Clifford Simak - The Ghost of a Model T - And Other Stories

“I have no doubt of that,” said Packer, bowing slightly. “You would, of course, an upright, honest business man like you.”

Hazlitt slammed the door as he went out.

Packer padded back to the bedroom, took up the tie again.

Hazlitt an honest man, he thought. And how many other honest men this night? And a year from now—how many honest men in the whole wide world just one year from now? How long before the entire Earth would be an honest Earth? With spores lurking in the cracks and floating in the air and running with the rivers, it might not take so long.

Maybe that was the reason Tony hadn’t skinned him yet. Maybe Tony was getting honest, too. Too bad, thought Packer, gravely. Tony wouldn’t be half as interesting if he should happen to turn honest.

And the government? A government that had come begging for the spores—begging to be honest, although to be completely fair one must admit the government as yet did not know about the honesty.

That was a hot one, Packer told himself. An honest government! And it would serve those stinkers right! He could see the looks upon their faces.

He gave up the business of the tie and sat down on the bed and shook for minutes with rumbling belly laughter.

At last he wiped the tears out of his eyes and finished with the tie.

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, he’d get in touch with Griffin and arrange the package deal for the stamp material. He’d act greedy and drive a hard bargain and then, in the end, pay a bit more than the price agreed upon for a long-term arrangement. An honest government, he told himself, would be too honest to rescind such an agreement even if, in the light of its new honesty, it should realize the wrongness of it. For, happily, one of the tenets of honesty was to stay stuck with a bad bargain, no matter how arrived at.

He shucked into his jacket and went into the living room. He stopped at the desk and opened the drawer. Reaching in, he lifted the lid of the box of leaf. He took a pinch and had it halfway to his mouth when the thought struck him suddenly and he stood for a moment frozen while all the gears came together, meshing, and the pieces fell into a pattern and he knew, without even asking, why he was the only genuine dishonest man left on the entire Earth.

I profetick and wach ahed for you!

He put the leaf into his mouth and felt the comfort of it.

Antidote, he thought, and knew that he was right.

But how could Pug have known—how could he have foreseen the long, twisting tangle of many circumstances which must inevitably crystallize into this very moment?

Leg. forst.?

He closed the lid of the box and shut the drawer and turned toward the door.

The only dishonest man in the world, he thought. Immune to the honesty factor in the yellow spores because of the resistance built up within him by his long use of the leaf.

He had set a trap tonight to victimize Pickering and tomorrow he’d go out and fox the government and there was no telling where he’d go from there. Hazlitt had said something about taking over the entire planet and the idea was not a bad one if he could only squeeze out the necessary time.

He chuckled at the thought of how all the honest suckers would stand innocently in line, unable to do a thing about it—all fair prey to the one dishonest man in the entire world. A wolf among the sheep!

He drew himself erect and pulled the white gloves on carefully. He flicked his walking stick. Then he thumped himself on the chest—just once—and let himself out into the hall. He did not bother to lock the door behind him.

In the lobby, as he stepped out of the lift, he saw the Widow Foshay coming in the door. She turned and called back cheerfully to friends who had brought her home.

He lifted his hat to her with an olden courtesy that he thought he had forgotten.

She threw up her hands in mock surprise. “Mr. Packer,” she cried, “what has come over you? Where do you think you’re going at this time of night, when all honest people are abed?”

“Minerva,” he told her gravely, “I was about to take a stroll. I wonder if you might come along with me?”

She hesitated for an instant, just long enough to give the desired small show of reluctance and indecision.

He whuffled out his mustache at her. “Besides,” he said, “I am not an honest person.”

He offered her his arm with distinguished gallantry.

Originally published in the March 1963 issue of Fantastic Stories , “Physician to the Universe” displays a level of obsession and anger seldom seem in stories by Cliff Simak. In his other works, Cliff has described outer space as “the great uncaring,” but when he uses those words here, he’s talking about a swamp. The swamp, however, is not the enemy here; rather, the enemy is the human fear that leads to tyranny.

He awoke and was in a place he had never seen before. It was an unsubstantial place that flickered on and off and it was a place of dusk in which darker figures stood out faintly. There were two white faces that flickered with the place and there was a smell he had never known before—a dank, dark smell, like the smell of black, deep water that had stood too long without a current to stir it.

And then the place was gone and he was back again in that other place that was filled with brilliant light, with the marble eminence looming up before him and the head of the man who sat atop this eminence and behind it, so that one must look up, it seemed, from very far below to see him. As if the man were very high and one were very low, as if the man were great and one, himself, were humble.

The mouth in the middle of the face of the man who was high and great was moving and one strained to catch the sound of words, but there was only silence, a terrible, humming silence that shut one out from this brilliant place, that made one all alone and small and very unimportant—too poor and unimportant to hear the words that the great man might be saying. Although it seemed as if one knew the words, knowing there were no other words the great man might be allowed to say, that he had to say them because, despite his highness and his greatness, he was caught in the self-same trap as the little, humble being who stood staring up at him. The words were there, just beyond some sort of barrier one could not comprehend, and if one could pierce that barrier he’d know the words without having heard them said. And it was important that he know them, for they were of great concern to him—they were, in fact, about him and they would affect his life.

His mind went pawing out to find the barrier and to strip it from the words and even as he did, the place of brilliance tilted and he was back again in the dusk that flickered.

The white faces still were bent above him and one of the faces now came closer, as if it were floating down upon him—all alone, all by itself, a small white-faced balloon. For in the dark one could not see the body. If there were a body.

“You’ll be all right,” the white face said. “You are coming round.”

“Of course I’ll be all right,” said Alden Street, rather testily.

For he was angry at the words, angry that here he could hear the words, but back in that place of brilliance he could hear no words at all—words that were important, while these words he had heard were no more than drivel.

“Who said I wouldn’t be all right?” asked Alden Street.

And that was who he was, but not entirely who he was, for he was more than just a name. Every man, he thought, was more than just a name. He was many things.

He was Alden Street and he was a strange and lonely man who lived in a great, high, lonely house that stood above the village and looked out across a wilderness of swampland that stretched toward the south until it went out of sight—farther, much farther than the human eye could see, a swamp whose true proportions could be drawn only on a map.