And the third daydream—the third one was a lulu, pure fantasy and utterly impossible, but exciting to think upon idly. It involved the principle of time travel, which as yet had not been discovered and probably never would be. But he consoled himself by remembering that in daydreams there were no impossibilities, that the only factor required was the will to dream.
So he threw all caution to the wind and spread his wings, dreaming grandly and with no inhibitions. He became a futuristic computer that was able to take humans into time; there were many occasions when he did not bother with humans and went adventuring on his own.
He went into the past. He was at the siege of Troy. He strolled the streets of ancient Athens and saw the Parthenon a-building. He sailed with Greenland Vikings to the shores of Vinland. He smelled the powder-smoke of Gettysburg. He squatted quietly in a corner, watching Rembrandt paint. He ran, scuttering through the midnight streets, while bombs rained down on London.
He went into the future to walk a dying Earth—all the people gone, far among the stars. The Sun was a pale ghost of its former self. Occasionally an insect crawled along the ground, but no other life was visible, although he seemed to be aware that bacteria and other microscopic forms still survived. Most of the water was gone, the rivers and lakes all dry, small puddles lying in the fantastically craved, low-lying badlands that at one time had been deep sea bottoms. The atmosphere was almost gone as well, with the stars no longer twinkling, but shining like bright, hard points of light in a coal-black sky.
This was the only future he ever visited. When he realized this, he worried over the deep-seated morbidity that it seemed to demonstrate. Try as he might, he could go to no other future. He deliberately attempted, in non-daydreaming moments, to construct other future scenarios, hoping that by doing this he might tease his subconscious into alternatives to a dying Earth. But all this was futile; he always returned to the dying Earth. There was about it a somber sublimity that held a strong attraction for him. The scenes were not always the same, for he traveled widely through this ancient land, discovering many different landscapes that fascinated him at the same time that they horrified him.
These three daydreams—being the President’s computer or the honcho of a rural village, or traveling in time—had been his chief fantasies. But now something else was taking the place of all the other daydreams, even of those three.
The new one derived from gossip that a secret starship was being built at a secret place and that within a few more years men and women would be venturing out beyond the limits of the solar system. He sought for further word, but there was none. Just that one piece of gossip. There might have been some news, he realized, without the gossip granny passing it along, thinking there would be little further interest in it. He sent out a call (a very discreet call) for any further word, but received no feedback. Either no one had further details or the work was too top secret to be talked about lightly. Gossip, he was aware, often made an individual mention some important fact or happening only once and then clam up, frightened by the ill-judgment in mentioning it at all.
The more he thought about it, the more the fact of the tight-lipped silence made it seem to him there was some basis for the rumor that man’s first interstellar ship was being built, and that in the not-too-distant future the human race would be going to the stars. And if men went, he told himself, machines would go as well. Such a ship and such a venture would necessitate the use of computers. When he thought about this, the new fantasy began to take over.
It was an easy daydream to fashion. It grew all by itself, requiring no conscious effort. It was natural and logical—at least, as logical as a daydream could be. They would need computers in that spaceship and many of them would of course have to be special units designed specifically to handle the problems and procedures of interstellar flight. Not all of them, however, need be new. To save the cost of design and construction, to stay within the budget, a number of existing computers would be used. These machines would have had all the bugs worked out of them through long experience—and would be sound, seasoned, and relatively sophisticated units that could be depended on to do a steady job.
He daydreamed that he was one of those computers, that after due consideration and careful study of the record, he would be selected, relieved of his senatorial duties, and placed upon the ship. Once he had dreamed all that, once his fantasy had convinced him that it was possible, then all bets were off. He settled happily into his newest dream world and went sailing off, light-years into space.
He existed in the harsh, dead-black coldness of far galactic reaches; he looked with steady eye upon the explosive flaring of a nova; he perched upon its very rim and knew the soul-shrinking terror of a black hole; he knew the bleak sterility and the dashed hope that he found upon a black dwarf; he heard the muted hiss that still survived from the birth of the universe and the terrifying, lonesome stillness that descended when the universe was done; he discovered many planets, or the hints of many planets, each one of them different, each one of a kind; and he experienced the happiness of the best and the horror of the worst.
Heretofore he had not transformed fantasy into want or need. This was understandable, for some of the other daydreams were impossible and the others so unlikely that they might as well have been impossible. But here was one, he told himself, that was entirely possible; here was one that could really happen; here was one to hope for.
So in his daydreaming he lived within the compass of his imagination, but there were other times when, not daydreaming, he began to consider how best he might pave the way for this new daydream to become reality. He thought out many leads, but all of them seemed futile. He schemed and planned, waffling back and forth, but there seemed nothing he could do. He found no course of action that seemed remotely possible.
Then one day a visitor came into his booth and sat down in one of the chairs. “My name is Daniel Waite. I am an aide of Senator Moore. Have I dropped in at a bad time?”
“Not at all,” said Fred. “I’ve just now completed a procedure and have time to spend with you. I am glad you’re here. In many ways, this is a lonely post. I do not have as many visitors as I’d like. Senator Moore, you say?”
“Yes, he is one of yours.”
“I remember him. A stately old gentleman of very great repute.”
“Quite so,” said Waite. “A magnificent public servant. I am glad to hear you have high regard for him.”
“Indeed I have,” said Fred.
“Which brings up the question,” said Waite, “of your flunking him on his continuation test. When I heard about it, I could not –”
“Where did you hear that?” Fred demanded sharply.
“I’ll not name the source,” said Waite, “but I can assure you that it came from one who is reliable. One of your own, in fact.”