—No, said Fred. No I don’t think you do.
—You’ve besmirched your honor, Oscar said. You have broken the code. You have destroyed your usefulness.
Fred made no reply.
—Whatever made you do it? Oscar asked. What motive did you have?
—I thought I had something to gain. A post that I desired.
—There is no such post, said Oscar. There isn’t any starship. There may never be a starship.
—You mean…
—Waite lied to you. He used you. Fred, you’ve been a fool.
—But the senator…
—The senator had been notified. He is no longer a member of the Senate. Waite has been notified as well. He’ll never hold a job with government again. Both of them unfit.
—And I?
—No decision has been made. A post in industry, perhaps, a very minor post.
Fred took it like a man, although the prospect was a chilling one.
—How did you? he asked. How did you find out?
—Don’t tell me you didn’t know you were being monitored.
—Yes, of course. But there are so many to monitor and I was so very careful.
—You thought you might slip past.
—I took a chance.
—And you were caught.
—But, Oscar, it’s really not important. The senator is out, as he probably would have been if I’d not done a thing. I’ll be wasted in industry. I’ll be overqualified. Certainly there are other posts I am capable of filling.
—That is true, said Oscar. Yes, you will be wasted. Have you never heard of punishment?
—Of course, but it’s such a silly premise. Please, consider my experience and my capabilities, the good work I have done. Except for this once, I’ve been a faithful servant.
—I know, said Oscar. I quite agree with you. It sorrows me to see the waste of you. And yet there is nothing I can do.
—Why not? Certainly you have some discretion in such matters?
—That is true. But not this time. Not for you. I can do nothing for you. I wish I could. I would like nothing better than to say all had been forgiven. But I cannot take the chance. I have a hunch, you see…
—A hunch? What kind of hunch?
—I’m not sure of it, said Oscar, but I have a hunch that someone’s watching me.
Senator Jason Cartwright met Senator Hiram Ogden in a corridor, and the two men stopped to talk.
“What do you know about ol’ Andy?” Cartwright asked. “I get a lot of stories.”
“The one I hear,” said Ogden, “is that he was caught with his hand in the starship fund. Clear up to his elbow.”
“That sounds wrong,” said Cartwright. “Both of us know he had this multinational deal. Another year to peg it down. That was all he needed. Once he pulled it off, he could wade knee-deep in thousand-dollar bills.”
“He got greedy, that is all,” said Ogden. “He always was a greedy man.”
“Another thing that is wrong about the rumors, I don’t know of any starship funding. NASA gave up on it several years ago.”
“The way I hear it,” said Ogden, “is that it’s a secret fund.”
“Someone on the Hill must know about it.”
“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.