The Masks Of Time Part 15

As she drew us along, Aster fished for what concerned her most: Vornan's comments. She knew that some sort of not-quite-human life existed in Vornan's time, for he had spoken in ambiguous terms at one of our early meetings of "servitors," which did not have full human status because they were genetically unhuman, life-forms built out of "lesser life." From what he had said, these servitors did not seem to be synthetic creations, but rather some kind of composites constructed of humbler germ plasm drawn from living things: dog-people, cat-people, gnu-people. Naturally Aster wished to know more, and she had just as naturally learned not a shred more from Vornan-19. Now she probed again, getting nowhere.

Vornan remained distantly polite. He asked a few questions: How soon, he wanted to know, would Aster be able to synthesize imitation humans? Aster looked hazy. "Five, ten, fifteen years," she said.

"If the world lasts that long," said Vornan slyly.

We all laughed, more an explosion of tensions than any real show of amus.e.m.e.nt. Even Aster, who had never displayed anything like a sense of humor, flashed a thin, mechanical smile. She turned away and indicated a tank mounted in a pressure capsule.

"This is our latest project," she said. "I'm not quite sure how it stands now, since as you all know I've been away from the laboratory since January. You see here an effort to synthesize a mammalian embryo.

We have several embryos in various stages of development. If you'll come closer . . ."

I looked and saw a number of fishlike things coiled within small membrane-bounded cells. My stomach tightened in nervous response to the sight of these big-headed little creatures, born from a mess of amino acids, ripening toward who knew what kind of maturity. Even Vornan looked impressed.

Lloyd Kolff grunted something in a language I did not understand: three or four words, thick, harsh, guttural. His voice carried an undertone of anguish. I looked toward him and saw him standing rigid, one arm brought up at an acute angle across his chest, the other pointing straight out from his side. He seemed to be performing some extremely complex ballet step and had become frozen in mid-pirouette.

His face was deep blue, the color of Ming porcelain; his red-rimmed eyes were wide and frightful. He stood that way a long moment. Then he made a little chittering noise in the back of his throat and pitched forward onto the stone top of a laboratory table. He clutched convulsively; flasks and burners went sliding and cras.h.i.+ng to the floor. His thick hands seized the rim of a small tank and pulled it over, spilling a dozen sleek little synthetic coelenterates. They flapped and quivered at our feet. Lloyd sagged slowly, losing his grip on the table and toppling in several stages, landing flat on his back. His eyes were still open. He uttered one sentence, with marvelously distinct diction: Lloyd Kolff's valedictory to the world.

It was in some ancient language, perhaps. None of us could identify it afterward or repeat even a syllable.

Then he died.

"Life support!" Aster yelled. "Hurry!"

Two laboratory a.s.sistants came scuttling up almost at once with a life-support rig. Kralick, meanwhile, had dropped beside Kolff and was trying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Aster got him away, and crouching efficiently beside Kolff's bulky, motionless form, ripped open his clothing to reveal the deep chest matted with gray hair. She gestured and one of her a.s.sistants handed her a pair of electrodes. She put them in place and gave Kolff's heart a jolt. The other a.s.sistant was already uncapping a hypodermic and pus.h.i.+ng it against Kolff's arm. We heard the whirr of the ultrasonic snout while it rose through the frequencies to the functional level. Kolff's big body s.h.i.+vered as the hormones and the electricity hit it simultaneously; his right hand rose a few inches, fist clenched, and dropped back again. "Galvanic response," Aster muttered. "Nothing more."

But she didn't give up. The life-support rig had a full complement of emergency devices, and she put them all into use. A chest compressor carried on artificial respiration; she injected refrigerants into his bloodstream to prevent brain decay; the electrodes rhythmically a.s.saulted the valves of his heart. Kolff was nearly concealed by the a.s.sortment of first-aid equipment covering him.

Vornan knelt and peered intently into Kolff's staring eyes. He observed the slackness of the features. He put a tentative hand forth to touch Kolff's mottled cheek. He noted the mechanisms that pumped and squeezed and throbbed on top of the fallen man. Then he rose and said quietly to me, "What are they trying to do to him, please?"

"Bring him back to life."

"This is death, then?"

"Death, yes."

"What happened to him?"

"His heart stopped working, Vornan. Do you know what the heart is?"

"Yes, yes."

"Kolff's heart was tired. It stopped. Aster's trying to start it again. She won't succeed."

"Does this happen often, this thing of death?"

"Once at least in everybody's lifetime," I said bitterly. A doctor had been summoned now. He pulled more apparatus from the life-support rig and began making an incision in Kolff's chest. I said to Vornan, "How does death come in your time?"

"Never suddenly. Never like this. I know very little about it."

He seemed more fascinated with the presence of death even than he had been with the creation of life in this same room. The doctor toiled; but Kolff did not respond, and the rest of us stood in a ring like statues. Only Aster moved, picking up the creatures that Kolff in his last convulsion had spilled. Some of them too were dead, a few from exposure to air, the others from being crushed by heedless feet. But some survived. She put them back in a tank.

At length the doctor rose, shaking his head.

I looked at Kralick. He was weeping.

FIFTEEN.

Kolff was buried in New York with high academic honors. Out of respect we halted our tour for a few days. Vornan attended the funeral; he was vastly curious about our customs of interment. His presence at the ceremony nearly caused a crisis, for the gowned academics pressed close to get a glimpse of him, and at one point I thought the coffin itself would be overturned in the confusion. Three books went into Kolff's grave with him. Two were works of his own; the third was the Hebrew translation ofThe New Revelation. I was enraged by that, but Kralick told me it had been Kolff's own idea. Three or four days before the end he had given Helen McIlwain a sealed tape that turned out to contain burial instructions.

After the period of mourning we headed west again to continue Vornan's tour. It was surprising how fast the death of Kolff ceased to matter to us; we were five now instead of six, but the shock of his collapse dwindled and shortly we were back to routine. As the season warmed, though, certain quiet changes in mood became apparent. Distribution ofThe New Revelation seemed complete, since virtually everyone in the country had a copy, and the crowds that attended Vornan's movements were larger every day.

Subsidiary prophets were springing up, interpreters of Vornan's message to humanity. The focus for much of this activity was in California, as usual, and Kralick took good care to keep Vornan out of that state. He was perturbed by this gathering cult, as was I, as were all of us. Vornan alone seemed to enjoy the presence of his flock. Even he sometimes seemed a bit apprehensive, as when he landed at an airport to find a sea of red-covered volumes gleaming in the sunlight. At least it was my impression that the really huge mobs made him ill at ease; but most of the time he seemed to revel in the attention he gained. One California newspaper had suggested quite seriously that Vornan be nominated to run for the Senate in the next election. I found Kralick gagging over the facsim of that one when it came in. "If Vornan ever sees this," he said, "we could be in a mess."

There was to be no Senator Vornan, luckily. In a calmer moment we persuaded ourselves that he could not meet the residence requirements; and, too, we doubted that the courts would accept a member of the Centrality as a citizen of the United States, unless Vornan had some way of demonstrating the Centrality to be the legally const.i.tuted successor-in-fact to the sovereignty of the United States.

The schedule called for Vornan to be taken to the Moon at the end of May to see the recently developed resort there. I begged off from this; I had no real wish to visit the pleasure palaces of Copernicus, and it seemed to me that I could use the extra time to get my personal affairs in order at Irvine as the semester ended. Kralick wanted me to go, especially since I had already had one leave of absence; but he had no practical way of compelling me, and in the end he let me have another leave. A committee of four could manage Vornan as well as a committee of five, he decided.

But it was a committee of three by the time they actually did depart for the lunar base.

Fields resigned on the eve of the departure. Kralick should have seen it coming, since Fields had been grumbling and muttering for weeks, and was in obvious rebellion against the entire a.s.signment. As a psychologist, Fields had been studying Vornan's responses to the environment as we moved about, and had come up with two or three contradictory and mutually exclusive evaluations. Depending on his own emotional weather, Fields concluded that Vornan was or was not an impostor, and filed reports covering almost every possibility. My private evaluation of Fields' evaluations was that they were worthless. His cosmic interpretations of Vornan's actions were in themselves empty and vapid, but I could have forgiven that if only Fields had managed to sustain the same opinion for more than two consecutive weeks.

His resignation from the committee, though, did not come on ideological grounds. It was provoked by nothing more profound than petty jealousy. And I must admit, little as I liked Fields, that I sympathized with him in this instance.

The trouble arose over Aster. Fields was still pursuing her in a kind of hopeless romantic quest which was as repugnant to the rest of us as it was depressing for him. She did not want him; that was quite clear, even to Fields. But proximity does strange things to a man's ego, and Fields kept trying. He bribed hotel clerks to put his room next to Aster's and searched for ways to slip into her bedroom at night.

Aster was annoyed, though not as much as if she'd been a real flesh-and-blood woman; in many ways she was as artificial as her own coelenterates, and she minimized the Byronic heavings and pantings of her too-ardent swain.

As Helen McIlwain told me, Fields grew more and more visibly worked up over this treatment. Finally one night when everyone was gathered together, he asked Aster point-blank to spend the night with him.

She said no. Fields then delivered himself of some blistering commentary on the defects in Aster's libido.

Loudly and angrily he accused her of frigidity, perversity, malevolence, and several other varieties of b.i.t.c.hiness. In a way, everything he said about Aster was probably true, with one limiting factor: she was anunintentional b.i.t.c.h. I don't think she had been trying to tease or provoke him at all. She had simply failed to understand what sort of response was expected of her.

This time, though, she remembered that she was a woman, and disemboweled Fields in a notably feminine way. In front of Fields, in front of everyone, she invited Vornan to share her bed with her that night. She made it quite clear that she was offering herself to Vornan without reservations. I wish I had seen that. As Helen put it, Aster looked female for the first time: eyes aglow, lips drawn back, face flushed, claws unsheathed. Naturally Vornan obliged her. Away they went together, Aster as radiant as a bride on her wedding night. For all I know, she thought of it that way.

Fields could take no more. I hardly blame him. Aster had cut him up in a fairly ultimate way, and it was too much to expect him to stick around for more of the same. He told Kralick he was quitting. Kralick naturally appealed to Fields to stay on, calling it his patriotic duty, his obligation to science, and so forth-a set of abstractions which I know are as hollow to Kralick as to the rest of us. It was a ritualized speech, and Fields ignored it. That night he packed up and cleared out, thus sparing himself, according to Helen, the sight of Aster and Vornan coming forth from the nuptial chambers the next morning in a fine full gleam of recollected delights.

I was back in Irvine while all this went on. Like any ordinary citizen I followed Vornan's career by screen, when I remembered to tune in. My few months with him now seemed even less real than when they were happening; I had to make an effort to convince myself that I had not dreamed the whole thing.

But it was no dream. Vornan was up there on the Moon, being shepherded about by Kralick, Helen, Heyman, and Aster. Kolff was dead. Fields had gone back to Chicago. He called me from there in the middle of June; he was writing a book on his experiences with Vornan, he said, and wanted to check a few details with me. He said nothing about his motives for resigning.

I forgot about Fields and his book within the hour. I tried to forget about Vornan-19, too. I returned to my much-neglected work, but I found it flat, weary, stale, and unprofitable. Wandering aimlessly around the laboratory, shuffling through the tapes of old experiments, occasionally tapping out something new on the computer, yawning my way through conferences with the graduate students, I suppose I cut a pathetic figure: King Lear among the elementary particles, too old, too dull-witted, too frazzled to grasp my own questions. I sensed the younger men patronizing me that month. I felt eighty years old. Yet none of them had any suggestions for breaking through the barrier that contained our research. They were stymied too; the difference was that they were confident something would turn up if we only kept on searching, while I seemed to have lost interest not only in the search but in the goal.

Naturally they were very curious about my views on the authenticity of Vornan-19. Had I learned anything about his method of moving through time? Did I think he reallyhad moved in time? What theoretical implications could be found in the fact of his visit?

I had no answers. The questions themselves became tedious. And so I wandered through a month of idleness, stalling, faking. Possibly I should have left the University again and visited s.h.i.+rley and Jack. But my last visit there had been a disturbing one, revealing unexpected gulfs and craters in their marriage, and I was afraid to go back for fear I would discover that my one remaining place of refuge was lost to me.

Nor could I keep running away from my work, depressing and moribund though it was. I stayed in California. I visited my laboratory every day or two. I checked through the papers of my students. I avoided the cascades of media people who wanted to question me about Vornan-19. I slept a good deal, sometimes twelve and thirteen hours at a stretch, hoping to sleep my way through this period of doldrums entirely. I read novels and plays and poetry in an obsessive way, going on binges. You can guess my mood from the statement that I worked myself through the Prophetic Books of Blake in five consecutive nights, without skipping a word. Those inspired ravings clog my mind even now, half a year later. I read all of Proust, too, and much of Dostoyevsky, and a dozen anthologies of the nightmares that pa.s.sed for plays in the Jacobean era. It was all apocalyptic art for an apocalyptic era, but much of it faded as fast as it moved across my glazed retina, leaving only a residue: Charlus, Svidrigailov, the d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi, Vindice, Swann's Odette. The foggy dreams of Blake remain: Enitharmon and Urizen, Los, Orc, majestic Golgonooza:

But blood & wounds & dismal cries & clarions of war, And hearts laid open to the light by the broad grizly sword, And bowels hidden in hammered steel ripp'd forth upon the ground.

Call forth thy smiles of soft deceit, call forth thy cloudy tears!

We hear thy sighs in trumpets shrill when Morn shall blood renew.

During this fevered time of solitude and inner confusion I paid little attention to the pair of conflicting ma.s.s movements that troubled the world, the one coming in, the other going out. The Apocalyptists were not extinct by any means, and their marches and riots and orgies still continued, although in a kind of dogged stubbornness not too different from the galvanic twitches of Lloyd Kolff's dead arm. Their time was over. Not too many of the world's uncommitted people now cared to believe that Armageddon was due to arrive on January 1, 2000-not with Vornan roaming about as living evidence to the contrary.

Those who took part in the Apocalyptist uprisings now, I gathered, were those for whom orgy and destruction had become a way of life; there was nothing theological in their posturings and cavortings any longer. Within this group of rowdies there was a hard core of the devout, looking forward hungrily to imminent Doomsday, but these fanatics were losing ground daily. In July, with less than six months left before the designated day of holocaust, it appeared to impartial observers that the Apocalyptist creed would succ.u.mb to inertia long before mankind's supposed final weeks arrived. Now we know that that is not so, for as I speak these words, only eight days remain before the hour of truth appears; and the Apocalyptists are still very much with us. It is Christmas eve, 1999, tonight-the anniversary of Vornan's manifestation in Rome, I now realize.

If in July the Apocalyptists seemed to be fading, that other cult, the nameless one of Vornan-wors.h.i.+p, was certainly gathering momentum. It had no thesis and no purpose; the aim of its adherents seemed only to be to get close to the figure of Vornan and scream their excited approbation of him.The New Revelation was its only scripture: a disjointed, incoherent patchwork of interviews and press conferences, studded here and there with tantalizing nuggets Vornan had dropped. I could construct just two tenets of Vornanism: that life on earth is an accident caused by the carelessness of interstellar visitors, and that the world will not be destroyed next January 1. I suppose religions have been founded on slimmer bases than these, but I can think of no examples. Yet the Vornanites continued to gather around the charismatic, enigmatic figure of their prophet. Surprisingly. many followed him to the Moon, creating crowds there that had not been seen since the opening of the commercial resort in Copernicus some years back. The rest a.s.sembled around giant screens erected in open plazas by canny corporations, and watched en ma.s.se the relays from Luna. And I in turn occasionally tuned in on pickups from those ma.s.s meetings.

What troubled me most about this movement was its formlessness. It was awaiting the shaper's hand. If Vornan chose to, he could give direction and impetus to his cult, merely by delivering a few ex cathedra p.r.o.nouncements. He could call for holy wars, for political upheavals, for dancing in the streets, for abstinence from stimulants, for overindulgence in stimulants-and millions would obey. He had not cared to make use of this power thus far. Perhaps it was only gradually dawning on him that the power was available to him. I had seen Vornan turn a private party into a shambles with a few casual movements of his hand; what could he not do once he grasped the levers that control the world?

The strength of his cult was appalling, and so was the speed at which it grew. His absence on the Moon seemed not to matter at all. Even from a distance he exerted a pull, as powerful and as mindless as the tug of the Moon itself on our seas. He was, more accurately than the cliche can convey, all things to all men; there were those who loved him for his gaudy nihilism, and others who saw him as a symbol of stability in a tottering world. I don't doubt that his basic appeal was as a deity: not Jehovah, not Wotan, not a remote and bearded father-figure, but as a handsome, dynamic, buoyant Young G.o.d, the incarnation of springtime and light, the creative and the destructive forces bound into a single synthesis.

He was Apollo. He was Baldur. He was Osiris. But also he was Loki, and the old mythmakers had not contemplated that particular combination.

His visit to Luna was extended several times. I believe it was the intention of Kralick-on behalf of the Government-to keep Vornan away from Earth as long as possible, so that the dangerous emotions engendered by his arrival in the last year of the old millennium might have a chance to subside. He had been scheduled to stay only to the end of June, but late in July he was still there. On the screens we caught glimpses of him in the gravity baths, or gravely examining the hydroponics tanks, or jet-skiing, or mingling with a select group of international celebrities at the gambling tables. And I noticed Aster beside him quite often, looking oddly regal, her slim body bedecked in startlingly revealing, astonis.h.i.+ngly un-Aster-like costumes. Hovering in the background occasionally were Helen and Heyman, an ill-a.s.sorted pair linked by mutual detestation, and I sometimes picked out the looming figure of Sandy Kralick, dour-faced, grim, lost in contemplation of his unlikely a.s.signment.

At the end of July 1 was notified that Vornan was returning and that my services would again be needed.

I was instructed to go to the San Francisco s.p.a.ceport to await Vornan's landing a week hence. A day later I received a copy of an unpleasant little pamphlet which I'm sure did not improve the flavor of Sandy Kralick's mood. It was a glossy-covered thing bound in red to imitateThe New Revelation; its t.i.tle wasThe Newest Revelation and its author was Morton Fields. A signed copy came to me compliments of the author. Before long, millions were in circulation, not because the booklet had any inherent interest but because it was mistaken by some for its original, and because it was coveted by others who collected any sc.r.a.p of printed matter dealing with the advent of Vornan-19.

The Newest Revelationwas Fields' ugly memoir of his experiences on tour with Vornan. It was his way of venting his spleen against Aster, mainly. It did not name her-for fear of the libel laws, I suppose-but no one could fail to identify her, since there were only two women on the committee and Helen McIlwain was mentioned by name. The portrait of Aster that emerged was not one that corresponded to the Aster Mikkelsen I had known; Fields showed her as a treacherous, sly, deceitful, and above all else amoral minx who had prost.i.tuted herself to the members of the committee, who had driven Lloyd Kolff into his grave with her insatiable s.e.xual appet.i.te, and who had committed every abomination known to man with Vornan-19. Among her lesser crimes was her deliberate s.a.d.i.s.tic torment of the one virtuous and sane member of our group, who was of course Morton Fields. Fields had written: "This vicious and wanton woman took a strange delight in sharpening her claws on me. I was her easiest victim. Because I made it clear from the start that I disliked her, she set out to snare me into her bed-and when I rebuffed her, she grew more determined to add me to her collection of scalps. Her provocations grew flagrant and shameful, until in a weak moment I found myself about to yield to them.

Then, of course, with great glee she denounced me as a Don Juan, callously humiliating me before the others, and . . ."

And so on. The whining tone was maintained consistently throughout. Fields ticked each of us off unsparingly. Helen McIlwain was a giddy post-adolescent, somewhat overripe; Lloyd Kolff was a superannuated dodderer making his way through gluttony, lechery, and the shrewd use of a mind that contained nothing but erotic verse; F. Richard Heyman was an arrogant stuffed s.h.i.+rt. (I did not find Fields' characterization of Heyman unjust.) Kralick was dismissed as a Government flunkey, trying hard to save everyone's face at once, and willing to make any compromise at all to avoid trouble. Fields was quite blunt about the Government's role in the Vornan affair. He said openly that the President had ordered complete acceptance of Vornan's claims in order to deflate the Apocalyptists; this of course was true, but no one had admitted it publicly before, certainly not anyone so highly placed in the circles around Vornan as was Fields. Luckily he buried his complaint in a long, clotted pa.s.sage devoted to a paranoid flaying of the national psyche, and I suspect the point was overlooked by most readers.

I came off fairly well in Fields' a.s.sessments. He described me as aloof, superficial, falsely profound, a mock-philosopher who invariably recoiled in terror from any hard issue. I am not pleased with those indictments, but I suspect that I must plead guilty to the charges. Fields touched on my excessive venery, on my lack of real commitment to any cause, and on my easy tolerance of the defects of those about me.

Yet there was no venom in his paragraph on me; to him, I seemed neither fool nor villain, but rather a neutral figure of little interest. So be it.

Fields' nasty gossip about his fellow committeemen alone would not have won his book much of a following outside academic circles, nor would I be speaking of it at such great length. The core of his essay was his "newest revelation"-his a.n.a.lysis of Vornan-19. Muddled, mazy, stilted, and dreary though it was, this section managed to carry enough of Vornan's charisma to gain it readers.h.i.+p. And thus Fields' foolish little book achieved an influence out of all proportion to its real content.

He devoted only a few paragraphs to the question of Vornan's authenticity. Over the course of the past six months Fields had held a variety of contradictory views on that subject, and he managed to pile all the contradictions into a short s.p.a.ce here. In effect he said that probably Vornan was not an impostor, but that it would serve us all right if he were, and in any case it did not matter. What counted was not the absolute truth concerning Vornan, but only his impact on 1999. In this I think Fields was correct. Fraud or not, Vornan's effect on us was undeniable, and the power of his pa.s.sage through our world was genuine even if Vornan-as-time-traveler may not have been.

So Fields dispensed with that problem in a cl.u.s.ter of blurred ambiguities and moved on to an interpretation of Vornan's culture-role among us. It was very simple, said Fields. Vornan was a G.o.d. He was deity and prophet rolled into one, an omnipotent self-advertiser, offering himself as the personification of all the vague, unfocused yearnings of a planet whose people had had too much comfort, too much tension, too much fear. He was a G.o.d for our times, giving off electricity that may or may not have been produced by surgically implanted power-packs; a G.o.d who Zeus-like took mortals to his bed; a trouble maker of a G.o.d; a slippery, elusive, evasive, self-indulgent G.o.d, offering nothing and accepting much. You must realize that in summarizing Fields' thoughts I am greatly compressing them and also untangling them, cutting away the brambles and thorns of excessive dogmatism and leaving only the inner theory with which I myself wholly agree. Surely Fields had caught the essence of our response to Vornan.

Nowhere inThe Newest Revelation did Fields claim that Vornan-19 wasliterally divine, any more than he offered a final opinion on the genuineness of his claim to have come from the future. Fields did not care whether or not Vornan was genuine, and he certainly did not think that he was in any way a supernatural being. What he was really saying-and I believe it wholeheartedly-was thatwe ourselves had made Vornan into a G.o.d. We had needed a deity to preside over us as we entered our new millennium, for the old G.o.ds had abdicated; and Vornan had come along to fill our need. Fields was a.n.a.lyzing humanity, not a.s.sessing Vornan.

But of course humanity in the ma.s.s is not capable of absorbing such subtle distinctions. Here was a book bound in red which said that Vornan was a G.o.d! Never mind the hedgings and fudgings, never mind the scholarly obfuscations. Vornan's divine status was officially proclaimed! And from "he is a G.o.d" to "He is G.o.d" is a very short journey.The Newest Revelation became a sacred scripture. Did it not say in words, in printed words, that Vornan was divine? Could one ignore such words?

The magical process followed expectations. The little red pamphlet was translated into every language of mankind, serving as it did as the holy justification of the madness of Vornan-wors.h.i.+p. The faithful had an additional talisman to carry about. And Morton Fields became the St. Paul of the new creed, the press agent of the prophet. Although he never saw Vornan again, never took an active part in the movement he unwittingly helped to encourage, Fields through his foul little book has already become an invisible presence of great significance in the movement that now sweeps the world. I suspect that he is due to be elevated to a lofty place in the canon of saints, once the new hagiologies have been written.

Reading my advance copy of Fields' book at the beginning of August, I failed to guess the impact it would have. I read it quickly and with the sort of cold fascination one feels upon lifting a boulder at the seash.o.r.e to disclose squirming white things beneath; and then I tossed it aside, amused and repelled, and forgot all about it until its importance became manifest. Duly I reported to San Francisco to greet Vornan when he landed from s.p.a.ce. The usual subterfuges and precautions were in effect at the s.p.a.ceport. While a roaring crowd wavedThe New Revelation aloft under a gray fogbound sky, Vornan moved through a subterranean channel to a staging area at the edge of the s.p.a.ceport.

He took my hand warmly. "Leo, you should have come," he said. It was pure delight. The triumph of your age, I'd say, that resort on the Moon. What have you been doing?"

"Reading, Vornan. Resting. Working."

"To good effect?"

"To no effect whatever."

He looked sleek, relaxed, as confident as always. Some of his radiance had transferred itself to Aster, who stood beside him in a frankly possessive way, no longer the blank, absent, crystalline Aster I remembered, but a warmly pa.s.sionate woman fully awakened to her own soul at last. However he had worked this miracle, it was undoubtedly his most impressive achievement. Her transformation was remarkable. My eyes met hers and in their liquid depths I saw a secret smile. On the other hand, Helen McIlwain looked old and drained, her features slack, her hair coa.r.s.e, her posture slumped. For the first time she seemed to be a woman in middle age. Later I discovered what had harrowed her: she felt defeated by Aster, for she had a.s.sumed all along that Vornan regarded her as a kind of consort, and quite clearly that role had pa.s.sed to Aster. Heyman, too, seemed weakened. The Teutonic heaviness I so disliked was gone from him. He said little, offered no greeting, and appeared remote, distracted, dislocated. He reminded me of Lloyd Kolff in his final weeks. Prolonged exposure to Vornan obviously had its dangers. Even Kralick, tough and resilient, looked badly overextended. His hand was shaking as he held it toward mine, and the fingers splayed apart from one another, requiring of him a conscious effort to unite them.

On the surface, though, the reunion was a pleasant one. Nothing was said about any strains that might have developed, nor about the apostasy of the odious Fields. I rode with Vornan in a motorcade to downtown San Francisco, and cheering mult.i.tudes lined the route, occasionally blocking it, just as though someone of the highest importance had arrived.

We resumed the interrupted tour.

Vornan had by now seen about as much of the United States as was deemed a representative sample, and the itinerary called for him to go abroad. Theoretically the responsibility of our Government should have ended at that point. We had not shepherded Vornan about in the earliest days of his visit to the twentieth century, when he had been exploring (and demoralizing) the capitals of Europe; we should have handed him on to others now that he was moving westward. But responsibilities have a way of inst.i.tutionalizing themselves. Sandy Kralick was stuck with the job of conveying Vornan from place to place, for he was the world's leading authority on that ch.o.r.e; and Aster, Heyman and myself were swept along in Vornan's...o...b..t. I did not object. I was blatantly eager to escape from the need to confront my own work.

So we traveled. We headed into Mexico, toured the dead cities of Chichen Itza and Uxmal, prowled Mayan pyramids at midnight, and cut over to Mexico City for a view of the hemisphere's most vibrant metropolis. Vornan took it all in quietly. His chastened mood, first in evidence in the spring, had remained with him here at the end of summer. No longer did he commit verbal outrages, no longer did he utter unpredictably scabrous comments, no longer could he be depended on to upset any plan or program in which he was involved. His actions seemed perfunctory and spasmodic now. He did not bother to infuriate us. I wondered why. Was he sick? His smile was as dazzling as ever, but there was no vitality behind it; he was all facade, now. He was going through the idle motions of a global tour and responding in a purely mechanical way to all he saw. Kralick seemed concerned. He, too, preferred Vornan the demon to Vornan the automaton, and wondered why the animation had gone out of him.

I spent a good deal of time with Vornan as we whirled westward from Mexico City to Hawaii, and on from there to Tokyo, Peking, Angkor, Melbourne, Tahiti, and Antarctica. I had not entirely given up my hope of getting hard information from him on the scientific points that were of concern to me; but although I failed in that, I learned a bit more about Vornan himself. I discovered why he was so flaccid these days.

He had lost interest in us.

We bored him. Our pa.s.sions, our monuments, our foolishnesses, our cities, our foods, our conflicts, our neuroses-he had sampled everything, and the taste had palled. He was, he confessed to me, deathly weary of being hauled to and fro on the face of our world.

"Why don't you go back to your own time, then?" I asked.

"Not yet, Leo."

"But if we're so tiresome to you-"

"I think I'll stay, anyhow. I can endure the boredom a while longer. I want to see how things turn out."

"What things?"

"Things," he said.

I repeated this to Kralick, who merely shrugged. "Let's hope he sees how things turn out fast," Kralick said. "He's not the only one who's tired of traveling around."

The pace of our journey was stepped up, as though Kralick wished to sicken Vornan thoroughly of the twentieth century. Sights and textures blurred and swirled; we zigzagged out of the white wastes of the Antarctic into the tropic swelter of Ceylon, and darted through India and the Near East, went by felucca up the Nile, trekked into the heart of Africa, sped from one s.h.i.+ning capital to the next. Wherever we went, even in the most backward countries, the reception was a frenzied one. Thousands turned out to hail the visiting deity. By now-it was nearly October-the message ofThe Newest Revelation had had time to sink in. Fields' a.n.a.logies were transformed into a.s.sertions; there was no Vornanite Church in any formal sense, but quite plainly the unfocused ma.s.s hysteria was coalescing into a religious movement.

My fears that Vornan would try to take hold of this movement proved unfounded. The crowds bored him as much as laboratories and power plants now did. From enclosed balconies he hailed the roaring throngs like a Caesar, with upraised palm; but I did not fail to notice the flicker of the nostrils, the barely suppressed yawn. "What do they want from me?" he asked, almost petulantly.