Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

He came to the place where the woven strip of vegetation dammed the stream-bed and almost tumbled over it onto the rocks below.

He ran the flat of his hand across the polished surface of the strip of weaving and tried to imagine what might have happened those several years ago.

A ship plunging down to Earth, out of control perhaps, and shattering on impact, with Metcalfe close at hand to effect a rescue.

It beats all hell, he thought, how things at times turn out.

If it had not been Metcalfe, given someone else who did not think in dollar signs, there might now be trees or bushes or rows of vegetables carrying hopes such as mankind had never known before—hope for surcease from disease and pain, an end to poverty and fear. And perhaps many other hopes that no one now could guess.

And they were gone now, in a spaceship grown by the two deserting rollas under Metcalfe’s very nose.

He squatted atop the dam and knew the blasted hopes of mankind, the hope that had never come to be, wrecked by avarice and greed.

Now they were gone—but, wait a minute, not entirely gone! For there was a rolla left. He had to believe that the deserting rolla he had never seen was with the others—but there was still his rolla, locked in the trunk of that old heap down on the river road!

He got up and stumbled through the darkness to the end of the dam and climbed around the clump of anchor trees. He skidded down the sharp incline to the stream-bed and went fumbling down the hollow.

What should he do, he wondered. Head straight for Washington? Go to the FBI?

For whatever else, no matter what might happen, that one remaining rolla must be gotten into proper hands.

Already there was too much lost. There could be no further chances taken. Placed in governmental or scientific hands, that one lone rolla might still retrieve much that had been lost.

He began to worry about what might have happened to the rolla, locked inside the trunk. He recalled that it had been banging for attention.

What if it suffocated? What if there were something of importance, something about its care, perhaps, that it had been vital that it tell him? What if that had been the reason for its banging on the trunk?

He fumbled down the stream-bed in sobbing haste, tripping on the gravel beds, falling over boulders. Mosquitos flew a heavy escort for him and he flapped his hands to try and clear them off, but he was so worried that they seemed little more than an inconvenience.

Up in the orchard, more than likely, Metcalfe’s mob was busy stripping trees, harvesting no one could guess how many millions in brand new, crinkly bills.

For now the jig was up and all of them would know it. Now there was nothing left to do but clean out the orchard and disappear as best they could.

Perhaps the money trees had required the constant attention of the rollas to keep on producing letter-perfect money. Otherwise why had Metcalfe had the rolla to tend the tree in town? And now, with the rollas gone, the trees might go on producing, but the money that they grew might be defective and irregular, like the growth of nubbin corn.

The slope of the land told him that he was near the road.

He went on blindly and suddenly came upon the car. He went around it in the dark and rapped upon the window.

Inside, Mabel screamed.

“It’s all right,” yelled Doyle. “It is me. I’m back.”

She unlocked the door and he climbed in beside her. She leaned against him and he put an arm around her.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry that I took so long.”

“Did everything go all right, Chuck?”

“Yes,” he mumbled. “Yes, I imagine that you could say it did.”

“I’m so glad,” she said, relieved. “It is all right, then. The rolla ran away.”

“Ran away! For God’s sake, Mabel …”

“Now, please don’t go getting sore, Chuck. He kept on with that banging and I felt sorry for him. I was afraid, of course, but more sorry than afraid. So I opened up the trunk and let him out and it was OK. He was the sweetest little chap …”

“So he ran away,” said Doyle, still not quite believing it. “But he might still be around somewhere, out there in the dark.”

“No,” said Mabel, “he is not around. He went up the hollow as fast as he could go, like a dog when his master calls. It was dark and I was scared, but I ran after him. I called and kept on following, but it was no use—I knew that he was gone.”

She sat up straight in the seat.

“It don’t make no difference now,” she said. “You don’t need him any longer. Although I am sorry that he ran away. He’da made a dandy pet. He talked so nice—so much nicer than a parakeet—and he was so good. I tied a ribbon, a yellow piece of ribbon around his neck and you never seen anything so cute.”

“I just bet he was,” said Doyle.

And he was thinking of a rolla, rocketing through space in a new-grown ship, heading out for a far-off sun and taking with him possibly some of man’s greatest hopes, all fixed up and cute with a ribbon round his neck.

Completed in October 1959, this story was first published in the January 1961 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction . It is one of several Simak stories that featured physicians; and while those stories all make it clear that Cliff respected members of that profession highly, in this one it is possible that Dr. Kelly has made a mistake that could cost the human race dearly (by subjecting it to a “treatment” that Cliff referred to in several others of his stories).

If so, it was a mistake arising out of Kelly’s desire to live up to his ethical code.

(It may or may not be an interesting coincidence that in the time I knew him, Cliff’s personal physician was enough of a friend that Cliff felt able to go to him for medical information that might be of use in his stories—but this Dr. Kelly instead carries the same last name as the man who was Cliff’s lawyer … well, it likely means nothing.)

The clinics were set up and in the morning they’d start on Operation Kelly—and that was something, wasn’t it, that they should call it Kelly!

He sat in the battered rocking chair on the sagging porch and said it once again and rolled it on his tongue, but the taste of it was not so sharp nor sweet as it once had been, when that great London doctor had risen in the United Nations to suggest it could be called nothing else but Kelly.

Although, when one came to think of it, there was a deal of happenstance. It needn’t have been Kelly. It could have been just anyone at all with an M.D. to his name. It could as well have been Cohen or Johnson or Radzonovich or any other of them—any one of all the doctors in the world.

He rocked gently in the creaking chair while the floor boards of the porch groaned in sympathy, and in the gathering dusk were the sounds, as well, of children at the day’s-end play, treasuring those last seconds before they had to go inside and soon thereafter to bed.

There was the scent of lilacs in the coolness of the air and at the corner of the garden he could faintly see the white flush of an early-blooming bridal wreath—the one that Martha Anderson had given him and Janet so many years ago, when they first had come to live in this very house.

A neighbor came tramping down the walk and he could not make him out in the deepening dusk, but the man called out to him.

“Good evening, Doc,” he said.

“Good evening, Hiram,” said old Doc Kelly, knowing who it was by the voice of him.

The neighbor went on, tramping down the walk.