Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

“Are you seeing right now?”

“No,” he said. “It takes effort to induce the state. It’s rather like a trance.” A wintry look swept his face. “At its most powerful it’s a kind of double vision, one world overlying the other, so that I can’t be entirely sure which world I’m inhabiting and which is the world I see. Even after all these years I haven’t fully adjusted to that disorientation, that confusion.” He may have shuddered then. “Usually it’s not so intense. For which I’m grateful.”

“Could you show me what it’s like?”

“Here? Now?”

“If you would.”

He studied me a long moment. He moistened his lips, compressed them, frowned, considered. Then abruptly his expression changed, his eyes becoming glazed and fixed as though he were watching a motion picture from the last row of a huge theater, or perhaps as if he were entering deep meditation. His pupils dilated and the aperture, once widened, remained constant regardless of the fluctuations of light as people walked past our table. His face showed evidence of great strain. His breathing was slow, hoarse, and regular. He sat perfectly still; he seemed altogether absent. A minute, maybe, elapsed; for me it was unendurably long. Then his fixity shattered like a falling icicle. He relaxed, shoulders slumping forward; color came to his cheeks in a quick pumping burst; his eyes watered and grew dull; he reached with a shaky hand for his water glass and gulped its contents. He said nothing. I dared not speak.

At length Carvajal said, “How long was I gone?”

“Only a few moments. It seemed a much longer time than it actually was.”

“It was half an hour for me. At least.”

“What did you see? ”

He shrugged. “Nothing I haven’t seen before. The same scenes recur, you know, five, ten, two dozen times. As they do in memory. But memory alters things. The scenes I see never change.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“It was nothing,” he said offhandedly. “Something that’s going to happen next spring. You were there. That’s not surprising, is it? We’re going to spend a lot of time together, you and I, in the months to come.”

“What was I doing?”

“Watching.”

“Watching what?”

“Watching me,” Carvajal said. He smiled, and it was a skeletal smile, a terrible bleak smile, a smile like all the smiles he had smiled that first day in Lombroso’s office. All the unexpected buoyancy of twenty minutes ago had gone out of him. I wished I hadn’t asked for the demonstration; I felt as though I’d talked a dying man into dancing a jig. But after a brief interval of embarrassing silence he appeared to recover. He took a swaggering pull at his cigar, he finished his sherry, he sat straight again. “That’s better,” he said. “It can be exhausting sometimes. Suppose we ask for the menu now, eh?”

“Are you really all right?”

“Perfectly.”

“I’m sorry I asked you to—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It wasn’t as bad as it must have looked to you.”

“Was it frightening, the thing you saw? ”

“Frightening? No, no, not frightening. I told you, it was nothing I haven’t seen before. I’ll tell you about it one of these days.” He summoned the waiter. “I think it’s time to have lunch,” he said.

My menu bore no prices, a sign of class. The list of offerings was incredible: baked salmon steak, Maine lobster, roast sirloin, filet of sole, a whole roster of unobtainables, none of your dreary latter-day soybean clevernesses and seaweed confections. Any first-class New York restaurant might be serving one kind of fresh fish and one sort of meat, but to find nine or ten rarities on the same menu was overwhelming testimony to the power and wealth of the Merchants and Shippers Club’s membership and the high connections of its chef. It would hardly have been more amazing to find the menu listing filet of unicorn and broiled sphinx chop. Having no idea what anything cost, I ordered blithely, cherrystone clams and the sirloin. Carvajal opted for shrimp cocktail and the salmon. He declined wine but urged me to get a half bottle for myself. The wine list likewise was priceless; I picked a ‘91 Latour, probably twenty-five bucks. No sense being stingy on Carvajal’s behalf. I was his guest and he could afford it.

Carvajal was watching me closely. He was more of a puzzle than ever. Certainly he wanted something from me; certainly he had some use for me. He seemed almost to be courting me, in his remote, inarticulate, secretive way. But he was giving no hints. I felt like a man playing poker blindfolded against an opponent who could see my hand.

The demonstration of seeing that I had extracted from him had been so disturbing a punctuation of our conversation that I hesitated to return to the subject, and for a time we talked aimlessly and amiably about wine, food, the stock market, the national economy, politics, and similar neutral themes. Unavoidably we came around to the topic of Paul Quinn, and the air seemed to grow perceptibly heavier.

He said, “Quinn’s doing a good job, isn’t he?”

“I think so.”

“He must be the city’s most popular mayor in decades. He does have charm, eh? And tremendous energy. Too much, sometimes, yes? He often seems impatient, unwilling to go through the usual political channels to get things done.”

“I suppose,” I said. “He’s impetuous, sure. A fault of youth. He isn’t even forty years old, remember.”

“He should go easier. There are times when his impatience makes him high-handed. Mayor Gottfried was high-handed, and you recall what happened to him.”

“Gottfried was an out-and-out dictator. He tried to turn New York City into a police state and—” I halted, dismayed. “Wait a second. Are you hinting that Quinn’s in real danger of assassination?”

“Not really. No more than any other major political figure.”

“Have you seen anything that—”

“No. Nothing.”

“I have to know. If you’re in possession of any sort of data concerning an attempt on the mayor’s life, don’t play games with it. I want to hear about it.”

Carvajal looked amused. “You misunderstand. Quinn’s in no personal danger that I’m aware of, and I chose my words badly if I implied that he is. What I meant is that Gottfried’s tactics were gaining enemies for him. If he hadn’t been murdered he might, just might, have begun running into problems getting re-elected. Quinn’s making enemies lately, too. As he bypasses the City Council more and more, he’s upsetting certain blocs of voters.”

“The blacks, yes, but—”

“Not only the blacks. The Jews in particular are getting unhappy about him.”

“I wasn’t aware of that. The polls don’t—”

“Not yet, no. But it’ll begin to surface in a few months. His stand on that religious-instruction business in the schools, for example, has apparently already hurt him in the Jewish neighborhoods. And his comments about Israel at the dedication of the new Bank of Kuwait Tower on Lexington Avenue—”

“That dedication doesn’t take place for another three weeks,” I pointed out.

Carvajal laughed. “It doesn’t? Oh, I’ve mixed up again, haven’t I! I did see his speech on television, I thought, but perhaps—”

“You didn’t see it. You saw it.”

“No doubt. No doubt.”

“What is he going to say about Israel.?”

“Just a few light quips. But the Jewish people here are extremely sensitive to such remarks, and the reaction wasn’t — isn’t going to be — good. New York’s Jews, you know, traditionally mistrust Irish politicians. Especially Irish mayors, but they weren’t even all that fond of the Kennedys before the assassinations.”