Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

Monty gave Bishop a long look.

“You catch on fast,” he said. “You’ll get along.”

“Drinks, gentlemen,” the cabinet said.

Bishop got the drinks, gave one of them to his visitor.

“You better let me put you down,” said Monty. “Might as well rake in what you can. You don’t need to know too much about it.”

“All right,” Bishop told him agreeably. “Go ahead and put me down.”

“You haven’t got much money,” Monty said.

“How did you know that?”

“You’re scared about this room,” said Monty.

“Telepathy?” asked Bishop.

“You pick it up,” said Monty. “Just the fringes of it. You’ll never be as good as they are. Never. But you pick things up from time to time—a sort of sense that seeps into you. After you’ve been here long enough.”

“I had hoped that no one noticed.”

“A lot of them will notice, Bishop. Can’t help but notice, the way you’re broadcasting. But don’t let it worry you. We are all friends. Banded against the common enemy, you might say. If you need a loan—”

“Not yet,” said Bishop. “I’ll let you know.”

“Me,” said Monty. “Me or anyone. We are all friends. We got to be.”

“Thanks.”

“Not at all. Now you go ahead and dress. I’ll sit and wait for you. I’ll bear you down with me. Everyone’s waiting to meet you.”

“That’s good to know,” said Bishop. “I felt quite a stranger.”

“Oh, my, no,” said Monty. “No need to. Not many come, you know. They’ll all want to know of Earth.”

He rolled the glass between his fingers.

“How about Earth?” he asked.

“How about—”

“Yes, it is still there, of course. How is it getting on? What’s the news?”

He had not seen the hotel before. He had caught a confused glimpse of it from the alcove off the lobby, with his luggage stacked up beside him, before the bell captain had showed up and whisked him to his rooms.

But now he saw that it was a strangely substantial fairyland, with fountains and hidden fountain music, with the spidery tracery of rainbows serving as groins and arches, with shimmery columns of glass that caught and reflected and duplicated many times the entire construction of the lobby so that one was at once caught up in the illusion that here was a place that went on and on forever, and at the same time you could cordon off a section of it in your mind as an intimate corner for a group of friends.

It was illusion and substantiality, beauty and a sense of home—it was, Bishop suspected, all things to all men and what you wished to make it. A place of utter magic that divorced one from the world and the crudities of the world, with a gaiety that was not brittle and a sentimentality that stopped short of being cheap, and that transmitted a sense of well-being and of self-importance from the very fact of being a part of such a place.

There was no such place on Earth, there could be no such place on Earth, for Bishop suspected that something more than human planning, more than human architectural skill, had gone into its building. You walked in an enchantment and you talked with magic and you felt the sparkle and the shine of the place live within your brain.

“It gets you,” Monty said. “I always watch the faces of the newcomers when they first walk in it.”

“It wears off after a time,” said Bishop, not believing it.

Monty shook his head. “My friend, it does not wear off. It doesn’t surprise you quite so much, but it stays with you all the time. A human does not live long enough for a place like this to wear thin and commonplace.”

He had eaten dinner in the dining room, which was old and solemn, with an ancient other-worldness and a hushed, tiptoe atmosphere, with Kimonian waiters at your elbow, ready to recommend a certain dish or a vintage as one that you should try.

Monty had coffee while he ate and there had been others who had come drifting past to stop a moment and welcome him and ask him of Earth, always using a studied casualness, always with a hunger in their eyes that belied the casualness.

“They make you feel at home,” said Monty, “and they mean it. They are glad when a new one comes.”

He did feel at home—more at home than he had ever felt in his life before, as if already he was beginning to fit in. He had not expected to fit in so quickly and he was slightly astonished at it—for here were all the people he had dreamed of being with, and he finally was with them. You could feel the magnetic force of them, the personal magnetism that had made them great, great enough to be Kimon-worthy, and looking at them he wondered which of them he would get to know, which would be his friends.

He was relieved when he found that he was not expected to pay for his dinner or his drinks, but simply sign a chit, and once he’d caught onto that, everything seemed brighter, for the dinner of itself would have taken quite a hole out of the twenty nestling in his pocket.

With dinner over and with Monty gone somewhere into the crowd, he found himself in the bar, sitting on a stool and nursing a drink that the Kimonian bartender had recommended as being something special.

The girl came out of nowhere and floated up to the stool beside him and she said:

“What’s that you’re drinking, friend?”

“I don’t know,” said Bishop. He made a thumb toward the man behind the bar. “Ask him to make you one.”

The bartender heard and got busy with the bottles and the shaker.

“You’re fresh from Earth,” said the girl.

“Fresh is the word,” said Bishop.

“It’s not so bad,” she said. “That is, if you don’t think about it.”

“I won’t think about it,” Bishop promised. “I won’t think of anything.”

“Of course, you do get used to it,” she said. “After a while you don’t mind the faint amusement. You think, what the hell, let them laugh all they want to so long as I have it good. But the day will come—”

“What are you talking about?” asked Bishop. “Here’s your drink. Dip your muzzle into that and—”

“The day will come when we are old to them, when we don’t amuse them any longer. When we become passé. We can’t keep thinking up new tricks. Take my painting, for example—”

“See here,” said Bishop. “You’re talking way above my head.”

“See me a week from now,” she said. “The name’s Maxine. Just ask to see Maxine. A week from now, we can talk together. So long, Buster.”

She floated off the stool and suddenly was gone.

She hadn’t touched her drink.

He went up to his rooms and stood for a long time at a window, staring out into the featureless landscape lighted by a moon.

Wonder thundered in his brain, the wonder and the newness and the many questions, the breathlessness of finally being here, of slowly coming to a full realization of the fact that he was here, that he was one of the glittering, fabulous company he had dreamed about for years.

The long grim years peeled off him, the years of books and study, the years of determined driving, the hungry, anxious, grueling years when he had lived a monkish life, mortifying body and soul to drive his intellect.

The years fell off and he felt the newness of himself as well as the newness of the scene. A cleanness and a newness and the sudden glory.

The cabinet finally spoke to him.

“Why don’t you try the live-it, sir?”

Bishop swung sharply around.

“You mean—?”

“The third room,” said the cabinet. “You’ll find it most amusing.”

“The live-it!”

“That’s right,” said the cabinet. “You pick it and you live it.”