Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

He had heard some more talk about the starting of the athletic teams and had talked to several men who had been enthusiastic about it as a source of revenue.

He had talked to another man named Thomas who was a gardening expert at one of the big Kimonian estates and the man had talked for an hour or more on the growing of exotic flowers. There had been a little man named Williams who had sat in the bar beside him and had told him enthusiastically of his commission to write a book of ballads based on Kimonian history and another man named Jackson who was executing a piece of statuary for one of the native families.

If a man could get a satisfactory job, Bishop thought, life could be pleasant here on Kimon.

Take the rooms he had. Beautiful appointments, much better than he could expect at home. A willing cabinet-robot who dished up drinks and sandwiches, who pressed clothes, turned out and locked up, and anticipated your no-more-than-half-formed wish. And the room—the room with the four blank walls and the single chair with the buttons on its arm. There, in that room, was instruction and entertainment and adventure. He had made a bad choice in picking the battle of Hastings for his first test of it, he knew now. But there were other places, other times, other more pleasant and less bloody incidents that one could experience.

It was experience, too—and not merely seeing. He had really been walking on the hilltop. He had tried to dodge the charging horses, although there’d been no reason to, for apparently, even in the midst of a happening, you stood by some special dispensation as a thing apart, as an interested but unreachable observer.

And there were, he told himself, many happenings that would be worth observing. One could live out the entire history of mankind, from the prehistoric dawnings to the day before yesterday—and not only the history of mankind, but the history of other things as well, for there had been other categories of experience offered—Kimonian and Galactic—in addition to Earth.

Some day, he thought, I will walk with Shakespeare. Some day I’ll sail with Columbus. Or travel with Prester John and find the truth about him.

For it was truth. You could sense the truth.

And how the truth?

That he could not know.

But it all boiled down to the fact that while conditions might be strange, one still could make a life of it.

And conditions would be strange, for this was an alien land and one that was immeasurably in advance of Earth in culture and in its technology. Here there was no need of artificial communications nor of mechanical transportation. Here there was no need of contracts; since the mere fact of telepathy would reveal one man to another, there’d be no need of contracts.

You have to adapt, Bishop told himself.

You have to adapt to play the Kimon game, for they were the ones who would set the rules. Unbidden he had entered their planet and they had let him stay and, staying, it followed that he must conform.

“You are restless, sir,” said the cabinet from the other room.

“Not restless,” Bishop said. “Just thinking.”

“I can supply you with a sedative. A very mild and pleasant sedative.”

“Not a sedative,” said Bishop.

“Then, perhaps,” the cabinet said, “you would permit me to sing you a lullaby.”

“By all means,” said Bishop. “A lullaby is just the thing I need.”

So the cabinet sang him a lullaby and after a time Bishop went to sleep.

The Kimonian goddess at the Employment Bureau told him next morning that there was a job for him.

“A new family,” she said.

Bishop wondered if he should be glad that it was a new family or if it would have been better if it had been an old one.

“They’ve never had a human before,” she said.

“It’s fine of them,” said Bishop, “to finally take one in.”

“The salary,” said the goddess, “is one hundred credits a day.”

“One hundred—”

“You will only work during days,” she said. “I’ll teleport you there each morning and in the evening they’ll teleport you back.”

Bishop gulped. “One hundred—What am I to do?”

“A companion,” said the goddess. “But you needn’t worry. We’ll keep an eye on them and if they mistreat you—”

“Mistreat me?”

“Work you too hard or—”

“Miss,” said Bishop, “for a hundred bucks a day I’d—”

She cut him short. “You will take the job?”

“Most gladly,” Bishop said.

“Permit me—” The universe came unstuck, then slapped back together.

He was standing in an alcove and in front of him was a woodland glen with a waterfall and from where he stood he could smell the cool, mossy freshness of the tumbling water. There were ferns and trees, huge trees like the gnarled oaks the illustrators like to draw to illustrate King Arthur and Robin Hood and other tales of very early Britain—the kind of oaks from which the Druids had cut the mistletoe.

A path ran along the stream and up the incline down which the waterfall came tumbling and there was a blowing wind that carried music and perfume.

A girl came down the path and she was Kimonian, but she didn’t seem as tall as the others he had seen and there was something a little less goddesslike about her.

He caught his breath and watched her and for a moment he forgot that she was Kimonian and thought of her only as a pretty girl who walked a woodland path. She was beautiful, he told himself—she was lovely.

She saw him and clapped her hands.

“You must be he,” she said.

He stepped out of the cubicle.

“We have been waiting for you,” she told him. “We hoped there’d be no delay, that they’d send you right along.”

“My name,” said Bishop, “is Selden Bishop and I was told—”

“Of course you are the one,” she said. “You needn’t even tell me. It’s lying in your mind.”

She waved an arm about her.

“How do you like your house?” she asked.

“House?”

“Of course, silly. This. Naturally, it’s only the living-room. Our bedrooms are up in the mountains. But we changed this just yesterday. Everyone worked so hard at it. I do hope you like it. Because, you see, it is from your planet. We thought it might make you feel at home.”

“House,” he said again.

She reached out a hand and laid it on his arm.

“You’re all upset,” she said. “You don’t begin to understand.”

Bishop shook his head. “I just arrived the other day.”

“But you do like it?”

“Of course I do,” said Bishop. “It’s something out of the old Arthurian legend. You’d expect to see Lancelot or Guinevere or some of the others riding through the woods.”

“You know the stories?”

“Of course I know the stories. I read my Tennyson.”

“And you will tell them to us.”

He looked at her, a little startled.

“You mean you want to hear them?”

“Why, yes, of course we do. What did we get you for?”

And that was it, of course.

What had they got him for?

“You want me to begin right now?”

“Not now,” she said. “There are the others you must meet. My name is Elaine. That’s not exactly it, of course. It is something else, but Elaine is as close as you’ll ever come to saying it.”

“I could try the other name. I’m proficient at the languages.”

“Elaine is good enough,” she said carelessly. “Come along.”

He fell in behind her on the path and followed up the incline.

And as he walked along, he saw that it was indeed a house—that the trees were pillars holding up an artificial sky that somehow failed to look very artificial and that the aisles between the trees ended in great windows which looked out on the barren plain.