How It Was When the Past Went Away

by Robert Silverberg

  As he finished, he saw a knot of people bustling toward him from the direction of the South Drive. Fearing trouble, Haldersen went out to meet them; but as he drew close he saw half a dozen disciples, clutching a scruffy, unshaven, terrified little man. They hurled him at Haldersen’s feet. The man quivered like a hare ringed by hounds. His eyes glistened; his wedge of a face, sharp-chinned, sharp of cheekbones, was pale.

  “It’s the one who poisoned the water supply!” someone called. “We found him in a rooming house on Judah Street. With a stack of drugs in his room, and the plans of the water system, and a bunch of computer programs. He admits it. He admits it!”

  Haldersen looked down. “Is this true?” he asked. “Are you the one?”

  The man nodded.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Won’t say. Want a lawyer.”

  “Kill him now!” a woman shrieked. “Pull his arms and legs off!”

  “Kill him!” came an answering cry from the other side of the group. “Kill him!”

  The congregation, Haldersen realized, might easily turn into a mob.

  He said, “Tell me your name, and I’ll protect you. Otherwise I can’t be responsible.”

  “Skinner,” the man muttered miserably. “Skinner. And you contaminated the water supply.” Another nod.

  “Why?”

  “To get even.”

  “With whom?”

  “Everyone. Everybody.”

  Classic paranoid. Haldersen felt pity. Not the others; they were calling out for blood.

  A tall man bellowed, “Make the bastard drink his own drug!”

  “No, kill him! Squash him!”

  The voices became more menacing. The angry faces came closer.

  “Listen to me,” Haldersen called, and his voice cut through the murmurings. “There’ll be no killing here tonight.”

  “What are you going to do, give him to the police?”

  “No,” said Haldersen. “We’ll hold communion together. We’ll teach this pitiful man the blessings of oblivion, and then we’ll share new joys ourselves. We are human beings. We have the capacity to forgive even the worst of sinners. Where are the memory drugs? Did someone say you had found the memory drugs? Here. Here. Pass it up here. Yes. Brothers, sisters, let us show this dark and twisted soul the nature of redemption. Yes. Yes. Fetch some water, please. Thank you. Here, Skinner. Stand him up, will you? Hold his arms. Keep him from falling down. Wait a second, until I find the proper dose. Yes. Yes. Here, Skinner. Forgiveness. Sweet oblivion.”

  It was so good to be working again that Mueller didn’t want to stop. By early afternoon on Saturday his studio was ready; he had long since worked out the sketches of the first piece; now it was just a matter of time and effort, and he’d have something to show Pete Castine. He worked on far into the evening, setting up his armature and running a few tests of the sound sequences that he proposed to build into the piece. He had some interesting new ideas about the sonic triggers, the devices that would set off the sound effects when the appreciator came within range. Carole had to tell him, finally, that dinner was ready. “I didn’t want to interrupt you,” she said, “but it looks like I have to, or you won’t ever stop.”

  “Sorry. The creative ecstasy.”

  “Save some of that energy. There are other ecstasies. The ecstasy of dinner, first.”

  She had cooked everything herself. Beautiful. He went back to work again afterward, but at half past one in the morning Carole interrupted him. He was willing to stop, now. He had done an honest day’s work, and he was sweaty with the noble sweat of a job well done. Two minutes under the molecular cleanser and the sweat was gone, but the good ache of virtuous fatigue remained. He hadn’t felt his way in years.

  He woke to Sunday thoughts of unpaid debts.

  “The robots are still there,” he said. “They won’t go away, will they? Even though the whole city’s at a standstill, nobody’s told the robots to quit.”

  “Ignore them,” Carole said.

  “That’s what I’ve been doing. But I can’t ignore the debts. Ultimately there’ll be a reckoning.”

  “You’re working again, though! You’ll have an income coming in.”

  “Do you know what I owe?” he asked. “Almost a million. If I produced one piece a week for a year, and sold each piece for twenty bigs, I might pay everything off. But I can’t work that fast, and the market can’t possibly absorb that many Muellers, and Pete certainly can’t buy them all for future sale.”

  He noticed the way Carole’s face darkened at the mention of Pete Castine.

  He said, “You know what I’ll have to do? Go to Caracas, like I was planning before this memory thing started. I can work there, and ship my stuff to Pete. And maybe in two or three years I’ll have paid off my debt, a hundred cents on the dollar, and I can start fresh back here. Do you know if that’s possible? I mean, if you jump to a debtor sanctuary, are you blackballed for credit forever, even if you pay off what you owe?”

  “I don’t know,” Carole said distantly.

  “I’ll find that out later. The important thing is that I’m working again, and I’ve got to go someplace where I can work without being hounded. And then I’ll pay everybody off. You’ll come with me to Caracas, won’t you?”

  “Maybe we won’t have to go,” Carole said.

  “But how—”

  “You should be working now, shouldn’t you?”

  He worked, and while he worked he made lists of creditors in his mind, dreaming of the day when every name on every list was crossed off. When he got hungry he emerged from the studio and found Carole sitting gloomily in the living room. Her eyes were red and puffy-lidded.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You don’t want to go to Caracas?”

  “Please, Paul—let’s not talk about it—”

  “I’ve really got no alternative. I mean, unless we pick one of the other sanctuaries. São Paulo? Spalato?”

  “It isn’t that, Paul.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’m starting to remember again.”

  The air went out of him. “Oh,” he said.

  “I remember November, December, January. The crazy things you were doing, the loans, the financial juggling. And the quarrels we had. They were terrible quarrels.”

  “Oh.”

  “The divorce. I remember, Paul. It started coming back last night, but you were so happy I didn’t want to say anything. And this morning it’s much clearer. You still don’t remember any of it?”

  “Not a thing past last October.”

  “I do,” she said, shakily. “You hit me, do you know that? You cut my lip. You slammed me against that wall, right over there, and then you threw the Chinese vase at me and it broke.”

  “Oh. Oh.”

  She went on, “I remember how good Pete was to me, too. I think I can almost remember marrying him, being his wife. Paul, I’m scared. I feel everything fitting into place in my mind, and it’s as scary as if my mind was breaking into pieces. It was so good, Paul, these last few days. It was like being a newlywed with you again. But now all the sour parts are coming back, the hate, the ugliness, it’s all alive for me again. And I feel so bad about Pete. The two of us, Friday, shutting him out. He was a real gentleman about it. But the fact is that he saved me when I was going under, and I owe him something for that.”

  “What do you plan to do?” he asked quietly.

  “I think I ought to go back to him. I’m his wife. I’ve got no right to stay here.”

  “But I’m not the same man you came to hate,” Mueller protested. “I’m the old Paul, the one from last year and before. The man you loved. All the hateful stuff is gone from me.”

  “Not from me, though. Not now.”

  They were both silent.

  “I think I should go back, Paul.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “I think I should. I wish you all kinds of luck, but I can’t stay here. Will it hurt your work if I
leave again?”

  “I won’t know until you do.”

  She told him three or four more times that she felt she ought to go back to Castine, and then, politely, he suggested that she should go back right now, if that was how she felt, and she did. He spent half an hour wandering around the apartment, which seemed so awfully empty again. He nearly invited one of the dun-fling robots in for company. Instead, he went back to work. To his surprise, he worked quite well, and in an hour he had ceased thinking about Carole entirely.

  Sunday afternoon, Freddy Munson set up a credit transfer and managed to get most of his liquid assets fed into an old account he kept at the Bank of Luna. Toward evening, he went down to the wharf and boarded a three-man hovercraft owned by a fisherman willing to take his chances with the law. They slipped out into the bay without running lights and crossed the bay on a big diagonal, landing some time later a few miles north of Berkeley. Munson found a cab to take him to the Oakland airport, and caught the midnight shuttle to L.A., where, after a lot of fancy talking, he was able to buy his way aboard the next Luna-bound rocket, lifting off at ten o’clock Monday morning. He spent the night in the spaceport terminal. He had taken with him nothing except the clothes he wore; his fine possessions, his paintings, his suits, his Mueller sculptures, and all the rest remained in his apartment, and ultimately would be sold to satisfy the judgments against him. Too bad. He knew that he wouldn’t be coming back to Earth again, either, not with a larceny warrant or worse awaiting him. Also too bad. It had been so nice for so long, here, and who needed a memory drug in the water supply? Munson had only one consolation. It was an article of his philosophy that sooner or later, no matter how neatly you organized your life, fate opened a trapdoor underneath your feet and catapulted you into something unknown and unpleasant. Now he knew that it was true, even for him.

  Too, too bad. He wondered what his chances were of starting over up there. Did they need stockbrokers on the Moon?

  Addressing the citizenry on Monday night, Commander Braskett said, “The committee of public safety is pleased to report that we have come through the worst part of the crisis. As many of you have already discovered, memories are beginning to return. The process of recovery will be more swift for some than others, but great progress has been made. Effective at six A.M. tomorrow, access routes to and from San Francisco will reopen. There will be normal mail service and many businesses will return to normal. Fellow citizens, we have demonstrated once again the real fiber of the American spirit. The Founding Fathers must be smiling down upon us today! How superbly we avoided chaos, and how beautifully we pulled together to help one another in what could have been an hour of turmoil and despair!

  “Dr. Bryce requests me to remind you that anyone still suffering severe impairment of memory—especially those experiencing loss of identity, confusion of vital functions, or other disability— should report to the emergency ward at Fletcher Memorial Hospital. Treatment is available there, and computer analysis is at the service of those unable to find their homes and loved ones. I repeat—”

  Tim Bryce wished that the good commander hadn’t slipped in that plug for the real fiber of the American spirit, especially in view of the necessity to invite the remaining victims to the hospital with his next words. But it would be uncharitable to object. The old spaceman had done a beautiful job all weekend as the Voice of the Crisis, and some patriotic embellishments now were harmless.

  The crisis, of course, was nowhere near as close to being over as Commander Braskett’s speech had suggested, but public confidence had to be buoyed.

  Bryce had the latest figures. Suicides now totaled ~oo since the start of trouble on Wednesday; Sunday had been an unexpectedly bad day. At least 40,000 people were still unaccounted for, although they were tracing i,ooo an hour and getting them back to their families or else into an intensive-care section. Probably 750,000 more continued to have memory difficulties. Most children had fully recovered, and many of the women were mending; but older people, and men in general, had experienced scarcely any memory recapture. Even those who were nearly healed had no recall of events of Tuesday and Wednesday, and probably never would; for large numbers of people, though, big blocks of the past would have to be learned from the outside, like history lessons.

  Lisa was teaching him their marriage that way.

  The trips they had taken—the good times, the bad—the parties, the friends, the shared dreams—she described everything, as vividly as she could, and he fastened on each anecdote, trying to make it a part of himself again. He knew it was hopeless, really. He’d know the outlines, never the substance. Yet it was probably the best he could hope for.

  He was so horribly tired, suddenly.

  He said to Kamakura, “Is there anything new from the park yet? That rumor that Haldersen’s actually got a supply of the drug?”

  “Seems to be true, Tim. The word is that he and his friends caught the character who spiked the water supply, and relieved him of a roomful of various amnesifacients.”

  “We’ve got to seize them,” Bryce said.

  Kamakura shook his head. “Not just yet. Police are afraid of any actions in the park. They say it’s a volatile situation.”

  “But if those drugs are loose—”

  “Let me worry about it, Tim. Look, why don’t you and Lisa go home for a while? You’ve been here without a break since Thursday.”

  “So have—”

  “No. Everybody else has had a breather. Go on, now. We’re over the worst. Relax, get some real sleep, make some love. Get to know that gorgeous wife of yours again a little.”

  Bryce reddened. “I’d rather stay here until I feel I can afford to leave.”

  Scowling, Kamakura walked away from him to confer with Commander Braskett. Bryce scanned the screens, trying to figure out what was going on in the park. A moment later, Braskett walked over to him.

  “Dr. Bryce?”

  “What?”

  “You’re relieved of duty until sundown Tuesday.”

  “Wait a second—”

  “That’s an order, Doctor. I’m chairman of the committee of public safety, and I’m telling you to get yourself out of this hospital. You aren’t going to disobey an order, are you?”

  “Listen, Commander—”

  “Out. No mutiny, Bryce. Out! Orders.”

  Bryce tried to protest, but he was too weary to put up much of a fight. By noon, he was on his way home, soupy-headed with fatigue. Lisa drove. He sat quite still, struggling to remember details of his marriage. Nothing came.

  She put him to bed. He wasn’t sure how long he slept; but then he felt her against him, warm, satin-smooth.

  “Hello,” she said. “Remember me?”

  “Yes,” he lied gratefully. “Oh, yes, yes, yes!”

  Working right through the night, Mueller finished his armature by dawn on Monday. He slept a while, and in early afternoon began to paint the inner strips of loudspeakers on: a thousand speakers to the inch, no more than a few molecules thick, from which the sounds of his sculpture would issue in resonant fullness. When that was done, he paused to contemplate the needs of his sculpture’s superstructure, and by seven that night was ready to move to the next phase. The demons of creativity possessed him; he saw no reason to eat and scarcely any to sleep.

  At eight, just as he was getting up momentum for the long night’s work, he heard a knock at the door. Carole’s signal. He had disconnected the doorbell, and robots didn’t have the sense to knock. Uneasily, he went to the door. She was there.

  “So?” he said.

  “So I came back. So it starts all over.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Can I come in?” she asked.

  “I suppose. I’m working, but come in.”

  She said, “I talked it all over with Pete. We both decided I ought to go back to you.”

  “You aren’t much for consistency, are you?” he asked.

  “I have to take things as they happen. When I los
t my memory, I came to you. When I remembered things again, I felt I ought to leave. I didn’t want to leave. I felt I ought to leave. There’s a difference.”

  “Really,” he said.

  “Really. I went to Pete, but I didn’t want to be with him. I wanted to be here.”

  “I hit you and made your lip bleed. I threw the Ming vase at you.”

  “It wasn’t Ming, it was K’ang-hsi.”

  “Pardon me. My memory still isn’t so good. Anyway, I did terrible things to you, and you hated me enough to want a divorce. So why come back?”

  “You were right, yesterday. You aren’t the man I came to hate. You’re the old Paul.”

  “And if my memory of the past nine months returns?”

  “Even so,” she said. “People change. You’ve been through hell and come out the other side. You’re working again. You aren’t sullen and nasty and confused. We’ll go to Caracas, or wherever you want, and you’ll do your work and pay your debts, just as you said yesterday.”

  “And Pete?”

  “He’ll arrange an annulment. He’s being swell about it.”

  “Good old Pete,” Mueller said. He shook his head. “How long will the neat happy ending last, Carole? If you think there’s a chance you’ll be bouncing back in the other direction by Wednesday, say so now. I’d rather not get involved again, in that case.”

  “No chance. None.”

  “Unless I throw the Ch’ien-lung vase at you.”

  “K’ang-hsi,” she said.

  “Yes. K’ang-hsi.” He managed to grin. Suddenly he felt the accumulated fatigue of these days register all at once. “I’ve been working too hard,” he said. “An orgy of creativity to make up for lost time. Let’s go for a walk.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  They went out, just as a dunning robot was arriving. “Top of the evening to you, sir,” Mueller said.

  “Mr. Mueller, I represent the accounts receivable department of the Acme Brass and—”

  “See my attorney,” he said.

  Fog was rolling in off the sea now. There were no stars. The downtown lights were invisible. He and Carole walked west, toward the park. He felt strangely light-headed, not entirely from lack of sleep. Reality and dream had merged; these were unusual days. They entered the park from the Panhandle and strolled toward the museum area, arm in arm, saying nothing much to one another. As they passed the conservatory Mueller became aware of a crowd up ahead, thousands of people staring in the direction of the music shell. “What do you think is going on?” Carole asked. Mueller shrugged. They edged through the crowd.