Robert Silverberg - The Millennium Express

Why, you may wonder, do these men want to destroy the world’s greatest repository of ancient art? And how does it come to pass that a man of the 28th century, more or less, is conspiring with three celebrities of a much earlier time?

Strettin Vulpius (2953–), who has been tracking this impish crew across the face of the peaceful world for many months now, knows much more about these people than you do, but he too has yet to fathom their fondness for destruction and is greatly curious about it. For him it is a professional curiosity, or as close to professional as anything can be, here in this happy time at the end of the third millennium, when work of any sort is essentially a voluntary activity.

At the moment, Vulpius is watching them from a distance of several thousand meters. He has established himself in a hotel room in the little Swiss village of Zermatt and they are making their headquarters presently in a lovely villa of baroque style that nestles far above the town in a bower of tropical palms and brightly blossoming orchids on the lush green slopes of the Matterhorn. Vulpius has succeeded in affixing a minute spy-eye to the fleshy inner surface of the room where the troublesome four are gathered. It provides him with a clear image of all that is taking place in there.

Cleversmith, who is the ringleader, says, “We need to make up our minds.” He is slender, agile, a vibrant long-limbed whip of a man. “The clock keeps on pushing, you know. The Millennium Express is roaring toward us minute by minute.”

“I tell you, implosion is the way for us to go,” says Einstein. He looks to be about 40, smallish of stature, with a great mop of curling hair and soft, thoughtful eyes, incongruous above his deep chest and sturdy, athletic shoulders. “An elegant symbolic statement. The earth opens; the museum and everything that it contains quietly disappear into the chasm.”

“Symbolic of what?” asks Picasso scornfully. He too is short and stocky, but he is almost completely bald, and his eyes, ferociously bright and piercing, are the antithesis of Einstein’s gentle ones. “Blow the damn thing up, I say. Let the stuff spew all around the town and come down like snow. A snow-fall of paintings, the first snow anywhere in a thousand years.”

Cleversmith nods. “A pretty image, yes. Thank you, Pablo. Ernest?”

“Implode,” says the biggest of the men. “The quiet way, the subtle way.” He lounges against the wall closest to the great curving window with his back to the others, a massive burly figure holding himself braced on one huge hand that is splayed out no more than five centimeters from the spy-eye as he stares down into the distant valley. He carries himself like a big cat, graceful, loose-jointed, subtly menacing. “The pretty way, eh? Your turn, Vjong.”

But Picasso says, before Cleversmith can reply, “Why be quiet or subtle about welcoming the new millennium? What we want to do is make a splash.”

“My position precisely,” Cleversmith says. “My vote goes with you, Pablo. And so we are still deadlocked, it seems.”

Hemingway says, still facing away from them, “Implosion reduces the chance that innocent passersby will get killed.”

“Killed?” cries Picasso, and claps his hands in amusement. “Killed? Who worries about getting killed in the year 2999? It isn’t as though dying is forever.”

“It can be a great inconvenience,” says Einstein quietly.

“When has that ever concerned us?” Cleversmith says. Frowning, he glances around the room. “Ideally we ought to be unanimous on this, but at the very least we need a majority. It was my hope today that one of you would be willing to switch his vote.”

“Why don’t you switch yours, then?” Einstein says. “Or you, Pablo. You of all people ought to prefer to have all those paintings and sculptures sink unharmed into the ground rather than have them blown sky-high.”

Picasso grins malevolently. “What fallacy is this, Albert? Why should I give a damn about paintings and sculptures? Do you care about—what was it called, physics? Does our Ernest write little stories?”

“Is the Pope Catholic?” Hemingway says.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen—”

The dispute quickly gets out of hand. There is much shouting and gesticulation. Picasso yells at Einstein, who shrugs and jabs a finger at Cleversmith, who ignores what Einstein says to him and turns to Hemingway with an appeal that is met with scorn. They are all speaking Anglic, of course. Anything else would have been very strange. These men are not scholars of obsolete tongues.

What they are, thinks the watching Vulpius, is monsters and madmen. Something must be done about them, and soon. As Cleversmith says, the clock is pulsing ceaselessly, the millennium is coming ever nearer.

It was on a grassy hilltop overlooking the ruins of sunken Istanbul that he first had encountered them, about a year and a half earlier. A broad parapet placed here centuries ago for the benefit of tourists provided a splendid view of the drowned city’s ancient wonders, gleaming valiantly through the crystalline waters of the Bosporus: the great upjutting spears that were the minarets of Hagia Sophia and the Mosque of Sьleyman the Magnificent and the other great buildings of that sort, the myriad domes of the covered bazaar, the immense walls of Topkapi Palace.

Of all the submerged and partly submerged cities Vulpius had visited—New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London and the rest—this was one of the loveliest. The shallow emerald waters that covered it could not fully conceal the intermingling layers upon layers of antiquity here, white marble and colored tile and granite slabs. Constantinople of the Byzantine emperors. Stamboul of the Sultans, Istanbul of the Industrial Age: toppled columns, fallen friezes, indestructible fortifications, the vague chaotic outlines of the hilly city’s winding streets, the shadowy hints of archaic foundations and walls, the slumping mud-engulfed ruins of the sprawling hotels and office buildings of a much later era that itself was also long gone. What a density of history! Standing there on that flower-bedecked hillside he felt himself becoming one with yesterday’s 7000 years.

A mild humid breeze was blowing out of the hinterland to the east, bearing the pungent scent of exotic blooms and unidentifiable spices. Vulpius shivered with pleasure. It was a lovely moment, one of a great many he had known in a lifetime of travel. The world had gone through long periods of travail over the centuries, but now it was wholly a garden of delight, and Vulpius had spent 20 years savoring its multitude of marvels, with ever so much still ahead for him.

He was carrying, as he always did, a pocket mnemone, a small quasi-organic device, somewhat octopoid in form, in whose innumerable nodes and bumps were stored all manner of data that could be massaged forth by one who was adept in the technique. Vulpius aimed the instrument now at the shimmering sea below him, squeezed it gently, and in its soft, sighing, semisentient voice it provided him with the names of the half-visible structures and something of their functions in the days of the former world: This had been the Galata Bridge, this the castle of Rumeli Hisar, this the mosque of Mehmed the Conqueror, these were the scattered remnants of the great Byzantine imperial palace.

“It tells you everything, does it?” said a deep voice behind him. Vulpius turned. A small bald-headed man, broad shouldered and cocky looking, grinned at him in a powerfully insinuating way. His obsidian eyes were like augers. Vulpius had never seen eyes like those. A second man, much taller, darkly handsome, smiling lazily, stood behind him. The little bald one pointed toward the place in the water where six graceful minarets came thrusting upward into the air from a single vast building just below the surface. “What’s that one, for instance?”