Robert Silverberg - The Second Shield

In the night, despite the unsettling trouble that was brewing with the client from Miami, the blustering and the importuning and the implied or even outright threats, Beckerman managed to dream satisfactorily after all. He dreamed a little free-standing staircase of alabaster and malachite that pivoted in the middle and went back down itself through some other dimension like something out of an Escher print; he dreamed an attenuated one-legged bronze statuette with three skinny arms and a funny spiral topknot, Giacometti meets Dr. Seuss, so to speak; he dreamed a squat, puckery-skinned cast-iron froggy thing with bulging ivory eyeballs that periodically opened its huge mouth and emitted little soprano squeaks. Everything a bit on the bizarre side, even for Beckerman; but he did have a tendency to go over the edge a little when things got tense. The three pieces were arrayed in a neat row by the side of his bed when he woke, just before noon. It was, he thought, a damned fine batch of work.

But he didn’t take the time just yet for a close inspection of the latest products. His shower came first; and then the usual breakfast, a grapefruit and half of another one, nearly a dozen sausages, a platter of scrambled eggs, half a loaf of bread, a couple of bottles of beer. He was drenched with sweat, as he always was on these mornings: stinking acrid sweat, clammy and thick, the sweat of an artisan who has been going at it full throttle for many hours. Beckerman’s work took a lot out of him. He worked every bit as hard as any sculptor who hammered away at marble slabs or one who wrestled with heavy iron struts, except that he worked lying down with his eyes closed, and there was no actual physical labor involved.

It felt that way, though. Good productive dreams like these could burn up five or six pounds’ worth of energy in a single night. It was all that Beckerman could do to keep his weight up, despite a constantly ravenous appetite. At best he was a slender man, but a busy season of work would reduce him to skin and bones, his clothes hanging from his gaunt limbs like rags flapping in the wind: the Auschwitz look. There was no way around that. It was the necessary cost of his art.

After he was washed and dressed and had some breakfast in him, he checked out the new items, poking and prodding them, looking for blemishes and flaws, areas of insubstantiality, indications of early dissolution. None of Beckerman’s work was permanent—he was careful to point that out to potential buyers, very careful, which was why this Miami thing was so maddening and disturbing—but he made it a matter of professional pride never to offer anything for sale that was likely to last for less than a year. It wasn’t always possible for him to predict a piece’s probable life-span accurately—he always pointed that out to them, too—but he could usually pinpoint it within a range of plus or minus three months. Some exceptionally evanescent items were gone within hours; some survived for years; most lasted thirty to forty months. The record thus far was eleven years, five months, for a Daliesque melted watch made of copper inlaid with precious stones, set in a silver basin filled with mercury, one of his very finest pieces.

This group looked promising. The Escheresque staircase had a nice solid feel when he tapped it with his knuckle, and there were no soft places anywhere. Beckerman gave it three to five years. The goofy Giacometti, a lean, stripped-down thing of impressive tangibility and compaction, was a cinch for six or seven. Even the weakest of the three, the froggish thing, which had a hollow interior and some porous places on its surface, and therefore would eventually begin to suffer molecular flyaway beginning from the inside out, looked good for at least two and a half years, maybe three.

His mind began running through the roster of possible purchasers. The frog would go to Michaelson, the cellular phone tycoon, at about thirty grand: Michaelson loved strange-looking things that made weird sounds, and the relatively short life-span, the fact that the artifact would vanish into the air in a couple of years, wasn’t an issue to an art collector who had made his fortune out of something as transient as telephone calls. Michaelson had even said once that he was willing to buy six-month items, and even shorter-lived ones than that, if only Beckerman would put them on the market, which he steadfastly refused to do.

Yes, Michaelson for the frog. The staircase, most likely, he would offer to Buddy Talbert, the leveraged-takeover man, who had a weakness for anything with mathematical trickery about it, dimensional twists, mind-dazzling stuff like that. And as for the Giacometti/Seuss, well—

The telephone rang.

Not many people had Beckerman’s home number. “Yes?”

“Alvarez,” a quiet voice said.

Again. Beckerman began taking deep breaths. “Look, there’s no sense you calling me. I told you I would phone just as soon as I had anything good to report.”

“You haven’t phoned, though.”

“I’m still coming up short on the new shield.”

“Try harder, Beckerman.”

“You don’t seem willing to realize that these things aren’t subject to conscious control. They’re dreams , remember. Can you pre-determine your dreams? Of course not. So why do you think I can?”

“The things I dream about aren’t sitting on the floor next to my bed when I wake up, either,” Alvarez said. “The way I dream has nothing to do with the way you dream. Mr. Apostolides is getting very impatient for his shield.”

“I’m doing my best to produce it.”

“Give me an estimate. Two weeks? Three?”

“How can I say? I try every night. I set my mind to it, last thing before I close my eyes, shield shield shield shield. But I end up with different things instead. I can’t help it.”

“Focus your attention better, then.”

Beckerman’s forehead began to throb. “I’ve told you and I’ve told you. I could focus for a million years and I still wouldn’t be able to dream anything to order. Especially a complicated thing like that. The dream products are accidents , won’t you understand that? Random creations of my subconscious mind.”

“Tell your subconscious mind to be less random. Mr. Apostolides paid a fortune for that shield, and he loved it very much, he was tremendously proud of possessing it, and he was extremely disappointed when it faded away.”

“It lasted sixteen months. I told you right at the outset it wasn’t good for more than a couple of years.”

“Sixteen months isn’t a couple of years. He feels very cheated.”

“The estimates that I give people are never one hundred percent accurate. They know that up front. And I’ve offered to refund—”

“He doesn’t want a refund. This isn’t a question of the money. What he can’t deal with is not having the shield on his wall. The patriotic pride, the sheer joy of possession: money can’t replace that. He wants it back. A new one, just like the old. He feels very strongly about that. Very very strongly. You have caused him great personal grief by giving him such a frustrating experience.”

“I’m sorry,” Beckerman said. “I want only to please my clients. He can have his pick of anything else that I—”

“The shield,” said Alvarez ominously. “The shield and nothing but the shield.”

“When and if I can.”

“Two weeks, Beckerman.”

“I simply can’t promise that.”

“Two weeks. You have given Mr. Apostolides deep emotional pain, Beckerman, and he can be extremely unpleasant to people who create anguish for him. Believe me, he can.”

“What are you telling me?” Beckerman demanded.