Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

“Yes?”

“It was this. Hellion said he was going to get you. Himself, personal, see? Some of us boys offered to do the job for him, but he said no, he was saving you for himself. The chief is funny that way.”

“Why?” asked Grant.

The question took the Rat by surprise. His cigarette drooped suddenly, almost fell from his mouth. His watery eyes blinked. But he recovered his composure and hunched farther across the table.

“That’s a funny question, Nagle. Funny question for you to be asking. When you put the chief out in the Alcatraz of Ganymede.”

“I didn’t put him there,” said the newsman. “All if did was write a story. That’s my job. I found out Hellion was hiding on Ceres with a bunch of assorted cutthroats, waiting for the heat to let up. And I wrote a story about it. Can I help it if the police read the Evening Rocket?”

The Rat eyed the reporter furtively.

“You’re smart, Nagle,” he said. “Too damn smart. Someday you’ll write yourself into a jam you can’t get out of. Maybe you done that already.”

“Look here,” asked Grant, “why did the chief send you around? Why didn’t he come himself? If Hellion’s got business with me, he knows where he can find me.”

“He can’t come now,” said the Rat. “He’s got to lay low for a while. And this time he’s got a place where no snooping reporter is going to find him.”

“Rat,” warned Grant coldly, “someday you’re going to talk yourself into a jam. I don’t know what your game is, but it is a game of some sort. Because Hellion can’t get out of the prison on Ganymede. No man ever has gotten out of it. When a man goes there, he stays there. When he come out he’s either served his sentence or he comes out feet first. Nobody escapes from Ganymede.”

The Rat smiled bleakly, drew a paper from his hip pocket and spread it on the table. It was an Evening Rocket, the ink still damp.

The banner screamed:

HELLION ESCAPES

“That,” said the Rat, tapping the paper, “should tell you what the score is. I ain’t talking through my hat.”

Grant stared at the paper. It was the five-star edition, the final for the day. And there it was in black and white. Hellion Smith had escaped from the impregnable Alcatraz on the airless, bitter, frigid plains of Ganymede. A mauve-tinted likeness of Hellion’s ugly mug stared back at him from the page.

“So what you told me is true,” said Grant softly. “Hellion has really escaped. And the message is the goods.”

“When Hellion says something he means it,” sneered the Rat.

“So do I,” declared Grant grimly. “And I got a message for you to take back to Hellion, if you can find hm. You tell him I only did my duty as a newspaperman before—nothing personal about it at all. But if he comes messing around again I’ll take a sort of interest in him. I’ll really put some heart into it, you understand. You tell Hellion that if he tries to carry out his threat I’ll rip him up by the roots and crucify him.”

The Rat stared at him with watery eyes.

Grant lifted the bottle off the table and filled his glass.

“Get the hell out of here!” he roared at the man across the table. “Just looking at you makes me want to gag.”

The copy boy found Grant at the table, twirling the liquor in his glass. He shuffled across the floor toward him.

Grant looked up and recognized him. “Hello, Lightnin’. Have a snort.”

Lightnin’ shook his head. “I can’t. The boss sent me to get you. He wants to see you.”

“He did, did he?” asked Grant. “Well, you go back and tell the boss I’m busy. Tell him I can’t be bothered. Tell him to cover over and see me if he’s in a rush.”

Lightin’ scuffed his feet uneasily, caught between two fires.

“It’s important,” he persisted.

“Hell,” said Grant. “There’s nothing important. Sit down, Lightnin’, and rest your feet.”

“Look,” said Lightnin’, pleadingly, “if you don’t come, the boss will give me hell. He said not to let you talk me out of it.”

“Oh, well,” said Grant. He tossed off the liquor and pocketed the bottle.

“Lead on, Lightnin’,” he said.

On the street outside the mechanical newsboys blatted their cries.

“Hellion Smith escapes. Hellion Smith escapes from Ganymede. Police baffled.”

“They’re always baffled,” said Grant.

Soft lights glowed in the gathering dusk. Smoothly operating street traffic slid silently along. Overhead the air lanes murmured softly. The city skyline was a blaze of vivid color.

Arthur Hart beamed at Grant. “I got a little assignment lined up for you,” he said. “One that will be a sort of vacation. You’ve been working hard and I thought a change might do you good.”

“Go on,” said Grant. “Go on and give it to me both barrels. When bad news is coming I like to meet it face to face. The last time you got all bloated up with kindness you sent me off to Venus and I spent two months there, smelling those stinking seas, wading around in swamps, interviewing those damn fish men.”

“It was a good idea,” Hart protested. “There was every reason to believe—still is—that the Venusians are a damn sight smarter than we think they are. They have big cities built down under those seas and just because they’ve never told us they didn’t have spaceships is no reason to believe they haven’t. For all we know, they may have visited Earth long before Earthmen flew to Venus.”

“It’s all over now,” said Grant, “but it still sounds screwy to me. What is it this time? Mars or Venus?”

“Neither one,” said Hart smoothly. “This time it really will be a little vacation jaunt. Down to sea bottom. I got it all fixed up. You’ll take a sub tonight down to Coral City and from there you’ll go to Deep End.”

“Deep End!” Grant protested. “That’s the jumping-off place. Right on the rim of the deep.”

“Sure,” snapped Hart. “What’s wrong with that?”

Grant shook his head sadly. “I don’t like it. I’m a claustrophobiac. Can’t stand being shut up in a room. And down there you got to wear steel armor. Take Coral City, now. That’s not a bad place. Only a couple hundred feet under and you meet nice people.”

“Nice bars, too,” suggested Hart.

“Bet your neck there are,” Grant agreed. “Now, I could go for a couple of weeks in Coral City.”

“You’ll go for Deep End, too,” declared Hart grimly.

Grant shrugged wearily, felt the comforting bulge of the bottle in his pocket.

“All right,” he said. “What’s the brainstorm this time?”

“There’s some sort of trouble down there on The Bottom,” said Hart. “Rumors, unconfirmed reports, nothing we’ve been able to get our teeth into. Seems the glass and quartz used in suits and domes hasn’t been standing up. There have been tragedies. Entire communities wiped out. A story here, a story there, over the period of months, from all parts of The Bottom. You’ve read them yourself. Inquiries that have gotten nowhere.”

“Forget it,” said Grant. “That’s only what’s to be expected. Any damn fool that goes down a half mile underwater and lives under a quartz dome is asking for trouble. When it comes he hasn’t got anybody but himself to blame. When you go monkeying around with pressures amounting to thousands of pounds per square inch you’re fooling around with dynamite.”

“But the point,” said Hart, “is that every catastrophe so far reported has occurred where one manufacturer’s quartz is being used. Snider quartz. You’ve heard of it.”

“Sure,” said Grant, unimpressed, “but that don’t add up to anything. Most of the quartz used down there is Snider stuff. It’s no secret Snider has a pull with the Underocean Colonization Board.” He looked at Hart squarely. “You aren’t figuring on sending me out on a one-man crusade against Snider quartz, are you?”