Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

Webster spoke sharply. “Leave me and my family out of this, Fowler! It is a thing that’s bigger—”

But Fowler was shouting, drowning out his words. “And I’m not going to let you bungle this. The world has lost enough because of you Websters. Now the world’s going to get a break. I’m going to tell the people about Jupiter. I’ll tell the press and radio. I’ll yell it from the housetops. I’ll—”

His voice broke and his shoulders shook.

Webster’s voice was cold with sudden rage. “I’ll fight you, Fowler. I’ll go on the beam against you. I can’t let you do a thing like this.”

Fowler had swung around, was striding toward the garden gate.

Webster, frozen in his chair, felt the paw clawing at his leg.

“Shall I get him, Boss?” asked Elmer. “Shall I go and get him?”

Webster shook his head. “Let him go,” he said. “He has as much right as I have to do the thing he wishes.”

A chill wind came across the garden wall and rustled the cape about Webster’s shoulders.

Words beat in his brain—words that had been spoken here in this garden scant seconds ago, but words that came from centuries away. One of your ancestors lost the Juwain philosophy. One of your ancestors—

Webster clenched his fists until the nails dug into his palms.

A jinx, thought Webster. That’s what we are. A jinx upon humanity. The Juwain philosophy. And the mutants. But the mutants had had the Juwain philosophy for centuries now and they had never used it. Joe had stolen it from Grant and Grant had spent his life trying to get it back. But he never had.

Maybe, thought Webster, trying to console himself, it really didn’t amount to much. If it had, the mutants would have used it. Or maybe—just maybe—the mutants had been bluffing. Maybe they didn’t know any more about it than the humans did.

A metallic voice coughed softly and Webster looked up. A small gray robot stood just outside the doorway.

“The call, sir,” said the robot. “The call you’ve been expecting.”

Jenkins’ face came into the plate—an old face, obsolete and ugly. Not the smooth, lifelike face boasted by the latest model robots.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” he said, “but it is most unusual. Joe came up and asked to use our visor to put in a call to you. Won’t tell me what he wants, sir. Says it’s just a friendly call to an old-time neighbor.”

“Put him on,” said Webster.

“He went at it most unusual, sir,” persisted Jenkins. “He came up and sat around and chewed the fat for an hour or more before he asked to use it. I’d say, if you’d pardon me, that it’s most peculiar.”

“I know,” said Webster. “Joe is peculiar, in a lot of ways.”

Jenkins’ face faded from the screen and another face came in—that of Joe, the mutant. It was a strong face with a wrinkled, leathery skin and blue-gray eyes that twinkled, hair that was just turning salt and pepper at the temples.

“Jenkins doesn’t trust me, Tyler,” said Joe, and Webster felt his hackles rising at the laughter that lurked behind the words.

“For that matter,” he told him bluntly, “neither do I.”

Joe clucked with his tongue. “Why, Tyler, we’ve never given you a single minute’s trouble. Not a single one of us. You’ve watched us and you’ve worried and fretted about us, but we’ve never hurt you. You’ve had so many of the dogs spying on us that we stumble over them everywhere we turn and you’ve kept files on us and studied us and talked us up and down until you must be sick to death of it.”

“We know you,” said Webster, grimly. “We know more about you than you know about yourselves. We know how many there are of you and we know each of you personally. Want to know what any one of you were doing at any given moment in the last hundred years or so? Ask us and we’ll tell you.”

Butter wouldn’t have melted in Joe’s mouth. “And all the time,” he said, “we were thinking kindly of you. Figuring out how sometime we might want to help you.”

“Why didn’t you do it, then?” snapped Webster. “We were ready to work with you at first. Even after you stole the Juwain philosophy from Grant—”

“Stole it?” asked Joe. “Surely, Tyler, you must have that wrong. We only took it so we could work it out. It was all botched up, you know.”

“You probably figured it out the day after you had your hands on it,” Webster told him, flatly. “What were you waiting for? Any time you had offered that to us we’d known that you were with us and we’d have worked with you. We’d have called off the dogs, we’d have accepted you.”

“Funny thing,” said Joe. “We never seemed to care about being accepted.”

And the old laughter was back again, the laughter of a man who was sufficient to himself, who saw the whole fabric of the human community of effort as a vast, ironic joke. A man who walked alone and liked it. A man who saw the human race as something that was funny and probably just a little dangerous—but funnier than ever because it was dangerous. A man who felt no need of the brotherhood of man, who rejected that brotherhood as a thing as utterly provincial and pathetic as the twentieth century booster clubs.

“O.K.,” said Webster sharply. “If that’s the way you want it. I’d hoped that maybe you had a deal to offer—some chance of conciliation. We don’t like things as they are—we’d rather they were different. But the move is up to you.”

“Now, Tyler,” protested Joe, “no use in flying off the handle. I was thinking maybe you’d ought to know about the Juwain philosophy. You’ve sort of forgotten about it now, but there was a time when the System was all stirred up about it.”

“All right,” said Webster, “go ahead and tell me.” The tone of his voice said he knew Joe wouldn’t.

“Basically,” said Joe, “you humans are a lonely lot of folks. You never have known your fellow-man. You can’t know him because you haven’t the common touch of understanding that makes it possible to know him. You have friendships, sure, but those friendships are based on pure emotions, never on real understanding. You get along together, sure. But you get along by tolerance rather than by understanding. You work out your problems by agreement, but that agreement is simply a matter of the stronger-minded among you beating down the opposition of the weaker ones.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Why, everything,” Joe told him. “With the Juwain philosophy you’d actually understand.”

“Telepathy?” asked Webster.

“Not exactly,” said Joe. “We mutants have telepathy. But this is something different. The Juwain philosophy provides an ability to sense the viewpoint of another. It won’t necessarily make you agree with that viewpoint, but it does make you recognize it. You not only know what the other fellow is talking about, but how he feels about it. With Juwain’s philosophy you have to accept the validity of another man’s ideas and knowledge, not just the words he says, but the thought back of the words.”

“Semantics,” said Webster.

“If you insist on the term,” Joe told him. “What it really means is that you understand not only the intrinsic meaning, but the implied meaning of what someone else is saying. Almost telepathy, but not quite. A whole lot better, some ways.”

“And Joe, how do you go about it? How do you—”

The laughter was back again. “You think about it a while, Tyler … find out how bad you want it. Then maybe we can talk.”

“Horse trading,” said Webster.

Joe nodded.

“Booby-trapped, too, I suppose,” said Webster.

“Couple of them,” said Joe. “You find them and we’ll talk about that, too.”