Free Time Is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak Page A

Father Flanagan. “I can assure you, purely academic. Something that is of interest to me personally. You are as safe with me as if you were in confessional.”
    â€œThere was a day,” said Blaine, “when science was deeply suspect as the hidden foes of all religious truth. We have the same thing here.”
    â€œBut the people,” said Father Flanagan, “are afraid again. They close and bar their doors. They do not go out of night. They have hex signs—hex signs, mind you, instead of the blessed crucifix—hanging on their gates and the gables of their houses. They whisper of things which have been dead and dust since the Middle Ages. They tremble in the smoky chimney corners of their minds. They have lost much of their ancient faith. They go through all the rituals, of course, but I see it in their faces, I sense it in their talk, I glimpse it in their minds. They have lost the simple art of faith.”
    â€œNo, Father, I don’t think they have. They’re just very troubled people.”
    â€œThe entire world is troubled,” said Father Flanagan.
    And that was right, Blaine told himself—the entire world was troubled. For it had lost a cultural hero and had not been able to acquire another for all that it had tried. It had lost an anchor which had held it against the winds of illogic and unreason and it was now adrift upon an ocean for which there was no chart.
    At one time science had served as the cultural hero. It had logic and reason and an ultimate precision that probed down into the atom and out to the farther edge of space. It spawned gadgets by the millions for the comfort of its worshipers and it placed the hand and eye of Man upon the entire universe, by proxy. It was something you could trust in, for it was the sum of human wisdom among many other things.
    But principally it was translated into machines and machine technology, for science was an abstract, but machines were something that anyone could see.
    Then there came the day when Man, for all his wondrous machines, for all his famed technology, had been driven back from space, had been whipped howling from the heavens back to the den of Earth. And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people’s minds.
    And that other day, when Man had gone to the stars without the benefit of machines, the worship of technology had died for good and all. Machines and technology and science itself still existed, still were in daily use, still were of vast importance, but they no longer formed a cult.
    For while Fishhook used machines, they were not machines as such—not machines that could be accepted by the common mass of mankind. For they had no pistons and no wheels, no gears, no shafts, no levers, not a single button—they had nothing of the component parts of a commonplace machine. They were strange and alien and they had no common touch.
    So Man had lost his cultural hero and since his nature was so fashioned that he must have some abstract hero-worship, because he must always have an ideal and a goal, a vacuum was created that screamed aloud for filling.
    Paranormal kinetics, for all its strangeness, for all its alien concept, filled the bill exactly. For here, finally, were all the crackpot cults completely justified; here, at last, was the promise of ultimate wish-fulfillment; here was something exotic enough, or that could be made exotic, to satisfy the depth of human emotion such as a mere machine never had been able.
    Here, so help us God, was magic!
    So the world went off on a magic jag.
    The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.
    So Man once again was without a cultural hero, but had acquired instead a neosuperstition that went howling through the dark of a second Middle Ages.
    â€œI have puzzled much upon the matter,” said Father Flanagan. “It is