“Then you might as well have been a barber.”
We laughed. Together we walked to the sundeck, where Shirley lay reading. It was a bright, crisp January afternoon, the sky a metallic blue, great slabs of clouds poised on the tips of the mountains, the sun big and warm. I felt very much at ease. In my two weeks here I had succeeded in externalizing my work problem, so that it seemed almost to belong to someone else. If I could get far enough outside it, I might find some daring new way to slice through the obstacles once I went back to Irvine.
The trouble was that I no longer thought in daring new ways. I thought in clever combinations of the old ways, and that was not good enough. I needed an outsider to examine my dilemma and show me with a quick intuitive flash which way the solution might be reached. I needed Jack. But Jack had retired from physics. He had chosen to disconnect his superb mind.
On the sundeck Shirley rolled over, sat up, grinned at us. Her body glistened with beads of perspiration. “What brings you two outdoors?”
“Despair,” I said. “The walls were closing in.”
“Sit down and warm up, then.” She tapped a button that cut off the radio outlet. I had not even noticed that the radio was on until the sound died away. Shirley said, “I’ve just been listening to the latest on the man from the future.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Vornan-19. He’s coming to the United States!”
“I don’t think I know anything about—”
Jack shot a tense glance at Shirley, the first time I had ever seen him reprove her. Instantly my interest was engaged. Was this something they were keeping from me?
“It’s just nonsense,” Jack said. “Shirley shouldn’t have bothered you with it.”
“Will you tell me what you’re talking about?”
Shirley said, “He’s the living answer to the Apocalyptists. He claims to have come back from the year 2999, as a sort of tourist, you know. He showed up in Rome, stark naked on the Spanish Stairs, and when they tried to arrest him, he knocked a policeman out with a touch of his fingertips. Since then he’s been causing all sorts of confusion.”
“A stupid hoax,” Jack said. “Obviously some moron is tired of pretending that the world is coming to an end next January, and decided to pretend that he was a visitor from a thousand years from now. And people are believing him. It’s the times we live in. When hysteria’s a way of life, you follow every lunatic who comes along.”
“Suppose he is a time traveler, though!” Shirley said.
“If he is, I’d like to meet him,” I put in. “He might be able to answer a few questions I’ve got about time-reversal phenomena.” I chuckled. Then I stopped chuckling. It wasn’t funny at all. I stiffened and said, “You’re right, Jack. He’s nothing but a charlatan. Why are we wasting all this time talking about him?”
“Because there’s a possibility he’s real, Leo.” Shirley got to her feet and shook out the long golden hair rippling to her shoulders. “The interviews make him out to be very strange. He talks about the future as though he’s been there. Oh, maybe he’s only clever, but he’s entertaining. He’s a man I’d like to meet.”
“When did he appear?”
“Christmas Day,” said Shirley.
“While I was here? And you didn’t mention it?”
She shrugged. “We assumed you were following the newscasts and didn’t find it an interesting topic.”
“I haven’t been near the screen since I came.”
“Then you ought to do some catching up,” she said.
Jack looked displeased. It was unusual to see this rift between them, and he had looked notably cross when Shirley had expressed a wish to meet the time traveler. Odd, I thought. With his interest in the Apocalyptists, why should he discriminate against the latest manifestation of irrationality?
My own feeling about the man from the future was a neutral one. The business of time travel amused me, of course; I had broken my soul to prove its practical impossibility, and I was hardly likely to accept cheerfully the claim that it had been accomplished. No doubt that was why Jack had tried to shield me from this item of news, believing that I needed no distorted parodies of my own work to remind me of the problems I had fled from just before Christmas. But I was getting free of my depression; time-reversal no longer triggered bleakness in me. I was in the mood to find out more about this fraud. The man seemed to have charmed Shirley via television, and anything that charmed Shirley was of interest to me.
One of the networks ran a documentary on Vornan-19 that evening, preempting an hour of prime time usually taken up by one of the kaleidoscope shows. That in itself revealed the depth and extent of public interest in the story. The documentary was aimed at Robinson Crusoes like myself who had neglected to follow the developments thus far, and so I was able to bring myself up to date all at once.
We floated on pneumochairs before the wall screen and outlasted the commercials. Finally a resonant voice said, “What you are about to see is in part a computer simulation.” The camera revealed the Piazza di Spagna on Christmas morning, with a sprinkling of figures posed on the Stairs and in the piazza as though the computer simulating them had been programmed by Tiepolo. Into this neatly reconstructed frieze of casual bystanders came the simulated image of Vornan-19 descending on a shining arc from the heavens. The computers do this sort of thing so well today. It does not really matter that a camera’s eye fails to record some sudden major event, for it can always be hauled from time’s abyss by a cunning re-creation. I wonder what future historians will make of these simulations… if the world survives past the first of next month, of course.
The descending figure was nude, but the simulators ducked the problem of the conflicting testimony of the nuns and the others by showing us only a rear view. There was no prudishness about that, I’m sure; the television coverage of the Apocalyptist revelry that Shirley and Jack had shown me had been quite explicitly revealing of the flesh, and apparently it is now a standard ploy of the networks to work anatomy into the newscasts whenever such displays fall under the protection of the Supreme Court decision on legitimate journalistic observation. I have no objection to this coverage of uncoverage; the nudity taboos are long overdue for discard, and I suppose that anything encouraging a well-informed citizenry is desirable, even pandering in the newscasts. But there is always cowardice an inch behind the faзade of integrity. Vornan-19’s loins went unsimulated because three nuns had sworn he had been covered by a misty nimbus, and it was easier to sidestep the issue than to risk offending the devout by contradicting the testimony of the holy sisters.
I watched Vornan-19 inspecting the piazza. I saw him mount the Spanish Stairs. I smiled as the excited policeman rushed up, proffered his cloak, and was knocked to the ground by an unseen thunderbolt.
The colloquy with Horst Klein followed. This was done most cleverly, for Klein himself was used, conversing with a dubbed simulation of the time traveler. The young German reconstructed his own conversation with Vornan, while the computer played back what Klein recalled the visitor to have said.
The scene shifted. Now we were indoors, in a high room with congruent polygons inscribed on the walls and ceiling, and with the smooth, even glow of thermoluminescence illuminating the faces of a dozen men. Vornan-19 was in custody, voluntarily, for no one could touch him without being smitten by that electric-eel voltage of his. He was being interrogated. The men about him were skeptical, hostile, amused, angered in turn. This, too, was a simulation; no one had bothered to make a record at the time.
Speaking in English, Vornan-19 repeated what he had told Horst Klein. The interrogators challenged him on various points. Aloof, tolerant of their hostility, Vornan parried their thrusts. Who was he? A visitor. Where was he from? The year 2999. How had he come here? By time transport. Why was he here? To view the medieval world at first hand.