The Masks of Time Read online

  Abruptly the screen dissolved into a swirl of colors, out of which came the replay of the news conference. Not a simulation this time. Vornan himself, live, appeared before my eyes for the first time.

  I was shaken.

  I can use no other word. In view of my later involvement with him, let me make it quite clear that at this time I regarded him as nothing but an ingenious fraud. I felt contempt for his pretensions and despised those who, for whatever motives, were choosing to play his silly game. Nevertheless my first sight of the purported visitor had a wholly unexpected impact. He peered outward from the screen, relaxed and poised, and the effect of his presence was something more than merely three-dimensional.

  He was a slim man of less than middle height, with narrow sloping shoulders, a slender feminine neck, and a finely modeled head held proudly erect. The planes of his face were pronounced: sharp cheek-bones, angular temples, a strong chin, a prominent nose. His skull was slightly too large for his frame; it was high-vaulted, longer than it was broad, and the bone structure in back would have been of interest to a phrenologist, for his skull was curiously prolonged and ridged. Its unusual features, though, fell within the range of what one might expect to find on the streets of any large city.

  His hair was close-cropped and gray. His eyes, too, were gray. He might have been of any age from thirty to sixty. His skin was unlined. He wore a pale blue tunic that had the simplicity of high style, and at his throat was a neatly gathered foulard, in cerise, providing the only touch of color about him. He looked cool, graceful, alert, intelligent, charming, and somewhat disdainful. I was reminded forcefully of a sleek bluepoint Siamese cat I had once known. He had the ambivalent sexuality of a superb tom, for there is something sinuously feminine even about most male cats, and Vornan projected that same quality, that well-groomed look of pantherish grace. I don’t mean to say that he was epicene in the sense of being sexless, but rather that he was androgynous, omnisexual, capable of finding and giving pleasure with anyone or anything. I stress the point that this was my instant impression, and not something that I am projecting backward out of what I later discovered about Vornan-19.

  Character is defined mainly by the eyes and the mouth. Vornan’s power centered there. His lips were thin, his mouth somewhat too wide, his teeth flawless, his smile dazzling. He flashed the smile like a beacon, radiating an immense warmth and concern, and just as swiftly cut it off, so that the mouth became a nullity and the center of attention shifted to the chilly, penetrating eyes. Those were the two most conspicuous sides of Vornan’s personality: the instant capacity to demand and seize love, represented by the irresistible blaze of the smile; and the quick withdrawal to calculating aloofness, represented by the moonstone gleam of the eyes. Charlatan or not, he was plainly an extraordinary man, and despite my scorn for such charades as this, I felt impelled to watch him in action. The simulated version shown a few moments before, under interrogation by the bureaucrats, had had the same features, but the power was missing. The first instant’s view of the live Vornan carried an immediate magnetism absent from the computerized zombie.

  The camera lingered on him for perhaps thirty seconds, long enough to register his curious ability to command attention. Then it panned around the room, showing the newsmen. Remote as I am from the heroes of the screen, I recognized at least half a dozen of them, and the fact that Vornan had been thought worthy of the time of the world’s star reporters was important in itself, testimony to the effect he had already had on the world while Jack and Shirley and I lazed in the desert. The camera continued around, revealing all the gimmicks of our gadgety era: the power core of the recording instruments, the dull snout of the computer input, the boom from which the sound equipment dangled, the grid of depth-sensors that kept the three dimensions of the telecast from wandering, and the small cesium laser that provided the spotlighting. Usually all these devices are carefully kept out of sight, but for this production they had been obtrusively thrust forward — props, one might say, to demonstrate that we medievals knew a thing or two.

  The press conference began with a voice saying in clipped London tones, “Mr. Vornan, would you kindly describe your assertions concerning your presence here?”

  “Certainly. I have come across time to gain insight into the life processes of early technological man. My starting point was the year you reckon as 2999. I propose to tour the centers of your civilization and carry back with me a full account for the delight and instruction of my contemporaries.”

  He spoke smoothly and with no discernible hesitation. His English was scrubbed free of accent; it was the sort of English I have heard computers speaking, a speech cobbled together from chaste isolated phonemes and thus missing any regional taint. The robotic quality of his timbre and enunciation clearly conveyed the notion that this man was speaking a language he had learned in vacuo, from some sort of teaching machine; but of course a twentieth-century Finn or Basque or Uzbek who had learned English via tape would have sounded much the same way. Vornan’s voice itself was flexible and well modulated, pleasant to hear.

  A questioner said, “How come you speak English?”

  “It seemed the most useful medieval language for me to learn.”

  “Isn’t it spoken in your time?”

  “Only in a greatly altered form.”

  “Tell us a little about the world of the future.”

  Vornan smiled — the charm again — and said patiently. “What would you like to know?”

  “The population.”

  “I’m not sure. Several billions, at least.”

  “Have you reached the stars yet?”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “How long do people live in 2999?”

  “Until they die,” said Vornan amiably. “That is, until they choose to die.”

  “What if they don’t so choose?”

  “I suppose they’d keep on living. I’m really not sure.”

  “What are the leading nations of 2999?”

  “We have no nations. We have the Centrality, and then there are the decentralized settlements. That is all.”

  “What’s the Centrality?”

  “A voluntary association of citizens in a single area. A city, in a sense, but something more than a city.”

  “Where is it?”

  Vornan-19 frowned delicately. “On one of the major continents. I forget your names for the continents.”

  Jack looked up at me. “Shall I turn it off? He’s obviously a phony. He can’t even fake the details convincingly!”

  “No, leave it,” Shirley said. She seemed entranced. Jack tensed again, and I quickly said, “Yes, let’s watch a little more. It’s amusing.”

  “…only one city, then?”

  “Yes,” Vornan replied. “Composed of those who value communal life. There’s no economic need for us to cluster together, you know. We’re each quite self-sufficient. What fascinates me is the need you folk have to keep your hands in each other’s pockets. This business of money, for example. Without it, a man starves, a man goes naked. Am I right? You lack independent means of production. Am I right in believing that energy conversion is not yet an accomplished fact?”

  A harsh American voice said, “Depends what you mean by energy conversion. Mankind’s had ways of getting energy since the first fires were kindled.”

  Looking perturbed, Vornan said, “I mean efficient energy conversion. The full use of the power stored within a single — ah, a single atom. You lack this?”

  I glanced sideways at Jack. He was gripping the float of his pneumochair in sudden anguish, and his features were distorted with tension. I looked away again as though I had intruded on something terribly private, and I realized that a decade-old question had been answered at least in part.

  Vornan was no longer discussing energy conversion when I was able to return my attention to the screen.

  “…a tour of the world. I wish to sample the full range of experience available in this era. And I will
begin in the United States of America.”

  “Why?”

  “One likes to see the processes of decadence in motion. When one visits a crumbling culture, one does best to explore its most powerful component first. My impression is that the chaos that will come upon you will radiate outward from the United States, and therefore I wish to search for the symptoms there first.” He said this with a kind of bland impersonality, as though it should be quite self-evident that our society was collapsing and that no offense could possibly be given by remarking on something so obvious. Then he flashed the smile just long enough to stun his audience into ignoring the underlying darkness of his words.

  The press conference trickled to an anticlimactic end. Random questions about Vornan’s world and about the method by which he had come to our time met with such vague generalities that he seemed clearly to be mocking his questioners. Occasionally he implied that he might provide further details on some point another time; mostly he declared that he simply did not know. He was particularly evasive on all efforts to get from him a sharp description of world events in our immediate future. I gathered that he had no high regard for our attainments and was a trifle surprised to discover that we had electricity and atomic energy and space travel at our early stage in the stream of history. He made no attempt to hide his disdain, but the odd thing was that his cockiness failed to be infuriating. And when the editor of a Canadian facsimsheet said, “Just how much of all this do you really expect us to believe?” he replied quite pleasantly, “Why, feel free to believe none of it. I’m sure it makes no difference to me.”

  When the program was over. Shirley turned to me and said, “Now you’ve seen the fabulous man from tomorrow, Leo. What do you think of him?”

  “I’m amused.”

  “Convinced?”

  “Don’t be silly. This is nothing but a very clever publicity dodge that’s working out magnificently for somebody. But give the devil credit: he’s got charm.”

  “He does indeed,” Shirley said. She looked toward her husband. “Jack, darling, would you mind very much if I arrange to sleep with him when he comes to the States? I’m sure they’ve invented a few new wrinkles in sex in the next thousand years, and maybe he could teach me something.”

  “Very funny,” Jack said.

  His face was black with rage. Shirley recoiled as she saw it. It startled me that he would overreact in this way to her innocently wanton suggestion. Surely their marriage was secure enough so that she could play at infidelity without angering him. And then it struck me that he was not reacting at all to her talk of sleeping with Vornan, that he was still locked in his earlier anguish. That talk of total energy conversion — of a decentralized world in which each man was an economically self-sufficient unit—

  “Do you mind?” he said, and left the room.

  Shirley and I exchanged troubled glances. She bit her lip, tugged at her hair, and said softly, “I’m sorry, Leo. I know what’s eating him, but I can’t explain.”

  “I think I can guess.”

  “Yes, you probably would be the one who could.”

  She opened the circuit that opaqued the side window. I saw Jack on the sundeck, gripping the rail, hulking forward and staring into the darkened desert. Lightning forked across the summits of the mountains in the west, and then came the instant fury of a winter rainstorm. Sheets of water cascaded across the glass paneling. Jack remained there, a statue more than a man, and let the storm unleash its force upon him. Beneath my feet I felt the purr of the house’s life-system as the storage pumps sucked the rainwater into the cisterns for later use. Shirley came up beside me and put her hand on my arm. “I’m afraid,” she whispered. “Leo, I’m afraid.”

  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.”