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 banners. I learned something I had not suspected previously about this mushroom cult: it was a patchwork of disparate components, made up of the alienated, the rootless, the youthfully rebellious, and — amazingly the devout. In the midst of the orgies of the Apocalyptists, among all the scatological rites and exhibitionist fervor, were the shabby, slab-jawed Fundamentalists, the quintessence of American Gothic, deeply persuaded that the world would indeed shortly come to its finish. We saw these people now for the first time dominant in the Apocalyptist riots. They did not commit bestialities themselves, but they paraded among the fornicators, benevolently accepting the shamelessness as a sign of the approaching end. To these people Vornan was Antichrist and his creation-from-garbage dogma was thunderous blasphemy.

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.

Dinner was served to us at the hotel that night. There was no question of our going outside, not with thousands of people in the streets about us. One of the networks screened a documentary on Vornan’s progress through the land, and we watched it. Vornan watched with us, although in the past he had not shown much interest in what the media had to say about him. In a way I wished he had not seen it. The documentary concentrated on the impact he had had on mass emotions, and showed things I had not suspected: Adolescent girls in Illinois writhing in drug-induced ecstasy before a tridim photo of our visitor. Africans lighting immense ceremonial bonfires in whose greasy blue smoke the image of Vornan was said to take form. A woman in Indiana who had collected tapes of every telecast dealing with the man from the future, and who was selling replicas of them mounted in special reliquaries. We saw a massive westward movement under way; hordes of curiosity-seekers were spilling across the continent, hoping to catch up with Vornan as he moved about. The camera’s eye descended into the swirling mobs we had been seeing so often, showing us the fixed faces of fanatics. These people wanted revelation from Vornan; they wanted prophecies; they wanted divine guidance. Excitement flickered like heat-lightning wherever he went. If Kolff ever let that cube of Vornan’s speech get into public circulation, it would provoke a new manifestation of glossolalia, I realized — a wild outburst of speaking in tongues as holy babbling became the way to salvation once more. I was frightened. In the slower moments of the documentary I stole glances at Vornan and saw him nodding in satisfaction, eminently pleased with the stir he was causing. He seemed to revel in the power that publicity and curiosity had placed in his hands. Anything he might choose to say would be received with high interest, discussed and discussed again, and swiftly would harden into an article of faith accepted by millions. It has been given only to a very few men in history to have such power, and none of Vornan’s charismatic predecessors had had his access to communications channels.

It terrified me. Up to now he had seemed wholly unconcerned by the world’s response to him, as aloof as he had been the day he strolled naked up the Spanish Stairs while a Roman policeman shouted at him to halt. Now, though, a feedback was appearing. He watched his own documentaries. Was he enjoying the confusion he engendered? Was he consciously planning new upheavals? Vornan acting in lighthearted innocence created chaos enough; Vornan motivated by deliberate malice could smash civilization. I had been scornful of him at first, and then amused by him. Now I was afraid of him.

Our gathering broke up early. I saw Fields speaking urgently to Aster; she shook her head, shrugged, and walked away from him, leaving him scowling. Vornan went up to him and touched him lightly on the shoulder. I have no idea what Vornan said to him, but Fields’ expression was even darker afterward. He went out, trying to slam a slamproof door. Kolff and Helen left together. I lingered awhile for no particular reason. My room was next to Aster’s, and we walked down the hall together. We stood awhile talking in front of her door. I had the odd impression that she was going to invite me in to spend the night; she seemed more animated than usual, eyelashes fluttering, delicate nostrils flaring. “Do you know how much longer we’ll be on this tour?” she asked me. I told her that I didn’t know. She was thinking of getting back to her laboratory, she said, but then she confessed wryly, “I’d leave right now except that I’m getting interested in this despite myself. Interested in Vornan. Leo, do you notice that he’s changing?”

“How?”

“Becoming more aware of what’s happening around him. He was so divorced from it at first, so alien. Do you remember the time he asked me to take a shower with him?”

“I can’t forget it.”

“If it had been another man, I would have refused, of course. But Vornan was so blunt about it — the way a child would be. I knew he meant no harm. But now — now he seems to want to use people. He isn’t just sightseeing any more. He’s manipulating everyone. Very subtly.”

I told her that I had thought all these thoughts too, during the television program a little earlier. Her eyes glowed; points of rosiness sprouted in her cheeks. She moistened her lips, and I waited for her to tell me that she and I had much in common and ought to know one another better; but all she said was, “I’m afraid, Leo. I wish he’d go back where he came from. He’s going to make real trouble.”

“Kralick and Company will prevent that.”

“I wonder.” She flashed a nervous smile. “Well, good night, Leo. Sleep well.”

She was gone. I stared for a long moment at her closed door, and the stolen image of her slim body drifted up out of my memory bank. Aster had not had much physical appeal for me up till now; she hardly seemed a woman at all. Suddenly I understood what Morton Fields saw in her. I desired her fiercely. Was this, too, some of Vornan’s mischief? I smiled. I was blaming him for everything now. My hand rested on the plate of Aster’s door, and I debated asking her to admit me, but I entered my own room instead. I sealed the door, undressed, prepared myself for sleep. Sleep did not come. I went to the window to stare at the mobs, but the mobs had dissipated. It was past midnight. A slice of moon dangled over the sprawling city. I drew out a blank notepad and began to sketch some theorems that had drifted into my mind during dinner: a way of accounting for a double reversal of charge during time travel. Problem: assuming that time-reversal is possible, create a mathematical justification for conversion from matter to anti-matter to matter again before the completion of a journey. I worked quickly and for a while even convincingly. I came to the verge of picking up the phone and getting a data hookup with my computer so I could run some verifying mockups of the system. Then I saw the flaw near the beginning of my work, the stupid algebraic error, the failure to keep my signs straight. I crumpled the sheets and threw them away in disgust.

I heard a tapping at my door. A voice: “Leo? Leo, are you awake?”

I nudged the scanner beside my bed and got a dim image of my visitor. Vornan! Instantly I sprang up and unsealed the door. He was dressed in a thin green tunic as though to go out. His presence astonished me, for I knew that Kralick sealed him in his room each night, and at least in theory there was no way for Vornan to break that seal, which was supposed to protect him but which also imprisoned him. Yet he was here.

“Come in,” I said. “Is anything wrong?”

“Not at all. Were you sleeping?”

“Working. Trying to calculate how your blasted time machine works, in fact.”

He laughed lightly. “Poor Leo. You’ll wear out your brain with all that thinking.”

“If you really felt sorry for me, you’d give me a hint or two about it.”

“I would if I could,” he said. “But it’s impossible. I’ll explain why downstairs.”

“Downstairs?”

“Yes. We’re going out for a little walk. You’ll accompany me, won’t you, Leo?”

I gaped. “There’s a riot going on outside. We’ll be killed by the hysterical mob!”

“I think the mob has gone away,” said Vornan. “Besides, I have these.” He extended his hand. In his palm lay two limp plastic masks of the sort we had worn at the Chicago brothel. “No one will recognize us. We’ll stroll the streets of this wonderful city in disguise. I want to go out, Leo. I’m tired of official promenades. I feel like exploring again.”

I wondered what to do. Call Kralick and have Vornan locked into his room again? That was the sensible response. Masks or not, it was rash to leave the hotel without a guard. But it would be a betrayal to turn Vornan in like that. Obviously he trusted me more than any of the others; perhaps there was even something he wished to tell me in confidence, beyond the range of Kralick’s spy-pickups. I would have to take the risks in the hope of winning from him some nugget of valuable information.

“All right. I’ll go with you.”

“Quickly, then. If someone monitors your room—”

“What about your room?”

He laughed smugly. “My room has been adjusted. Those who pry will think I am still in it. But if I am seen in here as well — get dressed, Leo.”

I threw on some clothing and we left the room. I sealed it from the outside. In the hall lay three of Kralick’s men, sound asleep; the green globe of an anesthetic balloon drifted in the air, and as its temperature-sensitive scanning plate picked up my thermals it homed in on me. Vornan lazily reached up for it, caught its trailing strand of plastic tape, and tugged it down to turn it off. He grinned conspiratorially at me. Then, like a boy running away from home, he darted across the hall, motioning to me to follow him. At a nudge a service door in the corridor opened, revealing a tumbletube for linens. Vornan beckoned me to enter.

“We’ll land in the laundry room!” I protested.

“Don’t be foolish. Leo. We’ll get off before the last stop.”

Mine not to reason why. I entered the tumbletube with him and down we caromed, flushed like debris to the depths of the building. A catchnet erupted across the tube unexpectedly and we bounced into it. I thought it was some kind of trap, but Vornan said simply, “It’s a safety device to keep hotel employees from falling into the linen conveyor. I’ve been talking to the chambermaids, you see. Come on!” He stepped out of the net, which I suppose had been activated by mass-detectors along the sides of the tube, and we perched on a ledge of the chute while he opened a door. For a man who scarcely understood what a stock exchange was, he had a remarkably complete knowledge of the inner workings of this hotel. The catchnet withdrew into the tube wall the moment I was out of it; an instant later some soiled linens zoomed past us from above and vanished into the maw of the laundry pit somewhere far below. Vornan beckoned again. We went scrambling down a narrow passageway lit from above by strips of cold light, and emerged finally in one of the hallways of the hotel. By a prosaic staircase we took ourselves to a sublobby and out unnoticed into the street.

All was quiet. We could see where the rioters had been. Stenciled slogans gleamed up from the sidewalk and glistened on the sides of buildings: THE END IS NEAR, PREPARE TO MEET YOUR MAKER, stuff like that, the classic billboard ruminations. Bits of clothing were scattered everywhere. Mounds of foam told me that the riot had not been dispersed without effort. Here and there a few sleepers lay, stunned or drunk or simply resting; they must have crept out of the shadows after the police had cleared the area.

We donned our masks and moved silently through the mildness of the Los Angeles night. Here in the early hours of morning little was taking place in the downtown district; the towers all about us were hotels and office buildings, and the nightlife went elsewhere. We strolled at random. Occasionally an advert balloon dawdled through the sky a few hundred feet above us, flashing its gaudy incitements. Two blocks from our hotel we paused to examine the window of a shop selling spy devices. Vornan seemed wholly absorbed. The shop was closed, of course, and yet as we lingered on a sensor plate embedded in the pavement a mellifluous voice told us the store hours and invited us to return in daytime. Two doors down we came to a sportsman’s shop specializing in fishing equipment. Our presence tripped another sidewalk trigger that yielded a sales talk aimed at deep-sea fishermen. “You’ve come to the right place,” a mechanical voice proclaimed. “We carry a full line. Hydrophotometers, plankton samplers, mud penetrometers, light-scattering meters, tide recorders, hydrostatic actuators, radar buoys, clinometers, sludge detectors, liquid-level indicators—”

We moved on.

Vornan said, “I love your cities. The buildings are so tall — the merchants are so aggressive. We have no merchants, Leo.”

“What do you do if you need a sludge detector or a plankton sampler?”

“They are available,” he said simply. “I rarely need such things.”

“Why have you told us so little about your time, Vornan?”

“Because I have come here to learn, not to teach.”

“But you’re not rushed for time. You could reciprocate. We’re morbidly curious about the shape of things to come. And you’ve said so little. I have only the vaguest picture of your world.”

“Tell me how it seems to you.”

“Fewer people than we have today,” I said. “Very sleek, very orderly. Gadgets kept in the background, yet anything at all available when needed. No wars. No nations. A simple, pleasant, happy world. It’s hard for me to believe in it.”

“You’ve described it well.”

“But how did it come to get that way, Vornan? That’s what we want to know! Look at the world you’ve been visiting. A hundred suspicious nations. Superbombs. Tension. Hunger and frustration. Millions of hysterical people hunting for a receptacle for their faith. What happened? How did the world settle down?”

“A thousand years is a long time, Leo. Much can happen.”

“What did happen, though? Where did the present nations go? Tell me about the crises, the wars, the upheavals.”

We halted under a lamppost. Instantly its photosensors detected us and stepped up the output of light. Vornan said. “Suppose you tell me, Leo, about the organization, rise, and decline of the Holy Roman Empire.”

“Where’d you hear about the Holy Roman Empire?”

“From Professor Heyman. Tell me what you know about the Empire, Leo.”

“Why — next to nothing, I guess. It was some kind of European confederation seven or eight hundred years ago. And — and—”

“Exactly. You know nothing about it at all.”

“I’m not claiming to be a practicing historian, Vornan.”

“Neither am I,” he said quietly. “Why do you think I should know anything more about the Time of Sweeping than you do about the Holy Roman Empire? It’s ancient history to me. I never studied it. I had no interest in learning about it.”

“But if you were planning to come back on a time trip, Vornan, you should have made it your business to study history the way you studied English.”

“I needed English in order to communicate. I had no need of history. I am not here as a scholar, Leo. Only as a tourist.”

“And you know nothing of the science of your era either, I suppose?”

“Nothing at all,” he said cheerfully.

“What do you know? What do you do in 2999?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“You have no profession?”

“I travel. I observe. I please myself.”

“A member of the idle rich?”

“Yes, except we have no idle rich. I guess you’d call me idle, Leo. Idle and ignorant.”

“And is everyone in 2999 idle and ignorant? Are work and scholarship and effort obsolete?”

“Oh. no, no, no,” Vornan said. “We have many diligent souls. My somatic brother Lunn-31 is a collector of light impulses, a ranking authority. My good friend Mortel-91 is a connoisseur of gestures. Pol-13, whose beauty you would appreciate, dances in the psychodrome. We have our artists, our poets, our learned ones. The celebrated Ekki-89 has labored fifty years on his revivification of the Years of Flame. Sator-11 has assembled a complete set of crystal images of the Seekers, all of his own making. I am proud of them.”

“And you, Vornan?”

“I am nothing. I do nothing. I am quite an ordinary man, Leo.” There was a note in his voice I had not heard before, a throb that I took for sincerity. “I came here out of boredom, out of the lust for diversion. Others are possessed by their commitment to the endeavors of the spirit. I am an empty vessel, Leo. I can tell you no science, no history. My perceptions of beauty are rudimentary. I am ignorant. I am idle. I search the worlds for my pleasures, but they are shallow pleasures.” Through the mask came the filtered gleam of his wondrous smile. “I am being quite honest with you, Leo. I hope this explains my failure to answer the questions of you and your friends. I am quite unsatisfactory, a man of many shortcomings. Does my honesty distress you?”

It did more than that. It appalled me. Unless Vornan’s sudden burst of humility was merely a ploy, he was labeling himself a dilettante, a wastrel, an idler — a nobody out of time, diverting himself among the sweaty primitives because his own epoch had momentarily ceased to amuse him. His evasiveness, the voids in his knowledge, all seemed comprehensible now. But it was hardly flattering to know that this was our time traveler, that we had merited nothing better than Vornan. And I found it ominous that a self-proclaimed shallow floater had the power over our world that Vornan had effortlessly gained. Where would his quest for amusement lead him? And what, if any, restraints would he care to impose on himself?

I said as we walked on, “Why have no other visitors from your era come to us?”

Vornan chuckled. “What makes you think I am the first?”

“We’ve never — no one has — there hasn’t been—” I paused, dithering, once more the victim of Vornan’s gift for opening trapdoors in the fabric of the universe.

“I am no pioneer,” he said gently. “There have been many here before me.”

“Keeping their identity secret?”

“Of course. It pleased me to reveal myself. More serious-minded individuals go about things surreptitiously. They do their work in silence and depart.”

“How many have there been?”

“I scarcely could guess.”

“Visiting all eras?”

“Why not?”

“Living among us under assumed identities?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Vornan said lightly. “Often holding public office, I believe. Poor Leo! Did you think that I was blazing a trail, a miserable fool like me?”

I swayed, more sickened by this than anything. Our world honeycombed by strangers out of time? Our nations perhaps guided by these wanderers? A hundred, a thousand, fifty thousand travelers popping in and out of history? No. No. No. My mind rebelled at that. Vornan was playing with me now. There could be no alternative. I told him I did not believe him. He laughed. He said, “I give you my permission not to believe me. Do you hear that sound?”

I heard a sound, yes. It was a sound like that of a waterfall, coming from the direction of Pershing Square. There are no waterfalls in Pershing Square. Vornan sprinted forward. I hurried after him, my heart pounding, my skull throbbing. I could not keep up. He halted after a block and a half to wait for me. He pointed ahead, “Quite a number of them,” he said. “I find this very exciting!”

The dispersed mob had regrouped, milling about Pershing Square and now beginning to overflow. A phalanx of capering humanity rolled toward us, filling the street from edge to edge. I could not tell for a moment which mob it was, the Apocalyptists or those who sought Vornan to worship him, but then I saw the crazily painted faces, the baleful banners, the zigging metal coils held high overhead as symbols of heavenly fire, and I knew that these were the prophets of doom bearing down on us.

I said, “We’ve got to get out of here. Back to the hotel!”

“I want to see this.”

“We’ll be trampled, Vornan!”

“Not if we’re careful. Stay with me, Leo. Let the tide sweep over us.”

I shook my head. The vanguard of the Apocalyptist mob was only a block from us. Wielding flares and sirens, the rioters were streaming in a wild rush toward us, screams and shrieks puncturing the air. Merely as bystanders, we might suffer at the hands of the mob; if we were recognized through our masks, we were dead. I caught Vornan’s wrist and tugged in anguish, trying to drag him down a side street that led to the hotel. For the first time I felt his electrical powers. A low-voltage jolt made my hand leap back. I clamped it to him again, and this time he transmitted a burst of stunning energy that sent me reeling away, muscles twitching in a dislocated dance. I dropped to my knees and crouched half dazed while Vornan gaily raced toward the Apocalyptists, his arms spread wide.

The bosom of the mob enfolded him. I saw him slip between two of the front runners and vanish into the core of the surging, shouting mass. He was gone. I struggled dizzily to my feet, knowing that I had to find him, and took three or four uncertain steps forward. An instant later the Apocalyptists were upon me.

I managed to stay on my feet long enough to throw off the effects of the shock Vornan had given me. About me moved the cultists, faces thick with red and green paint; the acrid tang of sweat was in the air, and mysteriously, I spied one Apocalyptist to whose chest was strapped the hissing little globe of an ion-dispersal deodorant; this was strange territory for the fastidious. I was whirled around. A girl with bare jiggling breasts, whose nipples glowed with luminescence, hugged me. “The end is coming!” she shrilled. “Live while you can!” She clawed at my hands and pressed them to her breasts. I clutched warm flesh for a moment, before the current of the mob whirled her away from me; when I looked down at my palms I saw the luminescent imprints gleaming in them, like watchful eyes. Musical instruments of indeterminate ancestry honked and blared. Three high-stepping boys, arms locked, paraded before me, kicking at anyone who came close. A towering man in a goat’s mask exposed his maleness jubilantly, and a heavy-thighed woman rushed toward him, offered herself, and clung tight. An arm snaked around my shoulders. I whirled and saw a gaunt, bony, grinning figure leaning toward me; a girl, I thought, from the costume and the long snarled silken hair, but then “her” blouse fell open and I saw the flat shining hairless chest with the two small dark circlets.

“Have a drink,” the boy said, and thrust a squeezeflask at me. I could not refuse. The snout of the flask went between my lips and I tasted something bitter and thin. Turning away, I spat it out, but the flavor remained like a stain on my tongue.

We were marching fifteen or twenty abreast in several directions at once, though the prevailing movement was back toward the hotel. I fought my way against the tide, hunting for Vornan. Hands clutched at me again and again. I stumbled over a couple locked in lust on the sidewalk; they were inviting destruction and did not seem to mind. It was like a carnival, but there were no floats, and the costumes were wildly individualistic.

“Vornan!” I bellowed. And the mob took it up, magnifying the cry. “Vornan… Vornan… Vornan… kill… Vornan… doom… flame… doom… Vornan…” It was the dance of death. A figure loomed before me, face marked with pustulent sores, dripping lesions, gaping cavities; a woman’s hand rose to caress it and the makeup smeared so that I could see the handsome unmarred face beneath the artificial horrors.

Here came a young man nearly seven feet high, waving a smoky torch and yelling of the Apocalypse; there was a flat-nosed girl drenched in sweat, rending her garments; two pomaded young men tweaked her breasts, laughed, kissed one another, and catapulted on. I called out again, “Vornan!”

Then I caught sight of him. He was standing quite still, like a boulder in a flowing stream, and curiously the rampaging mob was passing on either side of him as it roared forward. Several feet of open space remained inviolate around him, as though he had carved a private pocket in the throng. He stood with arms folded, surveying the madness about him. His mask had been ripped, so that his cheek showed through it, and he was daubed with paint and glowing substances. I struggled toward him, was carried away by a sudden inner surge within the main flow, and fought my way back to him with elbows and knees, hammering a route through tons of flesh. When I was within a few feet of him I understood why the rioters were bypassing him. Vornan had created a little dike all around himself out of stacked human bodies, piling them two or three high on each side. They seemed dead, but as I watched, a girl who had been lying to Vornan’s left stumbled to her feet and went reeling away. Vornan promptly reached toward the next Apocalyptist to come along, a cadaverous man whose bald skull was stained deep blue. A touch of Vornan’s hand and the man collapsed, falling neatly into place to restore the rampart. Vornan had built a living wall with his electricity. I jumped over it and thrust my face close to his.

“For God’s sake let’s get out of here!” I yelled.

“We are in no danger, Leo. Keep calm.”

“Your mask’s ripped. What if you’re recognized?”

“I have my defenses.” He laughed. “What delight this is!”

I knew better than to try to seize him again. In his careless rapture he would stun me a second time and add me to his rampart, and I might not survive the experience. So I stood beside him, helpless. I watched a heavy foot descend on the hand of an unconscious girl who lay near me; when the foot moved on, the shattered fingers quivered convulsively, bending at the joints in a way that human hands do not normally bend. Vornan turned in a full circle, taking everything in.

He said to me, “What makes them believe the world is going to end?”

“How would I know? It’s irrational. They’re insane.”

“Can so many people be insane at once?”

“Of course.”

“And do they know the day the world ends?”

“January 1, 2000.”

“Quite close. Why that day in particular?”

“It’s the beginning of a new century,” I said, “of a new millennium. Somehow people expect extraordinary things to happen then.”

With lunatic pedantry Vornan said, “But the new century does not begin until 2001. Heyman has explained it to me. It is not correct to say that the century starts when—”

“I know all that. But no one pays attention to it. Damn you. Vornan, let’s not stand here debating calendrics! I want to get away from here!”

“Then go.”

“With you.”

“I’m enjoying this. Look there, Leo!”

I looked. A nearly naked girl garbed as a witch rode on the shoulders of a man with horns sprouting from his forehead. Her breasts were painted glossy black, the nipples orange. But the sight of such grotesquerie did nothing to me now. I did not even trust Vornan’s improvised barricade. If things got any wilder—

Police copters appeared abruptly. Long overdue, too. They hovered between the buildings, no more than a hundred feet up and the whirr of their rotors sent a chilling draft upon us. I watched the dull gray nozzles extrude from the white globular bellies above us; then came the first spurts of the antiriot foam. The Apocalyptists seemed to welcome it. They rushed forward, trying to get into position under the nozzles; some of them stripped off what few garments they wore and bathed in it. The foam came bubbling down, expanding as it met the air, forming a thick viscous soapiness that filled the street and made movement almost impossible. Moving now in angular jerks like machines running down, the demonstrators lurched to and fro, fighting their way through the layers of foam. Its taste was oddly sweet. I saw a girl get a jolt of it in the face and stumble, blinded, mouth and nostrils engulfed in the stuff. She fell to the pavement and disappeared totally, for by now at least three feet of foam rose from the ground, cool, sticky, cutting all of us off at our thighs. Vornan knelt and drew the girl back into view, although she would not suffocate where she was. He cleared the foam tenderly from her face and ran his hands over her moist, slippery flesh. When he gripped her breasts, her eyes opened and he said quietly to her, “I am Vornan-19.” His lips went to hers. When he released her, she scrambled away on her knees, burrowing through the foam. To my horror I saw Vornan was without his mask.

We could scarcely move at all, now. Police robots were in the street, great shining domes of metal that buzzed easily through the foam, seizing the trapped demonstrators and hustling them into groups of ten or twelve. Sanitation mechs were already out to suck up the excess foam. Vornan and I stood near the outer border of the scene; slowly we sloshed through the foam and reached an open street. No one seemed to notice us. I said to Vornan, “Will you listen to reason now? Here’s our chance to get back to the hotel without any more trouble.”

“We have had little trouble so far.”

“There’ll be big trouble if Kralick finds out what you’ve been up to. He’ll restrict your freedom, Vornan. He’ll keep an army of guards outside your door and put a triple seal on it.”

“Wait,” he said. “I want something. Then we can go.”

He darted back into the mob. By now the foam had hardened to a doughy consistency, and those in it were wallowing precariously. In a moment Vornan returned. He was dragging a girl of about seventeen who seemed dazed and terrified. Her costume was of transparent plastic, but flecks of foam were clinging to it, conveying a probably unwanted modesty. “Now we can go to the hotel,” he said to me. And to the girl he whispered, “I am Vornan-19. The world does not end in January. Before dawn I will prove it to you.”