The Walking Shadow
Page 8
“We don’t have to chain him to the wall,” said Marcangelo, tiredly. “We can see him and talk to him. He isn’t even thinking about trying to escape into the arms of his would-be liberators. Are you?”
“Not for the moment,” said Paul, dutifully. “I’m not sure that I’d be in any better position there than here.”
“My purpose in being here,” said Marcangelo to Laker, in a tone replete with mock gentleness, “is to prove to Paul that we aren’t his enemies—that we need his help and that we deserve his help. I’m trying to show him that it will be the best thing for everyone, in the long run, if he lends his support to the present administration, if only in the short term. You aren’t helping me by suggesting that we should lock him up and treat him as a hostage, now are you?”
Laker stared at Marcangelo for a few minutes, then looked sideways at Paul, and then back at Marcangelo.
“I’m going to check in,” he muttered, and moved off down the corridor in search of privacy. The other security man, however, remained close at hand, impassively watching and listening.
Rebecca moved closer to Paul, until her arm was almost touching his. Paul put his own arm around her shoulder in reassurance.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked Marcangelo.
“I don’t know,” said the presidential aide, tiredly. “It depends on Lindenbaum and Wishart, and the mobs in the streets. There’s going to be trouble, but how much only God knows—unless he’s confided in his prophet...no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s all right,” said Paul.
“It’s time for you to start thinking,” said Marcangelo, soberly. “For the moment, you’re just a catalyst, helping everything to happen without being involved, but pretty soon, now, you’re going to be out. You’ll be in a position to enter the game as a player, instead of being a pawn in the hands of men like Gray and Scapelhorn...and Adam Wishart. If I were you, I’d be thinking hard right now about what I was going to do when the time came to act.”
“I still don’t know anything about this world,” said Paul defensively. “I’ve been pushed from place to place, shut up in a hospital bed.... I’ve only talked to two people. How am I in a position to make plans when I have no idea what’s at stake, or what’s going on?”
“Come with me,” said Marcangelo, softly. “I’ll show you what’s at stake, and what’s going on.” When both Horne and Sheehan showed signs of alarm, he added: “It’s all right. We aren’t going far.”
He led the way along the corridor to a set of double doors which gave access to a ward containing a dozen beds. None of the beds was occupied, but the ward wasn’t empty. There were four people stretched out horizontally, perfectly still, suspended in mid-air a metre off the floor. They gleamed brightly in the electric light, the surfaces of their bodies like convex distorting mirrors.
“When they go out like that we take the beds away,” said Marcangelo. “They don’t need them, and someone else might. They’re a nuisance, of course, taking up space like that, but we just have to work around them. Of course, when they come out of their hidey-holes—in twenty, or fifty, or a hundred years time—they’ll fall down, but they’ll fall relaxed, like babies. They were sick men when they went, and they’ll be sick men when they come back—no better off for the passage of time, and maybe worse.”
“That’s the normal position for jumping, of course—very few go standing up, the way you did. Eight out of ten go while lying down on a bed, and the beds are practically always taken out from under them. They fall through time, and then they fall through space. The prison has a lot of jumpers. It’s conducive to the habit. We used to go on using the cells even after one or two people had jumped, but we found that when a man’s in a cell with one or two of those it’s practically certain that sooner or later he’s going to follow the example. It was suggested that therein lay the answer to the problem of criminality, and that we could give every single offender a long-term sentence simply by encouraging him to absent himself for fifty years or so, but that wasn’t really what we wanted.
“I don’t know how many jumpers there are—nobody does. I’ve lived all my life with them around, and I’ve simply become accustomed to them. You just get used to it...knowing that if you bump into one in the dark, you hurt yourself. You get to take them for granted. I’ve never for one moment been tempted to become one myself, because I know how pointless it all is. The people who jump are the sick, the desperate, the unhappy and the neurotic. Every single one of them is trying to escape, but the things they’re trying to escape from are all inside themselves. They all know that, but the knowledge is counterbalanced by a crazy kind of hope that somehow it will all be different, that the world will be Utopia and that they’ll be reborn. You’re not responsible for their having that hope, Paul, but it’s tied to your name, and only you can cancel it out and make people see that they have to fight their problems here and now. In the long run, if enough people escape from the unhappy present, there won’t be a future to jump to at all, because there’ll be no one who can build it.”
While Marcangelo was speaking, Paul approached the nearest mirrored statue. He placed his hand on the man’s head, touching it lightly as if ready to snatch back if the surface were hot. It wasn’t hot or cold—it was just there.
“Why does he float like that?” asked Paul.
“Nobody knows. We think that it’s not as simple as his time-rate having slowed down. If it were just that, he’d look perfectly ordinary. It’s as if the jumpers cut themselves right out of the fabric of spacetime, leaving a hole—not an empty hole, but a hole in spacetime itself, which can’t be reached from spacetime, so that no light can pass into it and no matter can penetrate it. It seems to have substance, to be immovable and impervious, but there’s a kind of illusion. The reason it’s so solid and so hard is simply that it’s absolute nothingness. Do you remember old cartoon films, where the characters would fall over cliffs or be blasted through stone walls, and in the ground or the wall there would appear a cut-out shaped like the character? That’s what this is, except that it’s three-dimensional. It’s just a cut-out, where something’s gone from the fabric of existence, and to which it will return, aged by no more than a few seconds, after the passage of many years.”
“But if he were fixed in a particular position in space the Earth would move away from him at several miles per second,” said Paul.
“You know better than that,” replied Marcangelo. “There are no positions in space, in any absolute sense. All motion is relative. The hole is stationary in spacetime, within the Earth’s gravity well.”
“What causes it? What kind of energy is used to project people into these holes? How is it that people can do it to themselves?”
“We don’t know. We have no idea what kind of energy is involved or how it comes about that people can move themselves out of spacetime and leave holes behind. It’s been said that what’s happening is analogous to the situation of a two-dimensional being in a two-dimensional perceived world, who develops the ability to move in a third dimension, but that tells us nothing at all about causes. We have no explanation of why it suddenly began to happen. Again, it’s been said in support of the flatlander analogy that perhaps the universe itself underwent some kind of basic change, imperceptible to us, which actually brought into being this extra dimension and created an opportunity that wasn’t ever there before. It’s even been argued that this new dimension may have been deliberately opened up as a trap to catch people, by some kind of predatory creatures, or fishermen in the far future. It’s pure speculation, but you know how people are. They like a story when they don’t know.”
“Belief is only necessary in the absence of knowledge,” quoted Paul, “but in the absence of knowledge, belief is necessary.”
“Of course,” said Marcangelo, dryly. “Science and Metascience. You’re an expert on the speculative imagination and its utility. You could probably make up stories far better than we can.”
“This is supposed to be a moral lesson,” Paul commented.
“Damn right,” agreed Marcangelo. The hardness drained from his voice, however, as he went on: “None of this is any fault of yours. You knew nothing about it, and you certainly didn’t plan anything. But you have to realize how important your name has become, and your potential now, as a catalyst who could totally transform the historical situation. Your power is limited—most of it is only apparent, because it won’t take long for the vast majority of your followers to realize gut-wise what they’ve always known intellectually—that you aren’t a miracle-worker with a warrant from God to preside over the rebirth of the human world. You can’t even begin to fulfill the role that history and the popular imagination have carved out for you, but there’s still a great deal that you can do. You still have a voice that people want to hear, and even if you can’t tell them what they want to hear, you can make them listen. Some of them, at least, will listen to reason if it comes from your mouth. You can go some way to cancelling out the effect that the example of your first jump had upon the world. You can tell them that time-slipping isn’t any kind of solution to any kind of problem. You can ask them to redirect their hopes and their efforts to salvage rather than salvation—to the remaking of this world rather than to idle Utopian dreams that are incapable of fulfillment. I don’t know how much even you can achieve, but you must see that you have to try. You must.”
“You said before that some people can’t do it?” said Paul, half to himself, as if he was still contemplating the essential mystery of the silver statue while Marcangelo’s urgent pleading passed him by.
“So it seems,” agreed Marcangelo. “But that doesn’t mean that the people involved redirect their efforts wholly to the affairs of the present day. Some of them do little but trudge from one guru to the next, one set of mental exercises to the next, convinced that, simply because they can’t do it, it must be something infinitely valuable. The people who are running the world—not just the government, but everybody who’s doing a useful job—aren’t, for the most part, people who’ve tried to jump to Utopia and failed. They’re the people who don’t want to jump, who genuinely believe that the real future has to be made, and that there’s no short cut. People like me.”
“If there are enough of you,” said Paul, “maybe you could keep the world going for the time-jumpers. You couldn’t build them a Utopia, but you could at least maintain a world that could feed them and offer them a place to rest. You could make time-jumping a viable way of life.”
“Sure,” said Marcangelo. “Do you know the fable of the ant and the grasshopper?”
“The ants labored all summer while the grasshopper played and whistled,” answered Paul. “And when winter came he asked the ants to let him into the nest so that he could shelter from the cold.”
“And they told him to go whistle,” Marcangelo finished for him.
“But there are others,” Paul went on, calmly, “who don’t actually try to jump. It just happens to them...as it happened to me. They’re not trying to run away. And how can you tell, in any particular case, whether it was deliberate or not?”
“As far as we can tell,” said Marcangelo, “only one slip in fifty is an accident. It’s only an estimate, because the testimony of the jumpers themselves isn’t available. But what we do know is that damn few of the dedicated workers disappear through the universe’s asshole.”
“I see,” said Paul. “But you do understand, don’t you, why my immediate sympathies are with them rather than with you? I’m one of them, and I have the memory of what happened to me on my awakening fresh in my mind. A memory of being caged, hunted...their predicament seems a good deal more real to me at this moment than yours.”
“I know that,” said Marcangelo. “But you’ll come round to seeing things our way. I know that. It’s just that there isn’t much time—that’s why I’m trying to make you see now. You have to make up your mind quickly.”
“Because I have to save the world for civilization and the sanctity of motherhood,” murmured Paul.
“It’s not quite as dramatic as that,” replied Marcangelo, his voice level and serious. “But you have to help. Without your help, the balance just might tip against us.”
“Maybe so,” admitted Paul, turning away from the mirrored face to look first at Marcangelo and then at Rebecca, “but it occurs to me that if I throw in with you, and do what you want, I’ll seem to virtually all those who call themselves my followers to be betraying them. And you know, don’t you, what happens to prophets who betray their followers?”
“Sometimes,” continued Marcangelo, harshly, “it happens even to prophets who don’t.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Diehl stared across the table at Lindenbaum, his face the color of chalk.
“It’s fixed,” said the president. “I’m going out to meet him now.”
“Where?” demanded Diehl.
“Does it matter?”
“You know that it matters. How the hell am I supposed to provide you with security cover?”
“You aren’t supposed to. That’s part of the deal. I go alone. I can take a driver and one other man, but they stay with the car. The meeting is right out in the open, with nowhere close at hand that either of us could use as cover to plant extra men. He’s not going to try anything stupid, because he’s nothing to gain by it. Neither have I.”
“If you were killed—or even temporarily removed from the scene—there’d be chaos here. You know that...and so does Wishart. Vanetti could take over, but it’s not just a matter of taking over. Appearances matter, especially in a situation as delicately balanced as this. What do you think the cultists will feel when the news breaks that not only is Heisenberg out of our reach inside the prison but that the president’s disappeared? They’ll be declaring the millennium before nightfall. You can’t go.”
“It’s fixed,” repeated the president. “The matter’s closed. I’ll have a police escort to the city limits, and then I’ll be on my own. I’ll use an armored limousine. I’ll take Richardson with me, and my usual driver. Richardson will be in radio contact throughout. Nothing will go wrong, and I’ll be back before dusk. Until then, stay calm. Preserve the balance. Wishart’s people won’t try to force the issue—they’re dependent on this meeting as much as we are. I’m going to brief Vanetti now, and I’ll leave in twenty minutes.”
Diehl, his face quite bloodless, found it something of an effort to stay calm and to keep his fingers from trembling. But he did so, until Lindenbaum had gone from the room.
Then he reached for the phone, and said: “Get me the car pool. Now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Paul lay back on the bed and put his hands over his face. Marcangelo had left him in his room, alone with Rebecca, and was waiting out in the corridor with Laker, Horne and Sheehan. There was nothing to do but wait—there had been no communication by phone for over two hours.
“I don’t understand any of this,” said Paul, in a low whisper, as though reluctantly confiding a secret.
“No,” said Rebecca. “I don’t suppose there’s any way that you could.”
“What is it that people expect of me? What do you expect of me?”
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “I’ve never even thought about it much, though it seems stupid to say it, now. I never knew exactly what I could expect. It’s just...a feeling that when you came back things would get better. A kind of magic formula—the day Paul Heisenberg returns—I don’t know what we meant by it. We didn’t think...we didn’t try to analyze....”
“It’s all right,” said Paul, sitting up and reaching out to catch one of her wrists. The gesture was largely unnecessary. She wasn’t even close to tears. Her tone was
one of puzzlement rather than anguish. She seemed surprised when he touched her, but glad of the contact.
“What does he want you to do?” she asked.
“He wanted me to go on television, to tell people to be calm and to wait,” he told her. “But that was before all this blew up. There’ll be no television broadcast until the deadlock breaks down, and then there’ll be a new situation. Then there’s the rumor about alien spaceships approaching Earth—I don’t even know whether that’s true, but if it is...it seems almost absurd to be making plans at all, let alone for the saving of civilization.”
Rebecca hadn’t heard of the spaceships, but she said nothing about it now. It didn’t really seem important. “You shouldn’t judge the government by one man,” she said, slowly. “He’s been sent to try to persuade you, but you don’t know what they’ve been doing—the ways they’ve tried to force people to do the kinds of work they want them to do...the way they’ve tried to punish and penalize people who won’t co-operate with them...and the way they’ve tried to attack the cults and the Movement. They’re bad, Paul. We have to get rid of them. If we could only have got you across the river, to Adam Wishart...he would have been able to tell you everything. He’s a good man, Paul...he’s on the side of the people—the ordinary people.”
“Somehow,” said Paul, “I can’t quite believe that of Adam Wishart. A good man, yes, or good at his job, at least, and maybe the government is brutal and oppressive...but Adam Wishart as the Robin Hood of the twenty-first century—sorry, the twenty-second—I just can’t see. He’s a man who could sell himself as the people’s champion, but he’s too hard and cynical really to live the part. On the other hand, if that’s what the situation needs....”
He broke off as he was interrupted by the sound of a ringing telephone. He came rapidly to his feet and moved to the door, opening it just as Marcangelo answered the call. Horne and Sheehan were also there, looking expectant, but Laker had disappeared.