How It Was When the Past Went Away

by Robert Silverberg

  She put her hand to her lips in fear. Bryce felt a sudden warm urge to protect this lovely stranger, to guard and comfort her, and he realized he must be in love with her, even though he couldn’t remember who she was. He crossed the room to her and seized her in a brief, tight embrace; she responded eagerly, shivering a little. By a quarter to eight they were out of the house and heading for the hospital through unusually light traffic. Bryce led the girl quickly to the staff lounge. Ted Kamakura was there already, in uniform. The little Japanese psychiatrist nodded curtly and said, “Morning, Tim.” Then he blinked. “Good morning, Lisa. How come you’re here?”

  “You know her?” Bryce asked.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “A deadly serious one.”

  “Of course I know her,” Kamakura said, and his smile of greeting abruptly faded. “Why? Is something wrong about that?”

  “You may know her, but I don’t,” said Bryce.

  “Oh, God. Not you too!”

  “Tell me who she is, Ted.”

  “She’s your wife, Tim. You married her five years ago.”

  By half past eleven Thursday morning the Gerards had everything set up and going smoothly for the lunch rush at the Petit Pois. The soup caldron was bubbling, the escargot trays were ready to be popped in the oven, the sauces were taking form. Pierre Gerard was a bit surprised when most of the lunch-time regulars failed to show up. Even Mr. Munson, always punctual at half past eleven, did not arrive. Some of these men had not missed weekday lunch at the Petit Pois in fifteen years. Something terrible must have happened on the stock market, Pierre thought, to have kept all these financial men at their desks, and they were too busy to call him and cancel their usual tables. That must be the answer. It was impossible that any of the regulars would forget to call him. The stock market must be exploding. Pierre made a mental note to call his broker after lunch and find out what was going on.

  About two Thursday afternoon, Paul Mueller stopped into Metchnikoff’s Art Supplies in North Beach to try to get a welding pen, some raw metal, loudspeaker paint, and the rest of the things he needed for the rebirth of his sculpting career. Metchnikoff greeted him sourly with, “No credit at all, Mr. Mueller, not even a nickel!”

  “It’s all right. I’m a cash customer this time.”

  The dealer brightened. “In that case it’s all right, maybe. You finished with your troubles?”

  “I hope so,” Mueller said.

  He gave the order. It came to about $2,300; when the time came to pay, he explained that he simply had to run down to Montgomery Street to pick up the cash from his friend Freddy Munson, who was holding three bigs for him. Metchnikoff began to glower again. “Five minutes!” Mueller called. “I’ll be back in five minutes!” But when he got to Munson’s office, he found the place in confusion, and Munson wasn’t there. “Did he leave an envelope for a Mr. Mueller?” he asked a distraught secretary. “I was supposed to pick something important up here this afternoon. Would you please check?” The girl simply ran away from him. So did the next girl. A burly broker told him to get out of the office. “We’re closed, fellow,” he shouted. Baffled, Mueller left.

  Not daring to return to Metchnikoff’s with the news that he hadn’t been able to raise the cash after all, Mueller simply went home. Three dunning robots were camped outside his door, and each one began to croak its cry of doom as he approached. “Sorry,” Mueller said, “I can’t remember a thing about any of this stuff,” and he went inside and sat down on the bare floor, angry, thinking of the brilliant pieces he could be turning out if he could only get his hands on the tools of his trade. He made sketches instead. At least the ghouls had left him with pencil and paper. Not as efficient as a computer screen and a light-pen, maybe, but Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini had managed to make out all right without computer screens and light-pens.

  At four o’clock the doorbell rang.

  “Go away,” Mueller said through the speaker. “See my accountant! I don’t want to hear any more dunnings, and the next time I catch one of you idiot robots by my door I’m going to—”

  “It’s me, Paul,” a nonmechanical voice said.

  Carole.

  He rushed to the door. There were seven robots out there, surrounding her, and they tried to get in; but he pushed them back so she could enter. A robot didn’t dare lay a paw on a human being. He slammed the door in their metal faces and locked it.

  Carole looked fine. Her hair was longer than he remembered it, and she had gained about eight pounds in all the right places, and she wore an iridescent peekaboo wrap that he had never seen before, and which was really inappropriate for afternoon wear, but which looked splendid on her. She seemed at least five years younger than she really was; evidently a month and a half of marriage to Pete Castine had done more for her than nine years of marriage to Paul Mueller. She glowed. She also looked strained and tense, but that seemed superficial, the product of some distress of the last few hours.

  “I seem to have lost my key,” she said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t understand you, Paul.”

  “I mean, why’d you come here?”

  “I live here.”

  “Do you?” He laughed harshly. “Very funny.”

  “You always did have a weird sense of humor, Paul.” She stepped past him. “Only this isn’t any joke. Where is everything? The furniture, Paul. My things.” Suddenly she was crying. “I must be breaking up. I wake up this morning in a completely strange apartment, all alone, and I spend the whole day wandering in a sort of daze that I don’t understand at all, and now I finally come home and I find that you’ve pawned every damn thing we own, or something, and—” She bit her knuckles. “Paul?”

  She’s got it too, he thought. The amnesia epidemic.

  He said quietly, “This is a funny thing to ask, Carole, but will you tell me what today’s date is?”

  “Why…the fourteenth of September—or is it the fifteenth—”

  “2002?”

  “What do you think? 1776?”

  She’s got it worse than I have, Mueller told himself. She’s lost a whole extra month. She doesn’t remember my business venture. She doesn’t remember my losing all the money. She doesn’t remember divorcing me. She thinks she’s still my wife.

  “Come in here,” he said, and led her to the bedroom. He pointed to the cot that stood where their bed had been. “Sit down, Carole. I’ll try to explain. It won’t make much sense, but I’ll try to explain.”

  Under the circumstances, the concert by the visiting New York Philharmonic for Thursday evening was canceled. Nevertheless the orchestra assembled for its rehearsal at half past two in the afternoon. The union required so many rehearsals—with pay—a week; therefore the orchestra rehearsed, regardless of external cataclysms. But there were problems. Maestro Alvarez, who used an electronic baton and proudly conducted without a score, thumbed the button for a downbeat and realized abruptly, with a sensation as of dropping through a trapdoor, that the Brahms Fourth was wholly gone from his mind. The orchestra responded raggedly to his faltering leadership; some of the musicians had no difficulties, but the concertmaster stared in horror at his left hand, wondering how to finger the strings for the notes his violin was supposed to be yielding, and the second oboe could not find the proper keys, and the first bassoon had not yet even managed to remember how to put his instrument together.

  By nightfall, Tim Bryce had managed to assemble enough of the story so that he understood what had happened, not only to himself and to Lisa, but to the entire city. A drug, or drugs, almost certainly distributed through the municipal water supply, had leached away nearly everyone’s memory. The trouble with modern life, Bryce thought, is that technology gives us the potential for newer and more intricate disasters every year, but doesn’t seem to give us the ability to ward them off. Memory drugs were old stuff, going back thirty, forty years. He had studied several types of them himself. Memory is
partly a chemical and partly an electrical process; some drugs went after the electrical end, jamming the synapses over which brain transmissions travel, and some went after the molecular substrata in which long-term memories are locked up. Bryce knew ways of destroying short-term memories by inhibiting synapse transmission, and he knew ways of destroying the deep long-term memories by washing out the complex chains of ribonucleic acid, brain-RNA, by which they are inscribed in the brain. But such drugs were experimental, tricky, unpredictable; he had hesitated to use them on human subjects; he certainly had never imagined that anyone would simply dump them into an aqueduct and give an entire city a simultaneous lobotomy.

  His office at Fletcher Memorial had become an improvised center of operations for San Francisco. The mayor was there, pale and shrunken; the chief of police, exhausted and confused, periodically turned his back and popped a pill; a dazed-looking representative of the communications net hovered in a corner, nervously monitoring the hastily rigged system through which the committee of public safety that Bryce had summoned could make its orders known throughout the city.

  The mayor was no use at all. He couldn’t even remember having run for office. The chief of police was in even worse shape; he had been up all night because he had forgotten, among other things, his home address, and he had been afraid to query a computer about it for fear he’d lose his job for drunkenness. By now the chief of police was aware that he wasn’t the only one in the city having memory problems today, and he had looked up his address in the files and even telephoned his wife, but he was close to collapse. Bryce had insisted that both men stay here as symbols of order; he wanted only their faces and their voices, not their fumble-headed official services.

  A dozen or so miscellaneous citizens had accumulated in Bryce’s office too. At five in the afternoon he had broadcast an all-media appeal, asking anyone whose memory of recent events was unimpaired to come to Fletcher Memorial. “If you haven’t had any city water in the past twenty-four hours, you’re probably all right. Come down here. We need you.” He had drawn a curious assortment. There was a ramrod-straight old space hero, Taylor Braskett, a pure-foods nut who drank only mountain water. There was a family of French restaurateurs, mother, father, three grown children, who preferred mineral water flown in from their native land. There was a computer salesman named McBumey who had been in Los Angeles on business and hadn’t had any of the drugged water. There was a retired cop named Adler who lived in Oakland, where there were no memory problems; he had hurried across the bay as soon as he heard that San Francisco was in trouble. That was before all access to the city had been shut off at Bryce’s orders. And there were some others, of doubtful value but of definitely intact memory.

  The three screens that the communications man had mounted provided a relay of key points in the city. Right now one was monitoring the Fisherman’s Wharf district from a camera atop Ghirardelli Square, one was viewing the financial district from a helicopter over the old Ferry Building Museum, and one was relaying a pickup from a mobile truck in Golden Gate Park. The scenes were similar everywhere: people milling about, asking questions, getting no answers. There wasn’t any overt sign of looting yet. There were no fires. The police, those of them able to function, were out in force, and antiriot robots were cruising the bigger streets, just in case they might be needed to squirt their stifling blankets of foam at suddenly panicked mobs.

  Bryce said to the mayor, “At half past six I want you to go on all media with an appeal for calm. We’ll supply you with everything you have to say.”

  The mayor moaned.

  Bryce said, “Don’t worry. I’ll feed you the whole speech by bone relay. Just concentrate on speaking clearly and looking straight into the camera. If you come across as a terrified man, it can be the end for all of us. If you look cool, we may be able to pull through.”

  The mayor put his face in his hands.

  Ted Kamakura whispered, “You can’t put him on the channels, Tim! He’s a wreck, and everyone will see it!”

  “The city’s mayor has to show himself,” Bryce insisted. “Give him a double jolt of bracers. Let him make this one speech and then we can put him to pasture.”

  “Who’ll be the spokesman, then?” Kamakura asked. “You? Me? Police Chief Dennison?”

  “I don’t know,” Bryce muttered. “We need an authority-image to make announcements every half hour or so, and I’m damned if I’ll have time. Or you. And Dennison—”

  “Gentlemen, may I make a suggestion?” It was the old spaceman, Braskett. “I wish to volunteer as spokesman. You must admit I have a certain look of authority. And I’m accustomed to speaking to the public.”

  Bryce rejected the idea instantly. That right-wing crackpot, that author of passionate nut letters to every news medium in the state, that latter-day Paul Revere? Him, spokesman for the committee? But in the moment of rejection came acceptance. Nobody really paid attention to far-out political activities like that, probably nine people out of ten in San Francisco thought of Braskett, if at all, simply as the hero of the First Mars Expedition. He was a handsome old horse, too, elegantly upright and lean. Deep voice; unwavering eyes. A man of strength and presence.

  Bryce said, “Commander Braskett, if we were to make you chairman of the committee of public safety—”

  Ted Kamakura gasped.

  “—would I have your assurance that such public announcements as you would make would be confined entirely to statements of the policies arrived at by the entire committee?”

  Commander Braskett smiled glacially. “You want me to be a figurehead, is that it?”

  “To be our spokesman, with the official title of chairman.”

  “As I said: to be a figurehead. Very well, I accept. I’ll mouth my lines like an obedient puppet, and I won’t attempt to inject any of my radical, extremist ideas into my statements. Is that what you wish?”

  “I think we understand each other perfectly,” Bryce said, and smiled, and got a surprisingly warm smile in return.

  He jabbed now at his data board. Someone in the path lab eight stories below his office answered, and Bryce said, “Is there an up-to-date analysis yet?”

  “I’ll switch you to Dr. Madison.”

  Madison appeared on the screen. He ran the hospital’s radioisotope department, normally: a beefy, red-faced man who looked as though he ought to be a beer salesman. He knew his subject. “It’s definitely the water supply, Tim,” he said at once. “We tentatively established that an hour and a half ago, of course, but now there’s no doubt. I’ve isolated traces of two different memory-suppressant drugs, and there’s the possibility of a third. Whoever it was was taking no chances.”

  “What are they?” Bryce asked.

  “Well, we’ve got a good jolt of acetylcholine terminase,” Madison said, “which will louse up the synapses and interfere with short-term memory fixation. Then there’s something else, perhaps a puromycin-derivative protein dissolver, which is going to work on the brain-RNA and smashing up older memories. I suspect also that we’ve been getting one of the newer experimental amnesifacients, something that I haven’t isolated yet, capable of working its way deep and cutting out really basic motor patterns. So they’ve hit us high, low, and middle.”

  “That explains a lot. The guys who can’t remember what they did yesterday, the guys who’ve lost a chunk out of their adult memories, and the ones who don’t even remember their names— this thing is working on people at all different levels.”

  “Depending on individual metabolism, age, brain structure, and how much water they had to drink yesterday, yes.”

  “Is the water supply still tainted?” Bryce asked.

  “Tentatively, I’d say no. I’ve had water samples brought me from the upflow districts, and everything’s okay there. The water department has been running its own check; they say the same. Evidently the stuff got into the system early yesterday, came down into the city, and is generally gone by now. Might be some residuals in the pipes;
I’d be careful about drinking water even today.”

  “And what does the pharmacopoeia say about the effectiveness of these drugs?”

  Madison shrugged. “Anybody’s guess. You’d know that better than I. Do they wear off?”

  “Not in the normal sense,” said Bryce. “What happens is the brain cuts in a redundancy circuit and gets access to a duplicate set of the affected memories, eventually—shifts to another track, so to speak—provided a duplicate of the sector in question was there in the first place, and provided that the duplicate wasn’t blotted out also. Some people are going to get chunks of their memories back, in a few days or a few weeks. Others won’t.”

  “Wonderful,” Madison said. “I’ll keep you posted, Tim.”

  Bryce cut off the call and said to the communications man, “You have that bone relay? Get it behind His Honor’s ear.”

  The mayor quivered. The little instrument was fastened in place.

  Bryce said, “Mr. Mayor, I’m going to dictate a speech, and you’re going to broadcast it on all media, and it’s the last thing I’m going to ask of you until you’ve had a chance to pull yourself together. Okay? Listen carefully to what I’m saying, speak slowly, and pretend that tomorrow is election day and your job depends on how well you come across now. You won’t be going on live. There’ll be a fifteen-second delay, and we have a wipe circuit so we can correct any stumbles, and there’s absolutely no reason to be tense. Are you with me? Will you give it all you’ve got?”

  “My mind is all foggy.”

  “Simply listen to me and repeat what I say into the camera’s eye. Let your political reflexes take over. Here’s your chance to make a hero of yourself. We’re living history right now, Mr. Mayor. What we do here today will be studied the way the events of the 1906 fire were studied. Let’s go, now. Follow me. People of the wonderful city of San Francisco—”

  The words rolled easily from Bryce’s lips, and, wonder of wonders, the mayor caught them and spoke them in a clear, beautifully resonant voice. As he spun out his speech, Bryce felt a surging flow of power going through himself, and he imagined for the moment that he were the elected leader of the city, not merely a self-appointed emergency dictator. It was an interesting, almost ecstatic feeling. Lisa, watching him in action, gave him a loving smile.