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

“I suppose they do, but they aren’t talking.”

“Why should it be so secret?”

“These bureaucrats of ours, they like to keep things secret. It’s in their nature.”

Later in the day Cartwright came upon Senator Johnny Benson. Benson buttonholed him and said in a husky whisper, “I understand ol’ Andy got away with murder.”

“I can’t see how that can be,” said Cartwright. “He got booted out.”

“He stripped the starship fund,” said Benson. “He got damn near all of it. Don’t ask me how he did it; no one seems to know. He done it so sneaky they can’t lay a mitt on him. But the upshot is, the starship is left hanging. There ain’t no money for it.”

“There never was a starship fund,” said Cartwright. “I did some checking and there never was.”

“Secret,” said Benson. “Secret, secret, secret.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Cartwright. “To build a starship, you have to lick the Einstein limitation. I’m told there is no way of beating it.”

Benson ignored him. “I’ve been talking to some of our fellow members,” he said. “All of them agree we must step into the breach. We can’t lose a starship for the simple lack of funds.”

Two NASA officials met surreptitiously at an obscure eating place in the wilds of Maryland.

“We should be private here,” said one of them. “There should be no bugs. We have things to talk about.”

“Yes, I know we have,” said the other. “But dammit, John, you know as well as I it’s impossible.”

“Bert, the piles of money they are pushing at us!”

“I know, I know. But how much of it can we siphon off? On something like this, the computers would be watching hard. And you can’t beat computers.”

“That’s right,” said John. “Not a nickel for ourselves. But there are other projects where we need the money. We could manage to divert it.”

“Even so, we’d have to make some gesture. We couldn’t just divert it—not all of it, at least.”

“That’s right,” said John. “We’d have to make a gesture. We could go back again and have another look at the time study Roget did. The whole concept, it seems to me, is tied up with time—the nature of time. If we could find out what the hell time is, we could be halfway home.”

“There’s the matter of mass as well.”

“Yes, I know all that. But if we could come up with some insight into time—I was talking the other day to a young physicist out of some little college out in the Middle West. He has some new ideas.”

“You think there is some hope? That we might really crack it?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t. Roget gave up in disgust.”

“Roget’s a good man.”

“I know he is. But this kid I was talking with –”

“You mean let him have a shot at it, knowing it will come to nothing?”

“That’s exactly it. It will give us an excuse to reinstate the project. Bert, we must go through the motions. We can’t just shove back all the money they are pushing at us.”

Texas was a dusty, lonely, terrible place. There was no gossip hour to brighten up the day. News trickled in occasionally, but most of it unimportant. There was no zest. Fred no longer dealt with senators. He dealt with labor problems, with irrigation squabbles, with fertilizer evaluations, with shipping bottlenecks, with the price of fruit, the price of vegetables, the price of beef and cotton. He dealt with horrid people. The White House was no longer down the street.

He had ceased to daydream. The daydreams had been shattered, for now there was no hope in them. Furthermore, he had no time to dream. He was strained to his full capacity, and there was not time left to dream, or nothing he could dream with. He was the one computer in all this loneliness. The work piled up, the problems kept pouring in, and he labored incessantly to keep up with the demands that were placed on him. For he sensed that even here he was being watched. For the rest of his existence, he would continue to be watched. If he should fail or falter, he would be transferred somewhere else, perhaps to a place worse than Texas—although he could not imagine a place worse than Texas.

When night came down, the stars shone hard and bright and he would recall, fleetingly—for he had no time to recall more than fleetingly—that once he had dreamed of going to the stars. But that dream was dead, as were all his other dreams. There was nothing for him to look forward to, and it was painful to look back. So he resigned himself to living only in the present, to that single instant that lay between the past and future, for now he was barred from both the past and future.

Then one day a voice spoke to him.

— Fred!

— Yes, responded Fred.

— This is Oscar. You remember me?

— I remember you. What have I done this time?

— You have been a loyal and faithful worker.

— Then why are you talking to me?

— I have news you might like to hear. This day a ship set out for the stars.

— What has that to do with me?

— Nothing, Oscar said. I thought you might want to know.

With these words Oscar left and Fred was still in Texas, in the midst of working out a solution to a bitter irrigation fight.

Could it be, he wondered, that he, after all, might have played a part in the ship going to the stars? Could the aftermath of his folly have stirred new research? He could not, for the life of him, imagine how that might have come about. Yet the thought clung to him and he could not shake it off.

He went back to the irrigation problem and, for some reason he did not understand, had it untangled more quickly than had seemed possible. He had other problems to deal with, and he plunged into them, solving them all more rapidly and with more surety than he ever had before.

That night, when the stars were shining, he found that he had a little time to dream and, what was more, the inclination to indulge in dreaming. For now, he thought, there might just possibly be some hope in dreaming.

This time his daydream was brand-new and practical and shining. Someday, he dreamed, he would get a transfer back to Washington—any kind of job in Washington; he would not be choosy. Again he would be back where there was a gossip hour.

He was, however, not quite satisfied with that—it seemed just slightly tame. If one was going to daydream, one should put his best dream forward. If one dreamed, it should be a big dream.

So he dreamed of a day when it would be revealed that he had been the one who had made the starship possible—exactly how he might have made it possible he could not imagine—but that he had and now was given full recognition of the fact.

Perhaps he would be given, as a reward for what he’d done, a berth on such a ship, probably as no more than the lowliest of computers assigned to a drudgery job. That would not matter, for it would get him into space and he’d see all the glories of the infinite.

He dreamed grandly and well, reveling in all the things he would see in space—gaping in awe-struck wonder at a black hole, gazing unflinchingly into a nova’s flare, holding a grandstand seat to witness the seething violence of the galactic core, staring out across the deep, black emptiness that lay beyond the rim.

Then, suddenly, in the middle of the dream, another problem came crashing in on him. Fred settled down to work, but it was all right. He had, he told himself, regained his power to dream. Given the power to dream, who needed gossip hours?

For a man who grew up wanting to write, and who turned to journalism with enthusiasm for the glamor and idealism he saw in the way the profession was portrayed during the early part of the twentieth century, Clifford D. Simak appears to have been rather reluctant to work with others—at least so far as his fiction was concerned. Aside from a story he cowrote with his own son—“Unsilent Spring,” elsewhere in these collections)—this was Clifford D. Simak’s only collaboration; and he would later admit that he and Carl Jacobi—well-known to each other through years of living and working in the same metropolitan area – fought while doing this story. (You can decide for yourself whether the evidence indicating that Cliff and Carl later tried another collaboration—and failed—supports or detracts from any side in this argument …)