William Tenn - The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway

It was. It certainly was. But not on the third- or fourth-rate level. On the first. Mr. Glescu-Morniel Mathaway is the finest painter alive today. And the unhappiest.

“What’s the matter with these people?” he asked me wildly after his last exhibition. “Praising me like that! I don’t have an ounce of real talent in me; all my work, all, is completely derivative. I’ve tried to do something, anything, that was completely my own, but I’m so steeped in Mathaway that I just can’t seem to make my own personality come through. And those idiotic critics go on raving about me—and the work isn’t even my own!”

“Then whose is it?” I wanted to know.

“Mathaway’s, of course,” he said bitterly. “We thought there couldn’t be a time paradox—I wish you could read all the scientific papers on the subject; they fill whole libraries—because it isn’t possible, the time specialists argue, for a painting, say, to be copied from a future reproduction and so have no original artist. But that’ s what I’m doing! I’m copying from that book by memory!”

I wish I could tell him the truth—he’s such a nice guy, especially compared to the real fake of a Mathaway, and he suffers so much.

But I can’t.

You see, he’s deliberately trying not to copy those paintings. He’s working so hard at it that he refuses to think about that book or even discuss it. I finally got him to recently, for a few sentences, and you know what? He doesn’t actually remember, except pretty hazily!

Of course he wouldn’t—he’s the real Morniel Mathaway and there is no paradox. But if I ever told him that he was actually painting the pictures instead of merely copying them from memory, he’d lose whatever little self-confidence he has. So I have to let him think he’s a phony when he’s nothing of the sort.

“Forget it,” I go on telling him. “A buck’s a buck.”