The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  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 it is true, Leo?”

  “If you’re really worried about it, why don’t you burn your manuscript?” 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 manuscript’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 assume it has 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 manuscript. 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 manuscript, 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 ambassador 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. Assuming I could ever get access to him, assuming 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 reassuring 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.

  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 lust.

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

  “Everything.”

  “About the manuscript? 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 breasts, 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 bumping 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 reassuring. 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, sturdy 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 goddess 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 swirl
s 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 cocoon 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 space was being awarded the Goddard 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 few months? 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 knob, 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 massiveness 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 gratitude 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 bypass 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 zoologi
cal specimen, a purplish plasmoid that tirelessly sent forth its amoebalike projections in a passable 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 Assistant 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 breasts; 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 buttocks.

  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.”