Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

“You’re firing me?” I muttered.

“I’m sorry, Lew.”

“I can make you President, Paul!”

“I’ll have to get there on my own, I guess.”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” I said.

“That’s a harsh word.”

“But you do, right? You think you’ve been getting advice from a dangerous lunatic, and it doesn’t matter that the lunatic’s advice was always right, you have to get rid of him now, because it would look bad, yes, it would look very bad if people started thinking you had a witch doctor on your staff, and so—”

“Please, Lew,” Quinn said. “Don’t make this any harder for me.” He crossed the room and caught my limp, cold hand in his fierce grip. His face was close to mine. Here it came: the famed Quinn Treatment, once more, one last time. Urgently he said, “Believe me, I’m going to miss you around here. As a friend, as an adviser. I may be making a big mistake. And it’s painful to have to do this. But you’re right: I can’t take the risk, Lew. I can’t take the risk.”

I cleaned out my desk after lunch and went home, went to what passed for home for me, and wandered around the shabby half-empty rooms the rest of the afternoon, trying to comprehend what had happened to me. Fired? Yes, fired. I had taken off my mask, and they hadn’t liked what was underneath. I had stopped pretending to science and had admitted sorcery, I had told Mardikian the true truth, and now no more would I go to City Hall and sit among the mighty, and no longer would I shape and guide the destinies of the charismatic Paul Quinn, and when he took the oath of office in Washington come January five years hence I would watch the scene on television from afar, the forgotten man, the shunned man, the leper of the administration. I felt too forlorn even to cry. Wifeless, jobless, purposeless, I roamed my dreary flat for hours, and, wearying of that, stood idly by a window for an hour or more, watching the sky turn leaden, watching the unexpected flakes of the season’s first snowfall begin to descend, watching cold night spread over Manhattan.

Then anger displaced despair and, furious, I phoned Carvajal.

“Quinn knows,” I said. “About the Sudakis resignation. I gave the memo to Mardikian and he conferred with the mayor.”

“Yes?”

“And they fired me. They think I’m crazy. Mardikian checked with Sudakis, who said he didn’t have any intention of quitting, and Mardikian said he and the mayor were worried about my wild crystal-ball predictions, they wanted me to go back to straight projective stuff, so I told them about seeing. I didn’t mention you. I said I was able to do it, and that was where I was getting stuff like the Thibodaux trip and the Sudakis resignation, and Mardikian made me repeat everything to Quinn, and Quinn said it was too dangerous for him to keep a lunatic like me on his staff. He put it more gently than that, though. I’m on leave until June thirtieth, and then I get cut from the city payroll.”

“I see,” said Carvajal. He didn’t sound upset and he didn’t sound sympathetic.

“You knew this would happen.”

“Did I?”

“You must have. Don’t play games with me, Carvajal. Did you know I’d get thrown out if I told the mayor that Sudakis was going to quit in January?”

Carvajal said nothing.

“Did you know or didn’t you?”

I was shouting.

“I knew,” he said.

“You knew. Of course you knew. You know everything. But you didn’t tell me.”

“You didn’t ask,” he replied innocently.

“It didn’t occur to me to ask. God knows why, but it didn’t. Couldn’t you have warned me? Couldn’t you have said, Keep a tight lip, you’re in worse trouble than you suspect, you’re going to get tossed out on your ass if you aren’t careful?”

“How can you ask such a question this late in the game, Lew?”

“You were willing to sit back calmly and let my career be destroyed?”

“Think carefully,” Carvajal said. “I knew you’d be dismissed, yes. Just as I know Sudakis will resign. But what could I do about it? To me your dismissal has already happened, remember. It isn’t subject to prevention.”

“Oh, Jesus! Conservation of reality again?”

“Of course. Really, Lew, do you think I’d warn you against anything that might seem to be in your power to change? How futile that would be! How foolish! We don’t change things, do we?”

“No, we don’t,” I said bitterly. “We stand off to one side and politely let them happen. If necessary we help them happen. Even if it involves the destruction of a career, even if it involves the ruination of an attempt to stabilize the political fortunes of this miserable misgoverned country by guiding into the presidency a man who — Oh, Jesus, Carvajal, you led me right into this, didn’t you? You set me up for the whole thing. And you don’t give a damn. Isn’t that so? You simply don’t give a damn!”

“There are worse things than losing a job, Lew.”

“But everything I was building, everything I was trying to shape — How in God’s name am I going to help Quinn now? What am I going to do? You’ve broken me!”

“What has happened is what had to happen,” he said.

“Damn you and your pious acceptance!”

“I thought you had come to share that acceptance.”

“I don’t share anything,” I told him. “I was out of my mind ever to get involved with you, Carvajal. Because of you I’ve lost Sundara, I’ve lost my place at Quinn’s side, I’ve lost my health and my reason, I’ve lost everything that mattered to me, and for what? For what? For one stinking squint into the future that may have been nothing but a quick fatigue high? For a head full of morbid fatalistic philosophy and half-baked theories about the flow of time? Christ! I wish I’d never heard of you! You know what you are, Carvajal? You’re a kind of vampire, some sort of bloodsucker, pulling energy and vitality out of me, using me to support your strength as you drift along toward the end of your own useless, sterile, motiveless, pointless life.”

Carvajal didn’t seem at all moved. “I’m sorry to hear you so disturbed, Lew,” he said mildly.

“What else are you concealing from me? Come on, give me all the bad news. Do I slip on the ice at Christmas and break my back? Do I use up my savings and get shot holding up a bank? Am I going to become a sniffer addict next? Come on, tell me what’s heading toward me now!”

“Please, Lew.”

“Tell me!”

“You ought to try to calm down.”

“Tell me!”

“I’m holding nothing back. You won’t have an eventful winter. It’s going to be a time of transition for you, of meditation and inner change, without any dramatic external events. And then — and then — I can’t tell you any more, Lew. You know I can’t see beyond this coming spring.”

Those last few words hit me like a knee in the belly. Of course. Of course! Carvajal was going to die. A man who would do nothing to prevent his own death wasn’t going to interfere while someone else, even his only friend, marched serenely on toward catastrophe. He might even nudge that friend down the slippery slope if he felt a nudge was appropriate. It was naпve of me to have thought Carvajal would ever have done anything to protect me from harm once he had seen the harm coming. The man was bad news. And the man had set me up for disaster.

I said, “Any deal that may have existed between us is off. I’m afraid of you. I don’t want anything more to do with you, Carvajal. You won’t hear from me again.”

He was silent. Perhaps he was laughing quietly. Almost certainly he was laughing quietly.