All was quiet. We could see where the rioters had been. Stenciled slogans gleamed up from the sidewalk and glistened on the sides of buildings: THE END IS NEAR, PREPARE TO MEET YOUR MAKER, stuff like that, the classic billboard ruminations. Bits of clothing were scattered everywhere. Mounds of foam told me that the riot had not been dispersed without effort. Here and there a few sleepers lay, stunned or drunk or simply resting; they must have crept out of the shadows after the police had cleared the area.
We donned our masks and moved silently through the mildness of the Los Angeles night. Here in the early hours of morning little was taking place in the downtown district; the towers all about us were hotels and office buildings, and the nightlife went elsewhere. We strolled at random. Occasionally an advert balloon dawdled through the sky a few hundred feet above us, flashing its gaudy incitements. Two blocks from our hotel we paused to examine the window of a shop selling spy devices. Vornan seemed wholly absorbed. The shop was closed, of course, and yet as we lingered on a sensor plate embedded in the pavement a mellifluous voice told us the store hours and invited us to return in daytime. Two doors down we came to a sportsman’s shop specializing in fishing equipment. Our presence tripped another sidewalk trigger that yielded a sales talk aimed at deep-sea fishermen. “You’ve come to the right place,” a mechanical voice proclaimed. “We carry a full line. Hydrophotometers, plankton samplers, mud penetrometers, light-scattering meters, tide recorders, hydrostatic actuators, radar buoys, clinometers, sludge detectors, liquid-level indicators—”
We moved on.
Vornan said, “I love your cities. The buildings are so tall — the merchants are so aggressive. We have no merchants, Leo.”
“What do you do if you need a sludge detector or a plankton sampler?”
“They are available,” he said simply. “I rarely need such things.”
“Why have you told us so little about your time, Vornan?”
“Because I have come here to learn, not to teach.”
“But you’re not rushed for time. You could reciprocate. We’re morbidly curious about the shape of things to come. And you’ve said so little. I have only the vaguest picture of your world.”
“Tell me how it seems to you.”
“Fewer people than we have today,” I said. “Very sleek, very orderly. Gadgets kept in the background, yet anything at all available when needed. No wars. No nations. A simple, pleasant, happy world. It’s hard for me to believe in it.”
“You’ve described it well.”
“But how did it come to get that way, Vornan? That’s what we want to know! Look at the world you’ve been visiting. A hundred suspicious nations. Superbombs. Tension. Hunger and frustration. Millions of hysterical people hunting for a receptacle for their faith. What happened? How did the world settle down?”
“A thousand years is a long time, Leo. Much can happen.”
“What did happen, though? Where did the present nations go? Tell me about the crises, the wars, the upheavals.”
We halted under a lamppost. Instantly its photosensors detected us and stepped up the output of light. Vornan said. “Suppose you tell me, Leo, about the organization, rise, and decline of the Holy Roman Empire.”
“Where’d you hear about the Holy Roman Empire?”
“From Professor Heyman. Tell me what you know about the Empire, Leo.”
“Why — next to nothing, I guess. It was some kind of European confederation seven or eight hundred years ago. And — and—”
“Exactly. You know nothing about it at all.”
“I’m not claiming to be a practicing historian, Vornan.”
“Neither am I,” he said quietly. “Why do you think I should know anything more about the Time of Sweeping than you do about the Holy Roman Empire? It’s ancient history to me. I never studied it. I had no interest in learning about it.”
“But if you were planning to come back on a time trip, Vornan, you should have made it your business to study history the way you studied English.”
“I needed English in order to communicate. I had no need of history. I am not here as a scholar, Leo. Only as a tourist.”
“And you know nothing of the science of your era either, I suppose?”
“Nothing at all,” he said cheerfully.
“What do you know? What do you do in 2999?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“You have no profession?”
“I travel. I observe. I please myself.”
“A member of the idle rich?”
“Yes, except we have no idle rich. I guess you’d call me idle, Leo. Idle and ignorant.”
“And is everyone in 2999 idle and ignorant? Are work and scholarship and effort obsolete?”
“Oh. no, no, no,” Vornan said. “We have many diligent souls. My somatic brother Lunn-31 is a collector of light impulses, a ranking authority. My good friend Mortel-91 is a connoisseur of gestures. Pol-13, whose beauty you would appreciate, dances in the psychodrome. We have our artists, our poets, our learned ones. The celebrated Ekki-89 has labored fifty years on his revivification of the Years of Flame. Sator-11 has assembled a complete set of crystal images of the Seekers, all of his own making. I am proud of them.”
“And you, Vornan?”
“I am nothing. I do nothing. I am quite an ordinary man, Leo.” There was a note in his voice I had not heard before, a throb that I took for sincerity. “I came here out of boredom, out of the lust for diversion. Others are possessed by their commitment to the endeavors of the spirit. I am an empty vessel, Leo. I can tell you no science, no history. My perceptions of beauty are rudimentary. I am ignorant. I am idle. I search the worlds for my pleasures, but they are shallow pleasures.” Through the mask came the filtered gleam of his wondrous smile. “I am being quite honest with you, Leo. I hope this explains my failure to answer the questions of you and your friends. I am quite unsatisfactory, a man of many shortcomings. Does my honesty distress you?”
It did more than that. It appalled me. Unless Vornan’s sudden burst of humility was merely a ploy, he was labeling himself a dilettante, a wastrel, an idler — a nobody out of time, diverting himself among the sweaty primitives because his own epoch had momentarily ceased to amuse him. His evasiveness, the voids in his knowledge, all seemed comprehensible now. But it was hardly flattering to know that this was our time traveler, that we had merited nothing better than Vornan. And I found it ominous that a self-proclaimed shallow floater had the power over our world that Vornan had effortlessly gained. Where would his quest for amusement lead him? And what, if any, restraints would he care to impose on himself?
I said as we walked on, “Why have no other visitors from your era come to us?”
Vornan chuckled. “What makes you think I am the first?”
“We’ve never — no one has — there hasn’t been—” I paused, dithering, once more the victim of Vornan’s gift for opening trapdoors in the fabric of the universe.