When the time came to leave the restaurant, we found ourselves in an unhappily familiar kind of crisis. Word had circulated that the celebrated man from the future was here, and a crowd had gathered. Kralick had to order guards armed with neural whips to clear a path through the restaurant, and for a while it looked as though the whips might have to be used. At feast a hundred diners left their tables and shuffled toward us as we came down from the private room. They were eager to see, to touch, to experience Vornan-19 at close range. I eyed their faces in dismay and alarm. Some had the scowls of skeptics, some the glassy remoteness of the idle curiosity-seeker; but on many was that eerie look of reverence that we had seen so often in the past week. It was more than mere awe. It was an acknowledgment of an inner messianic hunger. These people wanted to drop on their knees before Vornan. They knew nothing of him but what they had seen on their screens, and yet they were drawn to him and looked toward him to fill some void in their own lives. What was he offering? Charm, good looks, a magnetic smite, an attractive voice? Yes, and alienness, for in word and deed he was stamped with strangeness. I could almost feel that pull myself. I had been too close to Vornan to worship him; I had seen his colossal esurience, his imperial self-indulgence, his gargantuan appetite for sensual pleasure of all sorts, and once one has seen a messiah coveting food and impaling legions of willing women, it is hard to feel truly reverent toward him. Nevertheless, I sensed his power. It had begun to transform my own evaluation of him. I had started as a skeptic, hostile and almost belligerent about it; that mood had softened, until I had virtually ceased to add the inevitable qualifier, “if he is genuine,” to everything I thought about Vornan-19. It was not merely the evidence of the blood sample that swayed me, but every aspect of Vornan’s conduct. I found it now harder to believe he might be a fraud than that he had actually come to us out of time, and this of course left me in an untenable position vis-а-vis my own scientific specialty. I was forced to embrace a conclusion that I still regarded as physically impossible: doublethink in the Orwellian sense. That I could be trapped like this was a tribute to Vornan’s power; and I believed I understood something of what these people desired as they pressed close, straining to lay hands on the visitor as he passed before them.
Somehow we got out of the restaurant without any unpleasant incident. The weather was so frigid that there were only a few stragglers in the street. We sped past them and into the waiting cars. Blank-faced chauffeurs convoyed us to our hotel. Here, as in New York, we had a string of connected rooms in the most secluded part of the building. Vornan excused himself at once when we came to our floor. He had been sleeping with Helen McIlwain for the past few nights, but it seemed that our trip to the brothel had left him temporarily without interest in women, not too surprisingly. He disappeared into his room. The guards sealed it at once. Kralick, looking drained and pale, went off to file his nightly report to Washington. The rest of us assembled in one of the suites to unwind a bit before going to bed.
The committee of six had been together long enough now for a variety of patterns to manifest themselves. We were still divided on the question of Vornan’s authenticity, but not as sharply as before. Kolff, an original skeptic, was still positive of Vornan’s phoniness, though he admired Vornan’s technique as a confidence man. Heyman, who had also come out against Vornan at the outset, was not so sure now; it clearly went against his nature to say so, but he was wavering in Vornan’s direction, mainly on the basis of a few tantalizing hints Vornan had dropped on the course of future history. Helen McIlwain continued to accept Vornan as authentic. Morton Fields, on the other hand, was growing disgruntled and backing away from his original positive appraisal. I think he was jealous of Vornan’s sexual prowess and was trying to get revenge by disavowing his legitimacy.
The original neutral, Aster, had chosen to wait until more evidence was in. Evidence had come in. Aster now was wholly of the opinion that Vornan came from further along the human evolutionary track, and she had biochemical proof that satisfied her of that. As I have noted, I too had been swayed toward Vornan, though purely on emotional grounds; scientifically he remained an impossibility for me. Thus we now had two True Believers, two vacillating ex-skeptics inclined to take Vornan’s story at face value, one former believer moving to the opposite pole, and one remaining diehard apostate. Certainly the movement had been to Vornan’s benefit. He was winning us.
So far as the emotional crosscurrents within our group went, they were strong and violent. We agreed on just one thing: that we were all heartily sick of F. Richard Heyman. The very sight of the historian’s coarse reddish beard had become odious to me. We were weary of his pontificating, his dogmatism, and his habit of treating the rest of us as not-too-bright undergraduates. Morton Fields, too, was outlasting his welcome in our midst. Behind his ascetic faзade he had revealed himself as a mere lecher, which I did not really mind, and as a conspicuously unsuccessful one, which I found objectionable. He had lusted after Helen and had been turned away; he had lusted after Aster and had failed utterly. Since Helen practiced a kind of professional nymphomania, operating under the assumption that a lady anthropologist had a duty to study all of mankind at the closest possible range, her rejection of Fields was the most cutting kind of rebuff. Before our tour was a week old, Helen had bedded down with all of us at least once, except for Sandy Kralick, who was too much in awe of her to think of her in sexual terms, and for poor Fields. Small wonder that his soul was souring. I suppose Helen had some private scholarly disagreement with him, dating back prior to the Vornan assignment, that motivated her unsubtle psychological castration of him. Fields’ next move had been toward Aster; but Aster was as unworldly as an angel, and blithely fended him off without seeming even to comprehend what he wanted from her. (Even though Aster had taken that shower with Vornan, none of us could believe that anything carnal had taken place between them. Aster’s crystalline innocence seemed proof even against Vornan’s irresistible masculine charm, we felt.)
Thus Fields had the sexual problems of a pimply adolescent, and as you might imagine, those problems erupted in many ways during ordinary social discussions. He expressed his frustrations by erecting opaque faзades of terminology behind which he glowered and raged and spat. This drew the disapproval of Lloyd Kolff, who in his Falstaffian heartiness could see Fields only as something to be deplored; when Fields got annoying enough, Kolff tended to slap him down with a jovial growl that only made matters worse. With Kolff I had no quarrel; he swilled his way pleasantly from night to night and made a cheerfully ursine companion on what might otherwise have been a more dreary assignment. I was grateful, too, for Helen McIlwain's company, and not only in bed. Monomaniac though she might be on the subject of cultural relativism, she was lively, well-informed, and enormously entertaining: she could always be depended on to puncture some immense procedural debate with a few choice words on the amputation of the clitoris among North African tribeswomen or on ceremonial scarification in New Guinea puberty rites. As for Aster the unfathomable, Aster the impenetrable, Aster the inscrutable, I could not honestly say that I liked her, but I found her an agreeable quasi-feminine enigma. It troubled me that I had seen her bareness via that spy pickup; enigmas should remain total enigmas, and now that I had looked upon Aster bare, I felt that her mystery had in part been breached. She seemed deliciously chaste, a Diana of biochemistry, magically sustained at the age of sixteen forever. In our frequent debates over ways and means of dealing with Vornan, Aster seldom spoke, but what she did have to say was invariably reasonable and just.