Clifford Simak - Dusty Zebra - And Other Stories

For he had changed as well as the room had changed; the room had changed because of the change in him.

He was no longer the final gentleman, but that other, more real person he had been this evening. He was himself again; had been jerked back to himself again, he knew, by the headlines in the paper.

He glanced around the room and knew that it finally was right, that all its starkness was real, that this had been the way the room had always been, even when he had made it into something more romantic.

He had found himself this very evening after thirty years and then—he sweat as he thought about it—and then he had lost himself again, easily and without knowing it, without a twitch of strangeness.

He had gone to see Cedric Madison, with this very paper clutched within his hands, had gone without clear purpose—almost, he told himself, as if he were being harried there.

And he had been harried for too long. He had been harried into seeing a room different than it was; he had been made to read a myth-haunted name upon a strange gravestone; he had been deluded into thinking that he had supper often with his mother who had long been dead; he had been forced to imagine that a common quick-and-greasy was a famous eatery—and, of course, much more than that.

It was humiliating to think upon, but there was more than mere humiliation—there was a method and a purpose and now it was important, most immediately important, to learn that method and that purpose.

He dropped the paper on the floor and went to the liquor cabinet and got a bottle and a glass. He sloshed liquor in the glass and gulped it.

You had to find a place to start, he told himself, and you worked along from there—and Cedric Madison was a starting point, although he was not the whole of it. No more, perhaps, than a single clue, but at least a starting point.

He had gone to see Cedric Madison and the two of them had sat and talked much longer than he planned, and somewhere in that talk he’d slid smoothly back into the final gentleman.

He tried to drive his mind and memory along the pathway of those hours, seeking for some break, hunting for the moment he had changed, but there was nothing. It ironed out flat and smooth.

But somewhere he had changed, or more likely had been changed, back into the masquerade that had been forced upon him long years in the past.

And what would be the motive of that masquerade? What would be the reason in changing a man’s life, or, more probably, the lives of many men?

A sort of welfare endeavor, perhaps. A matter of rampant dogoodism, an expression of the itch to interfere in other people’s lives.

Or was there here a conscious, well-planned effort to change the course of world events, to so alter the destiny of mankind as to bring about some specific end-result? That would mean that whoever, or whatever, was responsible possessed a sure method of predicting the future, and the ability to pick out the key factors in the present which must be changed in order effectively to change that future in the desired direction.

From where it stood upon the desk the phone snarled viciously.

He swung around in terror, frightened at the sound.

The phone snarled a second time.

He strode to the desk and answered. It was the senator.

“Good,” said the senator. “I did not get you up.”

“No. I was just getting ready to turn in.”

“You heard the news, of course.”

“On the radio,” said Harrington.

“The White House called…”

“And you had to take it.”

“Yes, of course, but then…”

There was a gulping, breathing sound at the other end as if the senator were on the verge of strangling.

“What’s the matter, Johnson? What is going—”

“Then,” said the senator, “I had a visitor.”

Harrington waited.

“Preston White,” said the senator. “You know him, of course.”

“Yes. The publisher of Situation.”

“He was conspiratorial,” said the senator. “And a shade dramatic. He talked in whispers and very confidentially. As if the two of us were in some sort of deal.”

“But what—”

“He offered me,” said the senator, almost strangling with rage, “the exclusive use of Harvey—”

Harrington interrupted, without knowing why—almost as if he feared to let the senator go on.

“You know,” he said, “I can remember, many years ago—I was just a lad—when Harvey was installed down in the Situation office.”

And he was surprised at how well he could remember it—the great hurrah of fanfare. Although at that time, he recalled, no one had put too much credence in the matter, for Situation was then notorious for its circulation stunts. But it was different now. Almost everyone read the Harvey column and even in the most learned of circles it was quoted as authority.

“Harvey!” spat the senator. “A geared-up calculator! A mechanical predicter!”

And that was it, Harrington thought wildly. That was the very thing for which he had been groping!

For Harvey was a predicter. He predicted every week and the magazine ran a column of the predictions he spewed out.

“White was most persuasive,” said the senator. “He was very buddy-buddy. He placed Harvey at my complete disposal. He said that he would let me see all the predictions that he made immediately he made them and that he’d withhold from publication any that I wished.”

“It might be a help, at that,” said Harrington.

For Harvey was good. Of that there was no question. Week after week he called the shots exactly, right straight down the line.

“I’ll have none of it!” yelled the senator. “I’ll have no part of Harvey. He is the worst thing that could have happened so far as public opinion is concerned. The human race is entirely capable, in its own good judgment, of accepting or rejecting the predictions of any human pundit. But our technological society has developed a conditioning factor that accepts the infallibility of machines. It would seem to me that Situation, in using an analytical computer, humanized by the name of Harvey, to predict the trend of world events, is deliberately preying upon public gullibility. And I’ll have no part of it. I will not be tarred with—”

“I knew White was for you,” said Harrington. “I knew he favored your appointment, but—”

“Preston White,” said the senator, “is a dangerous man. Any powerful man is a dangerous man, and in our time the man who is in a position to mould public opinion is the most powerful of them all. I can’t afford to be associated with him in any way at all. Here I stand, a man of some forty years of service, without, thank God, a single smudge upon me. What would happen to me if someone came along and pegged this man White—but good? How would I stand then?”

“They almost had him pegged,” said Harrington, “that time years ago when the congressional committee investigated him. As I remember, much of the testimony at that time had to do with Harvey.”

“Hollis,” said the senator, “I don’t know why I trouble you. I don’t know why I phoned you. Just to blow off steam, I guess.”

“I am glad you did,” said Harrington. “What do you intend to do?”

“I don’t know,” said the senator. “I threw White out, of course, so my hands theoretically are clean, but it’s all gone sour on me. I have a vile taste in my mouth.”

“Sleep on it,” said Harrington. “You’ll know better in the morning.”

“Thanks, Hollis, I think I will,” said the senator. “Good night.”

Harrington put up the phone and stood stiff beside the desk.

For now it all was crystal clear. Now he knew without a doubt exactly who it was that had wanted Enright in the state department.