The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  “Not only girls,” rumbled Kralick.

  “True. True. In London there was that young hairdresser.”

  I watched Vornan-19’s progress through Tivoli. A curious throng attended him; and in his immediate presence were a dozen brawny Danish police officers with neural whips, a few people who seemed to be government officials, and half a dozen individuals who obviously were reporters. I said. “How do you keep the journalists at bay?”

  “It’s a pool,” Kettridge snapped. “Six reporters represent all the media. They change every day. It was Vornan’s idea; he said he liked publicity but he hated to have a mob around him.”

  The visitor had come to a pavilion where Danish youngsters were dancing. The honkings and skreeings of the band unfortunately were reproduced in perfect clarity, and the boys and girls moved in jerky discontinuity, arms and legs flailing. It was one of those places where the floor is a series of interlocking revolving slidewalks, so that as you stand in place, going through the gyrations of the dance, you are swept on an orbit through the entire hall, confronting partner after partner. Vornan stood watching this in seeming wonder for a while. He smiled that wonderful smile of his and signaled to his bovine consort. They stepped out onto the dance floor. I saw one of the officials put coins in the slot; clearly Vornan did not deign to handle money himself, and it was necessary for someone to follow after him, paying the bills.

  Vornan and the Danish girl took places facing one another and caught the rhythm of the dance. There was nothing difficult about it: blatant pelvic thrusts combined with a pattern of stomping and clutching, just like all the other dances of the past forty years. The girl stood with feet flat, knees flexed, legs far apart, head tipped back; the giant cones of her breasts rose toward the faceted mirrors of the ceiling. Vornan, clearly enjoying himself, adopted the knees-in, elbows-out posture of the boys about him and started to move. He picked up the knack of it easily, after only a brief preliminary moment of uncertainty, and off he went, whirled through the hall by the mechanism beneath the floor, facing now this girl, now that, and performing the explicit erotic movements expected of him.

  Nearly all the girls knew who he was, it appeared. Their gasps and expressions of awe made that apparent. The fact that a global celebrity was moving in the throng created a certain amount of confusion, throwing the girls off their pace; one simply stopped moving and stared in rapture at Vornan for the whole period of ninety seconds or so that he was her partner. But there was no serious trouble for the first seven or eight turns. Then Vornan was dancing with a plumply pretty dark-haired girl of about sixteen who became totally catatonic with terror. She froze and twisted jerkily and managed to step backward beyond the electronic guard signal at the rear of her moving strip. A buzzer sounded to warn her, but she was beyond any such guidance, and a moment later she had one foot on each of two strips heading in opposite directions. She went down, her short skirt flipping upward to reveal pudgy pink thighs, and in her fright she grabbed at the legs of the boy nearest her.

  He toppled too, and in another moment I had a graphic demonstration of the domino effect, because dancers were losing their balance all over the room. Nearly everyone was on more than one strip at once and was clutching at someone else for support. A wave of collapse rippled across the great hall. And there was Vornan-19, still upright, watching the catastrophe in high good humor. His Junoesque paramour was also on her feet, 180 degrees away from him; but then a groping hand caught her ankle, and she went down like a felled oak, careening into two or three other dancers as she dropped. The scene was straight from the pit: writhing figures everywhere, arms and legs in the air, no one able to rise. The machinery of the dance pavilion finally crunched to a halt. The untangling took long minutes. Many girls were crying. Some had skinned knees or abraded rumps; one had somehow contrived to lose her skirt in the melee and was crouched in a fetal huddle. Where was Vornan? Vornan was already at the rim of the hall, safely extricating himself the instant the floor stopped moving. The blonde goddess was beside him.

  “He’s got an immense talent for disruption,” said Kettridge.

  Kralick, laughing, said, “This isn’t as bad as the business yesterday at the smorgasbord place in Stockholm, when he punched the wrong button and got the whole table revolving.”

  The screen darkened. An unsmiling Kettridge turned to me. “This man will be the guest of the United States three days from now, Dr. Garfield. We don’t know how long he’s staying. We intend to monitor his movements closely and try to head off some of the confusion that he’s been known to cause. What we have in mind. Professor, is appointing a committee of five or six leading scholars as — well, guides for the visitor. Actually they’ll also be overseers, watchdogs, and… spies.”

  “Does the United States officially believe that he’s a visitor from 2999?”

  “Officially, yes,” said Kettridge. “That is, we’re going to treat him as if he’s kosher,”

  “But—” I spluttered.

  Kralick put in, “Privately, Dr. Garfield, we think he’s a hoaxer. At least I do, and I believe Mr. Kettridge does. He’s an extremely sharp-witted and enterprising phony. However, for purposes of public opinion, we choose to accept Vornan-19 at face value until there’s some reason to think otherwise.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “You know of the Apocalyptist movement, Dr. Garfield?” asked Kralick.

  “Well, yes. I can’t say I’m an expert, but—”

  “So far, Vornan-19 hasn’t done anything much more harmful than mesmerizing a roomful of Danish schoolgirls into falling on their butts. The Apocalyptists do real damage. They riot, they loot, they destroy. They’re the force of chaos in our society. We’re attempting to contain them before they rip everything apart.”

  “And by embracing this self-appointed ambassador from the future,” I said, “you explode the chief selling point of the Apocalyptists, which is that the world is supposed to come to an end next January 1.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Very good,” I said. “I had already suspected it. Now you confirm it as official policy. But is it proper to meet mass insanity with deliberate dishonesty?”

  Kettridge said ponderously, “Dr. Garfield, the job of government is to maintain the stability of the governed society. When possible, we like to adhere to the Ten Commandments in so doing. But we reserve the right to meet a threat to the social structure in any feasible way, up to and including the mass annihilation of hostile forces, which I think you will regard as a more serious action than a little fibbing, and which this government has resorted to on more than one occasion. In short, if we can ward off the Apocalyptist lunacy by giving Vornan-19 a seal of approval, it’s worth a bit of moral compromise.

  “Besides,” said Kralick, “we don’t actually know he’s a fraud. If he isn’t, we’re not committing any act of bad faith.”

  “The possibility must be very soothing to your souls.” I said.

  I regretted my flippancy at once. Kralick looked hurt, and I didn’t blame him. He hadn’t set this policy. One by one, the frightened governments of the world had decided to short-circuit the Apocalyptists by proclaiming Vornan to be a real thing, and the United States was merely falling in line. The decision had been taken on high; Kralick and Kettridge were merely implementing it, and I had no call to impugn their morality. As Kralick had said, it might just turn out that hailing Vornan this way would be not only useful but even correct.

  Kettridge fussed with the spines of his ornate costume and did not look at me as he said, “We can understand, Dr. Garfield, that in the academic world people tend to view moral issues in the abstract, but nevertheless—”

  “All right,” I said wearily, “I suppose I was wrong. I had to put myself on record, that’s all. Let’s go past that point. Vornan-19 is coming to the United States, and we’re going to roll out the red carpet for him. Fine. Now what do you want from me?”

  “Two things,” said Kralick. “First: you’re wid
ely regarded, sir, as the world’s ranking authority on time-reversal physics. We’d like you to provide us with your opinion as to whether it’s theoretically possible for a man to travel backward in time as Vornan-19 claims to have done, and how, in your appraisal, it might have been accomplished.”

  “Well,” I said, “I have to be skeptical, because so far we’ve succeeded only in sending individual electrons backward in time. This converts them into positrons — the antiparticle of the electron, identical in mass but opposite in charge — and the effect is one of virtually instant annihilation. I see no practical way to sidestep the conversion of matter into antimatter during time-reversal, which means that to account for the purported time trip of Vornan-19, we must first explain how so much mass can be converted, and then why it is that although presumably composed of antimatter he does not touch off the annihilation effect when—”

  Kralick politely cleared his throat. I stopped talking. Kralick said, “I’m sorry that I didn’t make myself quite clear. We don’t want an immediate reply from you. We’d like a position paper, Dr. Garfield, which you can file in the next forty-eight hours or thereabouts. We’ll provide any necessary secretarial assistance. The President is quite anxious to read what you have to say.”

  “All right. The other thing you wanted?”

  “We’d like you to serve on the committee that will guide Vornan-19 when he gets here.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “You’re a nationally known scientific figure associated in the public’s mind with time travel,” said Kettridge. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

  “Who else is going to be on this committee?”

  “I’m not at liberty to reveal names, even to you,” Kralick told me. “But I give you my word that they’re all figures whose stature in the scientific or scholarly world is equal to your own.”

  “Meaning,” I said, “that not one of them has said yes yet, and you’re hoping to bulldoze them all.”

  Kralick looked hurt again. “Sorry,” I said.

  Kettridge, unsmiling, declared, “It was our belief that by putting you in close contact with the visitor, you would find some means of extracting information from him about the time-travel process he employed. We believed that this would be of considerable interest to you as a scientist, as well as of major value to the nation.”

  “True. I’d like to pump him on the subject.”

  “And then,” said Kralick, “why should you be hostile to the assignment? We’ve chosen a leading historian to find out the pattern of events in our future, a psychologist who will attempt to check on the genuineness of Vornan’s story, an anthropologist who’ll look for cultural developments, and so on. The committee will simultaneously be examining the legitimacy of Vornan’s credentials and trying to get from him anything that may be of value to us, assuming that he’s what he says he is. I can’t imagine any work that could be of greater significance to the nation and to humanity at this time.”

  I closed my eyes a moment. I felt properly chastened. Kralick was sincere in his earnest way, and so was Kettridge in his fast-talking though heavy-handed style. They needed me, honestly. And was it not true that I had reasons of my own for wanting to peer behind Vornan’s mask? Jack had begged me to do it, never dreaming that it would be so easy for me to manage.

  Why was I balking, then?

  I saw why. It had to do with my own work and the minute possibility that Vornan-19 was a genuine traveler in time. The man who is trying to invent the wheel is not really eager to learn the details of a five-hundred-mile-per-hour turbine car. Here was I, piddling around for half a lifetime with my reversed electrons, and here was Vornan-19, telling tales of vaulting across the centuries; in the depths of my soul I preferred not to think about him at all. However, Kralick and Kettridge were right: I was the man for this committee.

  I told them I would serve.

  They expressed their gratitude profusely, and then seemed to lose interest in me, as though they didn’t plan to waste any emotion on someone who was already signed up. Kettridge disappeared, and Kralick gave me an office somewhere in the underground annex of the White House. Little blobs of living light floated in a tank on the ceiling. He told me that I had full access to the executive mansion’s secretarial services, and showed me where the computer outputs and inputs were. I could make any phone calls I wanted, he said, and use any assistance I required in order to prepare my position paper on time travel for the President.

  “We’ve arranged accommodations for you,” Kralick told me. “You’re in a suite right across the park.”

  “I thought I might go back to California this evening to wind up my affairs.”

  “That wouldn’t be satisfactory. We have only seventy-two hours, you know, before Vornan-19 arrives in New York. We need to spend that time as efficiently as possible.”

  “But I had only just returned from vacation!” I protested. “I was in and out again. I need to leave instructions for my staff — to make arrangements for the laboratory—”

  “That can all be done by phone, can’t it, Dr. Garfield? Don’t worry about the phone expense. We’d rather have you spend two or three hours on the line to California than lose all the time of having you make another round trip in the short time remaining.”

  He smiled. I smiled.

  “All right?” he asked.

  “All right,” I said.

  It was very clear. My options had expired the moment I had agreed to serve on the committee. I was now part of the Vornan Project, with no independent scope for action. I would have only as much freedom as the Government could spare, until this thing was over. The odd part was that I didn’t resent it, I who had always been the first to sign any petition attacking infringement of liberties, I who had never regarded myself as an organization man but rather as a free-lance scholar loosely affiliated with the University. Without a murmur I let myself be pressed into service. I suppose it was all a subliminal way of dodging the unpleasantness that awaited me when I finally did get back into my laboratory to struggle with my unanswered questions.

  The office they had given me was cozy. The floor was bouncy sponge glass, the walls were silvered and reflective, and the ceiling was aglow with color. It was still early enough to call California and find someone in the laboratory. I notified the University proctor, first, that I’d been called into Government service. He didn’t mind. Then I spoke to my secretary and said I’d have to extend my absence indefinitely. I made arrangements for staff work and for monitoring my pupils’ research projects. I discussed the question of mail delivery and maintenance of my house with the local data utility, and over the screen came a detailed authorization form. I was supposed to check off the things I wished the utility to do for me and the things I did not. It was a long list:

  • Mow lawn

  • Survey sealing and climateproofing

  • Relay mail and messages

  • Gardening

  • Monitor storm damage

  • Notify sales organizations

  • Pay bills

  And so on. I checked off nearly everything and billed the service to the United States Government. I had learned something from Vornan-19 already: I didn’t plan to pay a bill of my own until I was released from this job.

  When I had tidied up my personal affairs, I put through a call to Arizona. Shirley answered. She looked taut and edgy, but she seemed to loosen a little when she saw my face on her screen. I said, “I’m in Washington.”

  “What for, Leo?”

  I told her. She thought I was joking at first, but I assured her that I was telling the truth.

  “Wait,” she said. “I’ll get Jack.”

  She walked away from the phone. The perspective changed as she retreated, and instead of the usual head-and-shoulders view the screen showed me the tiny image of all of Shirley, a three-quarters view. She stood in the doorway, back to camera, leaning against the doorframe so that one ripe globe of a breast showed under her arm. I knew that g
overnment flunkies were monitoring my call, and it infuriated me that they should be getting this free view of Shirley’s loveliness. I moved to cut off the vision, but it was too late; Shirley was gone and Jack was on screen.

  “What’s this?” he asked. “Shirley said—”

  “I’m going to be talking to Vornan-19 in a few days.”

  “You shouldn’t have bothered, Leo. I’ve been thinking about that conversation we had. I feel damned foolish about it. I said a lot of, well, unstable things, and I never dreamed that you’d drop everything and go running off to Washington to—”

  “It didn’t exactly happen that way, Jack. I got drafted to come out here. Vital to national security, that sort of thing. But I just wanted to tell you that as long as I’m here, I’ll try to help you in what you discussed.”

  “I’m grateful. Leo.”

  “That’s all. Try to relax. Maybe you and Shirley need to get away from the desert for a while.”

  “Maybe later on,” he said. “Let’s see how things work out.”

  I winked at him and broke the contact. He wasn’t fooling me at all with his feigned cheeriness. Whatever had been boiling and bubbling inside him a few days ago was still there, even though he was trying to apologize it away as foolishness. He needed help.

  One more job, now. I opened up the input and started to dictate my position paper on time-reversal. I didn’t know how much copy they wanted, but I figured that it didn’t really matter. I began to talk. A bright dot of green light danced along the ground-glass screen of the computer’s output, typing out my words as I spoke them. Working entirely from memory and not bothering to summon from the data tanks the texts of my own publications, I reeled off a quick, nontechnical prйcis of my thoughts on time-reversal. The gist of it was that while time-reversal on the subatomic level had already been achieved, it did not in terms of any physical theory I understood seem possible for a human being to travel backward in time and arrive at his destination alive, regardless of the power source used to transport him. I bolstered this with a few thoughts on accumulative temporal momentum, the extension of mass into an inverted continuum, and the annihilation of antimatter. And I wound it up by concluding in almost those words that Vornan-19 was plainly a fake.