Clifford Simak: The Shipshape Miracle : And Other Stories

Footsteps came deliberately down a shadow-hidden walk and Doyle saw the red glow of a cigar as someone puffed on it.

A man’s voice spoke out of the darkness and he recognized it as Metcalfe’s voice.

“Henry!”

“Yes, sir,” said Henry from the wide verandah.

“Where the devil did the rolla go?”

“He’s out there somewhere, sir. He never gets too far from the tree. It’s his responsibility, you know.”

The cigar-end glowed redder as Metcalfe puffed savagely.

“I don’t understand those rollas, Henry. Even after all these years, I don’t understand them.”

“No, sir,” said Henry. “They’re hard things to understand.”

Doyle could smell the smoke, drifting upward to him. He could tell by the smell it was a good cigar.

And naturally Metcalfe would smoke the very best. No man with a money tree growing in his garden need worry about the price of smokes.

Cautiously, Doyle edged a foot or two along the branch, anxious to get slightly closer to the wall and safety.

The cigar jerked around and pointed straight at him as Metcalfe tilted his head to stare into the tree.

“What was that!” he yelled.

“I didn’t hear a thing, sir. It must have been the wind.”

“There’s no wind, you fool. It’s that cat again!”

Doyle huddled closer against the branch, motionless, yet tensed to spring into action if it were necessary. Quietly he gave himself a mental bawling-out for moving.

Metcalfe had moved off the walk and clear of the shadow and was standing in the moonlight, staring up into the tree.

“There’s something up there,” he announced pontifically. “The leaves are so thick I can’t make out what it is. I bet you it’s that goddam cat again. He’s plagued the rolla for two nights hand running.”

He took the cigar out of his face and blew a couple of beautiful smoke rings that drifted ghost-like in the moonlight.

“Henry,”’ he shouted, “bring me a gun. I think the twelve-gauge is right behind the door.”

Doyle had heard enough. He made a dash for it. He almost fell, but he caught himself. He dropped the rope and almost dropped the sack, but managed to hang onto it. The rolla, inside the sack, began to thrash about.

“So you want to horse around,” Doyle said savagely to the thing inside the sack.

He tossed the bag toward the fence and it went over and he heard it thump into the alley. He hoped, momentarily, that he hadn’t killed it, for it might be valuable. He might be able, he thought, to sell it to a circus. Circuses were always looking for crazy things like that.

He reached the tree trunk and slid down it with no great ceremony and very little forethought and as a result collected a fine group of abrasions on his arms and legs from the roughness of the bark.

He saw the sack lying in the alley and from beyond the fence he heard the ferocious bellowing and blood-curdling cursing of J. Howard Metcalfe.

Someone ought to warn him, Doyle told himself. Man of his age, he shouldn’t ought to allow himself to fly into such a rage. Someday he’d fall flat upon his face and that would be the end of him.

Doyle scooped up the sack and ran as hard as he could to where he’d parked the car at the alley’s end. Reaching it, he tossed the sack into the seat and crawled in himself. He took off with a rush and wound a devious route to throw off any possible pursuit—although that, he admitted to himself, was just a bit fantastic, for he’d made his getaway before Metcalfe could possibly have put someone on his tail.

Half an hour later he pulled up beside a small park and began to take stock of the situation.

There was both good and bad.

He had failed to harvest as much of the tree-grown money as he had intended and he had tipped his mitt to Metcalfe, so there’d not be another chance.

But he knew now for a certainty that there were such things as money trees and he had a rolla, or he supposed it was a rolla, for whatever it was worth.

And the rolla —so quiet now inside the sack—in its more active moments of guarding the money tree, had done him not a bit of good.

His hands were dark in the moonlight with the wash of blood and there were stripes of fire across his ribs, beneath the torn shirt, where the rolla’s claws had raked him, and one leg was sodden-wet. He put down a hand to feel the warm moistness of his trouser leg.

He felt a thrill of fear course along his nerves. A man could get infected from a chewing-up like that—especially by an unknown animal.

And if he went to a doctor, the doc would want to know what had happened to him, and he would say a dog, of course. But what if the doc should know right off that it was no dog bite. More than likely the doc would have to make some report or other—maybe just like he’d have to make a report on a gunshot wound.

There was, he decided, too much at stake for him to take the chance—he must not let it be known he’d found out about the money tree.

For as long as he was the only one who knew, he might stand to make a good thing of it. Especially since he had the rolla, which in some mysterious manner was connected with the tree—and which, even by itself, without reference to the tree, might be somehow turned into a wad of cash.

He eased the car from the curb and out into the street.

Fifteen minutes later he parked in a noisome alley back of a block-long row of old apartment houses.

He descended from the car and hauled out the sack.

The rolla was still quiet.

“Funny thing,” Doyle said.

He laid his hand against the sack and the sack was warm and the rolla stirred a bit.

“Still alive,” Doyle told himself with some relief.

He wended his way through a clutter of battered garbage cans, stacks of rotting wood, piles of empty cans; cats slunk into the dark as he approached.

“Crummy place for a girl to live,” said Doyle, speaking to himself. “No place for a girl like Mabel.”

He found the rickety backstairs and climbed them, went along the hall until he came to Mabel’s door. She opened it at his knock, immediately, as if she had been waiting. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him in and slammed the door and leaned her back against it.

“I was worried, Chuck!”

“Nothing to worry about,” said Doyle. “Little trouble, that’s all.”

“Your hands!” she screamed. “Your shirt!”

Doyle jostled the bag gaily. “Nothing to it, Mabel. Got what done it right inside this sack.”

He looked around the place. “You got all the windows shut?” he asked.

She nodded, still a bit wide-eyed.

“Hand me that table lamp,” he said. “It’ll be handy for a club.”

She jerked the plug out of the wall and pulled off the shade, then handed the lamp to him.

He hefted the lamp, then picked up the sack, loosened the draw string.

“I bumped it couple of times,” he said, “and heaved it in the alley and it may be shook up considerable, but you can’t take no chances.”

He upended the sack and dumped the rolla out. With it came a shower of twenty-dollar bills—the three or four handfuls he had managed to pick before the rolla jumped him.

The rolla picked itself off the floor with a show of dignity and stood erect—except that it didn’t look as if it were standing erect. Its hind legs were so short and its front legs were so long that it looked as if it were sitting like a dog. The fact that its face, or rather its mouth, since it had no face, was on top of its head, added to the illusion of sitting.

Its stance was pretty much like that of a sitting coyote baying at the moon—or, better yet, an oversized and more than ordinarily grotesque bullfrog baying at the moon.