The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  Then I spent a few moments contemplating my glowing words in the vibrant but temporary green gleam on the screen. I brooded on the fact that the President of the United States, by executive decision, had chosen to look upon Vornan-19’s claims as convincing ones. I pondered the efficacy of telling the President to his face that he was party to a fraud. I debated whether to forfeit my own integrity for the sake of keeping the top man’s conscience from twinging, and then I said to hell with it and told the computer to print what I had dictated and transfer it to the Presidential data files.

  A minute later my personal copy bounced out of the output slot, typed, justified on both margins, and neatly stitched. I folded it, put it in my pocket, and called Kralick.

  “I’m finished,” I said, “I’d like to get out of here, now.”

  He came for me. It was very late afternoon, which is to say it was a bit past midday on the time system my metabolism was accustomed to, and I was hungry. I asked Kralick about lunch. He looked a little puzzled until he realized the time-zone problem. “It’s almost dinnertime for me,” he said. “Look, why don’t we go across the street and have a drink together, and then I’ll show you to your suite in the hotel. Then I can arrange some dinner for you, if that’s all right. An early dinner instead of a late lunch.”

  “Good enough,” I told him.

  Like Virgil in reverse, he guided me upward out of the maze beneath the White House, and we emerged in the open air at twilight. The city had had a light snowfall while I had been underground, I saw. Melting coils were humming in the sidewalks, and robot sweepers drifted dreamily through the streets, sucking up the slush with their long greedy hoses. A few flakes were still falling. In the shining towers of Washington the lights glittered like jewels against the blue-black afternoon sky. Kralick and I left the White House grounds by a side gate and cut across Pennsylvania Avenue in a knight’s move that brought us into a small, dim cocktail lounge. He folded his long legs under the table with difficulty.

  It was one of the automatic places that had been so popular a few years back: a control console at each table, a computerized mixologist in the back room, and an elaborate array of spigots. Kralick asked me what I’d have, and I said filtered rum. He punched it into the console and ordered Scotch and soda for himself. The credit plate lit up; he pushed his card into the slot. An instant later the drinks gurgled from the spigots.

  “Drink high,” he said.

  “The same.”

  I let the rum slip down my gullet. It went down easily, landing on no solid food to speak of, and began to infiltrate my nervous system. Shamelessly I asked for a refill while Kralick was still unwinding himself on his first. He tossed me a thoughtful look, as if telling himself that nothing in my dossier had indicated I was an alcoholic. But he got me the drink.

  “Vornan has gone on to Hamburg,” Kralick said abruptly. “He’s studying night life along the Reepersbahn.”

  “I thought that was closed down years ago.”

  “They run it as a tourist attraction, complete with imitation sailors who come ashore and get into brawls. God knows how he ever heard of it, but you can bet there’ll be a fine brawl there tonight.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s probably going on now. Six hours ahead of us. Tomorrow he’s in Brussels. Then Barcelona for a bullfight. And then New York.”

  “God help us.”

  “God,” said Kralick, “is bringing the world to an end in eleven months and — what is it? — sixteen days?” He laughed thickly. “Not soon enough. If He’d do the job tomorrow, we wouldn’t have to put up with Vornan-19.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a crypto-Apocalyptist!”

  “I’m a cryptoboozer,” he said. “I started on this stuff at lunchtime and my head’s spinning, Garfield. Do you know, I was a lawyer once? Young, bright, ambitious, a decent practice. Why did I want to go into the Government?”

  “You ought to punch for an antistim,” I said guardedly.

  “You know, you’re right.”

  He ordered himself a pill, and then, as an afterthought, ordered a third rum for me. My earlobes felt a little thick. Three drinks in ten minutes? Well, I could always have an antistim too. The pill arrived and Kralick swallowed it; he grimaced as his metabolism went through the speedup that would burn the backlog of alcohol out of it. For a long moment he sat there shivering. Then he pulled himself together.

  “Sorry. It hit me all at once.”

  “Feel better?”

  “Much,” he said. “Did I say anything classified?”

  “I doubt it. Except you were wishing the world would end tomorrow.”

  “Strictly a mood. Nothing religious about it. Do you mind if I call you Leo?”

  “I’d prefer it.”

  “Good. Leo, look, I’m sober now, and what I’m saying is the straight orbit. I’ve handed you a lousy job, and I’m sorry about it. If there’s anything I can do to make your life more comfortable while you’re playing nursemaid to this futuristic quack, just ask me. It’s not my money I’ll be spending. I know you like your comforts, and you’ll have them.”

  “I appreciate that — ah, Sanford.”

  “Sandy.”

  “Sandy.”

  “For instance, tonight. You came in on short notice, and I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to contact any friends. Would you like a companion for dinner… and afterward?”

  That was thoughtful of him. Ministering to the needs of the aging bachelor scientist. “Thanks,” I said. “but I think I’ll manage by myself tonight. Get caught up with my thoughts, get coordinated to your time-zone—”

  “It won’t be any trouble.”

  I shrugged the matter aside. We nibbled small algae crackers and listened to the distant hiss of the speakers in the bar’s sound system. Kralick did most of the talking. He mentioned the names of a few of my fellow members of the Vornan committee, among them F. Richard Heyman, the historian, and Helen McIlwain, the anthropologist, and Morton Fields of Chicago, the psychologist. I nodded sagely. I approved.

  “We checked everything carefully,” said Kralick. “I mean, we didn’t want to put two people on the committee who had had a feud or something of that sort. So we searched the entire data files to trace the relationships. Believe me, it was a job. We had to reject two good candidates because they’d been involved in, well, rather irregular incidents with one of the other members of the committee, and that was a disappointment.”

  “You keep files on fornication among the learned?”

  “We try to keep files on everything, Leo. You’d be surprised. But anyway we put a committee together, finally, finding replacements for those who wouldn’t serve, and replacements for those who turned up incompatible with the others on the data check, and arranging and rearranging—”

  “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to write Vornan off as a hoax and forget about him?”

  Kralick said, “There was an Apocalyptist rally in Santa Barbara last night. Did you hear about it?”

  “No.”

  “A hundred thousand people gathered on the beach. In the course of getting there they did two million dollars worth of property damage, estimated. After the usual orgies they began to march into the sea like lemurs.”

  “Lemmings.”

  “Lemmings.” Kralick’s thick fingers hovered over the bar console a moment, then withdrew. “Picture a hundred thousand chanting Apocalyptists from all over California marching stark naked into the Pacific on a January day. We’re still getting the figures on the drownings. Over a hundred, at least, and God knows how much pneumonia, and ten girls were trampled to death. They do things like that in Asia, Leo. Not here. Not here. You see what we’re up against? Vornan will smash this movement. He’ll tell us how it is in 2999, and people will stop believing that The End Is Nigh. The Apocalyptists will collapse. Another rum?”

  “I think I ought to get to my hotel.”

  “Right.” He uncoiled himself and we went out of the bar. As he walked around the edges of
Lafayette Park, Kralick said. “I think I ought to warn you that the information media know you’re in town and will start to bombard you with interview requests and whatnot. We’ll screen you as well as we can, but they’ll probably get through to you. The answer to all questions is—”

  “No comment.”

  “Precisely. You’re a star. Leo.”

  Snow was falling again, somewhat more actively than the melting coils were programmed to handle. Thin crusts of white were forming here and there on the pavement, and it was deeper in the shrubbery. Pools of newly melted water glistened. The snow twinkled like starlight as it drifted down. The stars themselves were hidden; we might have been alone in the universe. I felt a great loneliness. In Arizona now the sun was shining.

  As we entered the grand old hotel where I was staying. I turned to Kralick and said, “I think I’ll accept that offer of a dinner companion after all.”

  SIX

  I sensed the real power of the United States Government for the first time when the girl came to my suite about seven that evening. She was a tall blonde with hair like spun gold. Her eyes were brown, not blue, her lips were full, her posture was superb. In short, she looked astonishingly like Shirley Bryant.

  Which meant that they had been keeping tabs on me for a long time, observing and recording the sort of woman I usually chose, and producing one of exactly the right qualifications on a moment’s notice. Did that mean that they thought Shirley was my mistress? Or that they had drawn an abstract profile of all my women, and had come up with a Shirley-like girl because I had (unconsciously!) been picking Shirley-surrogates all along?

  This girl’s name was Martha. I said, “You don’t look like a Martha at all. Marthas are short and dark and terribly intense, with long chins. They smell of cigarettes all the time.”

  “Actually,” Martha said, “I’m a Sidney. But the government didn’t think you’d go for a girl named Sidney.”

  Sidney, or Martha, was an ace, a star. She was too good to be true, and I suspected that she had been created golemlike in a government laboratory to serve my needs. I asked her if that was so, and she said yes. “Later on,” she said, “I’ll show you where I plug in.”

  “How often do you need a recharge?”

  “Two or three times a night, sometimes. It depends.”

  She was in her early twenties, and she reminded me forcibly of the co-eds around the campus. Perhaps she was a robot, perhaps she was a call girl; but she acted like neither — more like a lively, intelligent, mature human being who just happened to be willing to make herself available for duties like this. I didn’t dare ask her if she did things of this sort all the time.

  Because of the snow, we ate in the hotel dining room. It was an old-fashioned place with chandeliers and heavy draperies, head waiters in evening clothes and an engraved menu a yard long. I was glad to see it; the novelty of using menu cubes had worn-off by now, and it was graceful to read our choices from a printed card while a live human being took down our wishes with a pad and pencil, just as in bygone times.

  The government was paying. We ate well. Fresh caviar, oyster cocktails, turtle soup, Chateaubriand for two, very rare. The oysters were the delicate little Olympias from Puget Sound. They have much to commend them, but I miss the true oysters of my youth. I last ate them in 1976 at the Bicentennial Fair — when they were five dollars a dozen, because of the pollution. I can forgive mankind for destroying the dodo, but not for blotting out bluepoints.

  Much satiated, we went back upstairs. The perfection of the evening was marred only by a nasty scene in the lobby when I was set upon by a few of the media boys looking for a story.

  “Professor Garfield—”

  “ — is it true that—”

  “ — words on your theory of—”

  “ — Vornan-19—”

  “No comment.” “No comment.” “No comment.” “No comment.”

  Martha and I escaped into the elevator. I slapped a privacy seal on my door — old-fashioned as this hotel is, it has modern conveniences — and we were safe. She looked at me coquettishly, but her coyness didn’t last long. She was long and smooth, a symphony in pink and gold, and she wasn’t any robot, although I found where she plugged in. In her arms I was able to forget about men from 2999, drowning Apocalyptists, and the dust gathering on my laboratory desk. If there is a heaven for Presidential aides, let Sandy Kralick ascend to it when his time comes.

  In the morning we breakfasted in the room, took a shower together like newlyweds, and stood looking out the window at the last traces of the night’s snow. She dressed; her black plastic mesh sheath seemed out of place in the morning’s pale light, but she was still lovely to behold. I knew I would never see her again.

  As she left, she said, “Someday you must tell me about time-reversal, Leo.”

  “I don’t know a thing about it. So long, Sidney.”

  “Martha.”

  “You’ll always be Sidney to me.”

  I resealed the door and checked with the hotel switchboard when she was gone. As I expected, there had been dozens of calls, and all had been turned away. The switchboard wanted to know if I’d take a call from Mr. Kralick. I said I would.

  I thanked him for Sidney. He was only a bit puzzled. Then he said, “Can you come to the first committee meeting at two, in the White House? A get-together session.”

  “Of course. What’s the news from Hamburg?”

  “Bad. Vornan caused a riot. He went into one of the tough bars and made a speech. The essence of it was that the most lasting historic achievement of the German people was the Third Reich. It seems that’s all he knows about Germany, or something, and he started praising Hitler and getting him mixed up with Charlemagne, and the authorities yanked him out of there just in time. Half a block of nightclubs burned down before the foam tanks arrived.” Kralick grinned ingenuously. “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this. It still isn’t too late for you to pull out.”

  I sighed and said, “Oh, don’t worry, Sandy. I’m on the team for keeps now. It’s the least I can do for you… after Sidney.”

  “See you at two. We’ll pick you up and take you across via tunnel because I don’t want you devoured by the media madmen. Stay put until I’m at your door.”

  “Right,” I said. I put down the phone, turned, and saw what looked like a puddle of green slime gliding across my threshold and into the room.

  It wasn’t slime. It was a fluid audio pickup full of monomolecular ears. I was being bugged from the corridor. Quickly I went to the door and ground my heel into the puddle. A thin voice said, “Don’t do that, Dr. Garfield. I’d like to talk to you. I’m from Amalgamated Network of—”

  “Go away.”

  I finished grinding my heel. I wiped up the rest of the mess with a towel. Then I leaned close to the floor and said to any remaining ears sticking to the woodwork. “The answer is still No Comment. Go away.”

  I got rid of him, finally. I adjusted the privacy seal so that it wouldn’t be possible even to slide a single molecule’s thickness of anything under the door, and waited out the morning. Shortly before two Sandy Kralick came for me and smuggled me into the underground tunnel leading to the White House. Washington is a maze of subterranean connections. I’m told you can get from anywhere to anywhere if you know the routes and have the right access-words handy when the scanners challenge you. The tunnels go down layer after layer. I hear there’s an automated brothel six layers deep below the Capitol, for Congressional use only; and the Smithsonian is supposed to be carrying on experiments in mutagenesis somewhere below the Mall, spawning biological monstrosities that never see the light of day. Like everything else you hear about the capital, I suppose these stories are apocryphal; I suppose that the truth, if it were ever known, would be fifty times as ghastly as the fables. This is a diabolical city.

  Kralick led me to a room with walls of anodized bronze somewhere beneath the West Wing of the White House. Four people were in it already. I recog
nized three of them. The upper levels of the scientific establishment are populated by a tiny clique, inbred, self-perpetuating. We all know one another, through interdisciplinary meetings of one kind or another. I recognized Lloyd Kolff, Morton Fields, and Aster Mikkelsen. The fourth person rose stiffly and said, “I don’t believe we’ve met, Dr. Garfield. F. Richard Heyman.”

  “Yes, of course. Spengler, Freud, and Marx, isn’t it? I remember it very fondly.” I took his hand. It was moist at the fingertips, and I suppose moist at the palms too, but he shook hands in that peculiarly untrusting Central European manner by which the suspicious one seizes the fingers of the other in a remote way, instead of placing palm next to palm. We exchanged noises about how pleased we were to make the other’s acquaintance.

  Give me full marks for insincerity. I did not think much of F. Richard Heyman’s book, which struck me as both ponderous and superficial at once, a rare feat; I did not care for the occasional reviews he wrote for the general magazines, which inevitably turned out to be neat eviscerations of his colleagues; I did not like the way he shook hands; I did not even like his name. What was I supposed to call an “F. Richard” when we had to use names? “F?” “Dick?” What about “my dear Heyman?” He was a short stocky man with a cannonball head, a fringe of coarse red hair along the back half of his skull, and a thick reddish beard curling down over his cheeks and throat to hide what I’m sure was a chin as round as the top of his head. A thin-lipped sharklike mouth was barely visible within the foliage. His eyes were watery and unpleasant.

  The other members of the committee I had no hostilities toward. I knew them vaguely, was aware of their high standings in their individual professions, and had never come to any disagreement with them in the scientific forums where we encountered one another. Morton Fields of the University of Chicago was a psychologist, affiliated with the new so-called cosmic school, which I interpreted to be a kind of secular Buddhism. They sought to unravel the mysteries of the soul by placing it in rapport with the universe as a totality, which has a pretentious sound to it. In person Fields looked like a corporation executive on the way up, say, a comptroller: lean athletic frame, high cheekbones, sandy hair, tight downturned mouth, prominent chin, pale questioning eyes. I could imagine him feeding data into a computer four days a week and spending his weekends slamming a golf ball mercilessly about the fairways. Yet he was not as pedantic as he looked.