he would go to the large city park with its pond in the middle, and head for the
bench where he always sat. On the rare occasions when someone was already
sitting in the place he considered his own, on the far left-hand end of the bench
next to the wrought iron armrest, Mr. Adam would wait unobtrusively to one
side for the bench to come free. It did not bother him if the remainder of the
bench was occupied, though he avoided entering into conversation with
strangers.
On warm, sunny days he would stay there until dusk, doing nothing but
idly watching what was happening around him: people strolling by, dogs
chasing each other frantically on the grass, leaves rustling in the surrounding
treetops, birds gliding silently through the blue sky, sudden ripples on the
smooth surface of the pond. Until recently this idleness would have seemed an
extremely foolish waste of time. Now, however, the tables were turned. He saw
everything which had gone before as a waste of time. All his previous life. All
the years, all the effort, all the hopes.
That was not how it had seemed, at any rate not in the beginning. Not in
the least. It was a pioneering time of great excitement. Great expectations. And
great naiveté. They thought that contact was only a matter of time. The
cosmos was teeming with life, messages were streaming between worlds, all
that was needed was to prick up our electronic ears to hear them. Without this
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optimistic certainty the money for the first projects would never have been
found—investments that could pay off stupendously as soon as the inexhaust-
ible wealth of knowledge started to pour in from the stars.
Mr. Adam had fond memories of those early days, despite later disappoint-
ments. There was something romantic in the anticipation that overcame him
whenever he put on his earphones. He spent countless hours listening to the
cacophony streaming from the skies, straining to recognize some sort of
orderly system in it. Like all his colleagues, he secretly hoped that he would
be the first to hear the signal.
But as time passed and nothing arrived except inarticulate noise, the true
proportions of the task started to emerge. Since listening to the closest star
systems produced no results, there was a shift to more distant ones, but each
new step brought a substantial increase in their number. The initial enthusi-
asm foundered when it was established that more than one generation might
be needed to complete the task. This led many people to leave the search for
extraterrestrial life in favor of more promising areas, and financiers were less
and less willing to continue investing in something so vague and unreliable.
Fortunately, at that point computers were introduced, with their numerous
advantages over people: they are incomparably faster, more effective and
dependable, and do not quickly lose heart in the face of failure. Even so,
Mr. Adam did not look upon their use with total approval. Computers
reduced people to commonplace assistants whose sole purpose was to serve
them. What had begun as a noble project for the chosen few degenerated into a
routine technical duty that almost anyone could perform—mere waiting,
leached of any true excitement. The last remnants of romance vanished
without a trace.
After several decades had passed, and the computers had meticulously
checked many millions of sun systems but detected no sign of extraterrestrial
intelligence, Mr. Adam felt a certain gloomy exultation. His feelings were
paradoxical, because only under opposite circumstances, with contact made,
would he be able to say that his life’s work had meaning. On the other hand,
contact achieved with the assistance of computers would to him be some sort
of injustice, almost an anticlimax.
Despite the silence of the cosmos, the search programs were not
discontinued. Although large, the number of investigated stars was trifling
compared to the total number of suns in the galaxy. In principle, one of the
giant radio telescopes could start receiving the long-awaited message from the
very next spot in the sky. However, as his retirement approached, Mr. Adam
became more and more skeptical in this regard.
The Puzzle
79
It was not just the realization that the prospects of finding Others within his
lifetime were negligible; he could somehow reconcile himself to that if he was
sure they were on the right track. But the suspicion started to trouble him that
the reason for failure lay not in the fact that only a tiny part of the sky had been investigated, rather in something much more fundamental. What if some of
the basic assumptions upon which the entire project was founded were wrong?
Maybe there was no one out there after all. Maybe sentient beings were so
unlikely that they had only appeared in one place. Everyone was convinced of
the opposite, but this conviction had no solid basis. Behind it might lie an
unwillingness to accept the terrifying fact of cosmic solitude. As the years
passed, Mr. Adam started to feel anxious under the unbounded wasteland. The
starry sky pressed heavily upon him at times. The strange need arose for some
sort of shelter, for consolation.
Suppose extraterrestrials exist and are communicating, but we don’t recog-
nize it? What if they were doing it in some other way, and not the way we
presumed? Mr. Adam had never asked himself this question seriously. When-
ever it stole quietly into his consciousness he would expel it hurriedly, with a
sense of hostility and guilt, as any true believer rejects a heretical thought. All
his sober, scientific being opposed it. Similar inconsistencies had prevented
him from coming to like science fiction.
He still considered this the proper approach, despite all the unfulfilled hopes
in the life that yawned behind him. And at the end of the day, what other
means besides electromagnetic waves could be used to communicate between
the stars? With regard to his past, the daily obligations he set himself helped
put it out of his mind. Perhaps these obligations really were meaningless, but
the problem of meaning no longer plagued him. He enjoyed everything he was
doing now, even idling in the park each Saturday, and that pleasure was all that
mattered. In any case, he was not just idly passing the time. He had recently
started to paint.
Music had been the catalyst. Upon reaching the park one Saturday at the
beginning of summer, he found that a bandstand had been erected near his
bench. It had not been there seven days previously, nor had anything heralded
its advent. This had irritated Mr. Adam no end. Although pretty, with its
slender columns and domed roof, he considered it an unconscionable dese-
cration of the environment. In addition, the bandstand largely blocked his
view of the pond, and he seriously considered looking for another place to sit.
But habit won out and he stayed on his bench, scornfully endeavoring to
disregard the interloper.
This ceased to be possible when musicians climbed onto the bandstand at
noon. They were formally dressed and the conductor even wore a tuxe
do with
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Z. Živkovic
a large white flower in his lapel. They sat on chairs placed in a circle and spent
some time tuning their instruments. Mr. Adam found this dissonance an
additional nuisance. It not only sounded awful but started to attract park
visitors, and rather a large crowd soon formed. A crowd of people, however,
was the last thing Mr. Adam wanted after his Friday spent in a packed movie
theatre.
He would have to move after all. He couldn’t stand this. But just as he
started to rise the music began. He stopped halfway, transfixed, then slowly sat
down again on the bench. All at once he was no longer surrounded by too
many people, his bad mood disappeared, and nothing existed beyond the
music. He stared fixedly at the bandstand, immobile, listening intently.
This paralysis did not last long. He came out of it suddenly and began
feverishly rummaging through his jacket pockets. It seemed to take forever to
find what he was after. He always carried a notebook and pen with him. Since
retirement he had not written anything in it, but he carried it with him
nonetheless. He opened it hurriedly and started to draw. He dared not miss
a thing.
He drew short, brusque lines, just like a stenographer taking rapid dictation.
The pages in the notebook were small, so he filled them quickly. He was afraid
he would run out of pages before the music ended, but fortunately the
notebook was thick enough. Even so, he made the last drawing on the
brown cardboard covers. Had the music lasted a moment longer, there
would not have been enough room. The very thought suddenly filled him
with horror.
The listeners’ echoing applause after the last chords had the effect of an
alarm clock suddenly going off. Mr. Adam jerked like one waking from restless
sleep; he turned this way and that in confusion for several moments as if trying
to figure out where he was. He feared he would arouse the suspicion of those
around him, but no one paid any attention to the old man on the end of the
bench, engrossed in his writing. All eyes were turned toward the conductor
who was bowing theatrically.
Mr. Adam stood up and walked away unobtrusively. There was no reason to
stay there any longer. During his extensive walks between churches he had
come to know the town quite well, so he knew exactly where to find a shop
with painting supplies. There might have been one closer, but he would waste
more time inquiring after and finding it than it took to reach the other. The
salesman noted with a smile that he was clearly preparing a serious project,
judging by the quantity of materials he had purchased. Mr. Adam returned the
smile, mumbled something vague, then hurried home.
The Puzzle
81
Unskilled at painting, he had trouble setting up the easel properly, but then
got down to work. He opened the notebook and began carefully transferring
onto the canvas what he had written, as if neatly copying over rough notes
taken in a hurry. He worked slowly but with passion, unaware of the passage of
time. When he had finished it was already quite dark.
He did not know what he had painted. Viewed from up close it looked just
like random strokes of paint. He was convinced, however, that not a single
stroke of the brush had been accidental, that everything was exactly as the
music ordered, in spite of his inexperience. When he moved back from the
painting a bit, he thought he could make out part of a larger shape, but he
wasn’t sure. It suddenly crossed his mind that before him was just one piece of
some larger puzzle. He thought briefly about what to do with the canvas, and
then he hung it unframed on one of the bare walls.
The next Saturday he went to the park well prepared. He no longer needed
the notebook as intermediary. He sat at his usual place on the bench and set up
the easel in front of him, holding paintbrush and palette. In different circum-
stances he would have abhorred the inquisitive peering of bystanders, although
a painter at work was certainly not unusual in the park. Now, however, he paid
no attention, concentrating exclusively on the impending concert.
This time he painted rapidly. It lasted just as long as the music. When the
applause resounded, Mr. Adam, panting and sweaty, had just finished covering
the last white space with paint. Before the crowd dispersed, several pairs of eyes
glanced at the painting, perplexed, since it did not depict anything recogniz-
able. A short, elderly woman dressed in a bright orange dress stopped by the
bench for a moment. She took an enormous pair of glasses out of her handbag
and examined first the painting and then the painter. “Very nice,” she said
with a smile. She put her glasses back in her handbag, nodded in brief approval
and walked away.
As a man unaccustomed to compliments, Mr. Adam felt ill at ease. The
woman’s words were by no means unpleasant, quite the contrary, yet he was
still glad she had not lingered. He would have been in the awkward situation of
having to say something in reply. He waited a while for the elderly woman to
move on, then collected his equipment and hurried home. He could have
stayed in the park longer, his work was completed and the day was very fine,
but curiosity got the better of him.
He put the new canvas next to the other one on the wall. He had no
expectations and thus was not very disappointed when it turned out they had
no points in common. For a moment, though, he thought he could make out
some part of a greater whole in the second painting, too, but here again it was
most likely just his imagination. In the absence of any recognizable form he
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thought he saw something that was not actually there. This was a trap he had
learned to avoid back in the early period, before computers, while listening to
the stars with his own ears. If you’re expecting a horseman you have to be very
careful not to mistake your heartbeat for the beat of a horse’s hoofs.
The next fourteen Saturdays, all summer long, each time Mr. Adam
returned from the park he had one more painting to place on the wall next
to the others. In time his brisk, almost frenetic painting became something of
an attraction at the park, and a good many music-lovers would stand around to
watch him work. He paid no attention to them. At the end of the music and
painting he would quickly glance through those gathered around him, but
never once did he catch sight of the slight figure in orange.
When Mr. Adam reached the park on the first Saturday in September,
carrying his painting materials as usual, a surprise awaited him. The bandstand
had disappeared as unexpectedly as it had arrived. It had been removed very
carefully, leaving no trace behind—not even trampled grass. He darted in
bewilderment around the spot where the little structure had stood, overcome
by completely opposite feelings from those which had assailed him in the
beginning. Now he missed the bandstand, and the environment seemed
somehow naked and incomplete without it. For a moment he considered
but he did not know where this should be done and in the end dropped
the idea.
He returned home in a dejected mood and sat in the armchair facing the
wall covered with paintings. The canvases formed a large square: four paintings
in each of four rows. He stayed there for seven full days, only leaving the
armchair to take a quick bite or go to the bathroom. He even slept there in his
clothes, but the brief, restless, erratic sleep did not refresh him. He changed the
distribution of the paintings from time to time. During that long week filled
with almost constant pouring rain, he tried just a tiny fraction of all possible
combinations of the sixteen canvases.
On the evening of the following Saturday he got up from the armchair,
stretched, and went to the window. Rays from the low sun in the western sky
were cutting a path through patchy clouds, just like gleaming swords. He
stayed there a while looking absently at the flickering play of light. Then he
went to the wall and took down the paintings. He couldn’t carry them all at
once and had to make two trips to the basement, where he left them.
When he came up from the basement the second time, he went into the
kitchen, took the large cookbook down from the shelf, opened it at the
bookmark and became immersed in reading the recipe that was next in line.
The following day was Sunday, his cooking day.
8
Time Gifts
The Astronomer
I
He had to escape from the monastery.
He should not have been there at all; he had never wanted to become a
monk. He’d said so to his father, but his father had been unrelenting, as usual,
and his mother did not have the audacity to oppose him, even though she
knew that her son’s inclinations and talents lay elsewhere. The monks had
treated him badly from the beginning. They had abused and humiliated him,
forced him to do the dirtiest jobs, and when their nocturnal visits commenced
he could stand it no longer.
He set off in flight, and a whole throng of pudgy, unruly brothers started
after him, screaming hideously, torches and mantles raised, certain he could
not get away. His legs became heavier and heavier as he attempted to reach the
monastery gate, but it seemed to be deliberately withdrawing, becoming more
Zoran Zivkovic - First Contact and Time Travel Page 13