"How much is all this going to cost you?" Dark said. Our pensions from Mr. Edison were ample for our needs and some luxuries, but would not really cover a considerable extra expense.
"Cost me? Cost me?" Valmis threw his head back and laughed. "Not a single simoleon, that's what it's going to cost me. George M.'s going to pay me!"
For the next few weeks, Valmis was absent much of the time, taking a morning train to New York to confer with Mr. Cohan, and returning only in the evening; he would even occasionally stay at a city hotel overnight. As presaged by his manner after his first encounter with Cohan, his speech and general attitude underwent startling changes. He would talk knowledgeably of theatrical performances and restaurants and cabarets frequented by actors, often offer to give us advice concerning wagers on sporting events, though we did not follow these entertainments at all closely, and regale us with a vast fund of anecdotes concerning persons of whom we knew nothing. One exception to our ignorance of his new circle of acquaintances was Rasputin, who appeared to be gaining a growing if in the main unsavory reputation among New York's flourishing motion picture colony. "Sharp fellow, that," Valmis remarked approvingly. "He's getting on in movie work and picking up a nice bundle of change endorsing soap for the ads. He's got a picture of himself the way he was in Russia, and they run that alongside a new one, and a balloon coming out of his mouth saying, 'Ebony soap did this for me—what wouldn't it do for you?' "
"I think," Ari observed later, "that Valmis is getting caught up in a Pattern he's not aware of."
Valmis was completely absent for some days before his first public appearance, having left word as to the time and place we should present ourselves to witness it. On the appointed day, we made our way to the theatrical district of New York. It was, I realized, at least a year and a half since I had had any close look at this portion of the city, and I was struck by some changes in it. Hardly any horse-drawn vehicles were to be seen, and the many motorcars operated much more quietly than I recalled, as did the elevated railways, which were now, I understood, converted to the turbine engine in general use on trips between cities. Overhead, a large flying machine slowly drew an advertising banner across the sky, offering inexpensive air trips to a place called Florida.
At one motion picture theater, I was interested to see a large poster promising that those who ventured within would see:
MAD MONK-EY SHINES
A New Sound Feature
Starring JOHN BARRYMORE
as "Grigori the Great"
A GOLDFISH-LASKY-RASPUTIN Production
Written by GREG RASPUTIN
Directed by GREG RASPUTIN
Technical Advisor GREG RASPUTIN
The auditorium to which Valmis had directed us, an ornately decorated place, was crowded, though this was the afternoon of a working day. We found our seats and settled into them with anticipation, in spite of our reservations about Valmis's course, proud that so many Earth people had turned out to see our companion.
We were thus at a loss when he did not appear at the rise of the curtain. A lady came out and sang, to the accompaniment of an orchestra just below the stage, a long song which seemed to turn on the fact that the words "June" and "moon" end in similar sounds. She was followed by a man who obliged a dog to do a number of things which I would have thought unlikely had I not seen them, and then by two bearded men whose conversation, though opaque to me, aroused great enthusiasm from the audience.
"What is all this?" I whispered to Ari. "Did Valmis send us to the wrong place?"
"It may be," Ari answered, "that this collection of oddities is meant to show the consequences of striving to live without Perceiving Patterns. Those last two, Weber and Fields, might well illustrate the principle of complete anarchy and chaos in an undetermined Universe."
"I don't know about that," Dark put in, "but the native term for this is three-a-day."
After two more people had come out and thrown each other into the air for some time, a placard was pushed onto the stage reading: THE AMAZING VALMIS—THE MAN FROM THE STARS.
"Ah," Dark said, "now we get down to it. I wonder what this crowd'll make of a lecture on Patterns after they've been worked up by all these other acts?"
The orchestra struck up a brisk tune, and Valmis, the spotlight gleaming on his white coverall, sauntered onto the stage. I was surprised to see him carrying a light walking stick, and hoped that he had not suffered an injury.
He assumed a negligent attitude, leaning on the stick, and, in time to the music from the orchestra, sang. I was later able to obtain a copy of the words of this song from him, though he insisted that any reproduction of them was strictly forbidden without mention of the fact that they were copyright 1910 by Co-Val Music Corp.
When singing in the bathtub or walking in the rain,
he warbled in a high, nasal voice,
Do you ever think to wonder what gives pleasure and what pain?
Why East is East and West is West, and never twain do meet?
Why sky is blue and grass is green, and honey mighty sweet?
Well, folks, I've got the news on that, and now you'll have it, too:
You've got to make your mind go blank, and let the Patterns through!
At this point, the tempo of the music became faster, and he executed a series of intricate steps, which had the effect of causing him to rotate about the walking stick as he continued to sing.
It's the Patterns! The Patterns!
In rabbits and their habits, in stars and Christmas trees,
In toads and frogs and puppy dogs, in hives of bumblebees;
It's the Patterns that all make 'em—
It's the Patterns, you can't break 'em—
Once you see 'em, you can shape 'em—
It's the Patterns that make all things as they are!
It was, I was obliged to admit, a catchy tune, and as Valmis accompanied succeeding verses with ever more imaginative steps, the performance was well received by the audience.
When he left, to be succeeded by an individual who announced his intention of divining the thoughts of any person in the audience, we quitted our seats and made our way to an area behind the stage, as Valmis had previously requested us to do.
We found him in a small room, seated in front of a mirror, removing some colored substance from his face.
"Didn't it go well?" he asked. "I thought I really had 'em after the verse, and once I swung into the chorus and did that sort of shuffle around the cane, they were in the palm of my hand—right, George?"
I now saw that Mr. Cohan was seated on a chair in the corner of the room. He nodded approvingly and assured Valmis, "You killed 'em, boy. You just want to watch your timing toward the end—you nearly kicked the cane out from under you and took a pratfall."
"Well," Valmis said, "don't you think a bit of comedy might in fact go well just there? It would, I don't know, give it a sense of—"
"Hey!" Dark strode over to Cohan. "You were supposed to be giving our friend here a chance to get some deep stuff across to the public, right? So what's this business about making him into a vaudeville turn?"
"I'll tell you," Cohan replied, looking up at the towering Captain. "I thought about it some, after Valmis came to me, and it just didn't seem to me that he would get any kind of a hearing, doing what he planned. So I worked out how he could at least draw an audience. And say," he added, glaring at Dark, "where do you get off knocking vaudeville turns, anyhow? Can you think of anything else you fellows are good for?"
24
We all knew after that, I think, what the future held for us, though the ingrained dread of which I have spoken caused us to avoid facing it for a very long time.
Valmis, though he insisted on playing out the engagement to which Mr. Cohan had bound him, had no heart to continue further when the disparity between his intention and the reality of his performance had been made clear to him. He spent much time in his room, looking morosely at a collection of signed photographs of theat
er people he had mounted on his wall, and sighing.
Ari, with an increasing lack of conviction, scanned all journals for signs of the oncoming war.
Dark sought relief in busying himself with mechanical matters; he participated in several automobile races and did quite well. During the latter part of this period, he was aided by Sergeant Olson, as mechanic, and Captain Thatcher, as manager, they having retired from the Marine Corps. But to an Explorer Captain cut off from his ship, automobile racing prizes are only a palliative, they do not cure; and the passage of time only deepened his gloom.
I quite enjoyed my trips to the Roslyn tavern, in spite of an occasional return of my fatigue, but these also could not make me forget that we were where we ought not to be, with little prospect of leaving . . . at least not during our normal life span.
Thus, the word "stasis," while unspoken among us, began to loom larger in my mind and, I now know, in those of my companions.
The events of that time held moments of occasional interest for us, even of high excitement. I shall never forget, for instance, the Titanic disaster, as we saw it on the color electrodiffuser. The scene of the great ship, mortally ripped by a piece of floating ice, slowly slipping under the sea, was eerily impressive, and contrasted dramatically with the darting movements of the rescue fleet of Wright fliers and Sikorsky ornithopters which had been dispatched from the American and European shores within moments of the arrival of the news of the ship's plight. After all the passengers and crew had been removed, one lone aircraft in the service of the electrodiffusion company remained, floodlighting and relaying the scene until, with a sudden boiling movement of the ocean, the ill-fated liner vanished. All of us were shaken, recalling Wanderer's disappearance in just such a manner . . . four years before, now.
It was in the same year that we saw and heard President Edison's unexpected speech in which he announced his decision not to run for a second term, as he wished to get back to work. "There's more going on than I ever dreamed possible," he declared, "and I mean to show the world that I'm up to getting in on it."
Mr. Roosevelt's triumphant return to office was also a reminder of our first days here, when our hopes had been so high.
One afternoon in July of 1914, Ari burst into my room in high glee. "It's late, but it's coming!" he announced. "I just heard on the electrodiffuser that somebody's shot the heir to the Austrian throne in Europe, and that's just the stuff to set them off. You wait, there'll be ultimatums and mobilizations and I don't know what else, and then, bang!"
"Well, that's nice," I said, not being able to rouse any real enthusiasm, for I had been through many such moments with Ari. And of course I was correct in this, the shooting, in the usual way of such crises, resulting in nothing more than the standard conferences of heads of government and some political readjustments.
A year or so later, for some reason, the papers, Oxford's magazine, and the electrodiffuser gave a great deal of coverage to Czar Nicholas's installation of one Vladimir Ulyanov as Minister-President of the Russian Democratic Empire; according to the electrodiffusion commentary, delivered, curiously enough, by Rasputin, who appeared to have spread himself over much of the communications and entertainment industry, this signaled political changes of great moment.
"A historical day, ladies and gentlemen," we heard him say, as the screen showed a view of the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. "Vladimir Ilich now kneeling before Little Father—all that about Siberia forgotten now, by damn!—and giving homage. On platform I can seeing Emperor from China, Kaiser, King Edward. Bells in cathedrals ringing now—that banging you hearing is twenty-one-gun salute from battleship Potemkin. When it finish, is sign that Holy Mother Russia be changed, all legal and by vote, to democratic monarchy! This Greg Rasputin, bringing you scene I never expecting to see!"
Ari switched the set off and regarded it glumly. "Everything's going on, and we're left out of it. I'm beginning to have moments, you know, when I almost lose my faith in Metahistory. I know it backwards and forwards, and everything I ever learned about it tells me that there should have been a war by now, even if I miscalculated about being able to do something to bring it on faster. But, damn it, it's as if we weren't here, as if we were ghosts or something, unable to get anybody to hear us or pay any attention to us. It's almost enough . . ."
All the same, we put off making the decision for another two years, watching the months come and go at what seemed to be an ever-increasing pace, and ourselves becoming less and less active.
It was Valmis who voiced our thoughts openly, on a bright autumn day. "Damn it, we might as well be in stasis, for all the good we are to ourselves, each other, or Wanderer. Your war is not coming on, Ari, and that means there's no telling when this planet's going to be up to helping us. I don't know what went wrong—maybe that Ford man was right about Metahistory being metabunk—but in any case that's a dead end. And the same about anything else the rest of us have tried. If we're not just going to sit around here until we wither, the only thing to do is face it and go into stasis for as long as we need to."
Our protests were a half-hearted ritual, for we had each privately arrived at the same conclusion some time before, though not yet daring to act on it.
Once the decision was taken, we took a melancholy pride in carrying it out quickly and efficiently. We consulted Oxford and were granted an interview with President Roosevelt (who had persuaded the voters in 1916 that the next term would not, if you looked at it the right way, actually be his fourth). Both were disconcertingly quick to agree that stasis would be a good solution.
"You just get off to sleep, then," the President said heartily, "and we'll have you woken up when we're ready to help you on your way, by Godfrey! Not before, mind you; we wouldn't want you cooling your heels any longer and thinking about getting wars started, eh?"
He agreed to have a stasis chamber constructed according to our specifications in a corner of a military cemetery at a place called Arlington. "Might as well," Ari muttered morosely. "The way things are going, it's not going to be used for much else."
Oxford agreed to set up, with the assistance of Wells, an organization that would oversee our period—perhaps centuries—in stasis and ensure that when the time came we should be awakened. Both the method of going into stasis and the process of awakening were quite simple, so that there would be little likelihood of the necessary instructions being garbled by the passage of years.
Soon the time came for us to leave the house at Glenwood, to return no more. We bade farewell to Mr. and Mrs. Bonacker, to whom we had deeded the place in appreciation of their services for almost precisely ten years, and took the train to New York.
"Look," Dark said, "why don't we put this off for a day or so and have one last look around Europe? There were some nice places there, and the fliers can get you across within a day. It'd be fun, wouldn't it?"
But, having made our decision, the rest of us agreed that it would be unnerving to defer its execution, and we proceeded to Washington and thence the next morning to the chamber prepared for us at Arlington.
We set out the stasis-inducing equipment and prepared it for use, and we stowed the reanimation instruments in a prominent place, not wishing them to be overlooked when the time came. We made all the preparations we could before sealing the chamber, and we stood for a moment at the half-opened door. It was a clear day, with the sky a deep blue and a touch of frost in the air; we heard the sound of a distant bell giving several slow chimes.
"Eleven o'clock," Dark said, counting them. "Well, that's a bit of a Pattern for you, Valmis. Eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. If we'd had the sense to do this seven years ago, it'd have been the eleventh year of the century, too. Well, let's get on with it—we haven't been able to do anything with this place, so the sooner we're out of it the better."
He pulled the door to and sealed it.
25
All the information we had been given on stasis was firm on the point that there
was no subjective awareness of the passage of time, that the interval between entering that state and leaving it would seem no more than a blink. As I have stated, this was mainly theory, based only upon limited experimentation, since volunteers to test the proposition that this effect would hold true over a period covering several normal life spans were not forthcoming.
I thus expected at the time I awoke to be somehow conscious that a number of years had come and gone, but the theory turned out in fact to be true after all. When I found myself aware of my surroundings again, it seemed to me so soon that I could almost fancy I heard the echo of the chiming bell still ringing in my ears.
Light flooded our chamber, and I looked up curiously to see what manner of future man might have awakened us. I felt an eerie chill as I saw in the two figures who now stood among us an uncanny resemblance to Wells and Oxford. These were men of more advanced years, but close to identical to them in feature and bearing. The clothing they were wearing, though substantially different in cut, was also sufficiently close to twen-tieth-century garments to suggest a bizarre idea.
Could it be, I wondered, that the "sleeping spacemen" had become the object of a cult, as decade followed decade and century followed century into the past? Had Oxford and Wells become the founders of a hereditary priesthood, passing their genes down the years to their successors? It would follow, then, that the prescribed ritual garments would be modeled after those of the original priests, or keepers. If such were the case, it boded little good, it seemed to me, as the level of superstition it suggested would not be compatible with the technology we required. It was in no easy frame of mind that I sat up and looked at my companions.
And Having Writ . . . Page 20
