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.
Physician to the Universe
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.
The house was surrounded by a great front yard and a garden at the rear and at the garden’s edge grew a mighty tree that flamed golden in the autumn for a few brief hours, and the tree held something of magnificent importance and he, Alden Street, was tied in with that great importance.
He sought wildly for this great importance and in the dusk he could not find it. It had somehow slipped his grasp. He had had it, he had known it, he’d lived with it all his life, from the time of childhood, but he did not have it. It had left him somehow.
He went scrabbling after it, frantically, for it was something that he could not lose, plunging after it into the darkness of his brain. And as he scrambled after it, he knew the taste again, the bitter taste when he had drained the vial and dropped it to the floor.
He scrabbled in the darkness of his mind, searching for the thing he’d lost, not remembering what it was, with no inkling of what it might have been, but knowing he would recognize it once he came across it.
He scrabbled and he did not find it. For suddenly he was not in the darkness of his brain, but back once more in the place of brilliance. And angry at how he’d been thwarted in his search.
The high and mighty man had not started speaking, although Alden could see that he was about to speak, that at any moment now he would start to speak. And the strange thing of it was that he was certain he had seen this all before and had heard before what the high, great man was about to say. Although he could not, for the life of him, recall a word of it. He had been here before, he knew, not once, but twice before. This was a reel re-run, this was past happening.
“Alden Street,” said the man so high above him, “you will stand and face me.”
And that was silly, Alden thought, for he was already standing and already facing him.
“You have heard the evidence,” said the man, “that has been given here.”
“I heard it,” Alden said.
“What have you, then, to say in your self-defense?”
“Not a thing,” said Alden.
“You mean you don’t deny it?”
“I can’t deny it’s true. But there were extenuating circumstances.”
“I am sure there were, but they’re not admissible.”
“You mean that I can’t tell you…”
“Of course you can. But it will make no difference. The law admits no more than the commission of the crime. There can be no excuses.”
“I would suppose, then,” said Alden Street, “there is nothing I can say. Your Honor, I would not waste your time.”
“I am glad,” said the judge, “that you are so realistic. It makes the whole thing simpler and easier. And it expedites the business of this court.”
“But you must understand,” said Alden Street, “that I can’t be sent away. I have some most important work and I should be getting back to it.”
“You admit,” said the high, great man, “that you were ill for twenty-four full hours and failed most lamentably to report your illness.”
“Yes,” said Alden Street.
“You admit that even then you did not report for treatment, but rather that you were apprehended by a monitor.”
Alden did not answer. It was piling up and there was no use to answer. He could see, quite plainly, that it would do no good.
“And, further, you admit that it has been some eighteen months since you have reported for your physical.”
“I was far too busy.”
“Too busy when the law is most explicit that you must have a physical at six month intervals?”