“I don’t know, Leo. The whole thing is crazy. I think I’m going crazy myself.”
“Let’s say for argument’s sake that Vornan-19 is genuine and that such a power system is in use in A.D. 2999. Yes? Okay, but we don’t know that it’s the system you devised. Suppose you burn your manuscript. The act of doing that would change the future so that the economy described by Vornan-19 would never have come into existence. He himself might wink out of existence the moment your book went into the incinerator. And that way you’d know that the future was saved from the terrible fate you had created for it.”
“No, Leo. Even if I burned the manuscript, I’d still be here. I could recreate my equations from memory. The menace is in my brain. Burning the book would prove nothing.”
“There are memory-washing drugs—”
He shuddered. “I couldn’t trust those.”
I looked at him in horror. With a sensation like that of falling through a trapdoor, I made contact with Jack’s paranoia for the first time; and the healthy, tanned extrovert of these desert years vanished forever. To think that he had come to this! Tied in knots over the possibility that a shrewd but implausible fraud represented a veritable ambassador from a distant future shaped by Jack’s own suppressed creation!
“Is there anything I can do to help you?” I said softly.
“There is, Leo. One thing.”
“Anything.”
“Find some way to meet Vornan-19 yourself. You’re an important scientific figure. You can pull the right strings. Sit down and talk with him. Find out if he’s really a faker.”
“Of course he is.”
“Find it out, Leo.”
“And if he’s really what he says he is?”
Jack’s eyes blazed with unsettling intensity. “Question him about his own era, then. Get him to tell you more about this atomic energy thing. Get him to tell you when it was invented — by whom. Maybe it didn’t come up until five hundred years from now — an independent rediscovery, nothing to do with my work. Wring the truth out of him, Leo. I have to know.”
What could I say?
Could I tell him, Jack, you’ve gone skully? Could I beg him to enter therapy? Could I offer a quick amateur diagnosis of paranoia? Yes, and lose forever my dearest friend. But to become a partner in psychosis by solemnly quizzing Vornan-19 this way was distasteful to me. Assuming I could ever get access to him, assuming there was some way of obtaining an individual audience, I had no wish to stain myself by treating the mountebank even for a moment as though his pretensions should be taken seriously.
I could lie to Jack. I could invent a reassuring conversation with the man.
But that was treachery. Jack’s dark, tormented eyes begged for honest aid. I’ll humor him, I thought.
“I’ll do what I can,” I promised.
His hand clasped mine. We walked quietly back to the house.
The next morning, as I packed, Shirley came into my room. She wore a clinging, pearly iridescent wrap that miraculously enhanced the contours of her body. I who had grown callously accustomed to her nakedness was reminded anew that she was beautiful, and that my uncle-like love for her incorporated a nugget of repressed though irrepressible lust.
She said, “How much did he tell you out there yesterday?”
“Everything.”
“About the manuscript? About what he’s afraid of?”
“Yes.”
“Can you help him, Leo?”
“I don’t know. He wants me to get hold of the man from 2999 and check everything out with him. That may not be so easy. And it probably won’t do much good even if I can.”
“He’s very disturbed, Leo. I’m worried about him. You know, he looks so healthy on the outside, and yet this thing has been burning through him year after year. He’s lost all perspective.”
“Have you thought of getting professional help for him?”
“I don’t dare,” she whispered. “It’s the one thing not even I can suggest. This is the great moral crisis of his life, and I’ve got to take it that way. I can’t suggest that it’s a sickness. At least not yet. Perhaps if you came back here able to convince him that this man’s a hoax, that would help Jack start letting go of his obsession. Will you do it?”
“Whatever I can, Shirley.”
Suddenly she was in my arms. Her face was thrust into the hollow between my cheek and my shoulder; the globes of her breasts, discernible through the thin wrap, crushed themselves against my chest, and her fingertips dug into my back. She was trembling and sobbing. I held her close, until I began to tremble for another reason, and gently I broke the contact between us. An hour later I was bumping over the dirt road, heading for Tucson and the transportation pod that was waiting to bring me back to California.
I reached Irvine at nightfall. A thumb to the doorplate and my house opened for me. Sealed for three weeks, climate-proofed, it had a musty, tomblike odor. The familiar litter of papers and spools everywhere was reassuring. I went in just as a light rain began to fall. Wandering from room to room, I felt that sense of an ending that I used to know on the day after the last day of summer; I was alone again, the holiday was over, the Arizona brightness had given way to the misty dark of California winter. I could not expect to find Shirley scampering sprite-like about the house, nor Jack uncoiling some characteristically involuted idea for my consideration. The homecoming sadness was even sharper this time, for I had lost the strong, sturdy Jack I had depended on for so many years, and in his place there had appeared a troubled stranger full of irrational doubts. Even golden Shirley stood revealed as no goddess but a worried wife. I had gone to them with a sickness in my own soul and had come home healed of that, but it had been a costly visit.
I cut out the opaquers and peered outside at the Pacific’s surging surf, at the reddish strip of beach, at the white swirls of fog invading the twisted pines that grew where sand yielded to soil. The staleness in the house gave way as that piney salt air was sucked through the vents. I slipped a music cube into the scanner, and the thousands of tiny speakers embedded in the walls spun a skein of Bach for me. I allowed myself a few ounces of cognac. For a while I sat quietly sipping, letting the music cocoon me, and gradually I felt a kind of peace come over me. My hopeless work awaited me in the morning. My friends were in anguish. The world was convulsed by an apocalyptic cult and now was beset by a self-appointed emissary from the epochs ahead. Yet there had always been false prophets loose in the land, men had always struggled with problems so heavy they strained their souls, and the good had always been plagued with shattering doubts and turmoils. Nothing was new. I need feel no pity for myself. Live each day for itself, I thought, meet the challenges as they arise, brood not, do your best, and hope for a glorious resurrection. Fine. Let the morrow come.
After a while I remembered to reactivate my telephone. It was a mistake.
My staff knows that I am incommunicado when I am in Arizona. All incoming calls are shunted to my secretary’s line, and she deals with them as she sees fit, never consulting me. But if anything of major importance comes up, she rings it into the storage cell of my home telephone so that I’ll find out about it right away when I return. The instant I brought my phone to life, the storage cell disgorged its burden; the chime sounded and automatically I nudged the output switch. My secretary’s long, bony face appeared on the screen.
“I’m calling on January fifth, Dr. Garfield. There have been several calls for you today from a Sanford Kralick of the White House staff. Mr Kralick wants to speak to you urgently and insisted a number of times that he be put through to Arizona. He pushed me quite hard, too. When I finally got it across to him that you couldn’t be disturbed, he asked me to have you call him at the White House as soon as possible, any hour of the day or night. He said it was on a matter vital to national security. The number is—”