Robert Silverberg - The Masks of Time

I prepared myself for death, thinking it properly absurd that I should perish in the home of one lunatic at the whim of another while I was engaged on this lunatic mission. But still I fought my way onward through the smoke and noise, through the tangled, screaming figures of the elegant guests, through the sliding walls and collapsing floors. Once more it seemed to me I saw Vornan moving ahead of me. With maniacal persistence I went after him, feeling that it was somehow my duty to find him and lead him out of the building before it demolished itself in one final expression of petulance. But I came to a barrier beyond which I could not pass. Invisible yet impermeable, it held me fast. “Vornan!” I shouted, for now I saw him plainly. He was chatting with a tall, attractive woman of middle years who seemed wholly undisturbed by what had happened. “Vornan! It’s me, Leo Garfield!” But he could hear nothing. He gave the woman his arm, and they strolled away, sauntering in an irregular course through the chaos. I hammered with my fists against the invisible wall.

“That’s no way to get out,” said a husky feminine voice. “You couldn’t smash that in a million years.”

I turned. A vision in silver had appeared behind me: a slender girl, no older than nineteen, whose entire form gleamed in whiteness. Her hair had a silken glitter; her eyes were silver mirrors; her lips were silvered; her body was encased in a silver gown. I looked again and realized it was no gown, but merely a layer of paint; I detected nipples, a navel, twin muscle-ridges up the flat belly. From throat to toes she wore the silver spray, and by the ghostly light she seemed radiant, unreal, unattainable. I had not seen her before at the party.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Bruton took us on a tour of the control room. Vornan pressed some buttons when we weren’t watching him. I think the house is going to explode.”

She touched her silvery hand to her silvery lips, “No, it won’t go up. But we’d better get out anyway. If it’s going through random changes, it might squeeze everybody flat before things settle down. Come with me.”

“You know how to get out?”

“Of course,” she said. “Just follow along! There’s an exit pouch three rooms from here… unless it’s moved.”

Mine not to reason why. She darted through a hatch that yawned suddenly, and mesmerized by the view of her dainty silvered rump, I followed. She led me along until I gasped with fatigue. We leaped over thresholds that undulated like serpents; we burrowed through heaps of giddy inebriates; we soared past impediments that came and went in mindless palpitations. I had never seen anything so beautiful as this burnished statue come to life, this girl of silver, nude and sleek and swift, moving purposefully through the dislocations of the house. She halted by a quivering strip of wall and said, “In here.”

“Where?”

“There.” The wall yawned wide. She thrust me inside and got in after me; then with a quick pirouette she moved around me, pressed on something, and we were outside the house.

The blast of January wind struck us like a whirling sword.

I had forgotten about the weather; we had been wholly shielded from it throughout the evening. Suddenly we were exposed to it, I in my light evening clothes, the girl in nudity covered only by a molecule-thick layer of silver paint. She stumbled and went down in a snowbank, rolling over as though aflame; I tugged her to her feet. Where could we go? Behind us the house churned and throbbed like a cephalopod gone berserk. Until this moment the girl had seemed to know what to do, but the frigid air numbed and stunned her, and now she trembled in paralysis, frightened and pathetic.

“The parking lot,” I said.

We raced for it. It lay at least a quarter of a mile away, and we did not travel on any covered glidewalk now; we ran over frozen ground made hazardous by mounds of snow and rivers of ice. I was so stoked by excitement that I hardly noticed the cold, but it punished the girl brutally. She fell several times before we reached the lot. There it was at last. The vehicles of the rich and mighty were neatly arranged under a protective shield. Somehow we erupted through; Bruton’s parking attendants had gone out of control in the general failure of power, and they made no attempt to stop us. They circled in buzzing bewilderment, flashing their lights on and off. I dragged the girl to the nearest limousine, pulled open its door, thrust her inside, and dropped down beside her.

Within it was warm and womblike. She lay gasping, shivering, congealed. “Hold me!” she cried, “I’m freezing! For God’s sake, hold me!”

My arms wrapped tight around her. Her slim form nestled against mine. In a moment her panic was gone; she was warm again, and as self-possessed as she had been when she led us from the house. I felt her hands against me. Willingly I surrendered to her silvered lure. My lips went to hers and came away tasting of metal; her cool thighs encircled me; I felt as though I were making love to some artfully crafted engine, but the silver paint was no more than skin deep, and the sensation vanished as I reached warm flesh beneath it. In our passionate struggles her silver hair revealed itself as a wig; it slipped away, displaying an unsilvered skull, bald as porcelain, below. I knew her now: she must be Bruton’s daughter. His gene for hairlessness bred true. She sighed and drew me down into oblivion.

Kralick said, “We lost control of events. We have to keep a tighter grip on things next time. Which one of you was with Vornan when he got hold of the controls?”

“I was,” I said. “There was absolutely no way of preventing what took place. He moved quickly. Neither Bruton nor I suspected that he might do any such thing.”

“You can’t ever let yourself get off guard with him,” Kralick said in anguish. “You have to assume at any given moment that he’s capable of doing the most outrageous thing imaginable. Haven’t I tried to get that point across to you before?”

“We are basically rational people,” said Heyman. “We do not find it easy to adjust to the presence of an irrational person.”

A day had passed since the debacle at Wesley Bruton’s wondrous villa. Miraculously, there had been no fatalities; Kralick had signaled for Government troops, who had pulled all the guests from the throbbing, swaying house in time. Vornan-19 had turned up standing outside the house, watching calmly as it went through its antics. The damage to the house, I heard Kralick mutter, had been several hundred thousand dollars. The Government would pay. I did not envy Kralick his job of calming Wesley Bruton down. But at least the utilities magnate could not say that he had suffered unjustly. His own urge to lionize the man from the future had brought this trouble upon him. Bruton surely had seen the reels of Vornan’s trip through the capitals of Europe, and was aware that unpredictable things took place around and about Vornan. Yet Bruton had insisted on giving the party, and had insisted too on taking Vornan to the control room of his mansion. I could not feel very sorry for him. As for the guests who had been interrupted in their revelry by the cataclysm, they deserved little pity either. They had come to stare at the time traveler and to make fools of themselves. They had done both, and what harm was it if Vornan had chosen to make fools of them in return?

Kralick was right to be displeased with us, though. It was our responsibility to keep such things from happening. We had not discharged that responsibility very well on our first outing with the man from the future.

A little grimly, we prepared to continue the tour.

Today we were visiting the New York Stock Exchange. I have no idea how that came to be on Vornan’s itinerary. Certainly he did not request it; I suspect that some bureaucrat in the capital decided arbitrarily that it would be a worthy propaganda move to let the futuristic sightseer have a look at the bastion of the capitalistic system. For my part I felt a little like a visitor from some alien environment myself, since I had never been near the Stock Exchange nor had any dealings with it. This is not the snobbery of the academic man, please understand. If I had time and inclination, I would gladly have joined the fun of speculating in Consolidated System Mining and United Ultronics and the other current favorites. But my salary is a good one and I have a small private income besides, ample for my needs; since life is too short to allow us to sample every experience, I have lived within my income and devoted my energy to my work, rather than to the market. In a kind of eager ignorance, then, I readied myself for our visit. I felt like a grade-school boy on an outing.