The Masks Of Time Part 6

"No comment."

"Precisely. You're a star. Leo."

Snow was falling again, somewhat more actively than the melting coils were programmed to handle. Thin crusts of white were forming here and there on the pavement, and it was deeper in the shrubbery. Pools of newly melted water glistened. The snow twinkled like starlight as it drifted down. The stars themselves were hidden; we might have been alone in the universe. I felt a great loneliness. In Arizona now the sun was s.h.i.+ning.

As we entered the grand old hotel where I was staying. I turned to Kralick and said, "I think I'll accept that offer of a dinner companion after all."

SIX.

I sensed the real power of the United States Government for the first time when the girl came to my suite about seven that evening. She was a tall blonde with hair like spun gold. Her eyes were brown, not blue, her lips were full, her posture was superb. In short, she looked astonis.h.i.+ngly like s.h.i.+rley Bryant.

Which meant that they had been keeping tabs on me for a long time, observing and recording the sort of woman I usually chose, and producing one of exactly the right qualifications on a moment's notice. Did that mean that they thought s.h.i.+rley was my mistress? Or that they had drawn an abstract profile of all my women, and had come up with a s.h.i.+rley-like girl because I had (unconsciously!) been picking s.h.i.+rley-surrogates all along?

This girl's name was Martha. I said, "You don't look like a Martha at all. Marthas are short and dark and terribly intense, with long chins. They smell of cigarettes all the time."

"Actually," Martha said, "I'm a Sidney. But the government didn't think you'd go for a girl named Sidney."

Sidney, or Martha, was an ace, a star. She was too good to be true, and I suspected that she had been created golemlike in a government laboratory to serve my needs. I asked her if that was so, and she said yes. "Later on," she said, "I'll show you where I plug in."

"How often do you need a recharge?"

"Two or three times a night, sometimes. It depends."

She was in her early twenties, and she reminded me forcibly of the co-eds around the campus. Perhaps she was a robot, perhaps she was a call girl; but she acted like neither-more like a lively, intelligent, mature human being who just happened to be willing to make herself available for duties like this. I didn't dare ask her if she did things of this sort all the time.

Because of the snow, we ate in the hotel dining room. It was an old-fas.h.i.+oned place with chandeliers and heavy draperies, head waiters in evening clothes and an engraved menu a yard long. I was glad to see it; the novelty of using menu cubes had worn-off by now, and it was graceful to read our choices from a printed card while a live human being took down our wishes with a pad and pencil, just as in bygone times.

The government was paying. We ate well. Fresh caviar, oyster c.o.c.ktails, turtle soup, Chateaubriand for two, very rare. The oysters were the delicate little Olympias from Puget Sound. They have much to commend them, but I miss the true oysters of my youth. I last ate them in 1976 at the Bicentennial Fair-when they were five dollars a dozen, because of the pollution. I can forgive mankind for destroying the dodo, but not for blotting out bluepoints.

Much satiated, we went back upstairs. The perfection of the evening was marred only by a nasty scene in the lobby when I was set upon by a few of the media boys looking for a story.

"Professor Garfield-"

"-is it true that-"

"-words on your theory of-"

"-Vornan-19-"

"No comment." "No comment." "No comment." "No comment."

Martha and I escaped into the elevator. I slapped a privacy seal on my door-old-fas.h.i.+oned as this hotel is, it has modern conveniences-and we were safe. She looked at me coquettishly, but her coyness didn't last long. She was long and smooth, a symphony in pink and gold, and she wasn't any robot, although I found where she plugged in. In her arms I was able to forget about men from 2999, drowning Apocalyptists, and the dust gathering on my laboratory desk. If there is a heaven for Presidential aides, let Sandy Kralick ascend to it when his time comes.

In the morning we breakfasted in the room, took a shower together like newlyweds, and stood looking out the window at the last traces of the night's snow. She dressed; her black plastic mesh sheath seemed out of place in the morning's pale light, but she was still lovely to behold. I knew I would never see her again.

As she left, she said, "Someday you must tell me about time-reversal, Leo."

"I don't know a thing about it. So long, Sidney."

"Martha."

"You'll always be Sidney to me."

I resealed the door and checked with the hotel switchboard when she was gone. As I expected, there had been dozens of calls, and all had been turned away. The switchboard wanted to know if I'd take a call from Mr. Kralick. I said I would.

I thanked him for Sidney. He was only a bit puzzled. Then he said, "Can you come to the first committee meeting at two, in the White House? A get-together session."

"Of course. What's the news from Hamburg?"

"Bad. Vornan caused a riot. He went into one of the tough bars and made a speech. The essence of it was that the most lasting historic achievement of the German people was the Third Reich. It seems that's all he knows about Germany, or something, and he started praising Hitler and getting him mixed up with Charlemagne, and the authorities yanked him out of there just in time. Half a block of nightclubs burned down before the foam tanks arrived." Kralick grinned ingenuously. "Maybe I shouldn't be telling you this.

It still isn't too late for you to pull out."

I sighed and said, "Oh, don't worry, Sandy. I'm on the team for keeps now. It's the least I can do for you . . . after Sidney."

"See you at two. We'll pick you up and take you across via tunnel because I don't want you devoured by the media madmen. Stay put until I'm at your door."

"Right," I said. I put down the phone, turned, and saw what looked like a puddle of green slime gliding across my threshold and into the room.

It wasn't slime. It was a fluid audio pickup full of monomolecular ears. I was being bugged from the corridor. Quickly I went to the door and ground my heel into the puddle. A thin voice said, "Don't do that, Dr. Garfield. I'd like to talk to you. I'm from Amalgamated Network of-"

"Go away."

I finished grinding my heel. I wiped up the rest of the mess with a towel. Then I leaned close to the floor and said to any remaining ears sticking to the woodwork. "The answer is still No Comment. Go away."

I got rid of him, finally. I adjusted the privacy seal so that it wouldn't be possible even to slide a single molecule's thickness of anything under the door, and waited out the morning. Shortly before two Sandy Kralick came for me and smuggled me into the underground tunnel leading to the White House.

Was.h.i.+ngton is a maze of subterranean connections. I'm told you can get from anywhere to anywhere if you know the routes and have the right access-words handy when the scanners challenge you. The tunnels go down layer after layer. I hear there's an automated brothel six layers deep below the Capitol, for Congressional use only; and the Smithsonian is supposed to be carrying on experiments in mutagenesis somewhere below the Mall, sp.a.w.ning biological monstrosities that never see the light of day.

Like everything else you hear about the capital, I suppose these stories are apocryphal; I suppose that the truth, if it were ever known, would be fifty times as ghastly as the fables. This is a diabolical city.

Kralick led me to a room with walls of anodized bronze somewhere beneath the West Wing of the White House. Four people were in it already. I recognized three of them. The upper levels of the scientific establishment are populated by a tiny clique, inbred, self-perpetuating. We all know one another, through interdisciplinary meetings of one kind or another. I recognized Lloyd Kolff, Morton Fields, and Aster Mikkelsen. The fourth person rose stiffly and said, "I don't believe we've met, Dr.

Garfield. F. Richard Heyman."

"Yes, of course.Spengler, Freud, and Marx, isn't it? I remember it very fondly." I took his hand. It was moist at the fingertips, and I suppose moist at the palms too, but he shook hands in that peculiarly untrusting Central European manner by which the suspicious one seizes the fingers of the other in a remote way, instead of placing palm next to palm. We exchanged noises about how pleased we were to make the other's acquaintance.

Give me full marks for insincerity. I did not think much of F. Richard Heyman's book, which struck me as both ponderous and superficial at once, a rare feat; I did not care for the occasional reviews he wrote for the general magazines, which inevitably turned out to be neat eviscerations of his colleagues; I did not like the way he shook hands; I did not even like his name. What was I supposed to call an "F. Richard"

when we had to use names? "F?" "d.i.c.k?" What about "my dear Heyman?" He was a short stocky man with a cannonball head, a fringe of coa.r.s.e red hair along the back half of his skull, and a thick reddish beard curling down over his cheeks and throat to hide what I'm sure was a chin as round as the top of his head. A thin-lipped sharklike mouth was barely visible within the foliage. His eyes were watery and unpleasant.

The other members of the committee I had no hostilities toward. I knew them vaguely, was aware of their high standings in their individual professions, and had never come to any disagreement with them in the scientific forums where we encountered one another. Morton Fields of the University of Chicago was a psychologist, affiliated with the new so-called cosmic school, which I interpreted to be a kind of secular Buddhism. They sought to unravel the mysteries of the soul by placing it in rapport with the universe as a totality, which has a pretentious sound to it. In person Fields looked like a corporation executive on the way up, say, a comptroller: lean athletic frame, high cheekbones, sandy hair, tight downturned mouth, prominent chin, pale questioning eyes. I could imagine him feeding data into a computer four days a week and spending his weekends slamming a golf ball mercilessly about the fairways. Yet he was not as pedantic as he looked.

Lloyd Kolff, I knew, was the doyen of philologists: a ma.s.sive thick-bodied man, well along in his sixties, with a seamed, florid face and the long arms of a gorilla. His base of operations was Columbia, and he was a favorite among graduate students because of his robust earthiness; he knew more Sanskrit obscenities than any man of the last thirty centuries, and used them all vividly and frequently. Kolff's sideline was erotic verse, all centuries, all languages. He supposedly wooed his wife-also a philologist-by murmuring scorching endearments in Middle Persian. He would be an a.s.set to our group, a valuable counterbalance to the stuffed s.h.i.+rt that I suspected F. Richard Heyman to be.

Aster Mikkelsen was a biochemist from Michigan State, part of the group involved in the life-synthesis project. I had met her at last year's A.A.A.S. conference in Seattle. Though her name has a Scandinavian ring to it, she was not one of those Nordic Junos of whom I am so scandalously fond, however. Dark-haired, sharp-boned, slender, she gave an appearance of fragility and timidity. She was hardly more than five feet tall; I doubt that she weighed a hundred pounds. I suppose she was about forty, though she looked younger. Her eyes held a wary sparkle; her features were elegant. Her clothes were defiantly chaste, modeling her boyish figure as if to advertise the fact that she had nothing to offer the voluptuary. Through my mind there speared the incongruous image of Lloyd Kolff and Aster Mikkelsen in bed together, the beefy folds of his heavy, hairy body thrust up against her slim frail form, her lean thighs and tapering calves straining in agony to contain his b.u.t.ting form, her ankles dug deep into his copious flesh. The mismatch of physiques was so monstrous that I had to close my eyes and look away. When I dared to open them, Kolff and Aster were standing side by side as before, the ziggurat of flesh beside the dainty nymph, and both were peering at me in alarm.

"Are you all right?" Aster asked. Her voice was high and piping, a reedy girlish sound. "I thought you were going to faint!"

"I'm a bit tired," I bluffed. I could not explain why that sudden image had come to me, nor why it left me so dazed. To cover my confusion I turned to Kralick and asked him how many other members our committee would have. One, he said: Helen McIlwain, the famed anthropologist, who was due at any moment. As though on cue, the door slid open and the divine Helen herself strode into the room.

Who has not heard of Helen McIlwain? What more can be said about her? The apostle of cultural relativism, the lady anthropologist who is no lady, the dogged student of p.u.b.erty rites and fertility cults who has not hesitated to offer herself as tribeswoman and blood sister? She who pursued the quest for knowledge into the sewers of Ouagadougu to partake of skewered dog, she who wrote the basic text on the techniques of masturbation, she who had learned at first hand how virgins are initiated in the frozen wastes of Sikkim? It seemed to me that Helen had always been with us, going from one outrageous exploit to another, publis.h.i.+ng books that in another era would have had her burned at the stake, solemnly informing the television audience of matters that might shock hardened scholars. Our paths had crossed many times, although not lately. I was surprised to see how youthful she looked; she had to be at least fifty.

She was dressed-well-flamboyantly. A plastic bar encircled her shoulders, and from it descended a black fiber cunningly designed to look like human hair. Perhaps itwas human hair. It formed a thick cascade reaching to mid-thigh, a fetis.h.i.+st's delight, long and silken and dense. There was something fierce and primordial about this tent of hair in which Helen was encased; all that was missing was the bone through the nose and the ceremonial scarifications on the cheeks. Beneath the ma.s.s of hair she was nude, I think. As she moved across the room, one caught sight of glints of pinkness peeping through the hairy curtain. I had the momentary illusion that I was seeing the tip of a rosy nipple, the curve of a smooth b.u.t.tock. Yet so cohesive was the sensual sweep of the long sleek satin-smooth strands of hair that it cloaked her body almost entirely, granting us only those fleeting views which Helen intended us to have.

Her graceful, slender arms were bare. Her neck, swanlike, rose triumphantly out of the hirsuteness, and her own hair, auburn and glossy, did not suffer by comparison with her garment. The effect was spectacular, phenomenal, awesome, and absurd. I glanced at Aster Mikkelsen as Helen made her grand entrance, and saw Aster's lips flicker briefly in amus.e.m.e.nt.

"I'm sorry I was late," Helen boomed in that magnificent contralto of hers. "I've been at the Smithsonian. They've been showing me amagnificent set of ivory circ.u.mcision knives from Dahomey!"

"And letting you practice with them?" Lloyd Kolff asked.

"We didn't get that far. But after this silly meeting, Lloyd, darling, if you'd like to come back there with me, I'd be delighted to demonstrate my technique. On you."

"It is sixty-three years too late for that," Kolff rumbled, "as you should know. I'm surprised your memory is so short, Helen."

"Oh, yes, darling! Absolutely right! A thousand apologies. I quite forgot!" And she rushed over to Kolff, hairy garment aflutter, to kiss him on his broad cheek. Sanford Kralick bit his lip. Obviously that was something his computer had missed. F. Richard Heyman looked uncomfortable. Fields smiled, and Aster seemed bored. I began to see that we were in for a lively time.

Kralick cleared his throat. "Now that we're all here, if I could have your attention a moment . . ."

He proceeded to brief us on our job. He used screens, data cubes, sonic synthesizers, and a battery of other up-to-the-minute devices by way of conveying to us the urgency and necessity of our mission.

Basically, we were supposed to help make Vornan-19's visit to 1999 more rewarding and enjoyable: but also we were under instructions to keep a close watch on the visitor, tone down his more outrageous behavior if possible, and determine secretly to our own satisfaction whether he was genuine or a clever fraud.

It turned out that our own group was split on that last point. Helen McIlwain believed firmly, even mystically, that Vornan-19had come from 2999. Morton Fields was of the same opinion, although he wasn't so vociferous about it. It seemed to him that there was something symbolically appropriate about having a messiah-figure come out of the future to aid us in our time of travail; and since Vornan fit the criteria, Fields was willing to accept him. On the other side, Lloyd Kolff thought the idea of taking Vornan seriously was too funny for words, while F. Richard Heyman seemed to grow purple in the face at the mere thought of embracing any notion so irrational. I likewise was unable to buy Vornan's claims.

Aster Mikkelsen was neutral, or perhaps agnostic is the better word. Aster had true scientific objectivity: she wasn't going to commit herself on the time traveler until she'd had a chance to see him herself.

Some of this genteel academic bickering took place under Kralick's nose. The rest occurred at dinner that night. Just the six of us at the table in the White House, with noiseless servants gliding in and out to ply us with delicacies at the taxpayer's expense. We did a lot of drinking. Certain polarities began to expose themselves in our ill-a.s.sorted little band. Kolff and Helen clearly had slept together before and meant to do so again; they were both so uninhibited about their l.u.s.tiness that it plainly upset Heyman, who seemed to have a bad case of constipation from his cranial vault clear to his insteps. Morton Fields apparently had some s.e.xual interest in Helen too, and the more he drank the more he tried to express it, but Helen wasn't having any; she was too involved with that fat old Sanskrit-spouting Falstaff, Kolff. So Fields turned his attention to Aster Mikkelsen, who, however, seemed as s.e.xless as the table, and deflected his heavy-handed advances with the cool precision of a woman long accustomed to such tasks.

My own mood was a detached one, an old vice: I sat there, the disembodied observer, watching my distinguished colleagues at play. This was a group carefully selected to eliminate personality conflicts and other flaws, I thought. Poor Sandy Kralick believed he had a.s.sembled six flawless savants who would serve the nation with zealous dedication. We hadn't been convened for eight hours yet, and already the lines of cleavage were showing up. What would happen to us when we were thrust into the presence of the slick, unpredictable Vornan-19? I feared much.

The banquet ended close to midnight. A row of empty wine bottles crisscrossed the table. Government flunkies appeared and announced that they would conduct us to the tunnels.

It turned out that Kralick had distributed us in hotels all around town. Fields made a boozy little scene about seeing Aster to her place, and she sidestepped him somehow. Helen and Kolff went off together, arm in arm; as they got into the elevator I saw his hand slide deep under the shroud of hair that enveloped her. I walked back to my hotel. I did not turn on the screen to find out what Vornan-19 had been up to this evening in Europe. I suspected, quite justly, that I'd get enough of his antics as the weeks unrolled, and that I could do without tonight's news.

I slept poorly. Helen McIlwain haunted my dreams. I had never before dreamed that I was being circ.u.mcised by a redheaded witch garbed in a cloak of human hair. I trust I don't have that dream again .

. . ever.

SEVEN.

At noon the next day the six of us-and Kralick-boarded the intercity tube for New York, nonstop.

An hour later we arrived, just in time for an Apocalyptist demonstration at the tube terminal. They had heard that Vornan-19 was due to land in New York shortly, and they were doing a little preliminary cutting up.

We ascended into the vast terminal hall and found it a sea of sweaty, s.h.a.ggy figures. Banners of living light drifted in the air, proclaiming gibberish slogans or just ordinary obscenities. Terminal police were desperately trying to keep order. Over everything came the dull boom of an Apocalyptist chant, ragged and incoherent, a cry of anarchy in which I could make out only the words "doom . . . flame . . . doom . .

Helen McIlwain was enthralled. Apocalyptists were at least as interesting to her as tribal witch doctors, and she tried to rush out to the terminal floor to soak up the experience at close range. Kralick asked her to come back, but it was too late: she rushed toward the mob. A bearded prophet of doom clutched at her and ripped the network of small plastic disks that was her garment this morning. The disks popped in every direction, baring a swath of Helen eight inches wide down the front from throat to waist. One bare breast jutted into view, surprisingly firm for a woman her age, surprisingly well developed for a woman of her lean, lanky build. Helen looked gla.s.sy-eyed with excitement; she clutched at her new swain, trying to extract the essence of Apocalyptism from him as he shook and clawed and pummeled her. Three burly guards went out there at Kralick's insistence to rescue her. Helen greeted the first one with a kick in the groin that sent him reeling away; he vanished under a tide of surging fanatics and we did not see him reappear. The other two brandished neural whips and used them to disperse the Apocalyptists. Howls of outrage went up; there were sharp shrill cries of pain, riding over the undercurrent of "doom . . . flame . .

. doom . . ." A troop of half-naked girls, hands to hips, paraded past us like a chorus line, cutting off my view; when I could see into the mob again, I realized that the guards had cut an island around Helen and were bringing her out. She seemed transfigured by the experience. "Marvelous," she kept saying, "marvelous, marvelous, such o.r.g.a.s.mic frenzy!" The walls echoed with "doom . . . flame . . . doom . . ."

Kralick offered Helen his jacket, and she waved it away, not caring about the bare flesh or perhaps caring very much to keep it in view. Somehow they got us out of there. As we hustled through the door, I heard one terrible cry of pain rising above everything else, the sound that I imagine a man would make as he was being drawn before quartering. I never found out who screamed that way, or why.

" . . . doom . . ." I heard, and we were outside.

Cars waited. We were taken to a hotel in mid-Manhattan. On the 125th floor we had a good view of the downtown renewal area. Helen and Kolff shamelessly took a double room; the rest of us received singles. Kralick supplied each of us with a thick sheaf of tapes dealing with suggested methods of handling Vornan. I filed mine without playing anything. Looking down into the distant street, I saw figures moving in a frantic stream on the pedestrian level, patterns forming and breaking, occasionally a collision, gesticulating arms, the movements of angry ants. Now and then a flying wedge of rowdies came roaring down the middle of the street. Apocalyptists, I a.s.sumed. How long had this been going on? I had been out of touch with the world; I had not realized that at any given moment in any given city one was vulnerable to the impact of chaos. I turned away from my window.

Morton Fields came into the room. He accepted my offer of a drink, and I punched the programming studs on my room service board. We sat quietly sipping filtered rums. I hoped he wouldn't babble at me in psychology jargon. But he wasn't the babbling kind: direct, incisive, sane, that was his style.

"Like a dream, isn't it?" he asked.

"This man from the future thing?"

"This whole cultural environment. Thefin de siecle mood."

"It's been a long century, Fields. Maybe the world is happy to see it out. Maybe all this anarchy around us is a way of celebration, eh?"

"You could have a point," he conceded. "Vornan-19's a sort of Fortinbras, come to set the time back into joint."

"You think so?"

"It's a possibility."

"He hasn't acted very helpful so far," I said. "He seems to stir up trouble wherever he goes."

"Unintentionally. He's not attuned to us savages yet, and he keeps tripping over tribal taboos. Give him some time to get to know us and he'll begin to work wonders."

"Why do you say that?"

Fields solemnly tugged his left ear. "He has charismatic powers, Garfield.Numen. The divine power.

You can see it in that smile of his, can't you?"

"Yes. Yes. But what makes you think he'll use that charisma rationally? Why not have some fun, stir up the mobs? Is he here as a savior or just as a tourist?"