The Masks of Time

Fields could take no more. I hardly blame him. Aster had cut him up in a fairly ultimate way, and it was too much to expect him to stick around for more of the same. He told Kralick he was quitting. Kralick naturally appealed to Fields to stay on, calling it his patriotic duty, his obligation to science, and so forth — a set of abstractions which I know are as hollow to Kralick as to the rest of us. It was a ritualized speech, and Fields ignored it. That night he packed up and cleared out, thus sparing himself, according to Helen, the sight of Aster and Vornan coming forth from the nuptial chambers the next morning in a fine full gleam of recollected delights.

I was back in Irvine while all this went on. Like any ordinary citizen I followed Vornan’s career by screen, when I remembered to tune in. My few months with him now seemed even less real than when they were happening; I had to make an effort to convince myself that I had not dreamed the whole thing. But it was no dream. Vornan was up there on the Moon, being shepherded about by Kralick, Helen, Heyman, and Aster. Kolff was dead. Fields had gone back to Chicago. He called me from there in the middle of June; he was writing a book on his experiences with Vornan, he said, and wanted to check a few details with me. He said nothing about his motives for resigning.

I forgot about Fields and his book within the hour. I tried to forget about Vornan-19, too. I returned to my much-neglected work, but I found it flat, weary, stale, and unprofitable. Wandering aimlessly around the laboratory, shuffling through the tapes of old experiments, occasionally tapping out something new on the computer, yawning my way through conferences with the graduate students, I suppose I cut a pathetic figure: King Lear among the elementary particles, too old, too dull-witted, too frazzled to grasp my own questions. I sensed the younger men patronizing me that month. I felt eighty years old. Yet none of them had any suggestions for breaking through the barrier that contained our research. They were stymied too; the difference was that they were confident something would turn up if we only kept on searching, while I seemed to have lost interest not only in the search but in the goal.

Naturally they were very curious about my views on the authenticity of Vornan-19. Had I learned anything about his method of moving through time? Did I think he really had moved in time? What theoretical implications could be found in the fact of his visit?

I had no answers. The questions themselves became tedious. And so I wandered through a month of idleness, stalling, faking. Possibly I should have left the University again and visited Shirley and Jack. But my last visit there had been a disturbing one, revealing unexpected gulfs and craters in their marriage, and I was afraid to go back for fear I would discover that my one remaining place of refuge was lost to me. Nor could I keep ru

During this fevered time of solitude and i

If in July the Apocalyptists seemed to be fading, that other cult, the nameless one of Vornan-worship, was certainly gathering momentum. It had no thesis and no purpose; the aim of its adherents seemed only to be to get close to the figure of Vornan and scream their excited approbation of him. The New Revelation was its only scripture: a disjointed, incoherent patchwork of interviews and press conferences, studded here and there with tantalizing nuggets Vornan had dropped. I could construct just two tenets of Vornanism: that life on earth is an accident caused by the carelessness of interstellar visitors, and that the world will not be destroyed next January 1. I suppose religions have been founded on slimmer bases than these, but I can think of no examples. Yet the Vornanites continued to gather around the charismatic, enigmatic figure of their prophet. Surprisingly. many followed him to the Moon, creating crowds there that had not been seen since the opening of the commercial resort in Copernicus some years back. The rest assembled around giant screens erected in open plazas by ca

What troubled me most about this movement was its formlessness. It was awaiting the shaper’s hand. If Vornan chose to, he could give direction and impetus to his cult, merely by delivering a few ex cathedra pronouncements. He could call for holy wars, for political upheavals, for dancing in the streets, for abstinence from stimulants, for overindulgence in stimulants — and millions would obey. He had not cared to make use of this power thus far. Perhaps it was only gradually dawning on him that the power was available to him. I had seen Vornan turn a private party into a shambles with a few casual movements of his hand; what could he not do once he grasped the levers that control the world?