The Dream

By Isaac Asimov

“I’m dreaming,” I said. It seemed to me that I had said it aloud. I knew that I was in bed. I was aware of the bedclothes. I was aware of the scattered city lights peeping through the slats of the Venetian blinds.

Yet he was there. As alive—as living—as real—

I could reach out and touch him, but I dared not move.

I recognized him. I’ve seen enough pictures of him, and so has everyone. He did not look quite like his pictures, for he was old, very old. White hair fringed his head. I recognized him. I simply knew who he was.

He said, “I’m dreaming.”

We stared at each other and all the world faded away—the bed and the bedclothes and the room. I said, “You’re Benjamin Franklin.”

He smiled slowly and said, “It may be that this is not a dream only. I stand close to death and perhaps the dying may have their wishes answered; if so be the wish be sufficiently earnest. Of what year are you?”

I felt panic rise. It might be a dream, but it might be madness. “I am dreaming!” I insisted wildly.

“Of course, you are, after a fashion, dreaming,” said Franklin—what else could I call him? “And I as well. How is it conceivable that you and I could speak but by something outside reality? And how does man transcend reality but in dreams? Of what year are you, my good sir?”

I was silent. He waited patiently and then shook his head.

“Then I will speak first,” he said. “I am old enough to have naught to fear. It is New Year’s Eve of the Year of our Lord, 1790, in the fourteenth year of the Independence of the United States, and in the first year of the presidency of George Washington. And in the last year of poor Benjamin Franklin, too. I will not last the new year. I know that.

“I do not die prematurely. In a fortnight and a few days I will mark my eighty-fourth birthday. A good old age, for it has made my life long enough to see my native land become a new nation among the nations of the Earth, and I have had something to do with that. We have a Constitution that was hammered out, not without pain, and will perhaps serve. And General Washington is spared to lead us.

“Yet will our nation last? The great monarchies of Europe remain hostile and there are dissensions among ourselves. British forces still hold our frontier posts; Spain threatens in the south; our trade languishes; the party spirit grows. Will our nation last?”

I managed to nod my head.

He chuckled almost noiselessly. “Is that all you can say? A nod? I asked for two hundred years. With this new year coming in, my last year, I asked what the United States might be like on its two hundredth birthday. Are these, then, the only tidings I am vouchsafed?”

“Almost,” I managed to say. “Almost. It is almost the Bicentennial.”

Franklin nodded. “Yet two centuries is a long time. It is two centuries since the first Englishmen stepped ashore on Roanoke Island; two centuries since Spain’s Invincible Armada was smashed. I fear the many inevitable changes two more centuries will bring.”

He paused and then his voice seemed stronger, as though he were preparing to face whatever might be. “You speak of the Bicentennial as though you accept the idea casually. The United States, then, still exists in your time?”

“Yes!”

“In what condition? Still independent? Still with the princely domain we won from Great Britain?”

“Still independent,” I said, and I felt myself grow warm with the pleasure at bringing great news. “And far larger. It is a land as large as all of Europe, with a population of more than two hundred million drawn from every nation. Fifty states stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with the fiftieth leaping the sea to the Hawaiian Islands of the mid-Pacific.”

His eyes lightened with joy. “And Canada?”

“Not Canada. That remains under the British crown.”

“Great Britain is still a monarchy then?”

“Yes. Queen Elizabeth II is on the throne, but Great Britain is our friend and has been for a long time.”

“Let the Creator be praised for that. Does the nation prosper?”

“The richest on Earth. The strongest.”

Now Franklin paused. He said, “You say that because you think to please me, perhaps. Richer than Great Britain? Stronger than France?”

“If you asked to have the future revealed to you, would it be lies you would hear? The time has not been all bliss. If we are a mighty Union of states now, under our thirty-seventh President in unbroken succession from George Washington, it is because we have survived a long and bloody War Between the States. In this present century, we have fought war after war overseas. We have had periods of economic disaster and periods of political corruption. It has not been the best of all possible worlds, but we have survived and, as we approach the Bicentennial, we are the richest and strongest nation on Earth.”

The old man seemed restless. He stirred in his bed and said, “I feel that I would like to walk about. I am not yet so old as to be bedridden. Yet I fear it will break the vision. It grows stronger, do you not feel that?”

“Yes,” I said. It was as though we two alone, separated by two centuries, were all that existed in a universe closed tightly about us.

Franklin said, “I feel your thoughts without asking. I begin to grow in you, or you in me. I sense your world—the world that is to come.”

There was a tickling in my skull—not a tickling, either—a sensation I could not describe and still cannot. It was another mind which, even in great old age, was more powerful than my own, and which had gently inserted itself into the interstices of my own.

Franklin said, with infinite satisfaction, “Yours is an age in which natural philosophy, then, is highly advanced, I see.”

“We call it science now,” I said, “and you are right. We fly through the air and can circle the globe in less time than it took you to go from Boston to Philadelphia. Our words streak at the speed of light and reach any corner of the globe in a fraction of a second. Our carriages move without horses and our buildings tower a quarter of a mile into the air.”

He was silent and for a time seemed to be attempting to absorb what might have seemed like wild fantasy.

I said, “Much of it stems from you. You were the first to penetrate the nature of electricity and it is electricity that now powers our society. You invented the lightning rod, the first device, based on the findings of pure science, that defeated a natural calamity. It was with the lightning rod that men first turned to science for help against the universe.”

He said, “You make it unnecessary for an old man to praise himself. I am too old to play at the game of modesty. I look back at my life and my eyes are not so blind as to fail to show me something of my true worth. Do you think, then, the lightning rod is my greatest invention?”

“One of them, certainly,” I said.

“Not at all,” said Franklin, seriously, “for my greatest invention is the United States, which I see is fated to increase so mightily in strength and wealth. But you think I exaggerate?”

“Well,” I said, “you were a member of the committee that wrote the Declaration of Independence—”

“Tom Jefferson did the writing,” interrupted Franklin, “though I suggested a passage or two.”

“And you were a member of the Constitutional Convention—”

“Where I devoted myself to quieting tempers. None of that. I invented the United States over a score of years before it was born. Have they forgotten that in your time?”

“I am not certain—”

“The French!” he said, impatiently. “Have the Americans of the future forgotten the day when France controlled Canada and Louisiana and reached out to take the Ohio Valley, too? The day when they would have penned us between the mountains and the sea, to take us at their leisure later?”

“We remember,” I said. “We remember Wolfe and the capture of Quebec.”

“But that was victory, in 1759. Cast your mind hack to 1754. The French were at Fort Duquesne, only 250 miles from Philadelphia. Young George Washington’s mission—for he was Young George then, a tad of 21—to the French had failed. Yet the colonies would not take action against the menace. The Pennsylvania proprietary government was torpid. The British were concerned with Europe, not with us. And even the Iroquois, our old Indian allies, were threatening to transfer their friendship to the French. Do you remember all that?”

“Only dimly, sir.”

“So Governor De Lancey of New York called a congress of the colonies to meet and confer about the common danger. On June 19, 1754, twenty-five delegates from seven colonies—the four of New England, plus New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland—met at Albany. We comforted the Iroquois and held them firm and then, on June 24, I presented my plan of Union to the Albany Congress.”

He paused dramatically.

He said, “I suggested the colonies be governed by a governor-general, appointed and paid by the British crown. Partner with him was to be a grand council in which delegates from the various colonies, in number proportional to population, would sit. The grand council would deal with American affairs, and the governor-general would see to it that the interests of the Empire were preserved. The congress accepted it—on July 4. It might have saved the colonies for Great Britain.”

I nodded. “It might have. Canada finally came to much such an arrangement and is still under the British crown, though it rules itself.”

“Ah! But the colonies ignored my plan because it gave too much power to the crown, and Parliament ignored it because it gave too much power to the colonies. But the idea of Union, which was mine, did not die, you see. And what I suggested, molded into modified form by time, came to pass, so that my invention became the United States of America. And,” he added, with deep satisfaction, “I lived to see it and to play my small—no, my large part.”

I nodded again.

“And now,” he said, “you live in a great world that has grown curiously small; a world far smaller than my thirteen colonies of 1754. Around the world in a day, you say? Words at the speed of light? The astronomer royal, Mr. Bradley, had worked that out to be some 180,000 miles per second.”

“That is right; 186,282 miles per second.”

“Even to the exact mile? And yet your world is as divided as our American states once were.”

“More divided, I fear.”

“I catch a dim view of devices that make war deadly,” he said.

“We have bombs that can destroy—”

But old Franklin waved his hand. “Do not tell me. I see enough. And yet with the chance of universal destruction, there remains no certainty of peace?”

“The nations are armed and hostile.”

“The United States arms also?”

“Certainly. It is the strongest nuclear power.”

“Then man does not advance in wisdom as he does in power?”

I shrugged. What could I say?

Franklin said, “Are there no enemies against which the nations can unite? We tried to unite against France, but relied too greatly on Great Britain to feel the absolute need. We did unite against Great Britain, at last, when we stood alone.”

I said, “There is no power against whom the nations of the world feel the need to unite. There is no enemy from beyond the Earth to threaten us with universal defeat and slavery.”

“Are there no enemies other than those who are living beings?” asked Franklin, angrily. “Is there not ignorance? Is there not misery? Is there not hunger and disease; and hatred and bigotry; and disorder and crime? Has your world changed so much that these things do not exist?”

“No. We have them. Not all of man’s material advance has ended the threat of those things you mention. We multiply still in number—nearly four billion the world over—and that multiplies our problems, and may even destroy us all.”

“And mankind will not combine against this immaterial foe?”

I said, “No more than the colonies combined against France; or even against Great Britain until bloodshed in New England brought them a clear and present danger.”

Franklin said, “Can you wait for a clear and present danger? What you call a nuclear war would make it too late at once. If matters advanced to the point where your complex society broke down, then even in the absence of war, you could not prevent catastrophe.”

“You are correct, sir.”

“Is there no way, then, to dramatize the—” His head bent in thought. He said, “You spoke of a War between the States. Are the states still at enmity? Is the nation still divided?”

“No, the wounds are healed.”

“How? In what manner?”

“That is not easy to explain. For one thing, in the years after that war, the nation was engaged in building the West. In this great colonizing venture, all the states, north and south, combined. In that common task, and in the further common task of strengthening the nation, smaller enmities were forgotten.”

“I see,” said Franklin. “And is there no great venture in which the world is engaged in your time? Is there nothing so grand that in it all the nations may find a common goal and, as you say, forget the smaller enmities?”

I thought for a moment. “Space, perhaps.”

“Space?”

“Both ourselves and the Soviet Union—which used to be the Russian Empire—have sent out exploring vessels as far as the planets Mars and Jupiter.”

For a moment, Franklin seemed speechless. Then he said, “With men on board?”

“No, unmanned. But six vessels, carrying three men each, have traveled to the Moon. Twelve Americans have walked on the Moon. A seventh vessel miscarried, but brought its crew safely back to Earth.”

Franklin said, “And with so majestic a feat at the disposal of mankind, the nations of the world can yet quarrel?”

“I am sorry, but it is so.”

“Is the venture, perhaps, merely a useless show?”

“No. Not at all. Vessels bearing instruments circle Earth. They help in our planetary communications. They serve as navigational aids. They report on our cloud cover and help us predict the weather. They investigate the properties of space and help us understand our universe. Through their observations we can plot Earth’s resources, pinpoint Earth’s physical problems of pollution, understand the planet as a whole in ways we never could before. We can add to our knowledge in as yet unsuspected fashion that will help us in—”

“And still the nations quarrel.”

“Yes.”

Franklin’s eyes began to blaze at this. One arm reached out tremblingly toward me. “Then there must be further dramatization. Tell me, is it an American venture only—those vessels to the Moon—or are other nations involved?”

“It is strictly American.”

“Ah. And the Bicentennial approaches. Then cannot the United States establish a birthday party that will be the greatest birthday party of all time by making it a celebration for mankind?”

“In what way, sir?”

“Launch one of your vessels on the Bicentennial,” be said, energetically. “Or, if there is not time for that, announce one to be launched by the united aid of all the nations of the world. Let there be a celebration of the Fourth, not as the Bicentennial of a single nation; but as a glorification of the principle of the union of political entities against a common foe and for a common purpose.

“Let there be the largest birthday cake in the world, if you will; the decoration of whole cities; the saluting of a thousand guns; the playing of ten thousand bands—but let it be for all mankind. Let the leaders of all nations assemble to praise the Union of mankind. Let them all plan their own part in the launching of vessels into space under the auspices of a united planet. Let the conquest of space be the source of pride for nothing smaller than mankind. Let it be that in which all men can find a common glory, and in which all men can forget small enmities.”

I said, “But the problems of mankind will remain. They will not disappear.”

Franklin’s figure seemed to waver, grow less substantial. “Do you want everything at once? The American Union did not solve all problems for Americans. But it made it possible for solutions to be sought, and sometimes found.”

He grew dimmer still, wraithlike, and then vanished in a fading smoke. And I woke up.

If it were a dream, it was Franklin’s dream, too. And a greater dream still—of a union beyond our Union.

But what could I do? I do not make policy.

Yet I am a writer. With help, I might make myself heard. With help!

So I picked up the telephone and called a certain editor, for, in addition to the lightning rod, to the United States, Benjamin Franklin had also invented The Saturday Evening Post.