The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

  THEY LEAVE

  WE WORRY

  MUCH ABOUT

  THEM.

  “You disagreed on growing money? They thought, maybe, you should grow something else?”

  WE DISAGREE

  ON METCALFE.

  TWO SAY HE TRICK US.

  REST OF US

  SAY HE VERY

  NOBLE HUMAN

  What a bunch of creeps, thought Doyle.

  Very noble human!

  WE TALK

  ENOUGH

  NOW WE

  SAY

  GOODBYE.

  They turned around, almost as if someone had shouted orders at them, and went stumping up the slope, back toward the orchard.

  “Hey!” yelled Doyle, leaping to his feet.

  Behind him was a rustle and he whirled around.

  The nettles that had been laid to either side to make the path were rising, wiping out the path!

  “Hey!” yelled Doyle again, but the rollas paid no attention to him. They went on stumping up the slope.

  Doyle stood in his little trampled area, wedged against the fence, and all around him were the nettles—upright and strong and bright in the afternoon. They stretched in a solid mass at least a hundred feet back from the fence and they were shoulder high.

  A man could manage to get through them. They could be kicked aside and trampled down, but some of them would be bound to peg a man and by the time one got out of there he’d have plenty welts.

  And did he, at the moment, really want to get out of there?

  He was, he told himself, no worse off than he had been before.

  Better off, perhaps, for he was through the nettles. Better off, that is, if those stinking little rollas didn’t run and tattle on him.

  There was no sense, he decided, in going through the nettles now. If he did, in just a couple of hours or so he’d have to wade back through them once again to reach the fence.

  He couldn’t climb the fence until it was getting dark and he had no place else to go.

  He took a good look at the fence and it would be a tough one to get over. It was a good eight feet of woven wire and atop that were three strands of barbed wire, attached to an arm-like bracket that extended outward beyond the woven fence.

  Just beyond the fence stood an ancient oak tree and if he had had a rope he could make a lariat—but he had no rope, and if he wanted to get over the fence, he would somehow have to climb it.

  He hunkered tight against the ground and felt downright miserable. His body was corrugated with mosquito lumps and the nettle welts on his hand had turned into blisters and he’d had a bit more sun than he was accustomed to. And now the upper molar on the left side of his jaw was developing a sort of galloping ache. All he needed.

  He sneezed and it hurt his head to sneeze and the aching tooth gave a bounding leap.

  Maybe, he figured, it was the pollen from those lousy nettles.

  Never saw no nettles like them before, he told himself, eying them warily.

  More than likely the rollas had a hand in growing them. The rollas were good with plants. They had developed the money trees and if they could develop money trees there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do with plants. He remembered how the nettles had fallen over to the left and right to make a path for him. It had been the rolla, he was sure, who had made them do that, for there hadn’t been enough wind to do it and even if there had been a wind, there wasn’t any wind that blew two ways at once.

  There was nothing like the rollas in the world. And that might be exactly it. They’d said something about doing good on other worlds. But no matter what they’d done on other worlds, they’d sure been suckered here.

  Do-gooders, he thought. Missionaries, maybe, from some other world, from some place out in space—a roving band of beings devoted to a cause. And trapped into a ridiculous situation on a planet that might have little, if anything, in common with any other world they’d ever seen.

  Did they even, he wondered, understand what money was? Just what kind of story had Metcalfe palmed off on them?

  They had arrived and Metcalfe, of all persons, had stumbled onto them and taken them in tow. Metcalfe, not so much a man as an organization that from long experience would know exactly how to exploit a situation such as the rollas offered. One man alone could not have handled it, could not have done all that needed to be done to set up the rollas for the kill. And only in an organization such as Metcalfe headed, long schooled in the essentials of self preservation, could there have been any hope of maintaining the essential secrecy.

  The rollas had been duped—completely, absolutely fooled—and yet they were no fools. They had learned the language, not the spoken language only, but both the spoken and the written, and that spelled sharp intelligence. Perhaps more intelligence than was first apparent, for they did not make use of sound in their normal talk among themselves. But they had adapted readily, it seemed, to sound communication.

  The sun long since had disappeared behind the nettles and now was just above the tree line of the bluffs. Dusk would be coming soon and then, Doyle told himself, he could get busy.

  He debated once again which course he should take. By now the rollas might have told Metcalfe he was at the fence and Metcalfe might be waiting for him, although Metcalfe, if he knew, more than likely would not just wait, but would be coming out to get him. And as for the raid upon the orchard—he’d had trouble enough with just one rolla when he tried to rob a tree. He didn’t like to think what five might do to him.

  Behind him the nettles began to rustle and he leaped to his feet. Maybe, he thought wildly, they were opening up the path again. Maybe the path was opened automatically, at regularly scheduled hours. Maybe the nettles were like four o’clocks or morning glories—maybe they were engineered by the rollas to open and to close the path so many times a day.

  And what he imagined was the truth in part. A path, he saw, was opening. And waddling down the path was another rolla. The path opened in front of him and then closed as he passed.

  The rolla came out into the trampled area and stood facing Doyle.

  GOOD EVENING, HEEL, he said.

  It couldn’t be the rolla locked in the trunk of the car down on the river road. It must, Doyle told himself, be one of the two that had walked out on the money project.

  YOU SICK? the rolla asked.

  “I itch just something awful and my tooth is aching and every time I sneeze the top of my head comes off.”

  COULD FIX.

  “Sure, you could grow a drug-store tree, sprouting linaments and salves and pills and all the other junk.”

  SIMPLE, spelled the rolla.

  “Well, now,” said Doyle and then tried to say no more. For suddenly it struck him that it would be as the rolla said—very, very simple.

  Most medicines came from plants and there wasn’t anyone or anything that could engineer a plant the way the rollas could.

  “You’re on the level there,” said Doyle enthusiastically. “You would be able to cure a lot of things. You might find a cure for cancer and you might develop something that would hold off heart disease. And there’s the common cold …”

  SORRY, PAL,

  BUT WE ARE

  OFF OF YOU.

  YOU MADE

  SAPS OF US.

  “Then you are one of them that ran away,” said Doyle in some excitement. “You saw through Metcalfe’s game…”

  But the rolla was paying no attention to anything he said. It had drawn itself a little straighter and a little taller and it had formed its lips into a circle as if it might be getting ready to let out a bay and the sides of its throat were quivering as if it might be singing, but there was no sound.

  No sound, but a rasping shrillness that skidded on one’s nerves, a something in the air that set one’s teeth o
n edge.

  It was an eerie thing, that sense of singing terror in the silence of the dusk, with the west wind blowing quietly along the tops of the darkening trees, with the silky rustle of the nettles and somewhere in the distance the squeaking of a chipmunk homeward bound on the last trip of the day.

  Out beyond the fence came the thumping of awkward running feet and in the thickening dusk Doyle saw the five rollas from the orchard plunging down the slope.

  There was something going on. Doyle was sure of that. He sensed the importance of the moment and the excitement that was in it, but there was no inkling of what it all might mean.

  The rolla by his side had sent out some sort of rallying call, pitched too high for the human ear to catch, and now the orchard rollas were tumbling down the slope in answer to that call.

  The five rollas reached the fence and lined up in their customary row and their blackboard chests were alive with glowing characters—the strange, flickering, nonsensical characters of their native language. And the chest of the one who stood outside the fence with Doyle also flamed with the fleeting symbols, changing and shifting so swiftly that they seemed to be alive.

  It was an argument, Doyle thought. The five inside the fence were arguing heatedly with the one who stood outside and there seemed an urgency in the argument that could not be denied.

  He stood there, on the edge of embarrassment, an innocent bystander pocketed in a family squabble he could not understand.

  The rollas were gesturing wildly now and the characters upon their chests glowed more brightly than ever as darkness deepened on the land.

  A squalling night bird flew overhead and Doyle tilted up his head to watch it and as he did he saw the moving figures of running men outlined against the lighter sky on the north ridge of the orchard.

  “Watch out!” he shouted and wondered even as he shouted why he should have shouted.

  At the shout the five rollas whirled back to face the fence.

  One set of symbols appeared upon each chest, as if suddenly they might have reached agreement, as if the argument might finally be resolved.

  There was a creaking sound and Doyle looked up quickly.

  Against the sky he could see the old oak tree was tipping, slanting slowly toward the fence, as if a giant hand had reached out and given it a push.

  He watched for a puzzled second and the tilt continued and the speed of the fall picked up and he knew that the tree was crashing down upon the fence and the time had come to get out of there.

  He stepped back a pace to turn around and flee and when he put his foot down there was no solid ground beneath it. He fought briefly to keep from falling, but he didn’t have a chance. He fell and thumped into a crowded cavity and above him he heard the roaring rush of the falling tree and then the jarring thud as it hit the ground and the long, high whine of wires stretched so tight they pinged and popped.

  Doyle lay quietly, afraid to move.

  He was in a ditch of some sort. It was not very deep, not more than three feet at the most, but he was cramped at an awkward angle and there was an uncomfortable stone or root in the middle of his back.

  Above him was a tracery of limbs and twigs, where the top of the oak had crashed across the ditch. And running through the fallen branches was a rolla, moving much more swiftly than one would have thought was possible.

  From up the slope beyond the smashed-down fence came the bellowing of men and the sound of running feet.

  Doyle huddled in his ditch glad of the darkness and of the shelter of the fallen tree.

  The stone or root was still in his back and he wriggled to get off it. He slid off to one side and put out a hand to catch his balance and his hand came in contact with a mound of stuff that felt like sand.

  And froze there. For just beyond the ditch, standing among the branches and the nettles, was a pair of legs and the loom of a body extending up into the darkness.

  “They went down that way,” said a voice. “Down into the woods. It will be hard to find them.”

  Metcalfe’s voice answered: “We have to find them, Bill. We can’t let them get away.”

  There was a pause, then Bill said: “I wonder what got into them. They seemed happy up till now.”

  Metcalfe swore bitterly. “It’s that photographer. That fellow—what’s his name—I saw him when he was in the tree and he got away that time. But he won’t make it this time. I don’t know what he did or what’s going on, but he’s in it, clear up to his neck. He’s around here somewhere.”

  Bill moved away a little and Metcalfe said, “If you run into this photographer, you know what to do.”

  “Sure, boss.”

  “Medium-sized guy. Has a dopey way about him.”

  They moved away. Doyle could hear them thrashing through the nettles, cursing as the nettles stung them.

  Doyle shivered a little.

  He had to get out and he had to make it fast, for before too long the moon would be coming up.

  Metcalfe and his boys weren’t fooling. They couldn’t afford to fool in a deal like this. If they spotted him, more than likely they would shoot to kill.

  Now, with everyone out hunting down the rollas, would be the time to get up to that orchard. Although the chances were that Metcalfe had men patrolling it.

  Doyle gave the idea some consideration and dropped it. There was, now, just one thing to do and that was get to the car down on the river road as fast as he could make it.

  Cautiously, he crawled out of the ditch. Once out of it, he crouched for long minutes in the tangle of fallen branches, listening for sound. There wasn’t any sound.

  He moved out into the nettles, following the path that had been crushed down by the men who had pursued the rollas. But, crushed down or not, some of the nettles pegged him.

  Then he started down the slope, running for the woods.

  Ahead of him a shout went up and he braked his speed and swerved. He reached a clump of brush and hurled himself behind it as other shouts went up and then two shots, fired in quick succession.

  He saw it moving above the treetops, rising from the woods—a pale ghost of a thing that rose into the sky, with the red glint of early moonlight on it.

  From it trailed a twisting line that had the appearance of a vine and from the vine hung a struggling doll-like figure that was screaming thinly. The ghost-like shape was stubby at the bottom and pointed at the top. It had the look about it of a ballooning Christmas tree and there was about it, too, even from a distance, a faint familiarity.

  And suddenly Doyle linked up that familiarity—linked it to the woven mass of vegetation that had damned the creek bed. And as he linked it up, he knew without a question the nature of this Christmas tree riding in the sky.

  The rollas worked with plants as Man would work with metals. They could grow a money tree and a protective strip of nettles that obeyed, they could make an oak tree fall and if they could do all that, the growing of a spaceship would not be too hard a job.

  The ship was moving slowly, slanting up across the ridge, and the doll still struggled at the end of the trailing vine and its screams came down to earth as a far-off wailing sound.

  Someone was shouting in the woods below:

  “It’s the boss! Bill, do something! It’s the boss!”

  It was quite apparent there was nothing Bill could do.

  Doyle sprang from his bush and ran. Now was the time to make his dash, when all the other men were yelling and staring up into the sky, where Metcalfe dangled, screaming, from the trailing vine—perhaps an anchor vine, mayhaps just a part of the rolla-grown spaceship that had become unravelled. Although, remembering the craftsmanship of that woven barrier blocking the creek-bed, it seemed unlikely to Doyle that anything would come unravelled from a rolla ship.

  He could imagine what had happened—Metcalfe glimpsing the last of the
rollas clambering up the ship and rushing at them, roaring, firing those two shots, then the ship springing swiftly upward and the trailing vine twisted round the ankle.

  Doyle reached the woods and went plunging into it. The ground dropped sharply and he went plunging down the slope, stumbling, falling, catching himself and going on again. Until he ran full tilt into a tree that bounced him back and put exploding stars inside his skull.

  He sat upon the ground where the impact had bounced him and felt of his forehead, convinced it was cracked open, while tears of pain streamed down his cheeks.

  His forehead was not cracked and there seemed to be no blood, although his nose was skinned and one lip began to puff.

  Then he got up and went on slowly, feeling his way along, for despite the moonlight, it was black-dark beneath the trees.

  Finally he came to the dry stream-bed and felt his way along it.

  He hurried as best he could, for he remembered Mabel waiting in the car. She’d be sore at him, he thought—she’d sure be plenty sore. He had gone and let her think he might be back by dark.

  He came to the place where the woven strip of vegetation dammed the stream-bed and almost tumbled over it onto the rocks below.

  He ran the flat of his hand across the polished surface of the strip of weaving and tried to imagine what might have happened those several years ago.

  A ship plunging down to Earth, out of control perhaps, and shattering on impact, with Metcalfe close at hand to effect a rescue.

  It beats all hell, he thought, how things at times turn out.

  If it had not been Metcalfe, given someone else who did not think in dollar signs, there might now be trees or bushes or rows of vegetables carrying hopes such as mankind had never known before—hope for surcease from disease and pain, an end to poverty and fear. And perhaps many other hopes that no one now could guess.

  And they were gone now, in a spaceship grown by the two deserting rollas under Metcalfe’s very nose.

  He squatted atop the dam and knew the blasted hopes of mankind, the hope that had never come to be, wrecked by avarice and greed.

  Now they were gone—but, wait a minute, not entirely gone! For there was a rolla left. He had to believe that the deserting rolla he had never seen was with the others—but there was still his rolla, locked in the trunk of that old heap down on the river road!