TWELVE

Our caravan moved westward from snowy Denver to a sunny welcome in California, but I did not remain with the others. A great restlessness had come over me, an impatience to get away from Vornan and Heyman and Kolff and the rest at least for a little while. I had been on this tour for over a month, now, and it was telling on me. So I asked Kralick for permission to take a brief leave of absence; he granted it and I headed south into Arizona, to the desert home of Jack and Shirley Bryant, with the understanding that I would rejoin the group a week later in Los Angeles.

It had been early January when I had last seen Jack and Shirley; now it was mid-February, so hardly any time had really passed. Yet inwardly a great deal of time must have elapsed, for them and for me. I saw changes in them. Jack looked drawn and frayed, as though he had been sleeping poorly lately; his motions were nervous and jerky, and I was reminded of the old Jack, the pallid eastern boy who had come to my laboratory so many years ago. He had retrogressed. The calm of the desert had fled from him. Shirley too seemed to be under some kind of strain. The sheen of her golden hair was dulled, and her postures now were rigid ones; I saw trusses of taut muscles form again and again in her throat. Her response to tension was an overcompensating gaiety. She laughed too often and too loudly; her voice often rose unnaturally in pitch, becoming shrill, harsh, and vibrant. She seemed much older; if she had looked twenty-five in December instead of her proper thirty-odd, now she seemed at the brink of her forties. All this I noticed in the first few minutes of my arrival, when such alterations are the most conspicuous. But I said nothing of what I saw, and just as well, for the first words were Jack’s:

“You look tired, Leo. This business must have taken a lot out of you.”

And Shirley:

“Yes, poor Leo. All that silly traveling around. You need a good rest. Can’t you contrive to stay here longer than a week?”

“Am I that much of a wreck?” I asked. “Is it so obvious?”

“A little Arizona sunshine will work wonders,” Shirley said, and laughed in that dreadful new way of hers.

That first day we did little but soak up Arizona sunshine. We lay, the three of us, on their sun deck, and after these weeks of soggy eastern winter it was pure delight to feel the warmth on my bare skin. Tactful as always, neither of them brought up the subject of my recent activities that day; we sunned and dozed, chatted a little, and in the evening feasted on grilled steak and a fine bottle of Chambertin ’88. As the chill of night swept down on the desert, we sprawled on the thick rug to listen to Mozart’s dancing melodies, and all that I had done and seen in the last weeks sloughed away and became unreal to me.

In the morning I woke early, for my inner clock was confused by the crossing of time zones, and walked for a while in the desert. Jack was up when I returned. He sat at the edge of the dry wash, carving something from a bit of gnarled, greasy-looking wood. As I drew near, he blurted, “Leo, did you find out anything about—”

“No.”

“ — energy conversion.”

I shook my head. “I’ve tried, Jack. But there’s no way to learn anything from Vornan that he doesn’t want to tell you. And he won’t give hard data on anything. He’s devilish about answering questions.”

“I’m in knots, Leo. The possibility that something I’ve devised will wreck society—”

“Drop it, will you? You’ve penetrated a frontier, Jack. Publish your work and accept your Nobel, and to hell with any misuse that posterity hands out. You’ve done pure research. Why crucify yourself over possible applications?”

“The men who developed the bomb must have said the same things,” Jack murmured.

“Have any bombs been dropping lately? Meanwhile your house runs on a pocket reactor. You might be lighting wood fires if those old boys hadn’t found out about nuclear fission.”

“But their souls — their souls—”

I lost patience. “We revere their damned souls! They were scientists; they did their best and they got somewhere. And changed the world, sure, but they had to. There was a war then, you know? Civilization was endangered. They invented something that caused a lot of trouble, yeah, but it did a lot of good, too. You haven’t even invented anything. Equations. Basic principles. And here you sit pitying yourself because you think you’ve betrayed mankind! All you’ve done has been to use your brain, Jack, and if that’s a betrayal of mankind in your philosophy, then you’d better—”

“All right, Leo,” he said quietly. “I plead guilty to a charge of self-pity and voluntarily solicited martyrdom. Sentence me to death and then let’s change the subject. What’s your considered opinion of this man Vornan? Real? Fake? You’ve seen him at close range.

“I don’t know.”

“Good old Leo,” he said savagely. “Always incisive! Always ready with the firm answer!”

“It isn’t that simple, Jack. Have you been watching Vornan on the screens?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know he’s complex. A tricky bastard, the trickiest I’ve ever seen.”

“But don’t you have some intuitive feel, Leo, some immediate response, a yes or a no, true or false?”

“I have,” I said.

“Keeping it a secret?”

I moistened my lips and scuffed at the sandy ground. “What I intuit is that Vornan-19 is what he says he is.”

“A man from 2999?”

“A traveler out of the future,” I said.

Behind me, Shirley laughed in a sharp crescendo. “That’s wonderful, Leo! You’ve finally learned how to embrace the irrational!”

She had come up behind us, nude, a goddess of the morning, heart-stoppingly beautiful, her hair like a flag in the breeze. But her eyes were too brilliant, shining with that new fixed glitter.

“The irrational is a thorny mistress,” I said. “I’m not happy to share my bed with her.”

“Why do you think he’s real?” Jack pressed.

I told him about the blood sample and about Lloyd Kolff’s experience with Vornan’s spoken language. I added some purely intuitive impressions I had gathered. Shirley seemed delighted. Jack pensive. He said finally, “You don’t know a thing about the scientific background of his supposed means of time transport?”

“Zero. He isn’t saying.”

“Small wonder. He wouldn’t want 2999 invaded by a bunch of hairy barbarians who’ve whipped up a time machine out of his description.”

“Maybe that’s it — a security matter,” I said.

Jack closed his eyes. He rocked back and forth on his haunches. “If he’s real, then the energy thing is real, and the possibility still exists that—”

“Cut it, Jack,” I said fiercely. “Snap out!”

With an effort he interrupted his lamentations. Shirley tugged him to his feet. I said, “What’s for breakfast?”

“What about brook trout, straight out of the freeze?”

“Good enough.” I slapped her amiably on her firm rump to send her scampering into the house. Jack and I strolled after her. He was calmer now.

“I’d like to sit down myself and talk with this Vornan,” Jack said. “Ten minutes, maybe. Could you arrange that?”

“I doubt it. Very few private interviews are being granted. The Government’s keeping him on a tight rein — or trying to. And I’m afraid if you aren’t a bishop or a holding-company president or a famous poet, you won’t stand a chance. But it doesn’t matter, Jack. He won’t tell you what you want to know. I’m sure of it.”

“Still, I’d like to try to get it out of him. Keep it in mind.”

I promised that I would, but I saw little chance of it. We managed to get into less problematical topics at breakfast. Afterward, Jack disappeared to finish something he was writing, and Shirley and I went to the sun deck. She was worried about Jack, she said; he was so totally obsessed with what the future might think of him. She did not know how to get him unwound. “It’s nothing new, you understand. It’s been going on ever since I’ve known him, since he was with you at the University. But since Vornan showed up, it’s become fifty times as bad. He genuinely thinks now that his manuscript is going to reshuffle all of future history. He said last week that he wished the Apocalyptists were right: he wants the world to be blown up next January. He’s sick, Leo.”