Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

Maybe it had been pure luck this Ship had picked him up. For any other legal ship would probably turn him over to the authorities at its next port of call, but this Ship didn’t seem to mind who he was or what his record might be. Any other ship that was not entirely legal would have grabbed off, not only the diamonds that he had but his discovery of the diamond field. But this particular Ship had no concern with diamonds.

What a setup, he thought. A human brain and a spaceship tied together, so closely tied together that their identities had merged. He shivered at the thought of it, for it was a gruesome thing.

Although perhaps it had not meant too much to that old man who was about to die. He had traded an aged and death-marked body for many years of life. Perhaps life as a part of a space-traveling machine was better than no life at all.

How many years, he wondered, had it been since that old man had translated himself into something else than human? A hundred? Five hundred? Perhaps even more than that.

In those years where had he been and what might he have seen? And, most pertinent of all, what thoughts had run through and congealed and formed within his mind? What was life like for him? Not a human sort of life, of course, not a human viewpoint, but something else entirely.

Sherwood tried to imagine what it might be like, but gave up in dismay. It would necessarily be a negation of everything he lived for—all the sensual pleasure, all the dreams of gain and glory, all the neat behavior patterns he had set up for himself, all his self-made rules of conduct, and of conscience.

A miracle, he thought. As a matter of fact, there’d been two miracles. The first had been when he had been able to set his ship down without a crackup when the valve had failed. He had come in close above the planet’s surface to find a place to land—and suddenly the valve went out and the engine failed and there he’d been, plunging down above the rough terrain. Then suddenly he had glimpsed a place where a landing might be just barely possible and had fought the controls madly to hit that certain spot and finally had hit it—alive.

It had been a miracle that he had made the landing; and the coming of the Ship to rescue him had been the second miracle.

The bunk dropped down flat against the wall and his sack of diamonds was dumped onto the floor.

“Hey, what goes on?” yelled Sherwood. Then he wished he had not yelled, for it was quite clear exactly what had happened. The support that held the bunk had not been snapped properly into place and had given way, letting down the bunk.

“Something wrong, Mr. Sherwood?” asked the Ship.

“No, not a thing,” said Sherwood. “My bunk fell down. I guess it startled me.”

He bent down to pick up the diamonds. As he did, the chair quietly and efficiently slid back against the wall, folded itself up and slid into a slight depression that exactly fitted it.

Squatted to pick up the diamonds, Sherwood watched the chair in horrified fascination, then swiftly spun around. The bunk no longer hung against the wall, also had fitted itself into another niche.

Cold fear speared into Sherwood. He rose swiftly to his feet, turning like a man at bay. He stood in a bare cubicle. With both the bunk and chair retracted, he stood within four bare walls.

He sprang toward the door and there wasn’t any door. There was only wall.

He staggered back into the center of the cubicle and spun around to view each wall in turn. There was no door in any of the walls. The metal went up from floor to ceiling without a single break.

The walls began to move, closing in on him, sliding in, retracting.

He watched, incredulous, frozen, thinking that perhaps he’d imagined the moving of the walls.

But it was not imagination. Slowly, inexorably, the walls were closing in. Had he put out his arms, he could have touched them on either side of him.

“Ship!” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm.

“Yes, Mr. Sherwood.”

“You are malfunctioning. The walls are closing in.”

“No,” said the Ship. “No malfunction, I assure you. A very proper function. My brain grows tired and feeble. It is not the body only—the brain also has its limits. I suspected that it might, but I could not know. There was a chance, of course, that separated from the poison of a body, it might live in its bath of nutrients forever.”

“No!” rasped Sherwood, his breath strangling in this throat. “No, not me!”

“Who else?” asked the Ship. “I have searched for years and you are the first who fitted.”

“Fitted!” Sherwood screamed.

“Why, of course,” the Ship said calmly, happily. “A man who would not be missed. No one knowing where you were. No one hunting for you. No one who will miss you. I had hunted for someone like you and had despaired of finding one. For I am humane. I would cause no one grief or sadness.”

The walls kept closing in.

The Ship seemed to sigh in metallic contentment.

“Believe me, Mr. Sherwood,” it said, “finding you was a very miracle.”

Clifford D. Simak’s few surviving journals do not make it clear just when he wrote this story; but the fact that he sent it to John W. Campbell Jr., the relatively new editor of Astounding Science Fiction , in September 1939 suggests he may have begun writing it soon after June 16 of that year, when he ended the nomadic stage of his newspaper career by joining the staff of Minnesota’s Minneapolis Star (and I speculate that the fact that Cliff found himself working downtown in the biggest city he had ever lived or worked in, along with several years of listening to the radio plays so often broadcast across the country in the evenings, led him to the unusual “gangster” style he used in this and a few other stories written during this period).

Campbell bought the story for $125, and it appeared in the May 1940 issue of his magazine.

Like other Simak stories from that era, the efforts of private commerce, in this case to colonize the ocean floors, and a secret incursion from outer space, seem not to lead anyone to think about getting the government involved—to modern eyes that seems unthinkable, but clearly, Cliff, product of rural American life in the early Twentieth Century, had not thought of society going in that direction … after all, World War II had not yet begun.

Cliff used a lot of his favorite devices in his story: the name of his protagonist, Grant, was used more frequently than any other name in Cliff’s stories (it happened to have been the name of the Wisconsin country in which Cliff was born). Grant is a newspaperman (in fact, he works for the Evening Rocket , a newspaper prominent in a number of stories Cliff wrote during that period); and Grant names the paper’s copyboy as “Lightnin’,” a hoary piece of newspaper humor than never fails to make me smile …

The Rat slouched into the Venus Flower and over to the table where Grant Nagle was settling down to the serious business of getting drunk.

The newspaperman eyed the Rat with unconcealed loathing. But the Rat didn’t seem to mind. He pushed his cap farther over his left eye and talked out of the corner of his mouth, his words hissing out alongside the smoke-trickling cigarette.

“I got a message for you,” he declared.

“Let’s have it,” said Grant. “Then get the hell out of my sight.”

“Hellion Smith is loose,” said the Rat.

Grant started, but his face didn’t change. He stared at the other icily and said nothing.

“He left word two years ago,” explained the Rat, “that when he cracked the crib I was to bring you a message. I’m bringing it, see?”