I spent a good deal of time with Vornan as we whirled westward from Mexico City to Hawaii, and on from there to Tokyo, Peking, Angkor, Melbourne, Tahiti, and Antarctica. I had not entirely given up my hope of getting hard information from him on the scientific points that were of concern to me; but although I failed in that, I learned a bit more about Vornan himself. I discovered why he was so flaccid these days.
He had lost interest in us.
We bored him. Our passions, our monuments, our foolishnesses, our cities, our foods, our conflicts, our neuroses — he had sampled everything, and the taste had palled. He was, he confessed to me, deathly weary of being hauled to and fro on the face of our world.
“Why don’t you go back to your own time, then?” I asked.
“Not yet, Leo.”
“But if we’re so tiresome to you—”
“I think I’ll stay, anyhow. I can endure the boredom a while longer. I want to see how things turn out.”
“What things?”
“Things,” he said.
I repeated this to Kralick, who merely shrugged. “Let’s hope he sees how things turn out fast,” Kralick said. “He’s not the only one who’s tired of traveling around.”
The pace of our journey was stepped up, as though Kralick wished to sicken Vornan thoroughly of the twentieth century. Sights and textures blurred and swirled; we zigzagged out of the white wastes of the Antarctic into the tropic swelter of Ceylon, and darted through India and the Near East, went by felucca up the Nile, trekked into the heart of Africa, sped from one shining capital to the next. Wherever we went, even in the most backward countries, the reception was a frenzied one. Thousands turned out to hail the visiting deity. By now — it was nearly October — the message of The Newest Revelation had had time to sink in. Fields’ analogies were transformed into assertions; there was no Vornanite Church in any formal sense, but quite plainly the unfocused mass hysteria was coalescing into a religious movement.
My fears that Vornan would try to take hold of this movement proved unfounded. The crowds bored him as much as laboratories and power plants now did. From enclosed balconies he hailed the roaring throngs like a Caesar, with upraised palm; but I did not fail to notice the flicker of the nostrils, the barely suppressed yawn. “What do they want from me?” he asked, almost petulantly.
“They want to love you,” Helen said.
“But why? Are they so empty?”
“Terribly empty,” Helen murmured.
Heyman said distantly, “If you went among them, you’d feel their love.”
Vornan seemed to shiver. “It would be unwise. They would destroy me with their love.”
I remembered Vornan in Los Angeles six months before, gleefully plunging into a mad mob of Apocalyptists. He had shown no dread of their desperate energies then. True, he had been masked, but the risks had still been great. The image of Vornan with a pile of stunned cultists forming a living barricade came to me. What joy he had felt in the midst of that chaos! Now he feared the love of the mobs that yearned for him. This was a new Vornan, then, a cautious one. Perhaps at last he was aware of the forces he had helped to unleash, and had grown more serious in his appraisal of danger. That freewheeling Vornan of the early days was gone.
In mid-October we were in Johannesburg, scheduled to hop the Atlantic for a tour of South America. South America was primed and ready for him. The first signs of organized Vornanism were appearing there: in Brazil and Argentina there had been prayer meetings attended by thousands; and we heard that churches were being founded, though the details were fragmentary and uninformative. Vornan showed no curiosity about this development. Instead he turned to me suddenly late one afternoon and said, “I wish to rest for a while, Leo.”
“To take a nap?”
“No, to rest from traveling. The crowds, the noise, the excitement — I have had enough. I want quietness now.”
“You’d better talk to Kralick.”
“First I must talk to you. Some weeks ago, Leo, you spoke to me of friends of yours in a quiet place. A man and a woman, a former pupil of yours, do you know the ones I mean?”
I knew. I went rigid. In an idle moment I had told Vornan about Jack and Shirley, about the pleasure it gave me to flee to them at times of internal crisis or fatigue. In telling him, I had hoped to draw from him some parallel declaration, some detail of his own habits and relationships in that world of the future that seemed yet so unreal to me. But I had not anticipated this.
“Yes,” I said tensely. “I know who you mean.”
“Perhaps we could go there together, Leo. You and I, and these two people, without the others, without the guards, the noise, the crowds. We could quietly disappear. I must renew my energies. This trip has been a strain for me, you know. And I want to see people of this era in day-to-day life. What I have seen so far has been a show, a pageant. But just to sit quietly and talk — I would like it very much. Could you arrange it for me, Leo?”
I was taken off balance. The sudden warmth of Vornan’s appeal disarmed me; and automatically I found myself calculating that we might learn much about Vornan this way, yes, that Jack, Shirley, and I, sipping cocktails in the Arizona sunlight, might pry from the visitor facts that had remained concealed during his highly public progress around the world. I was aware of what we might try to get from Vornan; and deluded by the undemanding Vornan of recent months, I failed to take into account what Vornan might try to get from us. “I’ll talk to my friends,” I promised. “And to Kralick. I’ll see what I can do about it, Vornan.”
SIXTEEN
Kralick was bothered at first by the disruption of the carefully balanced itinerary; South America, he said, would be very disappointed to learn that Vornan’s arrival would be postponed. But the positive aspects of the scheme were apparent to him as well. He thought it might be useful to get Vornan-19 off into a different kind of environment, away from the crowds and the cameras. I think he welcomed the chance to escape from Vornan for a while himself. In the end he approved the proposal.
Then I called Jack and Shirley.
I felt hesitant about dropping Vornan on them, even though they had both begged me to arrange something like this. Jack was desperately eager to talk to Vornan about total conversion of energy, though I knew he’d learn nothing. And Shirley… Shirley had confessed to me that she was physically drawn to the man from 2999. It was for her sake that I hesitated. Then I told myself that whatever Shirley might feel toward Vornan was something for Shirley herself to resolve, and that if anything happened between Shirley and Vornan, it would be only with Jack’s consent and blessing. In which case I did not have to feel responsible.
When I told them what had been proposed, they both thought I was joking. I had to work hard to persuade them that I really could bring Vornan to them. At length they decided to believe me, and I saw them exchange offscreen glances; then Jack said, “How soon is this going to come about?”