The Masks Of Time Part 3

Jack looked up at me. "Shall I turn it off? He's obviously a phony. He can't even fake the details convincingly!"

"No, leave it," Shirley said. She seemed entranced. Jack tensed again, and I quickly said, "Yes, let's watch a little more. It's amusing."

". . . only one city, then?"

"Yes," Vornan replied. "Composed of those who value communal life. There's no economic need for us to cl.u.s.ter together, you know. We're each quite self-sufficient. What fascinates me is the need you folk have to keep your hands in each other's pockets. This business of money, for example. Without it, a man starves, a man goes naked. Am I right? You lack independent means of production. Am I right in believing that energy conversion is not yet an accomplished fact?"

A harsh American voice said, "Depends what you mean by energy conversion. Mankind's had ways of getting energy since the first fires were kindled."

Looking perturbed, Vornan said, "I meanefficient energy conversion. The full use of the power stored within a single-ah, a single atom. You lack this?"

I glanced sideways at Jack. He was gripping the float of his pneumochair in sudden anguish, and his features were distorted with tension. I looked away again as though I had intruded on something terribly private, and I realized that a decade-old question had been answered at least in part.

Vornan was no longer discussing energy conversion when I was able to return my attention to the screen.

". . . a tour of the world. I wish to sample the full range of experience available in this era. And I will begin in the United States of America."

"Why?"

"One likes to see the processes of decadence in motion. When one visits a crumbling culture, one does best to explore its most powerful component first. My impression is that the chaos that will come upon you will radiate outward from the United States, and therefore I wish to search for the symptoms there first." He said this with a kind of bland impersonality, as though it should be quite self-evident that our society was collapsing and that no offense could possibly be given by remarking on something so obvious. Then he flashed the smile just long enough to stun his audience into ignoring the underlying darkness of his words.

The press conference trickled to an anticlimactic end. Random questions about Vornan's world and about the method by which he had come to our time met with such vague generalities that he seemed clearly to be mocking his questioners. Occasionally he implied that he might provide further details on some point another time; mostly he declared that he simply did not know. He was particularly evasive on all efforts to get from him a sharp description of world events in our immediate future. I gathered that he had no high regard for our attainments and was a trifle surprised to discover that we had electricity and atomic energy and s.p.a.ce travel at our early stage in the stream of history. He made no attempt to hide his disdain, but the odd thing was that his c.o.c.kiness failed to be infuriating. And when the editor of a Canadian facsimsheet said, "Just how much of all this do you really expect us to believe?" he replied quite pleasantly, "Why, feel free to believe none of it. I'm sure it makes no difference to me."

When the program was over. Shirley turned to me and said, "Now you've seen the fabulous man from tomorrow, Leo. What do you think of him?"

"I'm amused."

"Convinced?"

"Don't be silly. This is nothing but a very clever publicity dodge that's working out magnificently for somebody. But give the devil credit: he's got charm."

"He does indeed," Shirley said. She looked toward her husband. "Jack, darling, would you mind very much if I arrange to sleep with him when he comes to the States? I'm sure they've invented a few new wrinkles in s.e.x in the next thousand years, and maybe he could teach me something."

"Very funny," Jack said.

His face was black with rage. Shirley recoiled as she saw it. It startled me that he would overreact in this way to her innocently wanton suggestion. Surely their marriage was secure enough so that she could play at infidelity without angering him. And then it struck me that he was not reacting at all to her talk of sleeping with Vornan, that he was still locked in his earlier anguish. That talk of total energy conversion-of a decentralized world in which each man was an economically self-sufficient unit- "Do you mind?" he said, and left the room.

Shirley and I exchanged troubled glances. She bit her lip, tugged at her hair, and said softly, "I'm sorry, Leo. I know what's eating him, but I can't explain."

"I think I can guess."

"Yes, you probably would be the one who could."

She opened the circuit that opaqued the side window. I saw Jack on the sundeck, gripping the rail, hulking forward and staring into the darkened desert. Lightning forked across the summits of the mountains in the west, and then came the instant fury of a winter rainstorm. Sheets of water cascaded across the gla.s.s paneling. Jack remained there, a statue more than a man, and let the storm unleash its force upon him. Beneath my feet I felt the purr of the house's life-system as the storage pumps sucked the rainwater into the cisterns for later use. Shirley came up beside me and put her hand on my arm. "I'm afraid," she whispered. "Leo, I'm afraid."

FOUR.

"Come out into the desert with me," Jack said. "I'd like to talk to you, old man."

Two days had pa.s.sed since the telecast of Vornan-19's press conference. We had not turned the wallscreen on again, and the tension had ebbed from the house. I was planning to return to Irvine the following day. My work was calling me, and I felt also that I should leave Shirley and Jack in privacy while they dealt with whatever gulfs were opening in their lives. Jack had said little during the two days; he appeared to be making a conscious effort to conceal the pain he had felt that night. I was surprised and pleased by his invitation.

"Will Shirley go?" I asked.

"She doesn't need to. Just the two of us."

We left her sunbathing in the noon light, her eyes closed, her supple body upturned, her loveliness bare to the sun's caress. Jack and I walked more than a mile from the house, taking a path we rarely used.

The sand was still dimpled from the heavy rainfall, and the scrubby plants were erupting in violent greenery.

Jack halted at a place where three high mica-encrusted monoliths formed a kind of natural Stonehenge, and crouched down before one of the boulders to tug at a clump of sage growing by its base. When he had succeeded in pulling the hapless plant free, he cast it aside and said, "Leo, did you ever wonder why I left the University?"

"You know I did."

"What was the story I gave you?"

"That you were at a dead end in your work," I said. "That you were bored with it, that you had lost faith in yourself and in physics, that you simply wanted to get away to your love-nest with Shirley and stay there and write and meditate."

He nodded. "It was a lie."

"I know."

"Well, partly a lie. I did want to come away here and live apart from the world, Leo. But the bit about being at a dead end: it wasn't true at all. My problem was quite the opposite. I wasnot at a dead end.

G.o.d knows I wanted to be. But I saw my way clearly to the culmination of my thesis. The answers were in sight, Leo. All the answers."

Something twitched in my left cheek. "And you could stop, knowing that it was all in your grasp?"

"Yes," He scuffed at the base of the boulder, knelt, scooped sand, sifted it through his fingers. He did not look at me. At length he said, "Was it an act of moral grandeur, I wonder, or just an act of cowardice? What do you think, Leo?"

"You tell me."

"Do you know where my work was heading?"

"I think I knew it before you," I said. "But I wasn't going to point it out. I had to let you make all the decisions. You never once indicated that you saw any of the larger implications at all, Jack. As far as I could tell, you thought you were dealing with the atomic binding forces in a vacuum of theory."

"I was. For the first year and a half."

"And then?"

"I met Shirley, remember? She didn't know much about physics. Sociology, history, those were her fields. I described my work to her. She didn't understand, so I put it in simpler terms, and then still simpler terms. It was good discipline for me, verbalizing what had really been just a bunch of equations.

And finally I said that what I was doing was finding out what holds atoms together internally. And she said, 'Does that mean we'd be able to take them apart without blowing things up?' 'Yes,' I said. 'Why, we could take any atom at all and liberate enough energy to run a house on it, I suppose.' Shirley gave me a queer look and said, 'That would be the end of our whole economic structure, wouldn't it? ' "

"It had never occurred to you before?"

"Never, Leo. Never. I was that skinny kid from M.I.T., yes? I didn't worry about applied technology.

Shirley turned me upside down. I started calculating, then got on the phone to the library and had the computer run off some engineering texts for me, and Shirley gave me a little lecture on elementary economics. Then I saw, yes, by d.a.m.n, somebody could take my equations and figure out a way of liberating unlimited energy. It wasE=MC2 all over again. I panicked. I couldn't a.s.sume the responsibility for overturning the world. My first impulse was to go to you and ask what you thought I should do."

"Why didn't you?"

He shrugged. "It was the cheap way out. Loading the burden onto you. Anyway, I realized that you probably saw the problem already, and that you would have said something about it to me unless you felt I ought to work out the moral part by myself. So I asked for that sabbatical, and spent my time fooling around at the accelerator while I thought things over. I looked up Oppenheimer and Fermi, and the rest of the boys who built the atomic bomb, and asked myself what I would have done in their place. They worked in wartime, to help humanity against a really filthy enemy, and eventhey had their doubts. I wasn't doing anything that would save humanity from clear and present danger. I was simply whipping up a gratuitous bit of research that would smash the world's money structure. I saw myself as an enemy of mankind."

"With real energy conversion," I said quietly, "there'd be no more hunger, no more greed, no more monopolies-"

"There'd also be a fifty-year upheaval while the new order of things was taking shape. And the name of Jack Bryant would be accursed. I couldn't do it. I wasn't able to take the responsibility. At the end of that third year, I packed myself in. I walked away from my own work and came out here. I committed a crime against knowledge to avoid committing a worse crime."

"And you feel guilty about it?"

"Of course I do. I feel that my whole life for the past decade has been a penance for running away.

Have you ever wondered about the book I've been writing, Leo?"

"Many times."

"It's a kind of autobiographical essay: anapologia pro vita sua. In it I explain what I was working on at the University, how I came to realize its true nature, why I halted work, and what my att.i.tude toward my own withdrawal has been. The book's an examination of the moral responsibilities of science, you could say. By way of an appendix, I include the complete text of my thesis."

"As it was the day you stopped work?"

"No," Jack said. "Thecomplete text. I told you the answers were in sight when I quit. I finished my work five years ago. It's all there in the ma.n.u.script. With a billion dollars and a decently equipped laboratory any reasonably alert corporation could translate my equations into a fully functioning power system the size of a walnut that would run forever on an input of sand."

Just then it seemed to me as if the Earth wobbled a little on its axis. I said after a long moment, "Why did you wait this long to bring the subject up?"

"That stupid newscast the other night gave me the push. The so-called man from 2999, with his idiot talk of a decentralized civilization in which every man is self- sufficient because he's got full energy conversion. It was like having a vision of the future-a future that I helped to shape."

"Surely you don't believe-"

"I don't know, Leo. It's a load of nonsense to imagine a man dropping in on us from a thousand years ahead. I was as convinced as you were that the man was all phony . . . until he started describing the decentralization thing."

"The idea of complete liberation of atomic energy has been around for a long time, Jack. This fellow's clever enough to grab it up and use it. It doesn't necessarily mean that he really is from the future and that your equations have actually gone into use. Forgive me, Jack, but I think you're overestimating your own uniqueness. You've taken an idea out of the floating pool of futuristic dreams and turned it into reality, yes, but no one except you and Shirley knows that, and you mustn't let his random shot fool you into thinking-"

"But suppose itis true, Leo?"

"If you're really worried about it, why don't you burn your ma.n.u.script?" I suggested.

He looked as shocked as if I had proposed self-mutilation.

"I couldn't do that."

"You'd protect mankind against the upheaval that you seem to feel advance guilt for causing."

"The ma.n.u.script's safe enough, Leo."

"Where?"

"Downstairs. I've built a vault for it and rigged up a deadfall in the house reactor. If anyone tries to enter the vault improperly, the safeties come out of the reactor and the house blows sky high. I don't need to destroy what I've written. It'll never fall into the wrong hands."

"Yet you a.s.sume ithas fallen into the wrong hands, somewhere in the next thousand years; so that by the time Vornan-19 is born, the world is already living on your power system. Right?"

"I don't know, Leo. The whole thing is crazy. I think I'm going crazy myself."

"Let's say for argument's sake that Vornan-19 is genuine and that such a power system is in use in A.D.

2999. Yes? Okay, but we don't know that it's the system you devised. Suppose you burn your ma.n.u.script. The act of doing that would change the future so that the economy described by Vornan-19 would never have come into existence. He himself might wink out of existence the moment your book went into the incinerator. And that way you'd know that the future was saved from the terrible fate you had created for it."

"No, Leo. Even if I burned the ma.n.u.script,I'd still be here. I could recreate my equations from memory.

The menace is in my brain. Burning the book would prove nothing."

"There are memory-washing drugs-"

He shuddered. "I couldn't trust those."

I looked at him in horror. With a sensation like that of falling through a trapdoor, I made contact with Jack's paranoia for the first time; and the healthy, tanned extrovert of these desert years vanished forever. To think that he had come to this! Tied in knots over the possibility that a shrewd but implausible fraud represented a veritable amba.s.sador from a distant future shaped by Jack's own suppressed creation!

"Is there anything I can do to help you?" I said softly.

"There is, Leo. One thing."

"Anything."

"Find some way to meet Vornan-19 yourself. You're an important scientific figure. You can pull the right strings. Sit down and talk with him. Find out if he's really a faker."

"Of course he is."

"Find it out, Leo."

"And if he's really what he says he is?"

Jack's eyes blazed with unsettling intensity. "Question him about his own era, then. Get him to tell you more about this atomic energy thing. Get him to tell you when it was invented-by whom. Maybe it didn't come up until five hundred years from now-an independent rediscovery, nothing to do with my work. Wring the truth out of him, Leo. I have to know."

What could I say?

Could I tell him, Jack, you've gone skully? Could I beg him to enter therapy? Could I offer a quick amateur diagnosis of paranoia? Yes, and lose forever my dearest friend. But to become a partner in psychosis by solemnly quizzing Vornan-19 this way was distasteful to me. a.s.suming I could ever get access to him, a.s.suming there was some way of obtaining an individual audience, I had no wish to stain myself by treating the mountebank even for a moment as though his pretensions should be taken seriously.

I could lie to Jack. I could invent a rea.s.suring conversation with the man.

But that was treachery. Jack's dark, tormented eyes begged for honest aid. I'll humor him, I thought.

"I'll do what I can," I promised.

His hand clasped mine. We walked quietly back to the house.