He’s absolutely wonderful at it. I’ve never seen him so much as suspected, let alone caught. Of course, I have to pay for the favor by going through the same routine in an art-supply store, so that Morniel can replenish his stock of canvas, paint and brushes, but it’s worth it to me in the long run. The only thing it’s not worth is the thumping boredom I have to suffer through in listening to the guy, or my conscience bothering me because I know he never intends to pay for those things. Okay, so I will, when I can.
“I can’t be as unique as I feel I am,” he was saying now. “Other people must be born with the potential of such great talent, but it’s destroyed in them before they can reach artistic maturity. Why? How? Well, let’s examine the role that society—”
And that’s exactly when I first saw it. Just as he got to the word “society,” I saw this purplish ripple in the wall opposite me, the strange, shimmering outline of a box with a strange, shimmering outline of a man inside the hole.
It was about five feet off the floor and it looked like colored heat waves. Then there was nothing on the wall.
But it was too late in the year for heat waves. And I’ve never had optical illusions. It could be, I decided, that I had seen the beginnings of a new crack in Morniel’s wall. The place wasn’t really a studio, just a drafty cold-water flat that some old occupant had cleared so as to make one long room. It was on the top floor and the roof leaked occasionally; the walls were covered with thick, wavy lines in memory of the paths followed by the trickling water.
But why purple? And why the outline of a man inside a box? That was pretty tricky, for a simple crack in the wall. And where had it gone?
“—the eternal conflict with the individual who insists on his individuality,” 141orniel pointed out. “Not to mention—”
A series of high musical notes sounded, one after the other, rapidly. And then, in the center of the room, about two feet above the floor this time, the purple lines reappeared—still hazy, still transparent and still with the outline of a man inside.
Morniel swung his feet off the bed and stared up at it. “What the—” he began.
Once more, the outfit disappeared.
“W-what—” Morniel stuttered. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “But whatever it is, I’d say they’re slowly zeroing in.”
Again those high musical notes. And the purple box came into view with its bottom resting on the floor. It got darker, darker and more substantial. The notes kept climbing up the scale and getting fainter and fainter until, when the box was no longer transparent, they faded away altogether.
A door slid back in the box. A man stepped out, wearing clothing that seemed to end everywhere in curlicues. He looked first at me, then at Morniel.
“Morniel Mathaway?” he inquired.
“Ye-es,” Morniel said, backing away toward his refrigerator.
“Morniel Mathaway,” the man from the box said, “my name is Glescu. I bring you greetings from 2487 A.D.”
Neither of us could think of a topper for that one, so we let it lie there. I got up and stood beside Morniel, feeling obscurely that I wanted to get as close as possible to something I was familiar with.
And we all held that position for a while. Tableau.
I thought to myself, 2487 A.D. I’d never seen anyone dressed like that. Even more, I’d never imagined anyone dressed like that and my imagination can run pretty wild. The clothing was not exactly transparent and yet not quite opaque. Prismatic is the word for it, different colors that constantly chased themselves in and out and around the curlicues. There seemed to be a pattern to it, but nothing that my eyes could hold down and identify.
And the man himself, this Mr. Glescu, was about the same height as-Morniel and me and he seemed to be not very much older. But there was a something about him—I don’t know, call it quality, true and tremendous quality—that would have cowed the Duke of Wellington. Civilized, maybe that’s the word: he was the most civilized-looking man I’d ever seen.
He stepped forward. “We will now,” he said in a rich, wonderfully resonant voice, “indulge in the twentieth-century custom of shaking hands.”
So we indulged in the twentieth-century custom of shaking hands with him. First Morniel, then me—and both very gingerly. Mr. Glescu shook hands with a peculiar awkwardness that made me think of the way an Iowan farmer might eat with chopsticks for the first time.
The ceremony over, he stood there and beamed at us. Or, rather, at Morniel.
“What a moment, eh?” he said. “What a supreme moment!”
Morniel took a deep breath and I knew that all those years of meeting process servers unexpectedly on the stairs had begun to pay off. He was recovering; his mind was beginning to work again.
“How do you mean ‘what a moment’?” he asked. “What’s so special about it? Are you the—the inventor of time travel?”
Mr. Glescu twinkled with laughter. “Me? An inventor?
Oh, no. No, no! Time travel was invented by Antoinette Ingeborg in—but that was after your time. Hardly worth going into at the moment, especially since I only have half an hour.”
“Why half an hour?” I asked, not so much because I was curious as because it seemed like a good question.
“The skindrom can only be maintained that long,” he elucidated. “The skindrom is—well, call it a transmitting device that enables me to appear in your period. There is such an enormous expenditure of power required that a trip into the past is made only once every fifty years. The privilege is awarded as a sort of Gobel. I hope I have the word right. It is Gobel isn’t it? The award made in your time?”
I had a flash. “You wouldn’t mean Nobel, by any chance? The Nobel Prize?”
He nodded his head enthusiastically. “That’s it! The Nobel Prize. The trip is awarded to outstanding scholars as a kind of Nobel Prize. Once every fifty years—the man selected by the gardunax as the most pre-eminent—that sort of thing. Up to now, of course, it’s always gone to historians and they’ve frittered it away on the Siege of Troy, the first atom-bomb explosion at Los Alamos, the discovery of America—things like that. But this year—”
“Yes?” Morniel broke in, his voice quavering. We were both suddenly remembering that Mr. Glescu had known his name. “What kind of scholar are you?”
Mr. Glescu made us a slight bow with his head, “I am an art scholar. My specialty is art history. And my special field in art history is…”
“What?” Morniel demanded, his voice no longer quavering, but positively screechy. “What is your special field?”
Again a slight bow from Mr. Glescu’s head. “You, Mr. Mathaway. In my own period, I may say without much fear of contradiction, I am the greatest living authority on the life and works of Morniel Mathaway. My special field is you.”
Morniel went white. He groped his way to the bed and sat down as if his hips were made of glass. He opened his mouth several times and couldn’t seem to get a sound out. Finally, he gulped, clenched his fists and got a grip on himself.
“Do—do you mean,” he managed to croak at last, “that I’m famous? That famous?”
“Famous? You, my dear sir, are beyond fame. You are one of the immortals the human race has produced. As I put it—rather well if I may say so—in my last book, Mathaway, the Man Who Shaped the Future: ‘How rarely has it fallen to the lot of individual human endeavor to—’ ”
“That famous.” The blond beard worked the way a child’s face does when it’s about to cry.“That famous! ”