Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  Old Adams stood in the doorway, his figure outlined by the night lamp on the table in the hall. His snow-white hair was ruffled, standing like a halo round his head, and one frail hand was clutched against his chest, holding together the ragged dressing gown he wore.

  “You are late, sir,” said Adams. “We were growing a bit disturbed.”

  “I am sorry,” said Harrington. “I was considerably delayed.”

  He mounted the stoop and Adams stood aside as he went through the door.

  “You’re sure that everything’s all right, sir?”

  “Oh, quite all right,” said Harrington. “I called on Cedric Madison down at Situation. He proved a charming chap.”

  “If it’s all right with you, sir, I’ll go back to bed. Knowing you are safely in, I can get some sleep.”

  “It’s quite all right,” said Harrington. “Thanks for waiting up.”

  He stood at the study door and watched Adams trudge slowly up the stairs, then went into the study, turning on the lights.

  The place closed in around him with the old familiarity, with the smell of comfort and the sense of being home, and he stood gazing at the rows of calf-bound books, and the ordered desk, the old and home-like chairs, the worn, mellow carpet.

  He shrugged out of his topcoat and tossed it on a chair and became aware of the folded paper bulging in his jacket pocket.

  Puzzled, he pulled it out and held it in front of him and the headline hit him in the face. The room changed, a swift and subtle changing. No longer the ordered sanctuary, but a simple workroom for a writing man. No longer the calf-bound volumes in all their elegance upon the shelves, but untidy rows of tattered, dog-eared books. And the carpet was neither worn nor mellow; it was utilitarian and almost brand new.

  “My God!” gasped Harrington, almost prayerfully.

  He could feel the perspiration breaking out along his forehead and his hands suddenly were shaking and his knees like water.

  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.

  It was precisely the kind of thing, he thought, one could expect of White.

  He could not imagine how it had been done—but if there had been a way to do it, White would have been the one to ferret out that way.

  He’d engineered it so that Enright, by reading a line out of a book, had stayed in public life until the proper time had come for him to head the state department.

  And how many other men, how many other situations, stood as they did tonight because of the vast schemings of one Preston White?

  He saw the paper on the floor and picked it up and looked at the headline, then threw it down again.

  They had tried to get rid of him, he thought, and it would have been all right if he’d just wandered off like an old horse turned out to pasture, abandoned and forgotten. Perhaps all the others had done exactly that. But in getting rid of him, in getting rid of anyone, they must have been aware of a certain danger. The only safe and foolproof way would have been to keep him on, to let him go on living as the final gentleman until his dying day.

  Why had they not done that? Was it possible, for example, that there were limitations on the project, that the operation, whatever its purpose, had a load capacity that was now crammed to its very limit? So that, before they could take on someone else, they must get rid of him?

  If that were true, it very well could be there was a spot here where they were vulnerable.

  And yet another thing, a vague remembrance from that congressional hearing of some years ago—a sentence and a picture carried in the papers at the time. The picture of a very puzzled man, one of the top technicians who had assembled Harvey, sitting in the witness chair and saying: “But, senator, I tell you no analytical computer can be anywhere near as good as they claim Harvey is.”

  And it might mean something and it might not, Harrington told himself, but it was something to remember, it was a hope to which to cling.

  Most astonishing, he thought placidly, how a mere machine could take the place of thinking man. He had commented on that before, with some asperity, in one of his books—he could not recall which one. As Cedric Madison had said this very evening…

  He caught himself in time.

  In some dim corner of his brain an alarm was ringing, and he dived for the folded paper he had tossed onto the floor.

  He found it, and the headline screamed at him and the books lost their calf-bound elegance and the carpeting regained its harsh newness, and he was himself once more.

  He knelt, sobbing, on the floor, the paper clutched in a shaky hand.

  No change, he thought, no warning!

  And a crumpled paper the only shield he had.

  But a powerful shield, he thought.

  Try it again! he screamed at Harvey. Go ahead and try!

  Harvey didn’t try.

  It had been Harvey. And, he told himself, of course he didn’t know.

  Defenseless, he thought, except for a folded paper with a headline set in 18 point caps.

  Defenseless, with a story that no one would believe even if he told it to them.

  Defenseless, with thirty years of eccentricity to make his every act suspect.

  He searched his mind for help and there was no help. The police would not believe him and he had few friends to help, for in thirty years he had made few friends.

  There was the senator—but the senator had troubles of his own.

  And there was something else—there was a certain weapon that could be used against him. Harvey only had to wait until he went to sleep. For if he went to sleep, there was no doubt he’d wake the final gentleman and more than likely then remain the final gentleman, even more firmly the final gentleman than he’d ever been before. For if they got him now, they’d never let him go.

  He wondered, somewhat vaguely, why he should fight against it so. The last thirty years had not been so bad; the way they had been passed would not be a bad way, he admitted, being honest with himself, to live out the years that he had left in him.

  But the thought revolted him as an insult to his very humanness. He had a right to be himself, perhaps even an obligation to remain himself, and he felt a deep-banked anger at the arrogance that would make him someone else.

  The issue was straightly drawn, he knew. Two facts were crystal clear: Whatever he did, he must do himself; he must expect no help. And he must do it now before he needed sleep.

  He clambered to his feet, with the paper in his hand, squared his shoulders and turned toward the door. But at the door he halted, for a sudden, terrible truth had occurred to him.

  Once he left the house and went out into the darkness, he would be without his shield. In the darkness the paper would be worthless since he would not be able to read the headline.

  He glanced at his watch and it was just after three. There were still three hours of darkness and he couldn’t wait three hours.

  He needed time, he thought. He must somehow buy some time. Within the next few hours he must in some way manage to smash or disable Harvey. And while that, he admitted to himself, might not be the whole answer, it would give him time.

  He stood beside the door and the thought came to him that he might be wrong—that it might not be Harvey or Madison or White. He had put it all together in his mind and now he’d managed to convince himself. He might, he realized, have hypnotized himself almost as effectively as Harvey or someone else had hypnotized him thirty years ago.

  Although probably it had not been hypnotism.

  But whatever it might be, he realized, it was a bootless thing to try to thresh out now. There were more immediate problems that badly needed solving.

  First of all he must devise some other sort of shield. Defenseless, he’d never reach the door of the Situation lobby.

  Association, he thought—some sort of association—some way of reminding himself of who and what he was. Like a string around his finger, like a jingle in his brain.

  The study door came open and old Adams stood there, clut
ching his ragged robe together.

  “I heard someone talking, sir.”

  “It was I,” said Harrington. “On the telephone.”

  “I thought, perhaps,” said Adams, “someone had dropped in. Although it’s an unearthly time of night for anyone to call.”

  Harrington stood silent, looking at old Adams, and he felt some of his grimness leave him—for Adams was the same. Adams had not changed. He was the only thing of truth in the entire pattern.

  “If you will pardon me,” said Adams, “your shirt tail’s hanging out.”

  “Thanks,” said Harrington. “I hadn’t noticed. Thanks for telling me.”

  “Perhaps you had better get on to bed, sir. It is rather late.”

  “I will,” said Harrington, “in just another minute.”

  He listened to the shuffling of old Adams’ slippers going down the hall and began tucking in his shirt tail.

  And suddenly it struck him: Shirt tails—they’d be better than a string!

  For anyone would wonder, even the final gentleman would wonder, why his shirt tails had a knot in them.

  He stuffed the paper in his jacket pocket and tugged the shirt tails entirely free. He had to loosen several buttons before there was cloth enough to make a satisfactory knot.

  He made it good and hard, a square knot so it wouldn’t slip, and tight enough so that it would have to be untied before he took off the shirt.

  And he composed a silly line that went with the knotted shirt tails:

  I tie this knot because I’m not the final gentleman.

  He went out of the house and down the steps and around the house to the shack where the garden tools were kept.

  He lighted matches until he found the maul that he was looking for. With it in his hand, he went back to the car.

  And all the time he kept repeating to himself the line:

  I tie this knot, because I’m not the final gentleman.

  The Situation lobby was as brilliant as he remembered it and as silent and deserted and he headed for the door that said HARVEY on it.

  He had expected that it would be locked, but it wasn’t, and he went through it and closed it carefully behind him.