The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  Vornan-19 replied, “I will not do as you say.”

  Those were his first words to us — the opening lines of his Epistle to the Barbarians. He spoke in English. Many of the witnesses heard and understood what he had said. The policeman did not, and continued to harangue him in Italian.

  Vornan-19 said, “I am a traveler from a distant era. I am here to inspect your world.”

  Still in English. The policeman sputtered. He believed that Vornan was an Apocalyptist, and an American Apocalyptist at that, the worst kind. The policeman’s duty was to defend the decency of Rome and the sanctity of Christmas Day against this madman’s exhibitionist vulgarities. He shouted at the visitor to come down the steps. Ignoring him, Vornan-19 turned and serenely continued upward. The sight of those pale, slender retreating buttocks maddened the officer of the law. He removed his own cloak and rushed up the steps, determined to wrap it around the stranger.

  Witnesses declare that Vornan-19 did not look at the policeman or touch him in any way. The officer, holding the cloak in his left hand, reached out with his right to seize Vornan’s shoulder. There was a faint gleaming yellowish-blue discharge, and a slight popping sound, and the policeman tumbled backward as though he had been struck by an electric bolt. Crumpling as he fell, he rolled to the bottom of the stairs and lay in a heap, twitching faintly. The onlookers drew back. Vornan-19 proceeded up the steps to the top, halting there to tell one of the witnesses a bit about himself.

  The witness was a German Apocalyptist named Horst Klein, nineteen years old, who had taken part in the revelry at the Forum between midnight and dawn and now, too keyed up to go to sleep, was wandering the city in a mood of post coitum depression. Young Klein, fluent in English, became a familiar television personality in the days that followed, repeating his story for the benefit of global networks. Then he slipped into oblivion, but his place in history is assured. I don’t doubt that somewhere in Mecklenburg or Schleswig today he’s repeating the conversation yet.

  As Vornan-19 approached him, Klein said, “You shouldn’t kill carabinieri. They won’t forgive you.”

  “He isn’t dead. Merely stunned a bit.”

  “You don’t talk like an American,” said Klein.

  “I’m not. I come from the Centrality. That’s a thousand years from now, you understand.”

  Klein laughed. “The world ends in three hundred seventy-two days.”

  “Do you believe, that? What year is this, anyway?”

  “1998. December twenty-fifth.”

  “The world has at least a thousand more years. Of that I’m certain. I am Vornan-19, and I am here as a visitor. I am in need of hospitality. I would like to sample your food and your wine. I wish to wear clothing of the period. I am interested in ancient sexual practices. Where may I find a house of intercourse?”

  “That gray building there,” said Klein, pointing toward the church of Trinitа dei Monti. “They’ll take care of all your needs inside. Just tell them you come from a thousand years from now. 2998, is it?”

  “2999 by your system.”

  “Good. They’ll love you for that. Just prove to them that the world isn’t going to end a year from New Year’s Day, and they’ll give you whatever you want.”

  “The world will not end quite so soon,” said Vornan-19 gravely. “I thank you, my friend.”

  He began to move toward the church.

  Breathless carabinieri rushed at him from several directions at once. They did not dare come within five yards of him, but they formed a phalanx barring him from access to the church. They were armed with neural whips. One of them flung his cloak at Vornan’s feet.

  “Put that on.”

  “I do not speak your language.”

  Horst Klein said, “They want you to cover your body. The sight of it offends them.”

  “My body is undeformed,” said Vornan-19. “Why should I cover it?”

  “They want you to, and they have neural whips. They can hurt you with them. See? Those gray rods in their hands.”

  “May I examine your weapon?” the visitor said affably to the nearest officer. He reached for it. The man shrank back. Vornan moved with implausible swiftness and wrenched the whip from the policeman’s hand. He took it business end first, and should have received a stunning near-lethal burst, but somehow he did not. The men gaped as Vornan studied the whip, casually triggering it and rubbing his hand across the metal prod to feel the effects it produced. They stepped back, crossing themselves fervently.

  Horst Klein broke through the crumbling phalanx and flung himself at Vornan’s feet. “You really are from the future, aren’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “How do you do it — touch the whip?”

  “These mild forces can be absorbed and transformed,” said Vornan. “Don’t you have the energy rituals yet?”

  The German boy, trembling, shook his head. He scooped up the policeman’s cloak and offered it to the naked man. “Put this over yourself,” he whispered. “Please. Make things easier for us. You can’t walk around naked.”

  Surprisingly, Vornan consented. After some fumbling he managed to don the cloak.

  Klein said, “The world doesn’t end in a year?”

  “No. Certainly not.”

  “I’ve been a fool!”

  “Perhaps.”

  Tears ran down the broad, unlined Teutonic cheeks. The frayed laughter of exhaustion ripped through Horst Klein’s lips. He groveled on the cold stone slab, slapping his palms against the ground in an improvised salaam before Vornan-19. Shivering, sobbing, gasping, Horst Klein recanted his faith in the Apocalyptist movement.

  The man from the future had gained his first disciple.

  TWO

  In Arizona I knew nothing of this. If I had known, I would have dismissed it as folly. But I was at a dead end in my life, sterile and stale from overwork and underachievement, and I paid no attention to anything that took place beyond the confines of my own skull. My mood was ascetic, and among the things I denied myself that month was an awareness of world events.

  My hosts were kind. They had seen me through these crises before, and they knew how to handle me. What I needed was a delicate combination of attention and solitude, and only persons of a certain sensibility could provide the necessary atmosphere. It would not be improper to say that Jack and Shirley Bryant had saved my sanity several times.

  Jack had worked with me at Irvine for several years, late in the 1980’s. He had come to me straight from M.I.T., where he had captured most of the available honors, and like most refugees from that institution he had something pallid and cramped about his soul, the stigmata of too much eastern living, too many harsh winters and airless summers. It was a pleasure to watch him open like a sturdy flower in our sunlight. He was in his very early twenties when I met him: tall but hollow-chested, with thick unkempt curling hair, cheeks perpetually stubbled, sunken eyes, thin restless lips. He had all the stereotyped traits and tics and habits of the young genius. I had read his papers in particle physics, and they were brilliant. You must realize that in physics one works by following sudden lancing insights — inspirations, perhaps — and so it is not necessary to be old and wise before one can be brilliant. Newton reshaped the universe while only a lad. Einstein, Schrцdinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, and the rest of that crew of pioneers did their finest work before they were thirty. One may, like Bohr, get shrewder and deeper with age, but Bohr was still young when he peered within the atom’s heart. So when I say that Jack Bryant’s work was brilliant, I do not mean merely that he was an exceptionally promising young man. I mean that he was brilliant on an absolute scale and that he had achieved greatness while still an undergraduate.

  During the first two years he was with me, I thought he was genuinely destined to remake physics. He had that strange power, that gift of the shattering intuition that pierces all doubt; and, too, he had the mathematical ability and persistence to follow up his intuition and wrest firm truth from the unknown. His
work was only marginally connected with mine. My time-reversal project had become more experimental than theoretical by this time, since I had moved through the stages of early hypotheses and now was spending most of my time at the giant particle accelerator, trying to build up the forces that I hoped would send fragments of atoms flying pastwards. Jack, on the contrary, was still the pure theoretician. His concern was the binding force of the atom. There was nothing new about that, of course. But Jack had doubled back to reexamine some overlooked implications of Yukawa’s 1935 work on mesons, and in the course of reviewing the old literature, had generally reshuffled everything that supposedly was known about the glue that holds the atom together. It seemed to me that Jack was on his way to one of the revolutionary discoveries of mankind: an understanding of the fundamental energy relationships out of which the universe is constructed. Which is, of course, what we all ultimately seek.

  Since I was Jack’s sponsor, I kept an eye on his studies, looking over the successive drafts of his doctoral thesis while devoting most of my energies to my own work. Only gradually did the larger implications of Jack’s research dawn on me. I had been looking at it within the self-enclosed sphere of pure physics, but I now saw that the final outcome of Jack’s work had to be highly practical. He was heading toward a means of tapping the binding force of the atom and liberating that energy not through a sudden explosion but in a controlled flow.

  Jack himself did not seem to see it. Applications of physical theory were of no interest to him. Working within his airless environment of equations, he paid no more heed to such possibilities than he did to the fluctuations of the stock market. Yet I saw it. Rutherford’s work at the beginning of the twentieth century had been pure theory too, yet it led unerringly to the sunburst over Hiroshima. Lesser men could search within the core of Jack’s thesis and find there the means for total liberation of atomic energy. Neither fission nor fusion would be necessary. Any atom could be opened and drained. A cup of soil would run a million-kilowatt generator. A few drops of water would send a ship to the moon. This was the atomic energy of fantasy. It was all there, implicit in Jack’s work.

  But Jack’s work was incomplete.

  In his third year at Irvine he came to me, looking haggard and depleted, and said he was halting work on his thesis. He was at a point, he told me, where he needed to pause and consider. Meanwhile he asked for permission to engage in certain experimental work, simply as a change of air. Naturally, I agreed.

  I said nothing whatever to him about the potential practical applications of his work. That was not my place. I confess a sense of relief mingled with the disappointment when he interrupted his research. I had been reflecting on the economic upheaval that would come to society in another ten or fifteen years, when every home might run on its own inexhaustible power source, when transportation and communication would cease to depend on the traditional energy inputs, when the entire network of labor relationships on which our society is based would utterly collapse. Strictly as an amateur sociologist, I was disturbed by the conclusions I drew. If I had been an executive of any of the major corporations, I would have had Jack Bryant assassinated at once. As it was, I merely worried. It was not very distinguished of me, I admit. The true man of science forges ahead heedless of the economic consequences. He seeks truth even if the truth should bring society tumbling down. Those are tenets of virtue.

  I kept my own counsel. If Jack had wished at any time to return to his work, I would not have attempted to prevent it. I would not even have asked him to consider the long-range possibilities. He did not realize that any moral dilemma existed, and I was not going to be the one to tell him about it.

  By my silence, of course, I was making myself an accomplice in the destruction of the human economy. I might have pointed out to Jack that his work, extended to the extreme, would give each human being an unlimited access to an infinite energy source, demolishing the foundation of every human society and creating an instant decentralization of mankind. Through my interference I might have caused Jack to hesitate. But I said nothing. Give me no medals of honor, though; my anguish remained in suspension so long as Jack remained idle. He was making no further progress on his research, so I had no need to fret over the chances of its successful outcome. Once he got back to it, the moral problem would face me again: whether to support the free play of scientific inquiry, or to intervene for the sake of maintaining the economic status quo.

  It was a villainous choice. But I was spared making it.

  During his third year with me Jack pottered around the campus doing trivial things. He spent most of his time at the accelerator, as though he had just discovered the experimental side of physics and did not tire of toying with it. Our accelerator was new and awesome, a proton-loop model with a neutron injector. It operated in the trillion-electron-volt range then; of course, the current alpha-spiral machines far exceed that, but in its day it was a colossus. The twin pylons of the high-voltage lines carrying current from the fusion plant at the edge of the Pacific seemed like titanic messengers of power, and the great dome of the accelerator building itself gleamed in mighty self-satisfaction. Jack haunted the building. He sat by the screens while undergraduates performed elementary experiments in neutrino detection and in antiparticle annihilation. Occasionally he tinkered with the control panels just to see how they worked and to find out how it felt to be master of those surging forces. But what he was doing was meaningless. It was busywork. He was deliberately marking time.

  Was it really because he needed a rest?

  Or had he seen the implications of his own work at last — and been frightened?

  I never asked him. In such cases I wait for a troubled younger man to come to me with his troubles. And I could not take the risk of infecting Jack’s mind with my own doubts if those doubts had not already occurred to him.

  At the end of his second semester of idleness he requested a formal counseling session with me. Here it comes, I thought. He’s going to tell me where his work is leading, and he’ll ask me if I think it’s morally proper for him to continue, and then I’ll be on the spot. I came to the session loaded with pills.

  He said, “Leo, I’d like to resign from the University.”

  I was shaken. “You have a better offer?”

  “Don’t be absurd. I’m leaving physics.”

  “Leaving — physics — ?”

  “And getting married. Do you know Shirley Frisch? You’ve seen me with her. We’re getting married a week from Sunday. It’ll be a small wedding, but I’d like you to come, Leo.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ve bought a house in Arizona. In the desert near Tucson. We’ll be moving there.”

  “What will you do, Jack?”

  “Meditate. Write a little. There are some philosophical questions I want to consider.”

  “Money?” I asked. “Your University salary—”

  “I’ve got a small inheritance that somebody invested wisely a long time ago. Shirley’s also got a private income. It’s nothing much, but it’ll let us get by. We’re dropping out of society. I felt I couldn’t hide it from you any more.”

  I spread my hands on my desk and contemplated my knuckles for a long moment. I felt as though webs had begun to sprout between my fingers. Eventually I said, “What about your thesis, Jack?”

  “Discontinued.”

  “You were so close to finishing it.”

  “I’m at a total dead end. I can’t go on.” His eyes met mine and remained fixed. Was he telling me that he didn’t dare go on? Was his withdrawal at this point a matter of scientific defeat or of moral doubt? I wanted to ask. I waited for him to tell me. He said nothing. His smile was rigid and unconvincing. Finally he said, “Leo, I don’t think I’d ever do anything worthwhile in physics.”

  “That isn’t true. You—”

  “I don’t think I even want to do anything worthwhile in physics.”

  “Oh.”

  “Will you forgive me? Will yo
u still be my friend? Our friend?”

  I came to the wedding. It turned out I was one of four guests. The bride was a girl I knew only vaguely; she was about twenty-two, a pretty blonde, a graduate student in sociology. God knows how Jack had ever met her, with his nose pushed into his notebooks all the time, but they seemed very much in love. She was tall, almost to Jack’s shoulder, with a great cascade of golden hair like finespun wire, and honey-tanned skin, and big dark eyes, and a supple, athletic body. Beyond a doubt she was beautiful, and in her short white wedding gown she looked as radiant as any bride has ever looked. The ceremony was brief and nonsectarian. Afterwards we all went to dinner, and toward sundown the bride and groom quietly disappeared. I felt a curious emptiness that night as I went home. I rummaged among old papers for lack of anything else to do, and came upon some early drafts of Jack’s thesis; I stood staring at the scrawled notations for a long while, comprehending nothing.

  A month later they invited me to be their guest for a week in Arizona.

  I thought it was a pro forma invitation and politely declined, thinking I was expected to decline. Jack phoned and insisted I come. His face was as earnest as ever, but the little greenish screen clearly showed that the tension and haggardness had been ironed from it. I accepted. Their house, I found, was perfectly isolated, with miles of tawny desert on all sides. It was a fortress of comfort in all that bleakness. Jack and Shirley were both deeply tanned, magnificently happy, and wonderfully attuned to each other. They led me on a long walk into the desert my first day, laughing as jackrabbits or desert rats or long green lizards scuttered past us. They stooped to show me small gnarled plants close to the barren soil, and took me to a towering saguaro cactus whose massive corrugated green arms cast the only shade in view.

  Their home became a refuge for me. It was understood that I was free to come at any time on a day’s notice, whenever I felt the need to escape. Although they extended invitations from time to time, they insisted that I avail myself of the privilege of inviting myself. I did. Sometimes six or ten months went by without my making the journey to Arizona; sometimes I came for five or six weekends in a row. There was never any regular pattern. My need to visit them depended wholly upon my inner weather. Their weather never changed, within or without; their days were forever sunny. I never saw them quarrel or even mildly disagree. Not until the day that Vornan-19 careened into their life was there any gulf visible between them.