The Masks of Time

FOUR

“Come out into the desert with me,” Jack said. “I’d like to talk to you, old man.”

Two days had passed since the telecast of Vornan-19’s press conference. We had not turned the wallscreen on again, and the tension had ebbed from the house. I was planning to return to Irvine the following day. My work was calling me, and I felt also that I should leave Shirley and Jack in privacy while they dealt with whatever gulfs were opening in their lives. Jack had said little during the two days; he appeared to be making a conscious effort to conceal the pain he had felt that night. I was surprised and pleased by his invitation.

“Will Shirley go?” I asked.

“She doesn’t need to. Just the two of us.”

We left her sunbathing in the noon light, her eyes closed, her supple body upturned, her loveliness bare to the sun’s caress. Jack and I walked more than a mile from the house, taking a path we rarely used. The sand was still dimpled from the heavy rainfall, and the scrubby plants were erupting in violent greenery.

Jack halted at a place where three high mica-encrusted monoliths formed a kind of natural Stonehenge, and crouched down before one of the boulders to tug at a clump of sage growing by its base. When he had succeeded in pulling the hapless plant free, he cast it aside and said, “Leo, did you ever wonder why I left the University?”

“You know I did.”

“What was the story I gave you?”

“That you were at a dead end in your work,” I said. “That you were bored with it, that you had lost faith in yourself and in physics, that you simply wanted to get away to your love-nest with Shirley and stay there and write and meditate.”

He nodded. “It was a lie.”

“I know.”

“Well, partly a lie. I did want to come away here and live apart from the world, Leo. But the bit about being at a dead end: it wasn’t true at all. My problem was quite the opposite. I was not at a dead end. God knows I wanted to be. But I saw my way clearly to the culmination of my thesis. The answers were in sight, Leo. All the answers.”

Something twitched in my left cheek. “And you could stop, knowing that it was all in your grasp?”

“Yes,” He scuffed at the base of the boulder, knelt, scooped sand, sifted it through his fingers. He did not look at me. At length he said, “Was it an act of moral grandeur, I wonder, or just an act of cowardice? What do you think, Leo?”

“You tell me.”

“Do you know where my work was heading?”

“I think I knew it before you,” I said. “But I wasn’t going to point it out. I had to let you make all the decisions. You never once indicated that you saw any of the larger implications at all, Jack. As far as I could tell, you thought you were dealing with the atomic binding forces in a vacuum of theory.”

“I was. For the first year and a half.”

“And then?”

“I met Shirley, remember? She didn’t know much about physics. Sociology, history, those were her fields. I described my work to her. She didn’t understand, so I put it in simpler terms, and then still simpler terms. It was good discipline for me, verbalizing what had really been just a bunch of equations. And finally I said that what I was doing was finding out what holds atoms together internally. And she said, ‘Does that mean we’d be able to take them apart without blowing things up?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why, we could take any atom at all and liberate enough energy to run a house on it, I suppose.’ Shirley gave me a queer look and said, ‘That would be the end of our whole economic structure, wouldn’t it? ’ ”

“It had never occurred to you before?”

“Never, Leo. Never. I was that skinny kid from M.I.T., yes? I didn’t worry about applied technology. Shirley turned me upside down. I started calculating, then got on the phone to the library and had the computer run off some engineering texts for me, and Shirley gave me a little lecture on elementary economics. Then I saw, yes, by damn, somebody could take my equations and figure out a way of liberating unlimited energy. It was E=MC2 all over again. I panicked. I couldn’t assume the responsibility for overturning the world. My first impulse was to go to you and ask what you thought I should do.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugged. “It was the cheap way out. Loading the burden onto you. Anyway, I realized that you probably saw the problem already, and that you would have said something about it to me unless you felt I ought to work out the moral part by myself. So I asked for that sabbatical, and spent my time fooling around at the accelerator while I thought things over. I looked up Oppenheimer and Fermi, and the rest of the boys who built the atomic bomb, and asked myself what I would have done in their place. They worked in wartime, to help humanity against a really filthy enemy, and even they had their doubts. I wasn’t doing anything that would save humanity from clear and present danger. I was simply whipping up a gratuitous bit of research that would smash the world’s money structure. I saw myself as an enemy of mankind.”

“With real energy conversion,” I said quietly, “there’d be no more hunger, no more greed, no more monopolies—”

“There’d also be a fifty-year upheaval while the new order of things was taking shape. And the name of Jack Bryant would be accursed. I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t able to take the responsibility. At the end of that third year, I packed myself in. I walked away from my own work and came out here. I committed a crime against knowledge to avoid committing a worse crime.”

“And you feel guilty about it?”

“Of course I do. I feel that my whole life for the past decade has been a penance for running away. Have you ever wondered about the book I’ve been writing, Leo?”

“Many times.”

“It’s a kind of autobiographical essay: an apologia pro vita sua. In it I explain what I was working on at the University, how I came to realize its true nature, why I halted work, and what my attitude toward my own withdrawal has been. The book’s an examination of the moral responsibilities of science, you could say. By way of an appendix, I include the complete text of my thesis.”

“As it was the day you stopped work?”

“No,” Jack said. “The complete text. I told you the answers were in sight when I quit. I finished my work five years ago. It’s all there in the manuscript. With a billion dollars and a decently equipped laboratory any reasonably alert corporation could translate my equations into a fully functioning power system the size of a walnut that would run forever on an input of sand.”

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 swirls 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.”