The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 4: Trips: 1972-73

by Robert Silverberg

  The time machine hangs before me in the laboratory, a glittering golden ovoid suspended in ebony struts. Richards and Halleck smile nervously as I approach it. This, after all, is the climax of our years of research, and so much emotion rides on the success of the voyage I am about to take that every moment now seems freighted with heavy symbolic import. Our experiments with rats and rabbits seemed successful; but how can we know what it is to travel in time until a human being has made the journey?

  All right. I enter the machine. Crisply we crackle instructions to one another across the intercom. Setting? Fifth of May, 2500 A.D.—a jump of nearly three and a half centuries. Power level? Energy feed? Go. Go. Dislocation circuit activated? Yes. All systems go. Bon voyage!

  The control panel goes crazy. Dials spin. Lights flash. Everything’s zapping at once. I plunge forward in time, going, going, going!

  When everything is calm again I commence the emergence routines. The time capsule must be opened just so, unhurriedly. My hands tremble in anticipation of the strange new world that awaits me. A thousand hypotheses tumble through my brain. At last the hatch opens. “Hello,” says Richards. “Hi there,” Halleck says. “We are still in the laboratory.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “My meters show definite temporal transfer.”

  “There was,” says Richards. “You went forward to 2500 A.D., as planned. But you’re still here.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  Halleck laughs. “You know what happened, Mike? You did travel in time. You jumped forward three hundred and whatever years. But you brought the whole present along with you. You pulled our own time into the future. It’s like tugging a doughnut through its own hole. You see? Our work is kaput, Mike. We’ve got our answer. The present is always with us, no matter how far out we go.”

  Once about five years ago I took some acid, a little purple pill that a friend of mine mailed me from New Mexico. I had read a good deal about the psychedelics and I wasn’t at all afraid; eager, in fact, hungry for the experience. I was going to float up into the cosmos and embrace it all. I was going to become a part of the nebulas and the supernovas, and they were going to become part of me; or rather, I would at last come to recognize that we had been part of each other all along. In other words, I imagined that LSD would be like an input of five hundred s-f novels all at once; a mindblowing charge of imagery, emotion, strangeness, and transport to incredible unknowable places. The drug took about an hour to hit me. I saw the walls begin to flow and billow, and cascades of light streamed from the ceiling. Time became jumbled and I thought three hours had gone by, but it was only about twenty minutes. Holly was with me. “What are you feeling?” she asked. “Is it mystical?” She asked a lot of questions like that. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s very pretty, but I just don’t know.” The drug wore off in about seven hours, but my nervous system was keyed up and lights kept exploding behind my eyes when I tried to go to sleep. So I sat up all night and read Marcus’ Starflame novels, both of them, before dawn.

  There is no galactic empire. There never will be any galactic empire. All is chaos. Everything is random. Galactic empires are puerile power-fantasies. Do I truly believe this? If not, why do I say it? Do I enjoy bringing myself down?

  “Look over there!” the mutant whispered. Carter looked. An entire corner of the room had disappeared—melted away, as though it had been erased. Carter could see the street outside, the traffic, the building across the way. “Over there!” the mutant said. “Look!” The chair was gone. “Look!” The ceiling vanished. “Look! Look! Look!” Carter’s head whirled. Everything was going, vanishing at the command of the inexorable golden-eyed mutant. “Do you see the stars?” the mutant asked. He snapped his fingers. “No!” Carter cried. “Don’t!” Too late. The stars also were gone.

  Sometimes I slip into what I consider the science-fiction experience in everyday life. I mean, I can be sitting at my desk typing a report, or standing in the subway train waiting for the long grinding sweaty ride to end, when I feel a buzz, a rush, an upward movement of the soul similar to what I felt the time I took acid, and suddenly I see myself in an entirely new perspective—as a visitor from some other time, some other place, isolated in a world of alien beings known as Earth. Everything seems unfamiliar and baffling. I get that sense of doubleness, of déjà vu, as though I have read about this subway in some science-fiction novel, as though I have seen this office described in a fantasy story, far away, long ago. The real world thus becomes something science-fictional to me for twenty or thirty seconds at a stretch. The textures slide; the fabric strains. Sometimes, when that has happened to me, I think it’s more exciting than having a fantasy world become “real” as I read. And sometimes I think I’m coming apart.

  While we were sleeping there had been tragedy aboard our mighty starship. Our captain, our leader, our guide for two full generations, had been murdered in his bed! “Let me see it again!” I insisted, and Timothy held out the hologram. Yes! No doubt of it! I could see the blood stains in his thick white hair, I could see the frozen mask of anguish on his strong-featured face. Dead! The captain was dead! “What now?” I asked. “What will happen?”

  “The civil war has already started on E Deck,” Timothy said.

  Perhaps what I really fear is not so much a dizzying multiplicity of futures but rather the absence of futures. When I end, will the universe end? Nothingness, emptiness, the void that awaits us all, the tunnel that leads not to everywhere but to nowhere—is that the only destination? If it is, is there any reason to feel fear? Why should I fear it? Nothingness is peace. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name, thy kingdom nada, thy will be nada, in nada as it is in nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. That’s Hemingway. He felt the nada pressing in on all sides. Hemingway never wrote a word of science fiction. Eventually he delivered himself cheerfully to the great nada with a shotgun blast.

  My friend Leon reminds me in some ways of Henry Darkdawn in De Soto’s classic Cosmos trilogy. (If I said he reminded me of Stephen Dedalus or Raskolnikov or Julien Sorel, you would naturally need no further descriptions to know what I mean, but Henry Darkdawn is probably outside your range of literary experience. The De Soto trilogy deals with the formation, expansion, and decay of a quasi-religious movement spanning several galaxies in the years 30,000 to 35,000 A.D., and Darkdawn is a charismatic prophet, human but immortal or at any rate extraordinarily long-lived, who combines within himself the functions of Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul: seer, intermediary with higher powers, organizer, leader, and ultimately, martyr.) What makes the series so beautiful is the way De Soto gets inside Darkdawn’s character, so that he’s not merely a distant bas-relief—The Prophet—but a warm, breathing human being. That is, you see him warts and all—a sophisticated concept for science fiction, which tends to run heavily to marble statues in place of living protagonists.

  Leon, of course, is unlikely ever to found a galaxy-spanning cult, but he has much of the intensity that I associate with Darkdawn. Oddly, he’s quite tall—six feet two, I’d say—and has conventional good looks; people of his type don’t generally run to high inner voltage, I’ve observed. But despite his natural physical advantages something must have compressed and redirected Leon’s soul when he was young, because he’s a brooder, a dreamer, a fire-breather, always coming up with visionary plans for reorganizing our office, stuff like that. He’s the one who usually leaves s-f magazines on my desk as gifts, but he’s also the one who pokes the most fun at me for reading what he considers to be trash. You see his contradictory nature right there. He’s shy and aggressive, tough and vulnerable, confident and uncertain, the whole crazy human mix, everything right up front.

  Last Tuesday I had dinner at his house. I often go there. His wife Helene is a superb cook. She and I had an affair five years ago that lasted about six months. Leon knew about it after the third meeting, but he never has said a word to me. Judging by Helene’s desperate ardor,
she and Leon must not have a very good sexual relationship; when she was in bed with me she seemed to want everything at once, every position, every kind of sensation, as though she had been deprived much too long. Possibly Leon was pleased that I was taking some of the sexual pressure off him, and has silently regretted that I no longer sleep with his wife. (I ended the affair because she was drawing too much energy from me and because I was having difficulties meeting Leon’s frank, open gaze.)

  Last Tuesday just before dinner Helene went into the kitchen to check the oven. Leon excused himself and headed for the bathroom. Alone, I stood a moment by the bookshelf, checking in my automatic way to see if they had any s-f, and then I followed Helene into the kitchen to refill my glass from the martini pitcher in the refrigerator. Suddenly she was up against me, clinging tight, her lips seeking mine. She muttered my name; she dug her fingertips into my back. “Hey,” I said softly. “Wait a second! We agreed that we weren’t going to start that stuff again!”

  “I want you!”

  “Don’t, Helene.” Gently I pried her free of me. “Don’t complicate things. Please.”

  I wriggled loose. She backed away from me, head down, and sullenly went to the stove. As I turned I saw Leon in the doorway. He must have witnessed the entire scene. His dark eyes were glossy with half-suppressed tears; his lips were quivering. Without saying anything he took the pitcher from me, filled his martini glass, and drank the cocktail at a gulp. Then he went into the living room, and ten minutes later we were talking office politics as though nothing had happened. Yes, Leon, you’re Henry Darkdawn to the last inch. Out of such stuff as you, Leon, are prophets created. Out of such stuff as you are cosmic martyrs made.

  No one could tell the difference any longer. The sleek, slippery android had totally engulfed its maker’s personality.

  I stood at the edge of the cliff, staring in horror at the red, swollen thing that had been the life-giving sun of Earth.

  The horde of robots—

  The alien spaceship, plunging in a wild spiral—

  Laughing, she opened her fist. The Q-bomb lay in the center of her palm. “Ten seconds,” she cried.

  How warm it is tonight! A dank glove of humidity enfolds me. Sleep will not come. I feel a terrible pressure all around me. Yes! The beam of green light! At last, at last, at last! Cradling me, lifting me, floating me through the open window. High over the dark city. On and on, through the void, out of space and time. To the tunnel. Setting me down. Here. Here. Yes, exactly as I imagined it would be: the onyx walls, the sourceless dull gleam, the curving vault far overhead, the silent alien figures drifting toward me. Here. The tunnel, at last. I take the first step forward. Another. Another. I am launched on my journey.

  A SEA OF FACES

  This is the story I wrote for Terry Carr in July, 1972, after he found himself unable to publish “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” because of that story’s anti-science-fiction subtext. He liked this one just fine; but at a somewhat later date he and I independently realized that the theme of the psychotherapist who disappears into his patient’s consciousness had already been handled, and handled superbly, by Roger Zelazny in his novel The Dream Master.

  The writer’s mind plays odd tricks. There’s always the danger of unconsciously plagiarizing some story that you admire, or accidentally reinventing some splendid line from somebody else’s story that you now think is your own creation, because you’ve forgotten that you read it somewhere else. Anyone who has read as much as I have, and has written as much, is particularly prone to this syndrome, and more than once in my career I’ve belatedly discovered that I’ve unintentionally rewritten somebody else’s story. (I’ve done it intentionally a few times, too, as in “In Another Country,” my version of C.L. Moore’s “Vintage Season,” but in such cases I always make it quite clear upon first publication that the work is a pastiche.) Zelazny’s The Dream Master is one science-fiction story I very much wish I had written, but, since I was too late for that, I seem to have rewritten it instead in all blithe innocence, and Terry published it in the same way—leading to our “Oh, my God!” reactions afterward.

  Apart from theme, the stories don’t really have much in common, and so I don’t have any hesitation about reprinting my story here. A good theme can stand more than one handling; and in any case this sort of unconscious literary borrowing goes on all the time. (I’ve been on the other end of it, too.) I rather like my version of the idea, second-hand though it turned out to be, but I still wish I had written Zelazny’s before he did.

  ——————

  Are not such floating fragments on the sea of the unconscious called Freudian ships?

  JOSEPHINE SAXTON

  Falling.

  It’s very much like dying, I suppose. That awareness of infinite descent, that knowledge of the total absence of support. It’s all sky up here. Down below is neither land nor sea, only color without form, so distant that I can’t even put a name to the color. The cosmos is torn open, and I plummet headlong, arms and legs pinwheeling wildly, the gray stuff in my skull centrifuging toward my ears. I’m dropping like Lucifer. From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day; and with the setting sun Dropp’d from the Zenith, like a falling star. That’s Milton. Even now my old liberal-arts education stands me in good stead. And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, Never to hope again. That’s Shakespeare. It’s all part of the same thing. All of English literature was written by a single man, whose sly persuasive voice ticks in my dizzy head as I drop. God grant me a soft landing.

  “She looks a little like you,” I told Irene. “At least, it seemed that way for one quick moment, when she turned toward the window in my office and the sunlight caught the planes of her face. Of course, it’s the most superficial resemblance only, a matter of bone structure, the placement of the eyes, the cut of the hair. But your expressions, your inner selves externally represented, are altogether dissimilar. You radiate unbounded good health and vitality, Irene, and she slips so easily into the classic schizoid faces, the eyes alternately dreamy and darting, the forehead pale, flecked with sweat. She’s very troubled.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Lowry. April Lowry.”

  “A beautiful name. April. Young?”

  “About twenty-three.”

  “How sad, Richard. Schizoid, you said?”

  “She retreats into nowhere without provocation. Lord knows what triggers it. When it happens she can go six or eight months without saying a word. The last attack was a year ago. These days she’s feeling much better; she’s willing to talk about herself a bit. She says it’s as though there’s a zone of weakness in the walls of her mind, an opening, a trap door, a funnel, something like that, and from time to time her soul is irresistibly drawn toward it and goes pouring through and disappears into God knows what, and there’s nothing left of her but a shell. And eventually she comes back through the same passage. She’s convinced that one of these times she won’t come back.”

  “Is there some way to help her?” Irene asked. “What will you try? Drugs? Hypnosis? Shock? Sensory deprivation?”

  “They’ve all been tried.”

  “What then, Richard? What will you do?”

  Suppose there is a way. Let’s pretend there is a way. Is that an acceptable hypothesis? Let’s pretend. Let’s just pretend, and see what happens.

  The vast ocean below me occupies the entirety of my field of vision. Its surface is convex, belly-up in the middle and curving vertiginously away from me at the periphery; the slope is so extreme that I wonder why the water doesn’t all run off toward the edges and drown the horizon. Not far beneath that shimmering swollen surface, a gigantic pattern of crosshatchings and countertextures is visible, like an immense mural floating lightly submerged in the water. For a moment, as I plunge, the pattern resolves itself and becomes coherent: I see the face of Irene, a calm pale mask, the steady blue eyes focused lovingly on me. She fills the ocean. Her semblance covers a
n area greater than any continental mass. Firm chin, strong full lips, delicate tapering nose. She emanates a serene aura of inner peace that buoys me like an invisible net: I am falling easily now, pleasantly, arms outspread, face down, my entire body relaxed. How beautiful she is! I continue to descend and the pattern shatters; the sea is abruptly full of metallic shards and splinters, flashing bright gold through the dark blue-green; then, when I am perhaps a thousand meters lower, the pattern suddenly reorganizes itself. A colossal face, again. I welcome Irene’s return, but no, the face is the face of April, my silent sorrowful one. A haunted face, a face full of shadows: dark terrified eyes, flickering nostrils, sunken cheeks. A bit of one incisor is visible over the thin lower lip. O my poor sweet Taciturna. Needles of reflected sunlight glitter in her outspread waterborne hair. April’s manifestation supplants serenity with turbulence; again I plummet out of control, again I am in the cosmic centrifuge, my breath is torn from me and a dread chill rushes past my tumbling body. Desperately I fight for poise and balance. I attain it, finally, and look down. The pattern has again broken; where April has been, I see only parallel bands of amber light, distorted by choppy refractions. Tiny white dots—islands, I suppose—now are evident in the glossy sea.