William Tenn: The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway

You had to like it—so long as you had eyes—whether or not your appreciation had been limited to representational painting until now; even if, in fact, you’d never particularly cared about painting of any school.

I don’t want to sound maudlin, but I actually felt tears in my eyes. Anyone who was at all sensitive to beauty would have reacted the same way.

Not Morniel, though. “Oh, that kind of stuff,” he said as if a great light had broken on him. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted that kind of stuff?”

Mr. Glescu clutched at Morniel’s dirty tee-shirt. “Do you mean you have paintings like this, too?”

“Not paintings- painting. Just one. I did it last week as a sort of experiment, but I wasn’t satisfied with the way it turned out, so I gave it to the girl downstairs. Care to take a look at it?”

“Oh, yes! Very, very much!”

Morniel reached for the book and tossed it casually on the bed. “Okay,” he said. “Come on. It won’t take more than a minute or two.”

As we trooped downstairs, I found myself boiling with perplexity. One thing I was sure of—as sure as of the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer had lived before Algernon Swinburne—nothing that Morniel had ever done or had the capacity of ever doing could come within a million esthetic miles of the reproduction in that book. And for all of his boasting, for all of his seemingly inexhaustible conceit, I was certain that he also knew it.

He stopped before a door two floors below and rapped on it. There was no answer. He waited a few seconds and knocked again. Still no answer.

“Damn,” he said. “She isn’t home. And I did want you to see that one.”

“I want to see it,” Mr. Glescu told him earnestly. “I want to see anything that looks like your mature work. But time is growing so short—”

Morniel snapped his fingers. “Tell you what. Anita has a couple of cats she asks me to feed whenever she’s away for a while, so she’s given me a key to her apartment. Suppose I whip upstairs and get it?”

“Fine!” Mr. Glescu said happily, taking a quick look at his forefinger. “But please hurry.”

“Will do.” And then, as Morniel turned to go up the stairs, he caught my eye. And he gave me the signal, the one we use whenever we go “shopping.” It meant: “Talk to the man. Keep him interested.”

I got it. The book. I’d seen Morniel in action far too many times not to remember that casual gesture of tossing it on the bed as anything but a casual gesture. He’d just put it where he could find it when he wanted it—fast. He was going upstairs to hide it in some unlikely spot and when Mr. Glescu had to take off for his own time—well, the book would just not be available.

Smooth? Very pretty damned smooth, I’d say. And Morniel Mathaway would paint the paintings of Morniel Mathaway. Only he wouldn’t paint them.

He’d copy them.

Meanwhile, the signal snapped my mouth open and automatically started me talking.

“Do you paint yourself, Mr. Glescu?” I asked. I knew that would be a good gambit.

“Oh, no! Of course, I wanted to be an artist when I was a boy—I imagine every critic starts out that way—and I even committed a few daubs of my own. But they were very bad, very bad indeed! I found it far easier to write about paintings than to do them. Once I began reading the life of Morniel Mathaway, I knew I’d found my field. Not only did I empathize closely with his paintings, but he seemed so much like a person I could have known and liked. That’s one of the things that puzzles me. He’s quite different from what I imagined.”

I nodded. “I bet he is.”

“Of course history has a way of adding stature and romance to any important figure. And I can see several things about his personality that the glamorizing process of the centuries could—but I shouldn’t go on in this fashion, Mr. Dantziger. You’re his friend.”

“About as much of a friend as he’s got in the world,” I told him, “which isn’t saying much.”

And all the time I was trying to figure it out. But the more I figured, the more confused I got. The paradoxes in the thing. How could Morniel Mathaway become famous five hundred years from now by painting pictures that he first saw in a book published five hundred years from now? Who painted the pictures? MornieI Mathaway? The book said so, and with the book in his possession, he would certainly do them. But he’d be copying them out of the book. So who painted the original pictures?

Mr. Glescu looked worriedly at his forefinger. “I’m running out of time—practically none left!”

He sped up the stairs, with me behind him. When we burst into the studio, I braced myself for the argument over the book. I wasn’t too happy about it, because I liked Mr. Glescu.

The book wasn’t there; the bed was empty. And two other things weren’t there—the time machine and Morniel Mathaway.

“He left in it!” Mr. Glescu gasped. “He stranded me here! He must have figured out that getting inside and closing the door made it return!”

“Yeah, he’s a great figurer,” I said bitterly. This I hadn’t bargained for. This I wouldn’t have helped to bring about. “And he’ll probably figure out a very plausible story to tell the people in your time to explain how the whole thing happened. Why should he work his head off in the twentieth century when he can be an outstanding, hero-worshipped celebrity in the twenty-fifth?”

“But what will happen if they ask him to paint merely one picture—”

“He’ll probably tell them he’s already done his work and feels he can no longer add anything of importance to it. He’ll no doubt end up giving lectures on himself. Don’t worry, he’ll make out. It’s you I’m worried about. You’re stuck here. Are they likely to send a rescue party after you?”

Mr. Glescu shook his head miserably. “Every scholar who wins the award has to sign a waiver of responsibility, in case he doesn’t return. The machine may be used only once in fifty years—and by that time, some other scholar will claim and be given the right to witness the storming of the Bastille, the birth of Gautama Buddha or something of the sort. No, I’m stuck here, as you phrased it. Is it very bad, living in this period?”

I slapped him on the shoulder. I was feeling very guilty. “Not so bad. Of course, you’ll need a social security card, and I don’t know how you go about getting one at your age. And possibly—I don’t know for sure—the F.B.I. or immigration authorities may want to question you, since you’re an illegal alien, kind of.”

He looked appalled. “Oh, dear! That’s quite bad enough!”

And then I got the idea. “No, it needn’t be. Tell you what. Morniel has a social security card—he had a job a couple of years ago. And he keeps his birth certificate in that bureau drawer along with other personal papers. Why don’t you just assume his identity? He’ll never show you up as an imposter!”

“Do you think I could? Won’t I be—won’t his friends—his relatives—”

“Parents both dead, no relatives I ever heard about. And I told you I’m the closest thing to a friend he’s got.” I examined Mr. Glescu thoughtfully. “You could get away with it. Maybe grow a beard and dye it blond. Things like that. Naturally, the big problem would be earning a living. Being a specialist on Mathaway and the art movements that derived from him wouldn’t get you fed an awful lot right now.”

He grabbed at me. “I could paint! I’ve always dreamed of being a painter! I don’t have much talent, but there are all sorts of artistic novelties I know about, all kinds of graphic innovations that don’t exist in your time. Surely that would be enough—even without talent—to make a living for me on some third- or fourth-rate level!”