Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

Grant turned and through the haze of the water he saw a queer formation, a shady thing rising out of the ocean bed.

“What is it?” he asked. “It looks—Damned if it don’t look almost like a piece of machinery.”

“I don’t know,” said Gus softly, “but, by the good Lord Harry, we’re going to find out.”

They moved forward slowly, cautiously. Grant felt an unaccountable prickling at the back of his neck—an eerie sense of danger.

Butch gamboled ahead of them. Suddenly he stopped, stood stiff-legged, almost bristling. He pranced forward a few steps and waved his tentacles. Then he became a bundle of unseemly rage, rushing about, his eyes red, his body color changing from black to pink, to violet and finally to a dull brick-red.

“Butch sure has got his dander up,” said Old Gus, half fearfully.

The octopus ceased his demonstration of rage almost as suddenly as it had started and headed straight for the hazy mass before them. Old Gus broke into a sprint and Grant followed.

The towering mass was machinery, Grant saw. Two great cylinders standing close together, with a massive squat machine between them, connected to both of the cylinders by heavy pipes.

The muck and ooze had been scraped away for some distance around the cylinders and machine, probably to make way for secure anchorage, and a mighty hole had been blasted in the sea-bed rock.

There was no sign of life around the cylinders or the machine, but the machine was operating.

Butch reached the cylinders and whipped around them and the next instant something that looked like a merman shot out from behind the cylinders, with Butch in close pursuit.

The manlike thing flashed through the water with astonishing ease, but Butch was out for blood. With a tremendous burst of speed he drew nearer to the fleeing thing, launched his body in a great leap and closed in, tentacles flailing.

Old Gus was running now, yelling at the octopus. “Damn you, Butch; you stop that!”

But, by the time Grant reached them, it was all over. Old Gus, still furious, was prying an angry Butch from his prey, which the octopus still held in the death-grip of his tentacles.

“Someday,” Old Gus was saying, “I’m going to plumb lose patience with you, Butch.”

But Butch wasn’t worrying much about that. His one thought at the moment was to retain the choice morsel he had picked up. He clung stubbornly, but finally Gus hauled him loose. He tried to charge in again, but Gus booted him away and at that he withdrew, squatting at the base of one of the cylinders, fairly jigging with rage.

Grant was staring down at the thing on the bare rock. “Gus,” he said, “do you know what this is?”

“Danged if I do,” said Gus. “I’ve heard of mermen and mermaids, but I never did set no stock by them. I been roaming these ocean beds for nigh forty years and I never seen one yet.” He moved close, touched the body with the toe of his suit. “But,” he declared, “this is the spitting image of those old pictures of them.”

“That,” said Grant, “is a Venusian. A native of Venus. A fish man. The boss sent me to Venus a couple years ago to find out what I could about them. He had a screwy idea they were further advanced in science than they ever let the Earth people suspect. But I couldn’t do much about it, for it would be sheer suicide for a man to venture into a Venusian sea. The seas are unstable chemically. Always with more or less acid—lots of chlorine. They stink like hell, but these fellows seem to like it. The acid and pressure and chemical changes don’t seem to harm them and maybe the stink smells good to them.”

“If this is a Venusian, how did he get here?” asked Gus suspiciously.

“I don’t know,” said Grant, “but I aim to find out. To my knowledge a Venusian has never visited Earth. They can stand almost any pressure under the water, but they don’t like open air, even the Venusian air and that’s half water most of the time.”

“Maybe you’re mistaken,” suggested Gus. “Maybe this ain’t a Venusian but something almost like one.”

Grant shook his head behind the plate. “No, I’m not mistaken. There are too many identifying marks. Look at the gills—feathered. And the hide. Almost like steel. Really a shell—an outside skeleton.”

The newsman turned around and stared at the cylinders, then shifted his gaze to the machine squatting between them. It was operating smoothly and silently. Several large blocks of stone lay in front of it, and several similar blocks protruded from a hopperlike arrangement which surmounted the machine. The dangling jaws of a crane showed how the blocks had been lifted into the hopper. To one side of the machine were a number of small jugs.

“Gus,” Grant asked, “what kind of rock is this?”

The old man scooped up a couple of splinters and held them before his vision glass. The suit’s spotlight caught the splinters and they blazed with sudden moving light.

“Fluorite,” said Gus. “Crystals embedded all through this stuff.” He flung the splinters away. “The rock itself,” he said, “is old; older than hell. Probably Archean.”

“You’re sure about the fluorite?” asked Grant.

“Sure, it’s fluorite,” sputtered the old man. “The rock is lousy with it. You find lots of it on The Bottom. Lots of old rock here, and that’s where you find it mostly.”

Grant dismissed the subject of the rock and turned his attention to the engine and the tanks. The engine seemed simple in its operation—little more than a piston and a wheel—but it seemed without controls and it ran without visible source of power.

The hopper was a hopper and that was all. Across its throat flashed a ripple of fiery flame that ate swiftly at the block of stone, breaking it up and feeding it into the maw of the machine below.

Grant rapped against one of the tanks with his steel fist and it gave back a dead clicking sound unlike the ring of steel.

“Would you know what those tanks are made of?” he demanded of Gus.

The old man shook his head. “It’s got me all bogged down,” he confessed. “I seen some funny things in forty years down here, but nothing like this. A Venusian feeding rock into a machine of some sort. It just don’t add up.”

“It adds up to a hell of a lot more than we think,” said Grant gravely.

He picked up one of the jugs and rapped it. It gave back the same clicking sound. Carefully he worked the stopper out and from the neck of the jug spouted a puff of curling, deadly-appearing greenish yellow. Swiftly he jabbed the stopper in again and stepped back quickly.

“What is that stuff?” Gus shrieked at him, his blue eyes wide behind the plate of quartz.

“Hydrofluoric acid,” said Grant, a strange tenseness in his voice. “The only acid known that will attack glass!”

“Well, I be damned,” said Old Gus weakly. “Well, I be damned.”

“Gus,” said Grant, “I won’t be able to look at those clams today. I’ve got to get back to Deep End. I have a message to send.”

Gus looked gravely at the cylinders, at the body of the Venusian. “Yes, I guess you have,” he said.

“Maybe you’d like to go with me. I’ll come right back again.”

Gus shook his head. “Nope, I’ll stick around. But you might bring me back a couple pounds of coffee and some sugar.”

Out of the twilit waters came a charging black streak. It was Butch. He had made a flanking movement and now was coming in to get the dead Venusian.

His strategy succeeded. Gus rushed at him roaring, but Butch, hugging the body, squirted himself upward at a steep angle and disappeared.

Gus shook a fist after him.

“Someday,” he yelped, “I’ll give that danged octopus a trimming down that he’ll remember.”