“Is there anything I can do to help you?” I said softly.

“There is, Leo. One thing.”

“Anything.”

“Find some way to meet Vornan-19 yourself. You’re an important scientific figure. You can pull the right strings. Sit down and talk with him. Find out if he’s really a faker.”

“Of course he is.”

“Find it out, Leo.”

“And if he’s really what he says he is?”

Jack’s eyes blazed with unsettling intensity. “Question him about his own era, then. Get him to tell you more about this atomic energy thing. Get him to tell you when it was invented — by whom. Maybe it didn’t come up until five hundred years from now — an independent rediscovery, nothing to do with my work. Wring the truth out of him, Leo. I have to know.”

What could I say?

Could I tell him, Jack, you’ve gone skully? Could I beg him to enter therapy? Could I offer a quick amateur diagnosis of paranoia? Yes, and lose forever my dearest friend. But to become a partner in psychosis by solemnly quizzing Vornan-19 this way was distasteful to me. Assuming I could ever get access to him, assuming there was some way of obtaining an individual audience, I had no wish to stain myself by treating the mountebank even for a moment as though his pretensions should be taken seriously.

I could lie to Jack. I could invent a reassuring conversation with the man.

But that was treachery. Jack’s dark, tormented eyes begged for honest aid. I’ll humor him, I thought.

“I’ll do what I can,” I promised.

His hand clasped mine. We walked quietly back to the house.

The next morning, as I packed, Shirley came into my room. She wore a clinging, pearly iridescent wrap that miraculously enhanced the contours of her body. I who had grown callously accustomed to her nakedness was reminded anew that she was beautiful, and that my uncle-like love for her incorporated a nugget of repressed though irrepressible lust.

She said, “How much did he tell you out there yesterday?”

“Everything.”

“About the manuscript? About what he’s afraid of?”

“Yes.”

“Can you help him, Leo?”

“I don’t know. He wants me to get hold of the man from 2999 and check everything out with him. That may not be so easy. And it probably won’t do much good even if I can.”

“He’s very disturbed, Leo. I’m worried about him. You know, he looks so healthy on the outside, and yet this thing has been burning through him year after year. He’s lost all perspective.”

“Have you thought of getting professional help for him?”

“I don’t dare,” she whispered. “It’s the one thing not even I can suggest. This is the great moral crisis of his life, and I’ve got to take it that way. I can’t suggest that it’s a sickness. At least not yet. Perhaps if you came back here able to convince him that this man’s a hoax, that would help Jack start letting go of his obsession. Will you do it?”

“Whatever I can, Shirley.”

Suddenly she was in my arms. Her face was thrust into the hollow between my cheek and my shoulder; the globes of her breasts, discernible through the thin wrap, crushed themselves against my chest, and her fingertips dug into my back. She was trembling and sobbing. I held her close, until I began to tremble for another reason, and gently I broke the contact between us. An hour later I was bumping over the dirt road, heading for Tucson and the transportation pod that was waiting to bring me back to California.

I reached Irvine at nightfall. A thumb to the doorplate and my house opened for me. Sealed for three weeks, climate-proofed, it had a musty, tomblike odor. The familiar litter of papers and spools everywhere was reassuring. I went in just as a light rain began to fall. Wandering from room to room, I felt that sense of an ending that I used to know on the day after the last day of summer; I was alone again, the holiday was over, the Arizona brightness had given way to the misty dark of California winter. I could not expect to find Shirley scampering sprite-like about the house, nor Jack uncoiling some characteristically involuted idea for my consideration. The homecoming sadness was even sharper this time, for I had lost the strong, sturdy Jack I had depended on for so many years, and in his place there had appeared a troubled stranger full of irrational doubts. Even golden Shirley stood revealed as no goddess but a worried wife. I had gone to them with a sickness in my own soul and had come home healed of that, but it had been a costly visit.

I cut out the opaquers and peered outside at the Pacific’s surging surf, at the reddish strip of beach, at the white swirls of fog invading the twisted pines that grew where sand yielded to soil. The staleness in the house gave way as that piney salt air was sucked through the vents. I slipped a music cube into the scanner, and the thousands of tiny speakers embedded in the walls spun a skein of Bach for me. I allowed myself a few ounces of cognac. For a while I sat quietly sipping, letting the music cocoon me, and gradually I felt a kind of peace come over me. My hopeless work awaited me in the morning. My friends were in anguish. The world was convulsed by an apocalyptic cult and now was beset by a self-appointed emissary from the epochs ahead. Yet there had always been false prophets loose in the land, men had always struggled with problems so heavy they strained their souls, and the good had always been plagued with shattering doubts and turmoils. Nothing was new. I need feel no pity for myself. Live each day for itself, I thought, meet the challenges as they arise, brood not, do your best, and hope for a glorious resurrection. Fine. Let the morrow come.

After a while I remembered to reactivate my telephone. It was a mistake.

My staff knows that I am incommunicado when I am in Arizona. All incoming calls are shunted to my secretary’s line, and she deals with them as she sees fit, never consulting me. But if anything of major importance comes up, she rings it into the storage cell of my home telephone so that I’ll find out about it right away when I return. The instant I brought my phone to life, the storage cell disgorged its burden; the chime sounded and automatically I nudged the output switch. My secretary’s long, bony face appeared on the screen.

“I’m calling on January fifth, Dr. Garfield. There have been several calls for you today from a Sanford Kralick of the White House staff. Mr Kralick wants to speak to you urgently and insisted a number of times that he be put through to Arizona. He pushed me quite hard, too. When I finally got it across to him that you couldn’t be disturbed, he asked me to have you call him at the White House as soon as possible, any hour of the day or night. He said it was on a matter vital to national security. The number is—”

That was all. I had never heard of Mr. Sanford Kralick, but of course Presidential aides come and go. This was perhaps the fourth time the White House had called me in the past eight years, since I had inadvertently become part of the available supply of learned pundits. A profile of me in one of the weekly journals for the feeble-minded had labeled me as a man to be watched, an adventurer on the frontiers of thought, a dominant force in American physics, and since then I had been manipulated to the status of a star scientist. I was occasionally asked to lend my name to this or that official statement on the National Purpose or on the Ethical Structure of Humanity; I was called to Washington to guide beefy Congressmen through the intricacics of particle theory when appropriations for new accelerators were under discussion; I was dragooned as part of the backdrop when some bold explorer of space was being awarded the Goddard Prize. The foolishness even spread to my own profession. which should have known better; occasionally I keynoted an annual meeting of the A.A.A.S., or tried to explain to a delegation of oceanographers or archaeologists what was taking place out on my particular frontier of thought. I admit hesitantly that I came to welcome this nonsense, not for the notoriety it provided, but simply because it supplied me with a virtuous-sounding excuse for escaping from my own increasingly less rewarding work. Remember Garfield’s Law: star scientists usually are men in a private creative bind. Having ceased to produce meaningful results, they go on the public-appearance circuit and solace themselves with the reverence of the ignorant.