The Masks of Time

THIRTEEN

At the end of my week of reprieve I kissed Shirley good-bye, told Jack to go easy on himself, and sped off to Tucson to be podded to Los Angeles. I arrived there only hours after the rest of the team had come up the coast from San Diego. The impact of that interview with Vornan still reverberated through the land. Perhaps never before in human history had a major theological dogma been enunciated over television on a global hookup; certainly this one spread through the world even as the contamination of the primordial garbage had infected the sterile seas. Quietly, amiably, with great delicacy and restraint, Vornan had undermined the religious faith of four billion human beings. One had to admire his skill, surely.

Jack and Shirley and I had watched the unfolding of the reaction in cool fascination. Vornan had presented his belief as received fact, the result of careful investigation and of corroborative detail obtained from beings who had visited the world of his time. As usual, he offered no substructure of data, merely the bald, elliptical statement. But anyone who had swallowed the news that a man had come to us from 2999 would not have much difficulty swallowing that man’s story of the Creation; all it took was flexible jaws. WORLD STARTED FROM GARBAGE, said the tapes the next day, and swiftly the concept moved into the public domain.

The Apocalyptists, who had been quiescent for a few weeks, came back to life. They led vigorous protest rallies through the cities of the world. The screen showed us their fixed faces, their gleaming eyes, their defiant ba

To others it was The Word. The inchoate band of Vornan-worshipers that had been taking form in every city now had not only a prophet but a creed. We are trash and the descendants of trash, and we must put aside all mystical self-exaltation and accept reality, these people said. There is no God, and Vornan is His prophet! When I came to Los Angeles I found both these conflicting groups in full panoply, and Vornan under heavy guard. Only with great difficulty did I manage to get back to our group. They had to fly me in by helicopter, putting me down on the roof of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, while far below me the Apocalyptists capered and the worshipers of Vornan sought to abase themselves before their idol. Kralick led me to the edge of the roof and had me look down at the swirling, writhing mass in the streets.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“Since nine this morning. We arrived at eleven. We could call in troops, but for the moment we’ll just sit tight. The mob stretches from here to Pasadena, they say.”

“That’s impossible! We—”

“Look out there.”

It was true. A ribbon of brightness wound through the streets, coiling past the sparkling towers of the city’s reconstructed nucleus, weaving toward the distant stack of freeways and vanishing somewhere to the east. I could hear cries, shouts, gurgles. I did not want to look any longer. It was a siege.

Vornan was greatly amused at the forces he had unleashed. I found him holding court in the customary suite on the hotel’s eighty-fifth floor; about him were Kolff, Heyman, Helen, and Aster, a few media people, and a great deal of equipment. Fields was not there. I learned later that he was sulking, having made another pass at Aster the night before in San Diego. Vornan was speaking about California weather, I think, when I came in. He rose at once and glided to me, seizing my elbows and locking his eyes to mine.

“Leo, old man! How we’ve missed you!”

I was taken off stride by his chummy approach. But I managed to say, “I’ve been following your progress by screen, Vornan.”

“You heard the San Diego interview?” Helen asked.

I nodded. Vornan seemed very pleased with himself. He waved vaguely toward the window and said, “There’s a big mob out there. What do you think they want?”

“They’re waiting for your next revelation,” I told him.

“The gospel according to St. Vornan,” Heyman muttered darkly.

From Kolff, later, I got confusing news. He had run Vornan’s speech samples through the departmental computer at Columbia, with uncertain results. The computer was baffled by the structure of the language, and had sorted everything out into phonemes without coming to conclusions. Its analysis indicated the possibility that Kolff was right in thinking of the words as an evolved language, and also the possibility that Vornan had simply been mouthing noises at random, occasionally hitting on some combination of sounds that seemed to represent a futuristic version of a contemporary word. Kolff looked despondent. In his first flush of enthusiasm he had released his evaluation of Vornan’s talk to the media, and that had helped to fan the global hysteria; but now he was not at all sure that he had made the correct interpretation. “If I am wrong,” he said, “I have destroyed myself, Leo. I have lent all my prestige to nonsense, and if that is so, I have no more prestige.” He was shaking. He seemed to have lost twenty pounds in the few days since I had last seen him; pockets of loose skin dangled on his face.

“Why not run a recheck?” I asked. “Get Vornan to repeat what he taped for you before. Then feed both tapes to the computer and check the correlation function. If he was improvising gibberish the last time, he won’t be able to duplicate it.”

“My friend, that was my first thought.”

“And?”

“He will not speak to me in his language again. He has lost interest in my researches. He refuses to utter a syllable.”

“That sounds suspicious to me.”

“Yes,” said Kolff sadly. “Of course it is suspicious. I tell him that by doing this simple thing, he can destroy forever all doubts about his origin, and he says no. I tell him that by refusing, he is inviting us to regard him as an impostor, and he says he does not care. Is he bluffing? Is he a liar? Or does he genuinely not care? Leo, I am destroyed.”

“You heard a linguistic pattern, didn’t you, Lloyd?”

“Certainly I did. But it may have been only an illusion — a coincidental striking of sound values.” He shook his head like a wounded walrus, muttered something in Persian or Pushtu, and went shuffling away, bowed, sagging. And I realized that Vornan had diabolically canceled out one of the major arguments for accepting him as genuine. Deliberately. Wantonly. He was toying with us… with all of us.

Di