The Second Shield

In the night, despite the unsettling trouble that was brewing with the client from Miami, the blustering and the importuning and the implied or even outright threats, Beckerman managed to dream satisfactorily after all. He dreamed a little free-standing staircase of alabaster and malachite that pivoted in the middle and went back down itself through some other dimension like something out of an Escher print; he dreamed an attenuated one-legged bronze statuette with three skinny arms and a funny spiral topknot, Giacometti meets Dr. Seuss, so to speak; he dreamed a squat, puckery-skinned cast-iron froggy thing with bulging ivory eyeballs that periodically opened its huge mouth and emitted little soprano squeaks. Everything a bit on the bizarre side, even for Beckerman; but he did have a tendency to go over the edge a little when things got tense. The three pieces were arrayed in a neat row by the side of his bed when he woke, just before noon. It was, he thought, a damned fine batch of work.

But he didn’t take the time just yet for a close inspection of the latest products. His shower came first; and then the usual breakfast, a grapefruit and half of another one, nearly a dozen sausages, a platter of scrambled eggs, half a loaf of bread, a couple of bottles of beer. He was drenched with sweat, as he always was on these mornings: stinking acrid sweat, clammy and thick, the sweat of an artisan who has been going at it full throttle for many hours. Beckerman’s work took a lot out of him. He worked every bit as hard as any sculptor who hammered away at marble slabs or one who wrestled with heavy iron struts, except that he worked lying down with his eyes closed, and there was no actual physical labor involved.

It felt that way, though. Good productive dreams like these could burn up five or six pounds’ worth of energy in a single night. It was all that Beckerman could do to keep his weight up, despite a constantly ravenous appetite. At best he was a slender man, but a busy season of work would reduce him to skin and bones, his clothes hanging from his gaunt limbs like rags flapping in the wind: the Auschwitz look. There was no way around that. It was the necessary cost of his art.

After he was washed and dressed and had some breakfast in him, he checked out the new items, poking and prodding them, looking for blemishes and flaws, areas of insubstantiality, indications of early dissolution. None of Beckerman’s work was permanent—he was careful to point that out to potential buyers, very careful, which was why this Miami thing was so maddening and disturbing—but he made it a matter of professional pride never to offer anything for sale that was likely to last for less than a year. It wasn’t always possible for him to predict a piece’s probable life-span accurately—he always pointed that out to them, too—but he could usually pinpoint it within a range of plus or minus three months. Some exceptionally evanescent items were gone within hours; some survived for years; most lasted thirty to forty months. The record thus far was eleven years, five months, for a Daliesque melted watch made of copper inlaid with precious stones, set in a silver basin filled with mercury, one of his very finest pieces.

This group looked promising. The Escheresque staircase had a nice solid feel when he tapped it with his knuckle, and there were no soft places anywhere. Beckerman gave it three to five years. The goofy Giacometti, a lean, stripped-down thing of impressive tangibility and compaction, was a cinch for six or seven. Even the weakest of the three, the froggish thing, which had a hollow interior and some porous places on its surface, and therefore would eventually begin to suffer molecular flyaway beginning from the inside out, looked good for at least two and a half years, maybe three.

His mind began running through the roster of possible purchasers. The frog would go to Michaelson, the cellular phone tycoon, at about thirty grand: Michaelson loved strange-looking things that made weird sounds, and the relatively short life-span, the fact that the artifact would vanish into the air in a couple of years, wasn’t an issue to an art collector who had made his fortune out of something as transient as telephone calls. Michaelson had even said once that he was willing to buy six-month items, and even shorter-lived ones than that, if only Beckerman would put them on the market, which he steadfastly refused to do.

Yes, Michaelson for the frog. The staircase, most likely, he would offer to Buddy Talbert, the leveraged-takeover man, who had a weakness for anything with mathematical trickery about it, dimensional twists, mind-dazzling stuff like that. And as for the Giacometti/Seuss, well—

The telephone rang.

Not many people had Beckerman’s home number. “Yes?”

“Alvarez,” a quiet voice said.

Again. Beckerman began taking deep breaths. “Look, there’s no sense you calling me. I told you I would phone just as soon as I had anything good to report.”

“You haven’t phoned, though.”

“I’m still coming up short on the new shield.”

“Try harder, Beckerman.”

“You don’t seem willing to realize that these things aren’t subject to conscious control. They’re dreams, remember. Can you pre-determine your dreams? Of course not. So why do you think I can?”

“The things I dream about aren’t sitting on the floor next to my bed when I wake up, either,” Alvarez said. “The way I dream has nothing to do with the way you dream. Mr. Apostolides is getting very impatient for his shield.”

“I’m doing my best to produce it.”

“Give me an estimate. Two weeks? Three?”

“How can I say? I try every night. I set my mind to it, last thing before I close my eyes, shield shield shield shield. But I end up with different things instead. I can’t help it.”

“Focus your attention better, then.”

Beckerman’s forehead began to throb. “I’ve told you and I’ve told you. I could focus for a million years and I still wouldn’t be able to dream anything to order. Especially a complicated thing like that. The dream products are accidents, won’t you understand that? Random creations of my subconscious mind.”

“Tell your subconscious mind to be less random. Mr. Apostolides paid a fortune for that shield, and he loved it very much, he was tremendously proud of possessing it, and he was extremely disappointed when it faded away.”

“It lasted sixteen months. I told you right at the outset it wasn’t good for more than a couple of years.”

“Sixteen months isn’t a couple of years. He feels very cheated.”

“The estimates that I give people are never one hundred percent accurate. They know that up front. And I’ve offered to refund—”

“He doesn’t want a refund. This isn’t a question of the money. What he can’t deal with is not having the shield on his wall. The patriotic pride, the sheer joy of possession: money can’t replace that. He wants it back. A new one, just like the old. He feels very strongly about that. Very very strongly. You have caused him great personal grief by giving him such a frustrating experience.”

“I’m sorry,” Beckerman said. “I want only to please my clients. He can have his pick of anything else that I—”

“The shield,” said Alvarez ominously. “The shield and nothing but the shield.”

“When and if I can.”

“Two weeks, Beckerman.”

“I simply can’t promise that.”

“Two weeks. You have given Mr. Apostolides deep emotional pain, Beckerman, and he can be extremely unpleasant to people who create anguish for him. Believe me, he can.”

“What are you telling me?” Beckerman demanded.

But he was talking to a dead phone.

The shield that Beckerman had made for Apostolides, had dreamed for him one humid spring night three years ago, was one of his supreme masterpieces, his two or three finest works ever, and he regretted its evaporation even more, perhaps, than Apostolides did. But he couldn’t simply whip up another one, just like that, to replace it. He could only trust to luck, the random scoop of his dreaming mind, as with all of his pieces. And meanwhile here was Alvarez hounding him constantly, chivvying, bullying, fulminating, disturbing his peace of mind in a hundred different ways. Couldn’t he see that he was only making things worse?

Apostolides was a shipping magnate—Greek, of course, and he was mixed up in a lot of things besides shipping—with his name on the Forbes list of international billionaires and his fingers in all sorts of pies around the world. His main residence, the one where he had so proudly displayed Beckerman’s wondrous shield, was on a private island in Biscayne Bay, back of Miami, but there were homes in London and Majorca and South Africa and Thailand and Caracas too, and business offices in Geneva, the Cayman Islands, Budapest, Kuwait, Singapore, and one or two other places. Beckerman had never actually met or spoken to him. Not many people ever did, apparently. The artist’s dealings with Apostolides had been conducted entirely through the medium of Alvarez, who was some sort of agent for him.

Alvarez had tracked Beckerman down on the beach at the Hotel Halekulani in Waikiki, where he had gone for a week or two of tropical sunshine during one of San Diego’s rare spells of cool, wet winter weather. He was quietly sipping a daiquiri when Alvarez, a small smooth-faced man with rumpled sandy hair and a thin graying goatee through which you could easily see his chin, came up to him and greeted him by name.

Warily Beckerman admitted that he was who he was.

“I have a commission for you,” Alvarez said.

Beckerman disliked and distrusted him instantly. The little man’s eyes were troublesomely shifty and hard, and there was something weirdly incongruous, here on this sunny beach in 80-degree weather, about the fact that he was dressed in an elegant, closely cut Armani suit of some glossy gray-green fabric—jacket and tie, no less, probably the only necktie being worn anywhere in Hawaii that day. It made him look not only out of place but in some way menacing. But Beckerman made it a rule never to turn down the prospect of new business out of hand. After all these years of making money by pulling works of art literally out of thin air, he remained perversely afraid that all that prosperity would vanish some day, fading back to its mysterious source just as his sculptures inevitably did.

“I represent one of the world’s wealthiest men and greatest connoisseurs of art,” Alvarez said. “You would recognize his name immediately if I told it to you,” which he proceeded almost immediately to do. Beckerman did indeed recognize the name of Pericles Apostolides and he suddenly began to pay considerably more attention to Alvarez’s words. “Mr. Apostolides,” said Alvarez, “is, as perhaps you are aware, a student in the most intensely scholarly way of the heroic age of Greece, that is, the Mycenean period, the time of the Trojan War. You may have heard of the Homeric theme park that he is constructing outside Nauplia, with the full-scale replica of Agamemnon’s Mycenae, and life-size virtual-reality reenactments of the great moments of the Iliad and Odyssey, particularly the holographic simulations of Scylla and Charybdis and the blinding of Polyphemus, et cetera, et cetera.”

Beckerman had heard of the project. He thought it was nauseatingly tacky. But he went on listening.

Alvarez said, “Mr. Apostolides is aware of the quality of your work and has admired your splendid art in the collections of many of his friends. In recent months he was particularly keenly taken by the remarkable figure of a centaur in the possession of the Earl of Dorset and by the extraordinary Medusa that is owned by the Comte de Bourgogne. Mr. Apostolides has sent me here to inquire of you whether you would be willing to create something of a Homeric nature for him—not for the park, you understand, but for his personal and private gallery.”

“Mr. Apostolides must understand,” said Beckerman, “that I’m unable to work specifically to order—that is, that he can’t simply design a piece and expect me to execute it literally. My medium is dreams, dreams made tangible, and dreams are by their very nature unpredictable things. I can attempt to create what he wants, and perhaps it will approximate what he has in mind, but I can make no guarantees of specific pieces.”

“Understood.”

“Furthermore, Mr. Apostolides should realize that my work is quite costly.”

“That would hardly be a problem, Mr. Beckerman.”

“And finally, is Mr. Apostolides aware that the things I make are inherently impermanent? They will last a year or two, perhaps five or six in some cases, but almost never any longer than that. A man with his appreciation of ancient history may be unhappy to find that he has commissioned something that has hardly any more substance than—well, than a dream.”

Furrows appeared in Alvarez’s smooth forehead.

“Is there no exception to this? No kind of preservative that can be applied to particularly choice pieces?”

“None whatever.”

“Mr. Apostolides is a powerfully retentive man. He is a builder, a keeper. He does not sell the securities he invests in, he does not deaccession the works of art that he collects.”

“In that case perhaps he should give this commission some further thought,” Beckerman said.

“He very much wants a piece of yours comparable to those that he saw in the collections of the Earl of Dorset and the Comte de Bourgogne.”

“I would be extremely pleased to provide one. But the limitations on the durability of my work are not, I’m afraid, within my power to control.”

“I will explain this to him,” said Alvarez, and turned swiftly and walked away.

He reappeared two nights later, while Beckerman was enjoying a peaceful solitary dinner at the Halekulani’s elegant second-story open-air French restaurant, looking out over the moonlit Pacific. Taking a seat opposite Beckerman without being asked, Alvarez said, “How soon can you deliver?”

Beckerman had had an unusually productive autumn, to the point where by late November he had thought he might need to be hospitalized for exhaustion and general debilitation. By now he had recovered most of his loss of weight and was beginning to feel healthy again, but it had not been his plan to go back to work until the summer.

“July?” he said.

“Sooner,” said Alvarez.

“I can’t. I simply can’t.”

Alvarez named a price.

Beckerman, concealing his astonishment with some effort, said, “That would be quite adequate. But even so: my work is very demanding—physically demanding, is what I mean, with effects on my health—and I’m not ready just now to produce anything new, especially of the quality that Mr. Apostolides is undoubtedly expecting.”

Alvarez raised the offer by half.

“I could manage something by May, perhaps,” said Beckerman. “No earlier.”

“If the difficulty is that prior commissions are in the way, would some additional financial consideration persuade you to make changes in your working schedule?”

“I have no other work waiting. The issue is entirely one of needing time to build up my strength.”

“March?”

“April 15 at the earliest,” said Beckerman.

“We will expect it at that time.”

“Mr. Apostolides is fully aware of the conditions?”

“Fully. It is his hope that you will produce something unusually long-lived for him.”

“I’ll certainly try.”

“Will there be preliminary sketches for him to see?”

Beckerman felt the tiniest tweak of uneasiness. “You just told me that Mr. Apostolides is fully aware of the conditions. One of the conditions, as I attempted to make clear before, is that I have no a priori ability to control the shape of the work that emerges, none at all. If he’s dissatisfied with what I produce, he will, of course, be under no obligation to purchase it. But I can’t give him anything like sketches.”

“I see,” said Alvarez thoughtfully.

“If he doesn’t entirely realize that at this point, please see to it that it is made totally clear to him?”

“Of course,” said Alvarez.

Which was the last that Beckerman heard or saw of Alvarez for some months. He spent ten more days in Honolulu, until he felt fit and rested; and then, tanned and relaxed and almost back up to normal weight on the rich island cuisine, he returned to his studio in La Jolla and set about preparing himself for the Apostolides project.

Something Homeric, the man had said. Very well. Beckerman steeped himself in Homer: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Iliad again, reading this translation and that one, returning to the poems again and again until the wrath of Achilles and the homeward journey of Odysseus seemed more real to him than anything that was going on in the world he actually inhabited. He made no attempt at purposeful selection of design, no effort at directing his subliminal consciousness; that would be pointless, useless, even counterproductive.

After a while the dreams began.

Not his special kind, not yet. Just ordinary dreams, anybody’s kind of dreams, but they were rooted, nearly all of them, in his Homeric readings. Images out of the two poems floated nightly through his mind, the faces of Agamemnon and Menelaus and Hector and Achilles, the loveliness of Helen and the tenderness of Andromache, the monsters and princesses encountered by Odysseus as he made his long way home, the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors. Before long Beckerman knew that he was at the threshold of readiness to work. He could feel it building up in him, the sense of apprehension, the tingling in his fingertips and the tightness along his shoulders, an almost sexual tension that could find its release only in a tumultuous night of wild outpouring of artistic force. Beckerman pumped up his strength in anticipation of that night by doubling his intake of food, loading himself with milkshakes, ice cream, steak, mountains of pasta in heavy sauces, bread, potatoes, anything calorific that might give him some reserve of energy against the coming ordeal.

And then he knew, getting into bed one night in the first week of April, that the time was at hand.

In the morning, after some of the most turbulent effort he had ever put forth, the shield was next to his bed, a great gleaming half-dome of metal that seemed to be aglow with the fire of its own inner light.

Beckerman recognized it instantly for what it was. There is no mistaking the shield of Achilles: Homer devotes many pages to a description of it, the five sturdy layers, the shining triple rim of dazzling metal, the splendid silver baldric, above all the extraordinary intricacy of the designs that the god Hephaestus had engraved upon its face when he fashioned that astonishing shield for the foremost of the Greek warriors.

Not that Beckerman’s version of the shield was a literal rendition of the one so lovingly depicted by Homer. He never could have duplicated every one of the myriad details. A poet might be able to describe in words what a god had forged in his smithy, but Beckerman was constrained by the finite limitations of the medium in which he worked, and the best he could do was something that approached in general outline the vast and complex thing that Homer had imagined.

Still, it was a remarkable job, a top-level piece, perhaps his best one ever. The earth, the sea, and the sky were there in the center of the shield’s face, and the sun and the moon, and more than a suggestion of the major constellations. In the next ring were images of bustling cities, with tiny but carefully sketched figures acting out the events of municipal life, weddings and public meetings and a battle between armies whose generals were robed in gold; and outside that was a scene of farmers in their fields, and one of a king and his attendants at a feast, and a vineyard, and herds of golden cattle with horns of tin. Around everything, at the very rim, ran the mighty stream of the all-encompassing ocean.

He hadn’t shown everything Homer that had said was on the shield, but he had done plenty. Beckerman stared at the shield in awe and wonder, marveling that such a thing could have burst forth from his own sleeping mind in a single night. Surely it was the perfect thing for the Apostolides collection, well worth the staggering price and more, a masterpiece beyond even the billionaire’s own high expectations.

He called Alvarez in Miami. “I’ve got it,” he said. “The shield of Achilles. Book XVIII, the Iliad.”

“How does it look?”

“Terrific. Fantastic. If I say so myself.”

“Mr. Apostolides is very involved emotionally with Achilles, you know. I might even put it that he thinks of himself as a kind of modern-day Achilles, the invincible warrior, the all-conquering hero.”

“He’ll love it, then,” said Beckerman. “I guarantee it.”

Indeed he did. Apostolides paid Beckerman an unsolicited five-figure bonus, and gave the shield pride of place in what was apparently one of the finest private museums in the world, and flew his billionaire friends in from Majorca and the Grenadines and the Azores and Lanai to stand before it and admire it. He cherished that shield as though it were the Mona Lisa and the Apollo Belvedere and the David of Michelangelo all rolled into one.

Which was the problem. Because in less than a year and a half it began to melt and sag, and then it was gone altogether, and suddenly Alvarez was on the phone to say, “He wants another one. He doesn’t care how much it costs, but he wants another shield just like that one.”

The days went by. Had Alvarez been serious about that two-week deadline, or was it simply a bluff, a way of stampeding Beckerman into producing a second shield? In either case, there was nothing Beckerman could do about it. He had been telling Alvarez the simple truth when he said that he had no conscious control over the form of the dream-objects that he produced. He could give himself little hints at bedtime, yes, and that was often helpful in guiding the basic direction in which his dreaming mind would go; but that was about as much control as he had. Dreaming up a specific object was something he had never succeeded in doing.

He tried to put Apostolides and Alvarez out of his mind altogether and go about the normal routines of his business. He set up appointments with the collectors to whom he intended to offer the three new pieces; he made arrangements to be interviewed by an important art magazine that had wanted for months to do a feature on his work; he met with his broker for the regular semi-annual review of his stock portfolio.

“I could retire,” he told the broker, after he had gone over the portfolio and been apprised of the surprisingly strong gains it had made in the past six months. “I could sell all these stocks and put the money into municipal bonds and never do a night’s work again in my life.”

“Why would you want to do that?” the broker asked. “It isn’t as if the work takes up a lot of your time. Didn’t you once tell me that you actually produce your entire output in just six or seven nights a year?”

“Six or seven very strenuous and difficult nights, yes.”

“But you’re a great artist. Great artists don’t retire, no matter how wealthy they are. Did Picasso retire? Did Matisse? Monet was practically blind, and even richer than you are now, and he went on painting anyway, right to the end.”

“I am not Monet,” said Beckerman. “I am certainly not Picasso. I am Max Beckerman and I find my work increasingly demanding, too demanding, and it is becoming a great temptation to give it up altogether.”

“You don’t mean that, Max. You’ve just been working too hard lately, that’s all. Go to Hawaii again. Go to Majorca. You’ll feel better in a week or two.”

“Majorca,” Beckerman said bitterly. “Yes, sure, absolutely. I could go to Majorca.” He said it as if the broker had recommended a holiday in one of the suburbs of Hell. Apostolides had a house on Majorca, didn’t he? Everywhere he turned, something reminded him of Apostolides.

He knew what was behind this sudden talk of retiring. It wasn’t fatigue. The broker was right: he really did work only six or seven nights a year, and, arduous as those nights were, he recovered quickly enough from each ordeal, and there were new masterpieces to show for it. If he gave up work entirely, his entire oeuvre would fade away in a few years, and then there would be nothing left to indicate that he had ever lived at all. He would be utterly forgotten, a wealthy nobody who once had been a great artist, a rich old man sitting quietly on some tropical beach waiting for the eventual end to arrive. The museums were full of Matisses, Picassos, Monets, and always would be; but the moment Max Beckerman stopped working, that was the moment he would begin his slide into oblivion. He couldn’t face that prospect.

No, it was fear that had him thinking of retiring, of disappearing to some quiet and luxurious place where nobody would ever be able to find him again. Fear of Apostolides—of Alvarez, rather, because Apostolides was just a name to him, and Alvarez was a threatening voice on the telephone. The very rich, Beckerman knew, were utterly ruthless when they were thwarted. Run. Hide. Disappear. That was what he had to do. A villa in Monaco; an apartment in Zurich; a plantation in the Seychelles Islands. He could afford to go anywhere.

Beckerman went nowhere. He was surprised to find himself unexpectedly gliding into work mode again, much too soon after the last episode of creativity. He dreamed a small dinosaur-shaped animal the size of a large cat, a perpetual motion machine that energetically moved a complex arrangements of pistons through an elaborate pattern without pause even though it had no power source, and something that even he couldn’t identify, an abstract bunch of metallic squiggles, which to his relief melted away within a couple of hours. Good work, lots of it. But not the shield, no. Not the shield.

And then the two weeks were up.

“Beckerman?”

Alvarez, right on schedule. Beckerman hung up.

The phone rang again.

“Don’t do that,” Alvarez said. “Listen to me.”

“I’m listening.”

“What about the shield?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I’m very sorry.”

“You’ll be sorrier,” said Alvarez. “The client is getting extremely displeased now, extremely. Holding my feet to the fire, as a matter of fact. I was the one who brought you to his attention. Now he requires me to obtain a second shield from you for him. Dream him another shield, Beckerman. The shield of Achilles, just like the last one.”

“I’m trying to. Believe me, I’m trying. The Iliad is the last thing I read every night before I close my eyes. I fill my head with Homer. Heroes, swords, shields. But what comes out? Little dinosaurs come out. Perpetual motion machines come out. You see the problem?”

“I see the problem,” Alvarez said. “Do you?”

“Tell Mr. Apostolides that if he likes he can have my entire output for the next three years, free of charge, every single thing I produce. Only he must leave me alone on this thing of the shield.”

“What he wants is the shield, Beckerman.”

“I can’t give it to him.”

“Nobody tells things like that to Pericles Apostolides.”

“One day the Angel of Death is going to come for Mr. Apostolides, just like he comes for everybody else, and the angel is going to say, ‘All right, Pericles, come along with me’. Is he going to look the Angel in the eye and say that nobody tells things like that to Pericles Apostolides?”

“That’s not my problem, Beckerman. My problem is the shield. Your problem is the shield.”

“I’m doing the best I can. I can’t do better than that.”

“Two more weeks,” Alvarez said.

“And then?”

“Don’t ask. Just produce. Sweet dreams, Beckerman.”

He tried desperately to generate the shield. He lay rigid in his bed with his eyes closed, envisioning the shield as though hoping it would spring fully formed from his forehead while he was still awake. But it didn’t. Eventually he would drop off to sleep, and when he awoke in the middle of the following morning he could tell at once from the way he was trembling and the ferocious hunger he felt and the stink of sweat in the bedroom that he had worked during the night, and he would look eagerly at the floor beside his bed, and there would be something there, yes, a grinning ebony face with Picasso eyes, or a five-sided pyramid with a brilliant point of ruby light at its summit, or a formidable Wagnerian horned helmet that might very well have belonged to Wotan himself; but the shield of Achilles, no, no, never that.

He was exhausting himself in the effort, dreaming every night as though his life depended on it, which quite possibly it did, and accomplishing nothing. Beckerman was feverish all the time, now, wild-eyed with weariness and fear. The effects of the energy drain were horrifyingly apparent, the Auschwitz look again, Buchenwald, Dachau, a walking skeleton. He tried every remedy he knew to keep his strength up. Steroids; glucose injections; four meals a day, five; round-the-clock pizza delivery. Nothing worked for long. He was wasting away.

The telephone. Alvarez.

“Well, Beckerman?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m going to have to visit you in person, right?”

“What do you mean, visit me?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“Sit next to me while I sleep, and make me generate the shield?”

“That isn’t what I mean, no.”

“Don’t threaten me, Alvarez!”

“Who’s threatening? I just said I would come visiting.”

“Don’t even think of it. There was a contract that said the object I delivered was of its inherent nature impermanent, and that I could not be held responsible for its disappearance after a stipulated period of time. The stipulated minimum was twelve months. It’s in the contract, Alvarez. Which, as you know, Mr. Apostolides quite willingly signed.”

“You fulfilled that contract, yes. Mr. Apostolides now wants to enter into a second contract with you for a similar work of art. I’ll be coming soon to get your signature on it.”

“I never sign contracts that stipulate the design of a particular work.”

“You will this time.”

“Keep away from me, Alvarez!”

“Unfortunately, I can’t. I’ll be seeing you soon. And don’t try to run away. I’ll find you wherever you may be, Beckerman. You know that I will.”

Time was running out. Alvarez would be coming. The bell ringing downstairs; the voice on the intercom; and then the cold-eyed little man in the tight-fitting Armani suit, standing unsmilingly in the doorway, sadly shaking his head. And there would be no shield for Mr. Apostolides. Beckerman thought of a thousand different things he could do to protect himself, each one more implausible than the one before, and finally he thought of the thousand-and-first, which was not merely implausible but apparently impossible, and that was the one he resolved to try.

Never in his life had he been able to dream something to order. But that was what he intended to try now, one last wild attempt born of desperation. Not the shield, no: plainly that was beyond his power. Not only was he trying to dream something at somebody else’s command, but he was trying to dream a piece that he had already created once, and apparently his mind was unwilling to go back over a track that it had already traversed. Everything he had ever made had been one-of-a-kind.

But perhaps, perhaps, he could indeed by deliberate intent dream something to his own specifications that he had never dreamed before, something which would rescue him from the dilemma in which he found himself. It was worth a try, anyway.

That night he ate until he thought he would burst. Then he slept, and then he dreamed; and even as he dreamed he felt a flood of sudden strange optimism; and what he found beside his bed the next morning exceeded all his expectations. It was crude, it was badly proportioned, it was almost laughable; it would never fool Alvarez even for a moment. But it was a rough approximation of what he had set out to dream, and that was new, that was unique in his entire experience of the phenomenon about which he had built his life.

He tried again the next night, and the next, ordering his dreaming mind to work with the material at hand and shape it toward perfection. The first night’s work brought no visible improvement over what he already had, but to his amazement and delight there was a distinct transformation a night later, and when he awoke after one more night of work he realized that he had—in the final paroxysm of despair over his dire predicament—produced precisely what he needed.

If only I could have managed to do the second shield this way, he thought. Then I could have managed to keep my life intact.

But this, at least, would give him a way of sidestepping the wrath of Apostolides and the vindictiveness of Alvarez.

He looked down at the pale, haggard figure lying on the floor next to his bed and said, “Stand up.”

It shambled unsteadily to its feet.

“Stand straight,” Beckerman said. “Hold yourself like a man, will you?”

The figure attempted to improve its posture. It was, Beckerman saw, slightly lopsided, the left shoulder too narrow, the right leg a little short. Still, he was impressed with his own skill.

“Can you speak?” he asked.

“Yes. I can speak.”

It sounded rusty, and the voice seemed too high. But the faint European accent was a familiar one.

“Do you know who I am?”

“You are the artist Max Beckerman.”

“Yes. And who are you?”

A moment of silence.

“I am the artist Max Beckerman,” it said.

“Good. Good. We are both the artist Max Beckerman. Keep that in mind. Go to the closet, now. Find yourself some clothes, get yourself dressed.”

“I am hungry. I am in need of a shower.”

“Never mind that. Obey me. Get yourself dressed. Cover your body. Christ, you’re nothing but a skeleton with skin! I can’t stand looking at those ribs of yours. Cover yourself. Cover yourself!”

“What shall I wear?”

“Anything you like,” Beckerman said. “Whatever strikes your fancy.”

He went into the bathroom and took a quick shower. Then, ravenous, he grabbed up a loaf of bread and began to gnaw at it. The other Beckerman was dressed when he returned to the bedroom. It had chosen gray gabardine slacks, one of the good London shirts, and Beckerman’s favorite black shoes, the John Lobbs. Too bad about the shoes, he thought. But he could always have another pair run up for him.

What time was it right now, he wondered, in Zurich? Eight hours later, was it? Nine? Early evening, he figured. He picked up the phone and dialed Elise’s number.

Another miracle! She was there!

“Wer spricht, bitte?”

“It’s me, Max. Listen, I’ll be coming to stay with you for a little while, is that all right?”

“Max? Where are you, Max?”

“California, still. But I’ll be getting the next plane out. I’ll be there in twenty-four hours, maybe less. Can you manage that, Elise?”

“Of course! But—why—?”

“I’ll explain everything when I get there. Listen, I’ll phone you again from the airport in an hour or two, when I know which flight I’m on. You can meet me when I land, can’t you?”

“Natürlich, liebchen, natürlich! It’s just that—it’s all such a surprise—”

“I know,” he said. “I love you, Elise.” He blew her a kiss and hung up. He called the airport next; and then phoned his usual taxi service to arrange for a cab in thirty minutes.

The other Beckerman was still standing next to the bed.

“I am very hungry,” it said.

Beckerman gestured impatiently. “Go, then. Eat. Eat all you like. You know where to find it.” He began to shovel things into his suitcase, a couple of shirts, some slacks, his shaver, a pair of shoes, a few pairs of socks, underwear, three neckties.

The telephone rang. Beckerman went on packing. After eight or nine rings the phone fell silent; and then, in another moment, it began to ring again.

He closed his suitcase. Took a last look around. He probably would never be coming back here, he knew.

The telephone was still ringing.

“Should I answer it?” the other Beckerman asked.

“No,” Beckerman said. “Just let it ring.” He picked up the suitcase and walked toward the door. The cab would be here in another five or ten minutes. He would wait for it downstairs.

He paused at the door. The dream-Beckerman, dull-eyed, simpering, lopsided, but his twin in all essential respects, gazed stupidly at him.

“I’m expecting a visit shortly from a Mr. Alvarez,” Beckerman said. The other Beckerman nodded. “He’ll ring the bell downstairs. You press this buzzer to let him in. You got that?”

“Yes. I have that.”

“Good. Well, so long, my friend,” said Beckerman. “The place is yours now. Good luck.”

And be sure to tell Alvarez to give Mr. Apostolides my regards, he thought, as he headed downstairs to the waiting cab.