Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

Fletcher nodded. “That was for Duff,” he said. “The man on the cliff must have been one of the men who killed his master. He remembered, you see.”

Cynthia Thornton walked quickly forward, dabbed with a handkerchief at Fletcher’s face. “You’re a sight,” she said.

Hoofbeats interrupted her. A group of mounted men swung out of a canyon. The riders pulled up.

Zeb White rose in his stirrups and raised his hat. “Howdy ma’m,” he said to Cynthia.

“Hello, Mr. White.”

“I see you got him,” said White.

“For a while he had me,” Fletcher told him. “But Miss Thornton came along and created a sort of diversion, you might say.”

Cynthia shook her head. “Just out for a ride, Mr. White, and had my gun along to do some target practice. Then, when I saw Shane all trussed up like a turkey for the pan, I decided to do something about it.”

Another of the riders spoke up. “We heard some shooting.”

Fletcher nodded. “There was a little shooting, I guess.”

The man looked at Blair. “Must of shot him up considerable,” he guessed. In reply Fletcher raised his bloody knuckles.

“Find the money on him?” asked White.

“It’s over by the fire. He was bringing it back. Bringing me with it. Was going to claim I was the one who robbed the bank and killed Childress.”

“He can’t claim that, nohow,” said White. “He was the only one that was using a thirty-eight. The rest of you jaspers mixed up in the deal had forty-fives.”

“And a thirty-eight killed Childress,” said one of the other men. “Doc dug the slug out of him.”

“We better be getting back to town,” said White. “Some of you hombres catch up them horses over there and gather up things, includin’ Blair. And that thing over there in the blanket, whatever ‘tis.”

“That’s Blind Johnny,” Fletcher told him.

“Dead?”

Fletcher nodded. “One of the boys had better ride over to Antelope and tell the preacher we’ll be needing him.”

“Sure,” agreed White, heartily. “We got to give Johnny a proper plantin’.” He looked from Fletcher to Cynthia, back again. “Maybe you two might be wantin’ a preacher, too.”

Fletcher grinned. “After awhile, maybe. I’m not making enough to keep myself right now.”

“Shucks,” said White, “I forgot to tell you. We ain’t got no bank now since Childress was gunned. So we’re organizing another one. Need a man we can trust to run it.”

The men sat silent on their horses, watching Fletcher. “We were sort of considerin’ you,” White told him.

Suddenly Fletcher remembered. He put his hand in his inside coat pocket, drew out a bundle of papers. He riffled through them. He grinned at White. “Guess I had a wrong hunch on these,” he said. “I didn’t need them after all.”

“Put them back in your pocket,” White told him. “Collecting them will be part of your new job.”

Cynthia linked her arm through Fletcher’s, smiled at White. “Perhaps,” she said, “we can use that preacher, after all.”

“How-2” is not the sort of name Clifford Simak would have put on a story, and I suspect that someone in the offices of Galaxy Science Fiction eventually came up with that title. Cliff’s journals seem to show that he sent a story entitled “Let Freedom Ring” to Galaxy ’s editor, Horace Gold, early in 1954, and a different entry shows that Cliff was paid $600 that same year for a story entitled “Make It Yourself”—I think those entries both refer to this story (which in any case first appeared in the November 1954 issue of Galaxy .

With this story, Cliff Simak married the concept of artificial intelligence to the concepts of civil rights—and ended up raising questions about slavery.

(It seems ironic that in this story, there is brief mention that a Broadway play was written about the goings-on in the story, and that after this story’s publication, a play was written based on this story—sadly, the real-life play, after opening off-Broadway under the title How to Make a Man , closed after only a single night on the Great White Way.)

Gordon Knight was anxious for the five-hour day to end so he could rush home. For this was the day he should receive the How-2 Kit he’d ordered and he was anxious to get to work on it.

It wasn’t only that he had always wanted a dog, although that was more than half of it—but, with this kit, he would be trying something new. He’d never handled any How-2 Kit with biologic components and he was considerably excited. Although, of course, the dog would be biologic only to a limited degree and most of it would be packaged, anyhow, and all he’d have to do would be assemble it. But it was something new and he wanted to get started.

He was thinking of the dog so hard that he was mildly irritated when Randall Stewart, returning from one of his numerous trips to the water fountain, stopped at his desk to give him a progress report on home dentistry.

“It’s easy,” Stewart told him. “Nothing to it if you follow the instructions. Here, look—I did this one last night.”

He then squatted down beside Knight’s desk and opened his mouth, proudly pulling it out of shape with his fingers so Knight could see.

“Thish un ere,” said Stewart, blindly attempting to point, with a wildly waggling finger, at the tooth in question.

He let his face snap back together.

“Filled it myself,” he announced complacently. “Rigged up a series of mirrors to see what I was doing. They came right in the kit, so all I had to do was follow the instructions.”

He reached a finger deep inside his mouth and probed tenderly at his handiwork. “A little awkward, working on yourself. On someone else, of course, there’d be nothing to it.”

He waited hopefully.

“Must be interesting,” said Knight.

“Economical, too. No use paying the dentists the prices they ask. Figure I’ll practice on myself and then take on the family. Some of my friends, even, if they want me to.”

He regarded Knight intently.

Knight failed to rise to the dangling bait.

Stewart gave up. “I’m going to try cleaning next. You got to dig down beneath the gums and break loose the tartar. There’s a kind of hook you do it with. No reason a man shouldn’t take care of his own teeth instead of paying dentists.”

“It doesn’t sound too hard,” Knight admitted.

“It’s a cinch,” said Stewart. “But you got to follow the instructions. There’s nothing you can’t do if you follow the instructions.”

And that was true, Knight thought. You could do anything if you followed the instructions—if you didn’t rush ahead, but sat down and took your time and studied it all out.

Hadn’t he built his house in his spare time, and all the furniture for it, and the gadgets, too? Just in his spare time—although God knew, he thought, a man had little enough of that, working fifteen hours a week.

It was a lucky thing he’d been able to build the house after buying all that land. But everyone had been buying what they called estates, and Grace had set her heart on it, and there’d been nothing he could do.

If he’d had to pay carpenters and masons and plumbers, he would never have been able to afford the house. But by building it himself, he had paid for it as he went along. It had taken ten years, of course, but think of all the fun he’d had!

He sat there and thought of all the fun he’d had, and of all the pride. No, sir, he told himself, no one in his circumstances had a better house.

Although, come to think of it, what he’d done had not been too unusual. Most of the men he knew had built their homes, too, or had built additions to them, or had remodeled them.