The Masks of Time

NINE

Kralick said, “We lost control of events. We have to keep a tighter grip on things next time. Which one of you was with Vornan when he got hold of the controls?”

“I was,” I said. “There was absolutely no way of preventing what took place. He moved quickly. Neither Bruton nor I suspected that he might do any such thing.”

“You can’t ever let yourself get off guard with him,” Kralick said in anguish. “You have to assume at any given moment that he’s capable of doing the most outrageous thing imaginable. Haven’t I tried to get that point across to you before?”

“We are basically rational people,” said Heyman. “We do not find it easy to adjust to the presence of an irrational person.”

A day had passed since the debacle at Wesley Bruton’s wondrous villa. Miraculously, there had been no fatalities; Kralick had signaled for Government troops, who had pulled all the guests from the throbbing, swaying house in time. Vornan-19 had turned up standing outside the house, watching calmly as it went through its antics. The damage to the house, I heard Kralick mutter, had been several hundred thousand dollars. The Government would pay. I did not envy Kralick his job of calming Wesley Bruton down. But at least the utilities magnate could not say that he had suffered unjustly. His own urge to lionize the man from the future had brought this trouble upon him. Bruton surely had seen the reels of Vornan’s trip through the capitals of Europe, and was aware that unpredictable things took place around and about Vornan. Yet Bruton had insisted on giving the party, and had insisted too on taking Vornan to the control room of his mansion. I could not feel very sorry for him. As for the guests who had been interrupted in their revelry by the cataclysm, they deserved little pity either. They had come to stare at the time traveler and to make fools of themselves. They had done both, and what harm was it if Vornan had chosen to make fools of them in return?

Kralick was right to be displeased with us, though. It was our responsibility to keep such things from happening. We had not discharged that responsibility very well on our first outing with the man from the future.

A little grimly, we prepared to continue the tour.

Today we were visiting the New York Stock Exchange. I have no idea how that came to be on Vornan’s itinerary. Certainly he did not request it; I suspect that some bureaucrat in the capital decided arbitrarily that it would be a worthy propaganda move to let the futuristic sightseer have a look at the bastion of the capitalistic system. For my part I felt a little like a visitor from some alien environment myself, since I had never been near the Stock Exchange nor had any dealings with it. This is not the snobbery of the academic man, please understand. If I had time and inclination, I would gladly have joined the fun of speculating in Consolidated System Mining and United Ultronics and the other current favorites. But my salary is a good one and I have a small private income besides, ample for my needs; since life is too short to allow us to sample every experience, I have lived within my income and devoted my energy to my work, rather than to the market. In a kind of eager ignorance, then, I readied myself for our visit. I felt like a grade-school boy on an outing.

Kralick had been called back to Washington for conferences. Our governmental shepherd for the day was a taciturn young man named Holliday, who looked anything but happy at having drawn this assignment. At eleven that morning we headed downtown, traveling en masse: Vornan. the seven of us, an assortment of official hangers-on, the six members of today’s media pool, and our guards. By prearrangement the Stock Exchange gallery would be closed to other visitors while we were there. Traveling with Vornan was complex enough without having to share a visitors’ balcony.

Our motorcade of glossy limousines halted grandly before the immense building. Vornan looked politely bored as we were ushered inside by Exchange officials. He had said next to nothing all day; in fact, we had heard little from him since the grim homeward ride from the Bruton fiasco. I feared his silence. What mischief was he storing up? Right now he seemed wholly disconnected; neither the shrewd, calculating eyes nor the all-conquering smile were at work. Blank-faced, withdrawn, he seemed no more than a slight, ordinary man as we filed toward the visitors’ gallery.

The scene was stupendous. Beyond doubt this was the home of the moneychangers.

We looked down into a room at least a thousand feet on each side, perhaps a hundred fifty feet from floor to ceiling. In the middle of everything was the great masculine shaft of the central financial computer: a glossy column twenty yards in diameter, rising from the floor and disappearing through the ceiling. Every brokerage house in the world had its direct input to that machine. Within its polished depths existed who knew how many clicking and chattering relays, how many memory cores of fantastic smallness, how many phone links, how many data tanks? With one swift bolt of a laser cannon it would be possible to sever the communications network that held together the financial structure of civilization. I looked warily at Vornan-19, wondering what deviltry he had in mind. But he seemed calm, aloof, only faintly interested in the floor of the Exchange.

About the central rod of the computer shaft were situated smaller cagelike structures, some thirty or forty of them, each with its cluster of excited, gesticulating brokers. The open space between these booths was littered with papers. Messenger boys scurried frantically about, kicking the discarded papers into clouds. Overhead, draped from one wall to the other, ran the gigantic yellow ribbon of the stock ticker, reeling off in magnified form the information that the main computer was transmitting everywhere. It seemed odd to me that a computerized stock exchange would have all this bustle and clutter on its floor, and that there would be so much paper lying about, as though the year were 1949 instead of 1999. But I did not take into account the force of tradition among these brokers. Men of money are conservative, not necessarily in ideology but certainly in habit. They want everything to remain as it has always been.

Half a dozen Stock Exchange executives came out to greet us — crisp, gray-haired men, attired in neat old-fashioned business suits. They were unfathomably rich, I suppose; and why, given such riches, they chose to spend the days of their lives in this building I could not and cannot understand. But they were friendly. I suspect they would give the same warm, open-handed greeting to a touring delegation from the socialist countries that have not yet adopted modified capitalism — say, a pack of touring zealots from Mongolia. They thrust themselves upon us, and they seemed almost as delighted to have a gaggle of touring professors on their balcony as they did to have a man claiming to come from the far future.

The President of the Stock Exchange, Samuel Norton, made us a brief, courtly speech. He was a tall, well-groomed man of middle years, easy of manner, obviously quite pleased with his place in the universe. He told us of the history of his organization, gave us some weighty statistics, boasted a bit about the current Stock Exchange headquarters, which had been built in the 1980’s, and closed by saying, “Our guide will now show you the workings of our operations in detail. When she’s finished, I’ll be happy to answer any general questions you may have — particularly those concerning the underlying philosophy of our system, which I know must be of great interest to you.

The guide was an attractive girl in her twenties with short, shiny red hair and a gray uniform artfully designed to mask her feminine characteristics. She beckoned us forward to the edge of the balcony and said, “Below us you see the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. At the present time, four thousand one hundred twenty-five common and preferred stocks are traded on the Exchange. Dealings in bonds are handled elsewhere. In the center of the floor you see the shaft of our main computer. It extends thirteen stories into the basement and rises eight stories above us. Of the hundred floors in this building, fifty-one are used wholly or in part for the operations of this computer, including the levels for programming, decoding, maintenance, and record storage. Every transaction that takes place on the floor of the Exchange or on any of the subsidiary exchanges in other cities and countries is noted with the speed of light within this computer. At present there are eleven main subsidiary exchanges: San Francisco, Chicago, London. Zurich, Milan, Moscow, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Addis Ababa, and — ah — Sydney. Since these span all time zones, it is possible to carry out securities transactions twenty-four hours a day. The New York Exchange, however, is open only from ten in the morning to half past three, the traditional hours, and all ‘off-the-floor’ transactions are recorded and analyzed for the pre-opening session the following morning. Our daily volume on the main trading floor is about three hundred fifty million shares, and roughly twice that many shares are traded each day on the subsidiary exchanges. Only a generation ago such figures would have been regarded as fantastic.

“Now, how does a securities transaction take place?

“Let us say that you, Mr. Vornan, wish to purchase one hundred shares of XYZ Space Transit Corporation. You have seen in yesterday’s tapes that the market price is currently about forty dollars a share, so you know that you must invest approximately four thousand dollars. Your first step is to contact your broker, which of course can be done by a touch of your finger to your telephone. You place your order with him, and he immediately relays it to the trading floor. The particular data bank in which XYZ Space Transit transactions are recorded takes his call and notes your order. The computer conducts an auction, just as has been done in listed securities on the Exchange since 1792. The offers to sell XYZ Space Transit are matched against the offers to buy. At the speed of light it is determined that one hundred shares are available for sale at forty, and that a buyer exists. The transaction is closed and your broker notifies you. A small commission is his only charge to you; in addition there is a small fee for the computer services of the Exchange. A portion of this goes to the retirement fund of the so-called specialists who formerly handled the matching of buy and sell orders on the trading floor.

“Since everything is handled by computer, you may wonder what is taking place elsewhere on the trading floor. What you see represents a delightful Stock Exchange tradition: although not strictly necessary any longer, we maintain a staff of brokers who buy and sell securities for their own accounts, exactly as in the old days. They are following the precomputer process. Let me trace the course of a single transaction for you…”

In clean, precise tones she showed us what all the mad scurrying on the floor was about. I was startled to realize that it was done purely as a charade; the transactions were unreal and at the end of each day all accounts were canceled. The computer actually handled everything. The noise, the discarded papers, the intricate gesticulations — these were reconstructions of the archaic past, performed by men whose lives had lost their purpose. It was fascinating and depressing: a ritual of money, a running-down of the capitalistic clock. Old brokers who would not retire took part in this daily amusement, I gathered, while alongside them the monstrous shaft of the computer, which had unmanned them a decade previously, gleamed as the erect symbol of their impotence.

Our guide droned on and on, telling us of the stock ticker and the Dow-Jones averages, deciphering the cryptic symbols that drifted dreamily by on the screen, talking of bulls and bears, of short sellers, of margin requirements, of many another strange and wonderful thing. As the climax of her act she switched on a computer output and allowed us to have a squint at the boiling madhouse within the master brain, where transactions took place at improbable speeds and billions of dollars changed hands within moments.

I was awed by the awesomeness of it all. I who had never played the market felt the urge to phone my broker, if I could find one, and get plugged into the great data banks. Sell a hundred GFX! Buy two hundred CCC! Off a point! Up two! This was the core of life; this was the essence of being. The mad rhythm of it caught me completely. I longed to rush toward the computer shaft, spread my arms wide, embrace its gleaming vertical bulk. I envisioned its lines reaching out through the world, even unto the reformed socialist brethren in Moscow, threading a communion of dollars from city to city, and extending perhaps to the Moon, to our coming bases on the planets, to the stars themselves… capitalism triumphant!

The guide faded away. President Norton of the Stock Exchange stepped forward again, beaming pleasantly, and said. “Now, if I can help you with any further problems—”

“Yes,” said Vornan mildly. “What is the purpose, please, of a stock exchange?”

The executive reddened and showed signs of shock. After all this detailed explication… to have the esteemed guest ask what the whole thing was about? We looked embarrassed ourselves. None of us had thought that Vornan had come here ignorant of the basic uses of this enterprise. How had he let himself be taken to the Exchange without knowing what it was he was going to see? Why had he not asked before this? I realized once again that if he were genuine, Vornan must view us as amusing apes whose plans and schemes were funny to watch for their own sake; he was not so much interested in visiting a thing called a Stock Exchange as he was in the fact that our Government earnestly desired him to visit that thing.

“Well,” said the Stock Exchange man, “am I to understand, Mr. Vornan, that in the time that you — that you come from there is no such thing as a securities exchange?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Perhaps under some other name?”

“I can think of no equivalent.”

Consternation. “But how do you manage to transfer units of corporate ownership, then?”

Blankness. A shy, possibly mocking smile from Vornan-19.

“You do have corporate ownership?”

“Pardon,” Vornan said. “I have studied your language carefully before making my journey, but there are many gaps in my knowledge. Perhaps if you could explain some of your basic terms—”

The executive’s easy dignity began to flee. Norton’s checks were mottled, his eyes were flickering like those of a beast trapped in a cage. I had seen something of the same look on Wesley Bruton’s face when he had learned from Vornan that his magnificent villa, built to endure through the ages like the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal, had vanished and been forgotten by 2999, and would have been retained only as a curiosity, a manifestation of baroque foolishness, if it had survived. The Stock Exchange man could not comprehend Vornan’s incomprehension, and it unnerved him.

Norton said, “A corporation is a — well, a company. That is, a group of individuals banded together to do something for profit. To manufacture a product, to perform a service, to—”

“A profit,” said Vornan idly. “What is a profit?”

Norton bit his lip and dabbed at his sweaty forehead. After some hesitation he said, “A profit is a return of income above costs. A surplus value, as they say. The corporation’s basic goal is to make a profit that can be divided among its owners. Thus it must be efficiently productive, so that the fixed costs of operation are overcome and the unit cost of manufacturing is lower than the market price of the product offered. Now, the reason why people set up corporations instead of simple partnerships is—”

“I do not follow,” said Vornan. “Simpler terms, please. The object of this corporation is profit, to be divided among owners, yes? But what is an owner?”

“I was just coming to that. In legal terms—”

“And what use is this profit that the owners should want it?”

I sensed that a deliberate baiting was going on. I looked in worry at Kolff, at Helen, at Heyman. But they seemed hardly to be perturbed. Holliday, our government man, was frowning a bit, but perhaps he thought Vornan-19’s questions more innocent than they seemed to me.

The nostrils of the Stock Exchange man flickered ominously. His temper seemed to be held under tight restraint. One of the media men, alive to Norton’s discomfiture, moved close to flash a camera in his face. He glowered at it.

“Am I to understand,” Norton asked slowly, “that in your era the concept of the corporation is unknown? That the profit motive is extinct? That money itself has vanished from use?”

“I would have to say yes,” Vornan replied pleasantly. “At least, as I comprehend those terms, we have nothing equivalent to them.”

“This has happened in America?” Norton asked in incredulity.

“We do not precisely have an America,” said Vornan. “I come from the Centrality. The terms are not congruous, and in fact I find it hard to compare even approximately—”

“America’s gone? How could that be? When did it happen’?”

“Oh, during the Time of Sweeping, I suppose. Many things changed then. It was long ago. I do not remember an America.”

F. Richard Heyman saw an opportunity to scrape a little history out of the maddeningly oblique Vornan. He swung around and said, “About this Time of Sweeping that you’ve occasionally mentioned. I’d like to know—”

He was interrupted by a geyser of indignation from Samuel Norton.

“America gone? Capitalism extinct? It just couldn’t happen! I tell you—”

One of the executive’s aides moved hurriedly to his side and urgently murmured something. The great man nodded. He accepted a violet-hued capsule from the other and touched its ultrasonic snout to his wrist. There was a quick whirr, an intake of what I suppose was some kind of tranquilizing drug. Norton breathed deeply and made a visible effort to collect himself.

More temperately, the Stock Exchange leader said to Vornan, “I don’t mind telling you that I find all this hard to believe. A world without America in it? A world that doesn’t use money? Tell me this, will you, please: Has the whole world gone Communist where you come from?”

There ensued what they call a pregnant silence, during which cameras and recorders were busy catching tense, incredulous, angry, or disturbed facial expressions. I sensed impending disaster. At length Vornan said, “It is another term I do not understand. I apologize for my extreme ignorance. I fear that my world is much unlike yours. However” — at this point he produced his glittering smile, drawing the sting from his words — “it is your world, and not mine, that I have come here to discuss. Please do tell me the use of this Stock Exchange of yours.”

But Norton could not shake his obsession with the contours of Vornan-19’s world. “In a moment. If you’ll tell me, first, how you make purchases of goods — a hint or two of your economic system—”

“We each have all that any person would require. Our needs are met. And now, this idea of corporation ownership—”

Norton turned away in despair. Vistas of an unimaginable future stretched before us: a world without economics, a world in which no desire went unfulfilled. Was it possible? Or was it all the oversimplified shrugging away of details that a mountebank did not care to simulate for us? One or the other, I was beguiled. But Norton was derailed. He gestured numbly to one of the other Stock Exchange men, who came forward brightly to say, “Let’s start right at the beginning. We’ve got this company that makes things. It’s owned by a little group of people. Now, in legal terms there’s a concept known as liability, meaning that the owners of a company are responsible for anything their company might do that’s improper or illegal. To shift liability, they create an imaginary entity called a corporation, which bears the responsibility for any action that might be brought against them in their business capacity. Now, since each member of the owning group has a share in the ownership of this corporation, we can issue stock, that is, certificates representing proportional shares of beneficial interest in the…”

And so on and on. A basic course in economics.

Vornan beamed. He let the whole thing run its route, right to the point where the man was explaining that when an owner wished to sell his share in the company, he found it expedient to work through a central auction system that would put his stock up for the highest bidder, when Vornan quietly and devastatingly admitted that he still couldn’t quite grasp the concepts of ownership, corporations, and profit, let alone the transfer of stock interests. I’m sure he said it just to annoy and goad. He was playing the part now of the man from Utopia, eliciting long explanations of our society and then playfully giving the structure itself a shove by registering ignorance of its underlying assumptions, implying that the underlying assumptions were transient and insignificant. There was a distressed huddle among the offended but stonily reserved Stock Exchange officials. It had never occurred to them that anyone might take this mock-innocent attitude. Even a child knew what money was and what corporations did, even if the concept of limited liability remained elusive.

I felt no great impulse to get mixed up in the awkwardness. My eyes roved idly here and there. Looking toward the great yellow blowup of the stock ticker, I saw:

And then:

The tape began then to tell of stock transactions and of fluctuating averages. But the damage was done. Action on the trading floor came to a halt. The counterfeit buying and selling stopped, and a thousand faces were upturned to the balcony. Great shouts arose, incoherent, unintelligible. The brokers were waving and cheering. They flowed together, swirling around the trading posts, pointing, waving, crying out mysterious booming noises. What did they want? The Dow-Jones industrial averages for January, 2999? The laying-on of hands? A glimpse of the man from the future? Vornan was at the rim of the balcony, now, smiling, holding up his hands as though delivering a benediction upon capitalism. The last rites, perhaps… extreme unction for the financial dinosaurs.

Norton said, “They’re acting strangely. I don’t like this.”

Holliday reacted to the note of alarm in his voice. “Let’s get Vornan out of here,” he murmured to a guard standing just by my elbow. “There’s the look of a riot starting.”

Tickertape floated through the air. The churning brokers seized long streamers of it, danced around with it, sent it coiling upward toward the balcony. I heard a few shouts against the background of noise: they wanted Vornan to come down among them. Vornan continued to acknowledge their homage.

The ticker declared:

An exodus from the trading floor had begun. The brokers were coming upstairs to find Vornan! Our group dissolved in confusion. I was growing accustomed now to making quick exits; Aster Mikkelsen stood beside me, so I seized her by the hand and whispered hoarsely, “Come on, before the trouble starts! Vornan’s done it again!”

“But he hasn’t done anything!”

I tugged at her. A door appeared, and we slipped quickly through it. I looked back and saw Vornan following me, surrounded by his security guards. We passed down a long glittering corridor that coiled tubelike around the entire building. Behind us came shouts, muffled and inchoate. I saw a door marked NO ADMITTANCE and opened it. I was on another balcony, this one overlooking what could only have been the gut of the master computer. Snaky strands of data leaped convulsively from tank to tank. Girls in short smocks rushed back and forth, thrusting their hands into enigmatic openings. What looked like an intestine stretched across the ceiling. Aster laughed. I pulled her after me and we went out again, into the corridor. A robotruck came buzzing up toward us. We sidestepped it. What did the tape say now? FLOOR BROKERS RUN AMOK?

“Here,” Aster said. “Another door!”

We found ourselves at the lip of a dropshaft and stepped blithely into it. Down, down, down…

…and out. Into the warm arcade of Wall Street. Sirens wailed behind us. I paused, gasping, taking my bearings, and saw that Vornan was still behind me, with Holliday and the media crew right in back of him.

“Into the cars!” Holliday ordered.

We made our escape successfully. Later in the day we learned that the Dow-Jones averages had suffered a decline of 8.51 points during our visit to the Exchange, and that two elderly brokers had perished from derangement of their cardiac pacemakers during the excitement. As we sped out of New York City that night, Vornan said idly to Heyman, “You must explain capitalism to me again some time. It seems quite thrilling, in its fashion.”