The Masks Of Time Part 4

The next morning, as I packed, Shirley came into my room. She wore a clinging, pearly iridescent wrap that miraculously enhanced the contours of her body. I who had grown callously accustomed to her nakedness was reminded anew that she was beautiful, and that my uncle-like love for her incorporated a nugget of repressed though irrepressible l.u.s.t.

She said, "How much did he tell you out there yesterday?"

"Everything."

"About the ma.n.u.script? About what he's afraid of?"

"Yes."

"Can you help him, Leo?"

"I don't know. He wants me to get hold of the man from 2999 and check everything out with him. That may not be so easy. And it probably won't do much good even if I can."

"He's very disturbed, Leo. I'm worried about him. You know, he looks so healthy on the outside, and yet this thing has been burning through him year after year. He's lost all perspective."

"Have you thought of getting professional help for him?"

"I don't dare," she whispered. "It's the one thing not even I can suggest. This is the great moral crisis of his life, and I've got to take it that way. I can't suggest that it's a sickness. At least not yet. Perhaps if you came back here able to convince him that this man's a hoax, that would help Jack start letting go of his obsession. Will you do it?"

"Whatever I can, Shirley."

Suddenly she was in my arms. Her face was thrust into the hollow between my cheek and my shoulder; the globes of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, discernible through the thin wrap, crushed themselves against my chest, and her fingertips dug into my back. She was trembling and sobbing. I held her close, until I began to tremble for another reason, and gently I broke the contact between us. An hour later I was b.u.mping over the dirt road, heading for Tucson and the transportation pod that was waiting to bring me back to California.

I reached Irvine at nightfall. A thumb to the doorplate and my house opened for me. Sealed for three weeks, climate-proofed, it had a musty, tomblike odor. The familiar litter of papers and spools everywhere was rea.s.suring. I went in just as a light rain began to fall. Wandering from room to room, I felt that sense of an ending that I used to know on the day after the last day of summer; I was alone again, the holiday was over, the Arizona brightness had given way to the misty dark of California winter. I could not expect to find Shirley scampering sprite-like about the house, nor Jack uncoiling some characteristically involuted idea for my consideration. The homecoming sadness was even sharper this time, for I had lost the strong, st.u.r.dy Jack I had depended on for so many years, and in his place there had appeared a troubled stranger full of irrational doubts. Even golden Shirley stood revealed as no G.o.ddess but a worried wife. I had gone to them with a sickness in my own soul and had come home healed of that, but it had been a costly visit.

I cut out the opaquers and peered outside at the Pacific's surging surf, at the reddish strip of beach, at the white swirls of fog invading the twisted pines that grew where sand yielded to soil. The staleness in the house gave way as that piney salt air was sucked through the vents. I slipped a music cube into the scanner, and the thousands of tiny speakers embedded in the walls spun a skein of Bach for me. I allowed myself a few ounces of cognac. For a while I sat quietly sipping, letting the music coc.o.o.n me, and gradually I felt a kind of peace come over me. My hopeless work awaited me in the morning. My friends were in anguish. The world was convulsed by an apocalyptic cult and now was beset by a self-appointed emissary from the epochs ahead. Yet there had always been false prophets loose in the land, men had always struggled with problems so heavy they strained their souls, and the good had always been plagued with shattering doubts and turmoils. Nothing was new. I need feel no pity for myself. Live each day for itself, I thought, meet the challenges as they arise, brood not, do your best, and hope for a glorious resurrection. Fine. Let the morrow come.

After a while I remembered to reactivate my telephone. It was a mistake.

My staff knows that I am incommunicado when I am in Arizona. All incoming calls are shunted to my secretary's line, and she deals with them as she sees fit, never consulting me. But if anything of major importance comes up, she rings it into the storage cell of my home telephone so that I'll find out about it right away when I return. The instant I brought my phone to life, the storage cell disgorged its burden; the chime sounded and automatically I nudged the output switch. My secretary's long, bony face appeared on the screen.

"I'm calling on January fifth, Dr. Garfield. There have been several calls for you today from a Sanford Kralick of the White House staff. Mr Kralick wants to speak to you urgently and insisted a number of times that he be put through to Arizona. He pushed me quite hard, too. When I finally got it across to him that you couldn't be disturbed, he asked me to have you call him at the White House as soon as possible, any hour of the day or night. He said it was on a matter vital to national security. The number is-"

That was all. I had never heard of Mr. Sanford Kralick, but of course Presidential aides come and go.

This was perhaps the fourth time the White House had called me in the past eight years, since I had inadvertently become part of the available supply of learned pundits. A profile of me in one of the weekly journals for the feeble-minded had labeled me as a man to be watched, an adventurer on the frontiers of thought, a dominant force in American physics, and since then I had been manipulated to the status of a star scientist. I was occasionally asked to lend my name to this or that official statement on the National Purpose or on the Ethical Structure of Humanity; I was called to Washington to guide beefy Congressmen through the intricacics of particle theory when appropriations for new accelerators were under discussion; I was dragooned as part of the backdrop when some bold explorer of s.p.a.ce was being awarded the G.o.ddard Prize. The foolishness even spread to my own profession. which should have known better; occasionally I keynoted an annual meeting of the A.A.A.S., or tried to explain to a delegation of oceanographers or archaeologists what was taking place out on my particular frontier of thought. I admit hesitantly that I came to welcome this nonsense, not for the notoriety it provided, but simply because it supplied me with a virtuous-sounding excuse for escaping from my own increasingly less rewarding work. Remember Garfield's Law: star scientists usually are men in a private creative bind.

Having ceased to produce meaningful results, they go on the public-appearance circuit and solace themselves with the reverence of the ignorant.

Never once, though, had one of these Washington summonses been couched in such urgent terms. "Vital to national security," Kralick had said. Really? Or was he one of those Washingtonians for whom hyperbole is the native tongue?

My curiosity was piqued. It was dinnertime in the capital just now. Call at any hour, Kralick had said. I hoped I would interrupt him just as he sat down to supreme de volaille at some absurd restaurant overlooking the Potomac. Hastily I punched out the White House number. The Presidential seal appeared on my screen and a ghostly computerized voice asked me my business.

"I'd like to talk to Sanford Kralick," I said.

"One moment, please."

It took more than one moment. It took about three minutes while the computer hunted up a relay number for Kralick, who was out of his office, called it, and had him brought to the phone. In time my screen showed me a somber-looking young man, surprisingly ugly, with a tapering wedge of a face and bulging orbital ridges that would have been the pride of some Neanderthal. I was relieved; I had expected one of those collapsible plastic yes-men so numerous in Washington. Whatever else Kralick might be, he at least had not been stamped from the usual mold. His ugliness was in his favor.

"Dr. Garfield," he said at once. "I've been hoping you'd call! Did you have a good vacation?"

"Excellent."

"Your secretary deserves a medal for loyalty, professor. I practically threatened to call out the National Guard if she wouldn't put me through to you. She refused anyway."

"I've warned my staff that I'll vivisect anyone who lets my privacy be broken, Mr. Kralick. What can I do for you?"

"Can you come to Washington tomorrow? All expenses paid."

"What is it this time? A conference on our chances of surviving into the twenty-first century?"

Kralick grinned curtly. "Not a conference, Dr. Garfield. We need your services in a very special way.

We'd like to co-opt a few months of your time and put you to work on a job that no one else in the world can handle."

"A fewmonths? I don't think I can-"

"It's essential, sir. I'm not just making governmental noises now. This is big."

"May I have a detail or two?"

"Not over the phone, I'm afraid."

"You want me to fly to Washington on no day's notice to talk about something you can't tell me about?"

"Yes. If you prefer, I'll come to California to discuss it. But that would mean even more delay, and we've already forfeited so much time that-"

My hand hovered over the cutoff k.n.o.b, and I made sure Kralick knew it. "Unless I get at least a clue, Mr. Kralick, I'm afraid I'll have to terminate this discussion."

He didn't look intimidated. "One clue, then."

"Yes?"

"You're aware of the so-called man from the future who arrived a few weeks ago?"

"More or less."

"What we have in mind involves him. We need you to question him on certain topics. I-"

For the second time in three days I felt that sensation of dropping through a trapdoor. I thought of Jack begging me to talk to Vornan-19; and now here was the government commanding me to do the same.

The world had gone mad.

I cut Kralick off by blurting, "All right. I'll come to Washington tomorrow."

FIVE.

The telephone screen deceives. Kralick in the screen had looked engagingly lithe and agile; Kralick in the flesh turned out to be six feet seven or so, and that look of intellectuality that made his ugly face interesting was wholly engulfed by the impression of ma.s.siveness he projected. He met me at the airport; it was one in the afternoon, Washington time, when I arrived, after having taken a dawn flight out of Los Angeles International. The day was cold and clear, the sky hard, gray, unfriendly.

As we sped along the autotrack to the White House, he insistently stressed the importance of my mission and his grat.i.tude for my cooperation. He offered no details of what he wanted from me. We took the downtown shunt of the track and rolled smoothly through the White House's private bypa.s.s gate.

Somewhere in the bowels of the earth I was duly scanned and declared acceptable, and we ascended into the venerable building. I wondered if the President himself would do the briefing. As it turned out, I never caught sight of the man. I was shown into the Situation Room, which bristled preposterously with communications gear. In a crystal capsule on the main table was a Venusian zoological specimen, a purplish plasmoid that tirelessly sent forth its amoebalike projections in a pa.s.sable imitation of life. An inscription on the base of the capsule said that it had been found on the second expedition. I was surprised: I had not thought we had discovered so many that we could afford to leave them lying around like paperweights in the dens of the bureaucracy.

A brisk little man with cropped gray hair and a flamboyant suit entered the room, almost at a trot. His shoulders were padded like a fullback's and a row of glittering chromed spines jutted from his jacket like vertebrae gone berserk. Obviously this was a man who believed very much in being up to date.

"Marcus Kettridge," he said. "Special a.s.sistant to the President. Glad you're with us, Dr. Garfield."

Kralick said, "What about the visitor?"

"He's been in Copenhagen. The relay came in half an hour ago. Would you like to see it before the briefing?"

"It might be an idea."

Kettridge opened his hand; a tape capsule lay on his palm, and he inserted it. A screen I had not noticed before came to life. I saw Vornan-19 strolling through the baroque fancifulness of the Tivoli Gardens, domed against the weather and showing not a trace of the Danish winter. Patterns of flashing lights stained the sky. He moved like a dancer, controlling every muscle for maximum impetus. By his side walked a blonde giantess, perhaps nineteen years old, with a corona of dazzling hair and a dreamy look on her face. She wore crotch-high shorts and a skimpy bandeau across immense b.r.e.a.s.t.s; she might as well have been naked. Yards of flesh showed. Vornan put his arm around her and idly touched the tip of a finger to each of the deep dimples above her monumental b.u.t.tocks.

Kettridge said, "The girl's a Dane named Ulla Something that he collected yesterday at the Copenhagen Zoo. They spent the night together. He's been doing that everywhere, you know-like an emperor, summoning girls into his bed by royal command."

"Not only girls," rumbled Kralick.

"True. True. In London there was that young hairdresser."

I watched Vornan-19's progress through Tivoli. A curious throng attended him; and in his immediate presence were a dozen brawny Danish police officers with neural whips, a few people who seemed to be government officials, and half a dozen individuals who obviously were reporters. I said. "How do you keep the journalists at bay?"

"It's a pool," Kettridge snapped. "Six reporters represent all the media. They change every day. It was Vornan's idea; he said he liked publicity but he hated to have a mob around him."

The visitor had come to a pavilion where Danish youngsters were dancing. The honkings and skreeings of the band unfortunately were reproduced in perfect clarity, and the boys and girls moved in jerky discontinuity, arms and legs flailing. It was one of those places where the floor is a series of interlocking revolving slidewalks, so that as you stand in place, going through the gyrations of the dance, you are swept on an orbit through the entire hall, confronting partner after partner. Vornan stood watching this in seeming wonder for a while. He smiled that wonderful smile of his and signaled to his bovine consort.

They stepped out onto the dance floor. I saw one of the officials put coins in the slot; clearly Vornan did not deign to handle money himself, and it was necessary for someone to follow after him, paying the bills.

Vornan and the Danish girl took places facing one another and caught the rhythm of the dance. There was nothing difficult about it: blatant pelvic thrusts combined with a pattern of stomping and clutching, just like all the other dances of the past forty years. The girl stood with feet flat, knees flexed, legs far apart, head tipped back; the giant cones of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rose toward the faceted mirrors of the ceiling. Vornan, clearly enjoying himself, adopted the knees-in, elbows-out posture of the boys about him and started to move. He picked up the knack of it easily, after only a brief preliminary moment of uncertainty, and off he went, whirled through the hall by the mechanism beneath the floor, facing now this girl, now that, and performing the explicit erotic movements expected of him.

Nearly all the girls knew who he was, it appeared. Their gasps and expressions of awe made that apparent. The fact that a global celebrity was moving in the throng created a certain amount of confusion, throwing the girls off their pace; one simply stopped moving and stared in rapture at Vornan for the whole period of ninety seconds or so that he was her partner. But there was no serious trouble for the first seven or eight turns. Then Vornan was dancing with a plumply pretty dark-haired girl of about sixteen who became totally catatonic with terror. She froze and twisted jerkily and managed to step backward beyond the electronic guard signal at the rear of her moving strip. A buzzer sounded to warn her, but she was beyond any such guidance, and a moment later she had one foot on each of two strips heading in opposite directions. She went down, her short skirt flipping upward to reveal pudgy pink thighs, and in her fright she grabbed at the legs of the boy nearest her.

He toppled too, and in another moment I had a graphic demonstration of the domino effect, because dancers were losing their balance all over the room. Nearly everyone was on more than one strip at once and was clutching at someone else for support. A wave of collapse rippled across the great hall. And there was Vornan-19, still upright, watching the catastrophe in high good humor. His Junoesque paramour was also on her feet, 180 degrees away from him; but then a groping hand caught her ankle, and she went down like a felled oak, careening into two or three other dancers as she dropped. The scene was straight from the pit: writhing figures everywhere, arms and legs in the air, no one able to rise.

The machinery of the dance pavilion finally crunched to a halt. The untangling took long minutes. Many girls were crying. Some had skinned knees or abraded rumps; one had somehow contrived to lose her skirt in the melee and was crouched in a fetal huddle. Where was Vornan? Vornan was already at the rim of the hall, safely extricating himself the instant the floor stopped moving. The blonde G.o.ddess was beside him.

"He's got an immense talent for disruption," said Kettridge.

Kralick, laughing, said, "This isn't as bad as the business yesterday at the smorgasbord place in Stockholm, when he punched the wrong b.u.t.ton and got the whole table revolving."

The screen darkened. An unsmiling Kettridge turned to me. "This man will be the guest of the United States three days from now, Dr. Garfield. We don't know how long he's staying. We intend to monitor his movements closely and try to head off some of the confusion that he's been known to cause. What we have in mind. Professor, is appointing a committee of five or six leading scholars as-well, guides for the visitor. Actually they'll also be overseers, watchdogs, and . . . spies."

"Does the United States officially believe that he's a visitor from 2999?"

"Officially, yes," said Kettridge. "That is, we're going to treat him as if he's kosher,"

"But-" I spluttered.

Kralick put in, "Privately, Dr. Garfield, we think he's a hoaxer. At least I do, and I believe Mr.

Kettridge does. He's an extremely sharp-witted and enterprising phony. However, for purposes of public opinion, we choose to accept Vornan-19 at face value until there's some reason to think otherwise."

"For G.o.d's sake,why?"

"You know of the Apocalyptist movement, Dr. Garfield?" asked Kralick.

"Well, yes. I can't say I'm an expert, but-"

"So far, Vornan-19 hasn't done anything much more harmful than mesmerizing a roomful of Danish schoolgirls into falling on their b.u.t.ts. The Apocalyptists do real damage. They riot, they loot, they destroy.

They're the force of chaos in our society. We're attempting to contain them before they rip everything apart."

"And by embracing this self-appointed amba.s.sador from the future," I said, "you explode the chief selling point of the Apocalyptists, which is that the world is supposed to come to an end next January 1."

"Exactly."

"Very good," I said. "I had already suspected it. Now you confirm it as official policy. But is it proper to meet ma.s.s insanity with deliberate dishonesty?"

Kettridge said ponderously, "Dr. Garfield, the job of government is to maintain the stability of the governed society. When possible, we like to adhere to the Ten Commandments in so doing. But we reserve the right to meet a threat to the social structure in any feasible way, up to and including the ma.s.s annihilation of hostile forces, which I think you will regard as a more serious action than a little fibbing, and which this government has resorted to on more than one occasion. In short, if we can ward off the Apocalyptist lunacy by giving Vornan-19 a seal of approval, it's worth a bit of moral compromise.

"Besides," said Kralick, "we don't actuallyknow he's a fraud. If he isn't, we're not committing any act of bad faith."

"The possibility must be very soothing to your souls." I said.

I regretted my flippancy at once. Kralick looked hurt, and I didn't blame him.He hadn't set this policy.

One by one, the frightened governments of the world had decided to short-circuit the Apocalyptists by proclaiming Vornan to be a real thing, and the United States was merely falling in line. The decision had been taken on high; Kralick and Kettridge were merely implementing it, and I had no call to impugn their morality. As Kralick had said, it might just turn out that hailing Vornan this way would be not only useful but even correct.

Kettridge fussed with the spines of his ornate costume and did not look at me as he said, "We can understand, Dr. Garfield, that in the academic world people tend to view moral issues in the abstract, but nevertheless-"

"All right," I said wearily, "I suppose I was wrong. I had to put myself on record, that's all. Let's go past that point. Vornan-19 is coming to the United States, and we're going to roll out the red carpet for him.

Fine. Now what do you want from me?"

"Two things," said Kralick. "First: you're widely regarded, sir, as the world's ranking authority on time-reversal physics. We'd like you to provide us with your opinion as to whether it's theoretically possible for a man to travel backward in time as Vornan-19 claims to have done, and how, in your appraisal, it might have been accomplished."

"Well," I said, "I have to be skeptical, because so far we've succeeded only in sending individual electrons backward in time. This converts them into positrons-the antiparticle of the electron, identical in ma.s.s but opposite in charge-and the effect is one of virtually instant annihilation. I see no practical way to sidestep the conversion of matter into antimatter during time-reversal, which means that to account for the purported time trip of Vornan-19, we must first explain how so much ma.s.s can be converted, and then why it is that although presumably composed of antimatter he does not touch off the annihilation effect when-"

Kralick politely cleared his throat. I stopped talking. Kralick said, "I'm sorry that I didn't make myself quite clear. We don't want an immediate reply from you. We'd like a position paper, Dr. Garfield, which you can file in the next forty-eight hours or thereabouts. We'll provide any necessary secretarial a.s.sistance. The President is quite anxious to read what you have to say."