A questioner said, “How come you speak English?”
“It seemed the most useful medieval language for me to learn.”
“Isn’t it spoken in your time?”
“Only in a greatly altered form.”
“Tell us a little about the world of the future.”
Vornan smiled — the charm again — and said patiently. “What would you like to know?”
“The population.”
“I’m not sure. Several billions, at least.”
“Have you reached the stars yet?”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
“How long do people live in 2999?”
“Until they die,” said Vornan amiably. “That is, until they choose to die.”
“What if they don’t so choose?”
“I suppose they’d keep on living. I’m really not sure.”
“What are the leading nations of 2999?”
“We have no nations. We have the Centrality, and then there are the decentralized settlements. That is all.”
“What’s the Centrality?”
“A voluntary association of citizens in a single area. A city, in a sense, but something more than a city.”
“Where is it?”
Vornan-19 frowned delicately. “On one of the major continents. I forget your names for the continents.”
Jack looked up at me. “Shall I turn it off? He’s obviously a phony. He can’t even fake the details convincingly!”
“No, leave it,” Shirley said. She seemed entranced. Jack tensed again, and I quickly said, “Yes, let’s watch a little more. It’s amusing.”
“…only one city, then?”
“Yes,” Vornan replied. “Composed of those who value communal life. There’s no economic need for us to cluster together, you know. We’re each quite self-sufficient. What fascinates me is the need you folk have to keep your hands in each other’s pockets. This business of money, for example. Without it, a man starves, a man goes naked. Am I right? You lack independent means of production. Am I right in believing that energy conversion is not yet an accomplished fact?”
A harsh American voice said, “Depends what you mean by energy conversion. Mankind’s had ways of getting energy since the first fires were kindled.”
Looking perturbed, Vornan said, “I mean efficient energy conversion. The full use of the power stored within a single — ah, a single atom. You lack this?”
I glanced sideways at Jack. He was gripping the float of his pneumochair in sudden anguish, and his features were distorted with tension. I looked away again as though I had intruded on something terribly private, and I realized that a decade-old question had been answered at least in part.
Vornan was no longer discussing energy conversion when I was able to return my attention to the screen.
“…a tour of the world. I wish to sample the full range of experience available in this era. And I will begin in the United States of America.”
“Why?”
“One likes to see the processes of decadence in motion. When one visits a crumbling culture, one does best to explore its most powerful component first. My impression is that the chaos that will come upon you will radiate outward from the United States, and therefore I wish to search for the symptoms there first.” He said this with a kind of bland impersonality, as though it should be quite self-evident that our society was collapsing and that no offense could possibly be given by remarking on something so obvious. Then he flashed the smile just long enough to stun his audience into ignoring the underlying darkness of his words.
The press conference trickled to an anticlimactic end. Random questions about Vornan’s world and about the method by which he had come to our time met with such vague generalities that he seemed clearly to be mocking his questioners. Occasionally he implied that he might provide further details on some point another time; mostly he declared that he simply did not know. He was particularly evasive on all efforts to get from him a sharp description of world events in our immediate future. I gathered that he had no high regard for our attainments and was a trifle surprised to discover that we had electricity and atomic energy and space travel at our early stage in the stream of history. He made no attempt to hide his disdain, but the odd thing was that his cockiness failed to be infuriating. And when the editor of a Canadian facsimsheet said, “Just how much of all this do you really expect us to believe?” he replied quite pleasantly, “Why, feel free to believe none of it. I’m sure it makes no difference to me.”
When the program was over. Shirley turned to me and said, “Now you’ve seen the fabulous man from tomorrow, Leo. What do you think of him?”
“I’m amused.”
“Convinced?”
“Don’t be silly. This is nothing but a very clever publicity dodge that’s working out magnificently for somebody. But give the devil credit: he’s got charm.”
“He does indeed,” Shirley said. She looked toward her husband. “Jack, darling, would you mind very much if I arrange to sleep with him when he comes to the States? I’m sure they’ve invented a few new wrinkles in sex in the next thousand years, and maybe he could teach me something.”
“Very funny,” Jack said.
His face was black with rage. Shirley recoiled as she saw it. It startled me that he would overreact in this way to her innocently wanton suggestion. Surely their marriage was secure enough so that she could play at infidelity without angering him. And then it struck me that he was not reacting at all to her talk of sleeping with Vornan, that he was still locked in his earlier anguish. That talk of total energy conversion — of a decentralized world in which each man was an economically self-sufficient unit—
“Do you mind?” he said, and left the room.
Shirley and I exchanged troubled glances. She bit her lip, tugged at her hair, and said softly, “I’m sorry, Leo. I know what’s eating him, but I can’t explain.”
“I think I can guess.”
“Yes, you probably would be the one who could.”
She opened the circuit that opaqued the side window. I saw Jack on the sundeck, gripping the rail, hulking forward and staring into the darkened desert. Lightning forked across the summits of the mountains in the west, and then came the instant fury of a winter rainstorm. Sheets of water cascaded across the glass paneling. Jack remained there, a statue more than a man, and let the storm unleash its force upon him. Beneath my feet I felt the purr of the house’s life-system as the storage pumps sucked the rainwater into the cisterns for later use. Shirley came up beside me and put her hand on my arm. “I’m afraid,” she whispered. “Leo, I’m afraid.”
FOUR
“Come out into the desert with me,” Jack said. “I’d like to talk to you, old man.”
Two days had passed since the telecast of Vornan-19’s press conference. We had not turned the wallscreen on again, and the tension had ebbed from the house. I was planning to return to Irvine the following day. My work was calling me, and I felt also that I should leave Shirley and Jack in privacy while they dealt with whatever gulfs were opening in their lives. Jack had said little during the two days; he appeared to be making a conscious effort to conceal the pain he had felt that night. I was surprised and pleased by his invitation.
“Will Shirley go?” I asked.
“She doesn’t need to. Just the two of us.”
We left her sunbathing in the noon light, her eyes closed, her supple body upturned, her loveliness bare to the sun’s caress. Jack and I walked more than a mile from the house, taking a path we rarely used. The sand was still dimpled from the heavy rainfall, and the scrubby plants were erupting in violent greenery.