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mouth when the thought struck him suddenly and he stood for a moment frozen while all the gears came together, meshing, and the pieces fell into a pattern and he knew, without even asking, why he was the only genuine dishonest man left on the entire Earth.
    I profetick and wach ahed for you!
    He put the leaf into his mouth and felt the comfort of it.
    Antidote, he thought, and knew that he was right.
    But how could Pug have known—how could he have foreseen the long, twisting tangle of many circumstances which must inevitably crystallize into this very moment?
    Leg. forst.?
    He closed the lid of the box and shut the drawer and turned toward the door.
    The only dishonest man in the world, he thought. Immune to the honesty factor in the yellow spores because of the resistance built up within him by his long use of the leaf.
    He had set a trap tonight to victimize Pickering and tomorrow he’d go out and fox the government and there was no telling where he’d go from there. Hazlitt had said something about taking over the entire planet and the idea was not a bad one if he could only squeeze out the necessary time.
    He chuckled at the thought of how all the honest suckers would stand innocently in line, unable to do a thing about it—all fair prey to the one dishonest man in the entire world. A wolf among the sheep!
    He drew himself erect and pulled the white gloves on carefully. He flicked his walking stick. Then he thumped himself on the chest—just once—and let himself out into the hall. He did not bother to lock the door behind him.
    In the lobby, as he stepped out of the lift, he saw the Widow Foshay coming in the door. She turned and called back cheerfully to friends who had brought her home.
    He lifted his hat to her with an olden courtesy that he thought he had forgotten.
    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?”
    â€œMinerva,” 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.
    â€”dww
    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