a lot of things. You might find a cure for cancer and you might develop something that would hold off heart disease. And there’s the common cold …”

SORRY, PAL,

BUT WE ARE

OFF OF YOU.

YOU MADE

SAPS OF US.

“Then you are one of them that ran away,” said Doyle in some excitement. “You saw through Metcalfe’s game…”

But the rolla was paying no attention to anything he said. It had drawn itself a little straighter and a little taller and it had formed its lips into a circle as if it might be getting ready to let out a bay and the sides of its throat were quivering as if it might be singing, but there was no sound.

No sound, but a rasping shrillness that skidded on one’s nerves, a something in the air that set one’s teeth on edge.

It was an eerie thing, that sense of singing terror in the silence of the dusk, with the west wind blowing quietly along the tops of the darkening trees, with the silky rustle of the nettles and somewhere in the distance the squeaking of a chipmunk homeward bound on the last trip of the day.

Out beyond the fence came the thumping of awkward running feet and in the thickening dusk Doyle saw the five rollas from the orchard plunging down the slope.

There was something going on. Doyle was sure of that. He sensed the importance of the moment and the excitement that was in it, but there was no inkling of what it all might mean.

The rolla by his side had sent out some sort of rallying call, pitched too high for the human ear to catch, and now the orchard rollas were tumbling down the slope in answer to that call.

The five rollas reached the fence and lined up in their customary row and their blackboard chests were alive with glowing characters—the strange, flickering, nonsensical characters of their native language. And the chest of the one who stood outside the fence with Doyle also flamed with the fleeting symbols, changing and shifting so swiftly that they seemed to be alive.