Robert Silverberg - The Second Shield

“Six or seven very strenuous and difficult nights, yes.”

“But you’re a great artist. Great artists don’t retire, no matter how wealthy they are. Did Picasso retire? Did Matisse? Monet was practically blind, and even richer than you are now, and he went on painting anyway, right to the end.”

“I am not Monet,” said Beckerman. “I am certainly not Picasso. I am Max Beckerman and I find my work increasingly demanding, too demanding, and it is becoming a great temptation to give it up altogether.”

“You don’t mean that, Max. You’ve just been working too hard lately, that’s all. Go to Hawaii again. Go to Majorca. You’ll feel better in a week or two.”

“Majorca,” Beckerman said bitterly. “Yes, sure, absolutely. I could go to Majorca.” He said it as if the broker had recommended a holiday in one of the suburbs of Hell. Apostolides had a house on Majorca, didn’t he? Everywhere he turned, something reminded him of Apostolides.

He knew what was behind this sudden talk of retiring. It wasn’t fatigue. The broker was right: he really did work only six or seven nights a year, and, arduous as those nights were, he recovered quickly enough from each ordeal, and there were new masterpieces to show for it. If he gave up work entirely, his entire oeuvre would fade away in a few years, and then there would be nothing left to indicate that he had ever lived at all. He would be utterly forgotten, a wealthy nobody who once had been a great artist, a rich old man sitting quietly on some tropical beach waiting for the eventual end to arrive. The museums were full of Matisses, Picassos, Monets, and always would be; but the moment Max Beckerman stopped working, that was the moment he would begin his slide into oblivion. He couldn’t face that prospect.

No, it was fear that had him thinking of retiring, of disappearing to some quiet and luxurious place where nobody would ever be able to find him again. Fear of Apostolides—of Alvarez, rather, because Apostolides was just a name to him, and Alvarez was a threatening voice on the telephone. The very rich, Beckerman knew, were utterly ruthless when they were thwarted. Run. Hide. Disappear. That was what he had to do. A villa in Monaco; an apartment in Zurich; a plantation in the Seychelles Islands. He could afford to go anywhere.

Beckerman went nowhere. He was surprised to find himself unexpectedly gliding into work mode again, much too soon after the last episode of creativity. He dreamed a small dinosaur-shaped animal the size of a large cat, a perpetual motion machine that energetically moved a complex arrangements of pistons through an elaborate pattern without pause even though it had no power source, and something that even he couldn’t identify, an abstract bunch of metallic squiggles, which to his relief melted away within a couple of hours. Good work, lots of it. But not the shield, no. Not the shield.

And then the two weeks were up.

“Beckerman?”

Alvarez, right on schedule. Beckerman hung up.

The phone rang again.

“Don’t do that,” Alvarez said. “Listen to me.”

“I’m listening.”

“What about the shield?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I’m very sorry.”

“You’ll be sorrier,” said Alvarez. “The client is getting extremely displeased now, extremely . Holding my feet to the fire, as a matter of fact. I was the one who brought you to his attention. Now he requires me to obtain a second shield from you for him. Dream him another shield, Beckerman. The shield of Achilles, just like the last one.”

“I’m trying to. Believe me, I’m trying. The Iliad is the last thing I read every night before I close my eyes. I fill my head with Homer. Heroes, swords, shields. But what comes out? Little dinosaurs come out. Perpetual motion machines come out. You see the problem?”

“I see the problem,” Alvarez said. “Do you?”

“Tell Mr. Apostolides that if he likes he can have my entire output for the next three years, free of charge, every single thing I produce. Only he must leave me alone on this thing of the shield.”

“What he wants is the shield, Beckerman.”

“I can’t give it to him.”

“Nobody tells things like that to Pericles Apostolides.”

“One day the Angel of Death is going to come for Mr. Apostolides, just like he comes for everybody else, and the angel is going to say, ‘All right, Pericles, come along with me’. Is he going to look the Angel in the eye and say that nobody tells things like that to Pericles Apostolides?”

“That’s not my problem, Beckerman. My problem is the shield. Your problem is the shield.”

“I’m doing the best I can. I can’t do better than that.”

“Two more weeks,” Alvarez said.

“And then?”

“Don’t ask. Just produce. Sweet dreams, Beckerman.”

He tried desperately to generate the shield. He lay rigid in his bed with his eyes closed, envisioning the shield as though hoping it would spring fully formed from his forehead while he was still awake. But it didn’t. Eventually he would drop off to sleep, and when he awoke in the middle of the following morning he could tell at once from the way he was trembling and the ferocious hunger he felt and the stink of sweat in the bedroom that he had worked during the night, and he would look eagerly at the floor beside his bed, and there would be something there, yes, a grinning ebony face with Picasso eyes, or a five-sided pyramid with a brilliant point of ruby light at its summit, or a formidable Wagnerian horned helmet that might very well have belonged to Wotan himself; but the shield of Achilles, no, no, never that.

He was exhausting himself in the effort, dreaming every night as though his life depended on it, which quite possibly it did, and accomplishing nothing. Beckerman was feverish all the time, now, wild-eyed with weariness and fear. The effects of the energy drain were horrifyingly apparent, the Auschwitz look again, Buchenwald, Dachau, a walking skeleton. He tried every remedy he knew to keep his strength up. Steroids; glucose injections; four meals a day, five; round-the-clock pizza delivery. Nothing worked for long. He was wasting away.

The telephone. Alvarez.

“Well, Beckerman?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m going to have to visit you in person, right?”

“What do you mean, visit me?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“Sit next to me while I sleep, and make me generate the shield?”

“That isn’t what I mean, no.”

“Don’t threaten me, Alvarez!”

“Who’s threatening? I just said I would come visiting.”

“Don’t even think of it. There was a contract that said the object I delivered was of its inherent nature impermanent, and that I could not be held responsible for its disappearance after a stipulated period of time. The stipulated minimum was twelve months. It’s in the contract, Alvarez. Which, as you know, Mr. Apostolides quite willingly signed.”

“You fulfilled that contract, yes. Mr. Apostolides now wants to enter into a second contract with you for a similar work of art. I’ll be coming soon to get your signature on it.”

“I never sign contracts that stipulate the design of a particular work.”

“You will this time.”

“Keep away from me, Alvarez!”

“Unfortunately, I can’t. I’ll be seeing you soon. And don’t try to run away. I’ll find you wherever you may be, Beckerman. You know that I will.”

Time was running out. Alvarez would be coming. The bell ringing downstairs; the voice on the intercom; and then the cold-eyed little man in the tight-fitting Armani suit, standing unsmilingly in the doorway, sadly shaking his head. And there would be no shield for Mr. Apostolides. Beckerman thought of a thousand different things he could do to protect himself, each one more implausible than the one before, and finally he thought of the thousand-and-first, which was not merely implausible but apparently impossible, and that was the one he resolved to try.