The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  The days that followed were soothing ones. My nerves uncoiled. Sometimes I walked alone in the desert; sometimes they came with me. They took me to their Indian ruin. Jack knelt to show me the potsherds in the sand: triangular wedges of white pottery marked by black bars and dots. He indicated the sunken contours of a pit-dwelling; he showed me the fragmentary foundations of a building wall made of rough stone mortared with mud.

  “Is this Papago stuff?” I asked.

  “I doubt it. I’m still checking, but I’m sure it’s too good for the Papagos. My guess is that it’s a colony of ancestral Hopis, say a thousand years back, coming downstate out of Kayenta. Shirley’s supposed to bring me some tapes on archaeology next time she goes into Tucson. The data library doesn’t have any of the really advanced texts.”

  “You could request them,” I said. “It wouldn’t be hard for the Tucson library to transfer facsims to the dataphone people and shoot them right out to you. If Tucson doesn’t have the right books, they can scoop them from L.A. The whole idea of this data network is that you can get what you need at home, right away, when—”

  “I know,” Jack said gently. “But I didn’t want to start too much of a fuss. The next thing you know, I might have a team of archaeologists out here. We’ll get our books the old-fashioned way, by going to the library.”

  “How long have you known about this site?”

  “A year,” he said. “There’s no hurry.”

  I envied him his freedom from all normal pressures. How had these two done it, finding a life like this for themselves in the desert? For one jealous moment I wished it were possible for me to do the same. But I could hardly stay permanently with them, though they might not object, and the idea of living by myself in some other corner of the desert was not appealing. No. My place was at the University. So long as I had the privilege of escaping to the Bryants when the need arrived, I could seek solace in my work. And at that thought I felt a surge of joy; after only two days here, I was beginning to think hopefully of my work again!

  Time flowed easily by. We celebrated the advent of 1999 with a little party at which I got mildly drunk. My tensions eased. A burst of summer warmth hit the desert during the first week in January, and we stretched naked in the sun, mindlessly happy. A winter-flowering cactus in their garden produced a cascade of yellow blooms, and bees appeared from somewhere. I let a great furry bumblebee with thighs swollen with pollen alight on my arm, and twitching only slightly, made no effort to shoo him. After a moment he flew to Shirley and explored the warm valley between her breasts; then he vanished. We laughed. Who could fear such a fat bumblebee?

  Almost ten years had gone by, now, since Jack had resigned from the University and taken Shirley into the desert. The turning of the year brought the usual reflections on the passage of time, and we had to admit that we had changed very little. It seemed as if a kind of stasis had settled over us all in the late 1980’s. Though I was past 50, I had the appearance and health of a much younger man, and my hair was still black, my face unlined. For that I gave thanks, but I had paid a steep price for my preservation: I was no further along in my work this first week of 1999 than I had been the first week of 1989. I still sought ways of confirming my theory that the flow of time is two-directional and that at least on the subatomic level it can be reversed. For a full decade I had moved in roundabout ways, getting nowhere, while my fame grew willy-nilly and my name was often mentioned for the Nobel. Take it as Garfield’s Law that when a theoretical physicist becomes a public figure, something has gone awry with his career. To journalists I was a glamorous wizard who would someday give the world a time machine; to myself I was a futile failure trapped in a maze of detours.

  The ten years had flecked the edges of Jack’s temples with gray, but otherwise time’s metamorphosis had been a positive one for him. He was more muscular, a brawny man who had utterly shed that indoor pallor; his body rippled with strength and he moved with an easy grace that belied his vanished awkwardness. Exposure to the sun had darkened his skin for good. He seemed confident, potent, assured, where once he had been wary and tentative.

  Shirley had gained most of all. The changes in her were slight but all to the good. I remembered her as lean, coltish, too ready to giggle, too slender in the thigh for the fullness of her breasts. The years had adjusted those minor flaws. Her golden-tan body was magnificent in its proportions now, and that made her seem all the less naked when she was nude, for she was like some Aphrodite of Phidias walking about under the Arizona sun. Ten pounds heavier than in the California days, yes, but every ounce of it placed perfectly. She was flawless, and, like Jack, she had that deep reservoir of strength, that total self-assurance, which guided her every move and every word. Her beauty was still ripening. In two or three more years she would be blinding to behold. I did not wish to think about her as she one day would be, withered and shrunken. It was hard to imagine that these two — and especially she — were condemned to the same harsh sentence under which we all must live.

  To be with them was joy. I felt whole enough, in the second week of my visit, to discuss the problems of my work with Jack in some detail. He listened sympathetically, following with an effort, and seemed not to understand much. Was it true? Could a mind as fine as his have lost contact so thoroughly with physics? At any rate he listened to me, and it did me good. I was groping in darkness; I felt as though I was more distant from my goal now than I had been five or eight years before. I needed a listener, and I found him in Jack.

  The difficulty lay in the annihilation of antimatter. Move an electron back in time and its charge changes; it becomes a positron and immediately seeks its antiparticle. To find is to perish. A billionth of a second and the tiny explosion comes, and a photon is released. We could sustain our time-reversal thrust only by sending our particle back into a matter-free universe.

  Even if we could find enough power to hurl larger particles — protons and neutrons and even alphas — backward in time, we would still enter the same trap. Whatever we sent to the past would be annihilated so swiftly that it would be the merest microevent on our tracking scanner. The newstapes to the contrary, there was no chance at all of true time travel; a man sent back in time would be a superbomb, assuming that a living thing could survive the transition into antimatter in the first place. Since this part of our theory seemed incontestable, we had been exploring the notion of a matter-free universe, seeking some pocket of nothingness into which we could thrust our backward-going traveler, containing it while we monitored it. But here we were beyond our depth.

  Jack said, “You want to open up a synthetic universe?”

  “Essentially.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “In theory we can. On paper. We set up a strain pattern that breaches the wall of the continuum. Then we thrust our backward-moving electron through the breach.”

  “But how can you monitor it?”

  “We can’t,” I said. “That’s where we’re stuck.”

  “Of course,” Jack murmured. “Once you introduce anything but the electron into the universe, it’s no longer matter-free, and you get the annihilation that you don’t want. But then you’ve got no way of observing your own experiment.”

  “Call it Garfield’s Uncertainty Principle,” I said faintly. “The act of observing the experiment queers it instantaneously. Do you see why we’re hung up?”

  “Have you made any efforts at opening this adjoining universe of yours?”

  “Not yet. We don’t want to go to the expense until we’re sure we can do something with it. For that matter, we’ve got a little further checking to do before we dare try it. You don’t go about ripping space-time open until you’ve run a mock-up of every possible consequence.”

  He came over to me and punched me lightly in the shoulder. “Leo, Leo, Leo, don’t you ever wish you had decided to become a barber instead?”

  “No. But there are times I wish physics were a little easier.”

  “Then yo
u might as well have been a barber.”

  We laughed. Together we walked to the sundeck, where Shirley lay reading. It was a bright, crisp January afternoon, the sky a metallic blue, great slabs of clouds poised on the tips of the mountains, the sun big and warm. I felt very much at ease. In my two weeks here I had succeeded in externalizing my work problem, so that it seemed almost to belong to someone else. If I could get far enough outside it, I might find some daring new way to slice through the obstacles once I went back to Irvine.

  The trouble was that I no longer thought in daring new ways. I thought in clever combinations of the old ways, and that was not good enough. I needed an outsider to examine my dilemma and show me with a quick intuitive flash which way the solution might be reached. I needed Jack. But Jack had retired from physics. He had chosen to disconnect his superb mind.

  On the sundeck Shirley rolled over, sat up, grinned at us. Her body glistened with beads of perspiration. “What brings you two outdoors?”

  “Despair,” I said. “The walls were closing in.”

  “Sit down and warm up, then.” She tapped a button that cut off the radio outlet. I had not even noticed that the radio was on until the sound died away. Shirley said, “I’ve just been listening to the latest on the man from the future.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Vornan-19. He’s coming to the United States!”

  “I don’t think I know anything about—”

  Jack shot a tense glance at Shirley, the first time I had ever seen him reprove her. Instantly my interest was engaged. Was this something they were keeping from me?

  “It’s just nonsense,” Jack said. “Shirley shouldn’t have bothered you with it.”

  “Will you tell me what you’re talking about?”

  Shirley said, “He’s the living answer to the Apocalyptists. He claims to have come back from the year 2999, as a sort of tourist, you know. He showed up in Rome, stark naked on the Spanish Stairs, and when they tried to arrest him, he knocked a policeman out with a touch of his fingertips. Since then he’s been causing all sorts of confusion.”

  “A stupid hoax,” Jack said. “Obviously some moron is tired of pretending that the world is coming to an end next January, and decided to pretend that he was a visitor from a thousand years from now. And people are believing him. It’s the times we live in. When hysteria’s a way of life, you follow every lunatic who comes along.”

  “Suppose he is a time traveler, though!” Shirley said.

  “If he is, I’d like to meet him,” I put in. “He might be able to answer a few questions I’ve got about time-reversal phenomena.” I chuckled. Then I stopped chuckling. It wasn’t funny at all. I stiffened and said, “You’re right, Jack. He’s nothing but a charlatan. Why are we wasting all this time talking about him?”

  “Because there’s a possibility he’s real, Leo.” Shirley got to her feet and shook out the long golden hair rippling to her shoulders. “The interviews make him out to be very strange. He talks about the future as though he’s been there. Oh, maybe he’s only clever, but he’s entertaining. He’s a man I’d like to meet.”

  “When did he appear?”

  “Christmas Day,” said Shirley.

  “While I was here? And you didn’t mention it?”

  She shrugged. “We assumed you were following the newscasts and didn’t find it an interesting topic.”

  “I haven’t been near the screen since I came.”

  “Then you ought to do some catching up,” she said.

  Jack looked displeased. It was unusual to see this rift between them, and he had looked notably cross when Shirley had expressed a wish to meet the time traveler. Odd, I thought. With his interest in the Apocalyptists, why should he discriminate against the latest manifestation of irrationality?

  My own feeling about the man from the future was a neutral one. The business of time travel amused me, of course; I had broken my soul to prove its practical impossibility, and I was hardly likely to accept cheerfully the claim that it had been accomplished. No doubt that was why Jack had tried to shield me from this item of news, believing that I needed no distorted parodies of my own work to remind me of the problems I had fled from just before Christmas. But I was getting free of my depression; time-reversal no longer triggered bleakness in me. I was in the mood to find out more about this fraud. The man seemed to have charmed Shirley via television, and anything that charmed Shirley was of interest to me.

  One of the networks ran a documentary on Vornan-19 that evening, preempting an hour of prime time usually taken up by one of the kaleidoscope shows. That in itself revealed the depth and extent of public interest in the story. The documentary was aimed at Robinson Crusoes like myself who had neglected to follow the developments thus far, and so I was able to bring myself up to date all at once.

  We floated on pneumochairs before the wall screen and outlasted the commercials. Finally a resonant voice said, “What you are about to see is in part a computer simulation.” The camera revealed the Piazza di Spagna on Christmas morning, with a sprinkling of figures posed on the Stairs and in the piazza as though the computer simulating them had been programmed by Tiepolo. Into this neatly reconstructed frieze of casual bystanders came the simulated image of Vornan-19 descending on a shining arc from the heavens. The computers do this sort of thing so well today. It does not really matter that a camera’s eye fails to record some sudden major event, for it can always be hauled from time’s abyss by a cunning re-creation. I wonder what future historians will make of these simulations… if the world survives past the first of next month, of course.

  The descending figure was nude, but the simulators ducked the problem of the conflicting testimony of the nuns and the others by showing us only a rear view. There was no prudishness about that, I’m sure; the television coverage of the Apocalyptist revelry that Shirley and Jack had shown me had been quite explicitly revealing of the flesh, and apparently it is now a standard ploy of the networks to work anatomy into the newscasts whenever such displays fall under the protection of the Supreme Court decision on legitimate journalistic observation. I have no objection to this coverage of uncoverage; the nudity taboos are long overdue for discard, and I suppose that anything encouraging a well-informed citizenry is desirable, even pandering in the newscasts. But there is always cowardice an inch behind the faзade of integrity. Vornan-19’s loins went unsimulated because three nuns had sworn he had been covered by a misty nimbus, and it was easier to sidestep the issue than to risk offending the devout by contradicting the testimony of the holy sisters.

  I watched Vornan-19 inspecting the piazza. I saw him mount the Spanish Stairs. I smiled as the excited policeman rushed up, proffered his cloak, and was knocked to the ground by an unseen thunderbolt.

  The colloquy with Horst Klein followed. This was done most cleverly, for Klein himself was used, conversing with a dubbed simulation of the time traveler. The young German reconstructed his own conversation with Vornan, while the computer played back what Klein recalled the visitor to have said.

  The scene shifted. Now we were indoors, in a high room with congruent polygons inscribed on the walls and ceiling, and with the smooth, even glow of thermoluminescence illuminating the faces of a dozen men. Vornan-19 was in custody, voluntarily, for no one could touch him without being smitten by that electric-eel voltage of his. He was being interrogated. The men about him were skeptical, hostile, amused, angered in turn. This, too, was a simulation; no one had bothered to make a record at the time.

  Speaking in English, Vornan-19 repeated what he had told Horst Klein. The interrogators challenged him on various points. Aloof, tolerant of their hostility, Vornan parried their thrusts. Who was he? A visitor. Where was he from? The year 2999. How had he come here? By time transport. Why was he here? To view the medieval world at first hand.

  Jack snickered. “I like that. We’re medievals to him!”

  “It’s a convincing touch,” said Shirley.

  “
The simulators dreamed it up,” I pointed out. “So far we haven’t heard an authentic word.”

  But shortly we did. Bridging the events of the past ten days in a few words, the program’s narrator described how Vornan-19 had moved into the most imposing suite of an elegant hotel on the Via Veneto, how he was holding court there for all interested comers, how he had obtained a wardrobe of fine contemporary clothes by requesting one of Rome’s costliest tailors to attend to his needs. The whole problem of credibility had seemingly been bypassed. What astonished me was the ease with which Rome appeared to accept his story at face value. Did they really believe he came from the future? Or was the Roman attitude a huge joke, a self-indulgent romp?

  The screen showed us shots of Apocalyptist pickets outside his hotel, and suddenly I understood why the hoax was succeeding. Vornan-19 did have something to offer a troubled world. Accept him, and one accepted the future. The Apocalyptists were attempting to deny the future. I watched them: the grotesque masks, the painted bodies, the wanton capers, the signs held high, crying, REJOICE! THE END IS NEAR! In fury they shook their fists at the hotel and cast sacks of living light at the building, so that trickles of gleaming red and blue pigment streamed down the weathered masonry. The man from the future was the nemesis of their cult. An epoch racked by fears of imminent extinction turned to him easily, naturally, and hopefully. In an apocalyptic age all wonders are welcome.

  “Last night in Rome,” said the narrator, “Vornan-19 held his first live press conference. Thirty reporters representing the major global news services questioned him.”