The Masks of Time

SIXTEEN

Kralick was bothered at first by the disruption of the carefully balanced itinerary; South America, he said, would be very disappointed to learn that Vornan’s arrival would be postponed. But the positive aspects of the scheme were apparent to him as well. He thought it might be useful to get Vornan-19 off into a different kind of environment, away from the crowds and the cameras. I think he welcomed the chance to escape from Vornan for a while himself. In the end he approved the proposal.

Then I called Jack and Shirley.

I felt hesitant about dropping Vornan on them, even though they had both begged me to arrange something like this. Jack was desperately eager to talk to Vornan about total conversion of energy, though I knew he’d learn nothing. And Shirley… Shirley had confessed to me that she was physically drawn to the man from 2999. It was for her sake that I hesitated. Then I told myself that whatever Shirley might feel toward Vornan was something for Shirley herself to resolve, and that if anything happened between Shirley and Vornan, it would be only with Jack’s consent and blessing. In which case I did not have to feel responsible.

When I told them what had been proposed, they both thought I was joking. I had to work hard to persuade them that I really could bring Vornan to them. At length they decided to believe me, and I saw them exchange offscreen glances; then Jack said, “How soon is this going to come about?”

“Tomorrow, if you’re ready for it.”

“Why not?” Shirley said.

I searched her face for a betrayal of her desire. But I saw nothing except simple excitement.

“Why not?” Jack agreed. “But tell me this: is the place going to be overrun by reporters and policemen? I won’t put up with that.”

“No,” I said. “Vornan’s whereabouts are going to be kept secret from the press. There won’t be a media man in sight. And I suppose the access roads to your place will be guarded, just in case, but you won’t be bothered with security people. I’ll make sure they stay far away.”

“All right,” Jack said. “Bring him, then.”

Kralick had the South American trip postponed, and announced that Vornan was going to an undisclosed place for a private holiday of indeterminate length. We let it leak out that he would be vacationing at a villa somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Amid great show of significance, a private plane left Johannesburg the next morning bound for the island of Mauritius. It sufficed to keep the press baffled and misled. A little later that morning Vornan and I boarded a small jet and headed across the Atlantic. We changed planes in Tampa and were in Tucson by early afternoon. A car was waiting there. I told the Government chauffeur to get lost, and drove down to Jack and Shirley’s place myself. Kralick, I knew, had spread a surveillance net in a fifty-mile radius around the house, but he had agreed not to let any of his men come closer unless I requested help. We would be undisturbed. It was a flawless late-autumn afternoon, the sky sharp and flat, free of clouds, the taut blueness practically vibrating. The mountains seemed unusually distinct. As I drove, I noticed the occasional golden gleam of a Government copter high overhead. They were watching us… from a distance.

Shirley and Jack were in front of the house when we drove up. Jack wore a ragged shirt and faded jeans; Shirley was dressed in a skimpy halter and shorts. I had not seen them since the spring, and I had spoken to them only a few times. It struck me that the tensions I had observed in them in the spring had continued to erode them over the succeeding months. They both looked edgy, coiled, compressed, in a way that could not altogether be credited to the arrival of their celebrated guest.

“This is Vornan-19,” I said. “Jack Bryant. Shirley.”

“Such a pleasure,” Vornan said gravely. He did not offer his hand, but bowed in an almost Japanese way, first to Jack, then to Shirley. An awkward silence followed. We stood staring at each other under the harsh sun. Shirley and Jack behaved almost as though they had never believed in Vornan’s existence until this moment; they seemed to regard him as some fictional character unexpectedly conjured into life. Jack clamped his lips together so firmly that his cheeks throbbed. Shirley, never taking her eyes from Vornan, rocked back and forth on the balls of her bare feet. Vornan, self-contained and affable, studied the house, its environment, and its occupants with cool curiosity.

“Let me show you to your room,” Shirley blurted.

I fetched the luggage: a suitcase apiece for Vornan and myself. My own grip was nearly empty, holding nothing more than a few changes of clothing; but I had to struggle to lift Vornan’s. Naked he had come into this world, but he had accumulated a good deal on his travels: clothing, knickknacks, a random miscellany. I hauled it into the house. Shirley had given Vornan the room I usually occupied, and a storage room near the sun deck had been hastily converted into an auxiliary guest room for me. That seemed quite proper. I set his suitcase down, and left Shirley with him to instruct him in the use of the household appliances. Jack took me to my own room.

I said, “I want you to realize, Jack, that this visit can be ended at any time. If Vornan gets to be too much for you, just say the word and we’ll pull out. I don’t want you going to any trouble on his account.”

“That’s all right. I think this is going to be interesting, Leo.”

“No doubt. But it might also be strenuous.”

He smiled fitfully. “Will I get a chance to talk to him?”

“Of course.”

“You know about what.”

“Yes. Talk all you like. There won’t be much else to do. But you won’t get anywhere, Jack.”

“I can try, at least.” In a low voice he added, “He’s shorter than I thought he’d be. But impressive. Very impressive. He’s got a kind of natural power to dominate, doesn’t he?”

“Napoleon was a short man,” I reminded him. “Also Hitler.”

“Does Vornan know that?”

“He doesn’t seem to be much of a student of history,” I said, and we both laughed.

A little while later Shirley came out of Vornan’s room and encountered me in the hall. I don’t think she expected to find me there, for I caught a quick glimpse of her face, and she was wholly without the mask that we wear in front of others. Her eyes, her nostrils, her lips, all revealed raw emotion, churning conflicts. I wondered if Vornan had attempted anything in the five minutes they had been together. Certainly what I saw on Shirley’s face was purely sexual, a tide of desire flooding toward the surface. An instant later she realized I was looking at her, and the mask slipped swiftly into place. She smiled nervously. “He’s all settled in,” she said. “I like him, Leo. You know, I expected him to be cold and forbidding, some kind of robotlike thing. But he’s polite and courtly, a real gentleman in his strange way.”

“He’s quite the charmer, yes.”

Telltale points of color lingered in her cheeks. “Do you think it was a mistake for us to say he could come here?”

“Why should it be a mistake?”

She moistened her lips. “There’s no telling what might happen. He’s beautiful, Leo. He’s irresistible.”

“Are you afraid of your own desires?”

“I’m afraid of hurting Jack.”

“Then don’t do anything without Jack’s consent,” I said, feeling more than ever like an uncle. “It’s that simple. Don’t get carried away.”

“What if I do, Leo? When I was in the room with him — I saw him looking at me so hungrily—”

“He looks at all beautiful women that way. But surely you know how to say no, Shirley.”

“I’m not sure I’d want to say no.”

I shrugged. “Should I call Kralick and say that we’d like to leave?”

“No!”

“Then you’ll have to be the watchdog of your own chastity, I’m afraid. You’re an adult, Shirley. You ought to be able to keep from sleeping with your house guest if you think it would be unwise. That’s never been much of a problem for you before.” She recoiled, startled, at my gratuitous final words. Her face crimsoned again beneath the deep tan. She peered at me as if she had never seen me in clear focus before. I felt angry at myself for my foolishness. In one breath I had cheapened a decade-long relationship. But the taut moment passed. Shirley relaxed as though going through a series of inner exercises, and said at last in a calm voice, “You’re right, Leo. It won’t really be a problem.”

The evening was surprisingly free from tension. Shirley produced a magnificent meal, and Vornan was lavish in his praise: it was, he said, the first dinner he had eaten in anyone’s home, and he was delighted by it. Afterwards we strolled together at twilight. Jack walked beside Vornan, and I with Shirley, but we stayed close to one another. Jack pointed out a kangaroo rat that had emerged from hiding a little early and went hopping madly over the desert. We saw a few jackrabbits and some lizards. It forever astonished Vornan that wild animals should be on the loose. Later, we returned to the house for drinks, and sat pleasantly like four old friends, talking of nothing in particular. Vornan seemed to accommodate himself perfectly to the personalities of his hosts. I began to think that I had been uneasy over nothing.

The curious tranquility continued for several days more. We slept late, explored the desert, reveled in eighty-degree heat, talked, ate, peered at the stars. Vornan was restrained and almost cautious. Yet he spoke more of his own time here than was usual for him. Pointing to the stars, he tried to describe the constellations he knew, but he failed to find any, not even the Dipper. He talked of food taboos and how daring it would be for him to sit at table with his hosts in a parallel situation in 2999. He reminisced lazily about his ten months among us, like a traveler who is close to the end of his journey and beginning to look back at remembered pleasures.

We were careful not to tune in on any news broadcasts while Vornan was around. I did not want him to know that there had been riots of disappointment in South America over the postponement of his visit, nor that a kind of Vornan-hysteria was sweeping the world, with folk everywhere looking toward the visitor for all the answers to the riddles of the universe. In his past pronouncements Vornan had smugly let it be known that he would eventually supply all the answers to everything, and this promissory note seemed to be infinitely negotiable, even though in fact Vornan had raised more questions than answers. It was good to keep him in isolation here, far from the nodes of control that he might so easily seize.

On the fourth morning we woke to brilliant sunlight. I cut out my window-opaquers and found Vornan already on the sun-deck. He was nude, stretched cozily in a web-foam cradle, basking in the brightness. I tapped on the window. He looked up, saw me, smiled. I stepped outside just as he rose from the cradle. His sleek, smooth body might have been made of some seamless plastic substance; his skin was without blemish and he had no body hair whatever. He was neither muscular nor flabby, and seemed simultaneously frail and powerful. I know that sounds paradoxical. He was also formidably male. “It’s wonderfully warm out here, Leo.” he said. “Take off your clothes and join me.”

I held back. I had not told Vornan of the free-and-easy nudism of my earlier visits to this house; and thus far all the proprieties had been carefully observed. But of course Vornan had no nudity taboos; and now that he had made the first move, Shirley was quick to follow. She emerged on the deck, saw Vornan bare and myself clad in nightclothes, and said smilingly, “Yes, that’s quite all right. I meant to suggest that yesterday. We aren’t foolish about our bodies here.” And having made that declaration of liberalism, she stripped away the flimsy wrap she had been wearing and lay down to enjoy the sun. Vornan watched in what struck me as remarkably aloof curiosity as Shirley revealed her supple, magnificently endowed body. He seemed interested, but only in a theoretical way. This was not the ravenously wolfish Vornan I knew. Shirley, though, betrayed profound inner discomfort. A flush swept nearly to the base of her throat. Her movements were exaggeratedly casual. Her eyes strayed guiltily to Vornan’s loins a moment, then quickly pulled away. Her nipples gave her away, rising in sudden excitement. She knew it, and hastily rolled over to lie on her belly, but not before I had noticed the effect. When Shirley and Jack and I had sunbathed together, it had been as innocent as in Eden; but the stiffening of those two nubs of erectile tissue bluntly advertised how she felt about being nude in front of a nude Vornan.

Jack appeared a while later. He took in the situation with an amused glance: Shirley sprawled out with upturned buttocks, Vornan peeled and dozing, I pacing the sundeck in distress. “A beautiful day,” he said, a little too enthusiastically. He was wearing shorts and he kept them on. “Shall I get breakfast, Shirl?”

Neither Shirley nor Vornan bothered to get dressed at all that morning. She seemed determined to achieve the same informality that had been the hallmark of my visits here; and after her first moments of confusion, she did indeed subside into a more natural acceptance of the situation. Oddly, Vornan appeared to be totally indifferent to her body. That was apparent to me long before Shirley realized it. Her little coquettishnesses, her deftly subtle movements, flexing a shapely thigh or inflating her rib cage to send her breasts rising, were wholly lost on him. Since he evidently came from a culture where nudity among near-strangers was nothing remarkable, that was not too strange — except that Vornan’s attitude toward women had always been so predatory in the past months, and it was mysterious that he so conspicuously did not respond to Shirley’s loveliness.

I got down to the buff too. Why not? It was comfortable, and it was the mode. But I found I could not relax. In the past I had not been aware that sunbathing with Shirley generated any obvious tension within me. Now, though, such a torrent of yearning roared through me at times that I became dizzy and had to grip the rail of the sundeck and look away.

Jack’s behavior also was odd. Nakedness was wholly natural to him here, but he kept his shorts on for a full day and a half after Vornan had precipitated the rest of us into stripping. He was almost defiant about it — working in the garden, hacking at a bush in need of pruning, sweat rolling down his broad back and staining the waistband of his shorts. Shirley asked him, finally, why he was being so modest. “I don’t know,” he said strangely. “I hadn’t noticed it.” He kept the shorts on.

Vornan looked up and said, “It is not on my account, is it?” Jack laughed. He touched the snap of his shorts and wriggled out of them, chastely turning his back to us. Though he went without them thereafter, he appeared markedly unhappy about it.

Jack seemed captivated by Vornan. They talked long and earnestly over drinks; Vornan listened thoughtfully, saying something now and then, while Jack unreeled a strand of words. I paid little attention to these discussions. They talked of politics, time travel, energy conversion, and many other things, each conversation quickly becoming a monologue. I wondered why Vornan was so patient, but of course there was little else to do here. After a while I withdrew into myself and simply lay in the sun, resting. I realized that I was terribly tired. This year had been a formidable drain on me. I dozed. I basked. I sipped flasks of cooling drinks. And I let destruction enfold my dearest friends without remotely sensing the pattern of events.

I did see the vague discontent rising in Shirley. She felt ignored and rebuffed, and even I could understand why. She wanted Vornan. And Vornan, who had commandeered so many dozens of women, treated her with glacial respect. As if belatedly embracing bourgeois morality, Vornan declined to enter any of Shirley’s gambits, backing away with just the right degree of tact. Had someone told him that it was improper to seduce the wife of one’s host? Propriety had never troubled Vornan in the past. I could credit his miraculous display of continence now only to his streak of innate mischief. He would take a woman to bed out of impishness — as with Aster, say — but now it amused him to thwart Shirley simply because she was beautiful and bare and obviously available. It was, I thought, an outburst of the devilish old Vornan, the deliberate thumber of the nose.

Shirley grew almost desperate about it. Her clumsiness offended me, the involuntary witness. I saw her sidle up beside Vornan to press the firmness of a breast into his back as she pretended to reach for his discarded drink-flask; I saw her invite him brazenly with her eyes; I saw her stretch out in carefully wanton postures that she had always instinctively avoided in the past. None of it did any good. Perhaps if she had entered Vornan’s bedroom in the dark hours and thrown herself upon him, she would have had what she wanted from him, but her pride would not let her go quite that far. And so she grew coarse and shoddy with frustration. Her ugly shrill giggle returned. She made remarks to Jack or to Vornan or to me that revealed scarcely hidden hostilities. She spilled things and dropped things. The effect of all this on me was a depressing one, for I too had shown tact with Shirley, not just over a few days but across a decade; I had resisted temptation, I had denied myself the forbidden pleasure of taking my friend’s wife. She had never offered herself to me the way she now offered herself to Vornan. I did not enjoy the sight of her this way, nor did I find pleasure in the ironies of the situation.

Jack was totally unaware of his wife’s torment. His fascination with Vornan left him no opportunity to observe what was taking place about him. In his desert isolation Jack had had no chance in years to make new friends, and little enough contact with his old ones. Now he took to Vornan precisely as a lonely boy would take to some odd newcomer on his block. I choose that simile deliberately; there was something adolescent or even subadolescent about Jack’s surrender to Vornan. He talked endlessly, delineating himself against the background of his University career, describing the reasons for his desert withdrawal, even taking Vornan down into that workshop I had never entered, where he showed the guest the secret manuscript of his autobiography. No matter how intimate the subject, Jack spoke freely, like a child hauling out his most prized toys to display. He was buying Vornan’s attention with a frantic effort. Jack appeared to regard Vornan as a chum. I who had always thought of Vornan as unutterably alien, who had come to accept him as genuine largely because he inspired such mysterious dread in me, found it bewildering to see Jack succumbing this way. Vornan seemed pleased and amused. Occasionally they disappeared into the workshop for several hours at a time. I told myself that this was all some ploy on Jack’s part to wangle from Vornan the information he desired. It was clever of Jack, was it not, to construct so intense a relationship for the sake of picking Vornan’s mind?

But Jack got no information from Vornan. And in my blindness I was aware of nothing.

How could I have failed to see it? That look of bemused and dreamy confusion that Jack wore much of the time now? The moments when his eyes dropped and he turned away from Shirley or from me, cheeks glowing in unknown embarrassments? Even when I saw Vornan slip his hand possessively onto Jack’s bare shoulder, I remained blind.

Shirley and I spent more time together in those days than on any previous visit, for Jack and Vornan were forever off by themselves. I did not take advantage of my opportunity. We said little, but lay side by side, baking in the sun; Shirley seemed so taut and keyed up that I scarcely knew what to say to her, and so I kept silent. Arizona was gripped by an autumn heat wave. Warmth came boiling out of Mexico toward us, making us sluggish. Shirley’s bare skin gleamed like fine bronze. The fatigue washed from me. Several times Shirley seemed about to speak, and the words died in her throat. A fabric of tension took form. In a subliminal way I felt trouble in the air, the way one feels a summer storm coming on. But I had no idea what was awry; I hovered in a cocoon of heat, detecting uncertain emanations of impending cataclysm, and not until the actual moment of disaster did I grasp the truth of the situation.

It happened on the twelfth day of our visit. We were only a day short of November, now, but the unseasonal warmth was staying on; at noon the sun was like a blazing eye whose fiery stare was impossible to meet, and I could not remain outdoors. I excused myself from Shirley — Jack and Vornan were nowhere about — and went to my room. As I opaqued the window, I paused to peer out at Shirley, lying torpid on the sundeck, eyes shielded, her left knee drawn up, her breasts slowly rising and falling, her skin glistening with sweat. She was the image of total relaxation, I thought, the languid beautiful woman drowsing in the heat of noon. And then I caught sight of her left hand, fiercely clenched, so tightly fisted that it trembled at the wrist and muscles throbbed the length of her arm; and I understood that her pose was a conscious counterfeit of tranquility, maintained by sheer force of will.

I darkened the room and stretched out on my bed. The cool indoor air was refreshing. Perhaps I slept. My eyes opened when I heard the sound of someone at my door. I sat up.

Shirley rushed in. She looked wild: eyes glaring in horror, lips drawn back, breasts heaving. Her face was crimson. Bright beads of sweat, I saw with curious clarity, covered her skin, and there was a shining rivulet in the valley of her bosom. “Leo—” she said in a rusty choking voice. “Oh, God, Leo!”

“What is it? What happened?”

She stumbled across the room and sagged forward, her knees against my mattress. She seemed almost in a state of shock. Her jaws worked, but no words came forth.

“Shirley!”

“Yes,” she muttered. “Yes. Jack — Vornan — oh, Leo, I was right about them! I didn’t want to believe it, but I was right. I saw them! I saw them!”

“What are you talking about?”

“It was time for lunch,” she said, gulping for calm. “I woke up on the sundeck and went looking for them. They were in Jack’s workshop, as usual. They didn’t answer when I knocked, and I pushed the door open, and then I saw why they hadn’t answered. They were busy. With each other. With… each… other. Arms and legs all over each other. I saw. I stood there maybe half a minute watching it. Oh, Leo, Leo, Leo!”

Her voice rose to a piercing shriek. She flung herself forward in despair, sobbing, shattered. I caught her as she lurched into me. The heavy globes of her breasts pressed with tips of flame against my cool skin. In the eye of my mind I could see the scene she had described for me; now the obviousness of it all struck me, and I gasped at my own stupidity, at Vornan’s callousness, and at Jack’s innocence. I squirmed as I pictured for myself Vornan wrapped about him like some giant predatory invertebrate, and then there was no time for further thought. Shirley was in my arms, trembling and bare and sweat-sticky and weeping. I comforted her and she clung to me, looking only for an island of stability in a suddenly quaking world; and the embrace of comfort that I offered her rapidly became something quite different. I could not control myself, and she did not resist, but rather she welcomed my invasion in relief or out of revenge, and at long last my body pierced hers and we fell joined and heaving to the pillow.