Crisis! Page 4

  “Like me? Was that what I did?"

  “Great events are propelled by great forces. Equal forces usually hold them back, but when those forces slacken and events get rolling toward some cataclysmic conclusion their momentum builds."

  “Like news that reinforces people's beliefs in the inhumanity of the enemy?"

  “Almost as if we can't work ourselves up to destroying an enemy unless we first convince ourselves that he isn't human. That's why we have to call them ‘gooks’ or ‘fascists’ or ‘commies.'

  “And the stories I was distributing that described the enemy's humorous, sentimental, good-hearted moments—they made us pause and think. But what about Tom Logan? What did he do?"

  “He gave the leaders on both sides a chance to save face—the opportunity to make concessions that the enemy knows you are willing to make, and in the assurance that the enemy also will make concessions that you know about in advance."

  “What kind of concessions?"

  “I don't know. Maybe you'll find out in the next few days, maybe not. I won't. I'll have forgotten. I was making a bad joke about forgetting you in the morning. That won't happen until I mail off the tapes. But the next morning...."

  The darkness in which their voices had hung disembodied was undisturbed for a moment. Then a voice said, “Bill?"

  “Yes?"

  “Maybe you should have something more to forget.” That was the end of the third day.

  * * * *

  When he awoke in the morning she was gone. He looked around the room. It was not different in any meaningful way from the room in which he had awakened three days before: standard hotel. But there was one change. She had left something on the desk, a small machine.

  He got up and walked slowly to it. The machine was a small cassette recorder. On it was a note, written not too legibly by a hand that had scribbled too many notes in a reporter's pad. It said, “Maybe this will help you remember."

  He pushed the button marked “Play."

  Her voice began. “This is Frances Miller, and I want you to remember the person who helped you when you needed help, and you helped more than you can know....” There was more, but he stopped it. She thought it would be simple, but she didn't know what it was to have a mind like a slate periodically wiped clean. Tomorrow she would be a stranger, and he, a man who had no memory of her or their intimacies. No normal person could stand that. And he—he was weak. He did not dare allow himself a reason for not intervening.

  He pressed the rewind button and began to record over the previous message. “Your name is Bill Johnson. You have just saved the world from World War III, and you don't remember. You will find stories in the newspaper about the crisis through which the world has passed. But you will find no mention of the part you played.

  “For this there are several possible explanations...."

  Episode Two

  Child of the Sun

  He opened his eyes. He was lying on a bed. The sheets and blankets were tangled as if he had been thrashing around in his sleep.

  He looked up at the ceiling. Cracks ran across the old plaster like a map of a country he did not recognize. On his left a window let a thin, wintry light through layers of dust. On the right was the rest of the room: shabby, dingy, ordinary. In the center of the room was a black-and-white breakfast table made of metal and plastic; pulled up to it were two matching metal chairs. Beyond the table, toward what appeared to be the door to the room, was a black plastic sofa; a rickety wooden coffee table stood in front of it, and a floor lamp, at one end. Against the left wall was a wooden dresser whose walnut veneer was peeling and, beside it, an imitation-walnut wardrobe. Against the right wall was another door which led, no doubt, to a bathroom. Next to the door four-foot partitions separated from the rest of the room a stove, a sink, a refrigerator, and cabinets.

  Newspapers advertised it as a studio apartment; once it was called a kitchenette.

  The man swung his legs out of bed and sat up, rubbing the sleep out of his face with open hands. He appeared to be a young man, a good-looking man with brown, curly hair and dark eyes and a complexion that looked as if he had been out in the sun. He had a youthful innocence about him, a kind of newly born awareness and childlike interest in everything that made people want to talk to him, to tell him personal problems, secrets they might have shared with no one else.

  But after meeting him what people remembered most were his eyes. They seemed older than the rest of him. They looked at people and at things steadily, as if they were trying to understand, as if they were trying to make sense out of what they saw, as if they saw things other people could not see, as if they had seen too much. Or perhaps they were only the eyes of a man who often forgot and was trying to remember. They looked like that now as they surveyed the room and finally returned to the table and the hand-sized tape recorder that rested on it.

  He stood up and walked to the table and looked down at the recorder. A cassette was in place. He pushed the lever marked “Play.” The cassette hissed for a moment and then a man spoke in a clear, musical voice but with a slight accent, like someone who learned English after adolescence and speaks it better than the natives.

  “Your name is Bill Johnson,” the voice said. “You have just saved the world from World War III, and you don't remember. You will find stories in the newspapers about the crisis through which the world has passed. But you will find no mention of the part you played.

  “For this there are several possible explanations, including the likelihood that I may be lying or deceived or insane. But the explanation on which you must act is that I have told you the truth: you are a man who was born in a future that has almost used up all hope; you were sent to this time and place to alter the events that created the future.

  “Am I telling the truth? The only evidence you have is your apparently unique ability to foresee consequences—it comes like a vision, not of the future because the future can be changed, but of what will happen if events take their natural course, if someone does not act, if you do not intervene.

  “But each time you intervene, no matter how subtly, you change the future from which you came. You exist in this time and outside of time and in the future, and so each change makes you forget.

  “I recorded this message last night to tell you what I know, just as I learned about myself a few days ago by reading a letter, for I am you and we are one, and we have done this many times before...."

  After the voice stopped, the man called Bill Johnson picked up a billfold lying beside the recorder; near it were a few coins, a couple of keys on a ring, and a black pocket comb. In the billfold he found thirty-six dollars, a Visa charge card and a plastic-encased social security card both made out to Bill Johnson, and a receipt for an insured package.

  He tossed the billfold back to the table, walked to the stove, ran a little water from the hot water tap into a teakettle, and put it on the stove. He turned on the gas under it and tried to light it several times before he gave up and turned the knob off. He went into the bathroom, came out a few minutes later, and opened the front door. A newspaper lay on the dusty carpet outside. He picked it up, shut the door, and turned on the overhead light. The bulb burned dimly, as if the current was weak. He made himself a cup of instant coffee with tap water and took it to the table.

  The newspaper was thin, only eight pages. The man leafed through it quickly before he stopped at one item, stared at it for a long moment as if he were not so much reading it as looking through it, tore it out, folded it, and put it into the billfold. He stood up, went to the dresser, put on his clothes, removed a scratched plastic suitcase from the top of the wardrobe, and put into it two extra pairs of pants, three shirts and a jacket, and a handful of socks and underwear; he put his dirty clothes into a paper sack and packed it, remembered the tape recorder and put it in among the clothes, closed the suitcase, picked up the assorted objects on the table and slipped them into his pockets, and walked to the door.

  He look
ed back. The room had been ordinary before. Now it was anonymous. A series of nonentities had lived here, leaving no impression of themselves upon their surroundings. Time itself in its passage had left a cigarette burn on the table, torn a hole in the cushion of a chair, ripped the sofa, scratched the coffee tables and the walls and the doors a thousand times, deposited loesses of dirt and lint in the covers and under the bed.

  Johnson smiled briefly and shut the door behind him.

  Downstairs he stooped to drop the keys on the ring into the mail slot in the door marked with a plaque on which was spelled out the word “Manager.” Just after the keys hit the floor, the door opened. Johnson found himself looking into the face of a middle-aged woman. Her gray hair was braided and wound around her head; her face was creased into a frown of concern.

  “Mr. Johnson,” she said. “You're leaving? So sudden?"

  “I told you I might.” His voice was the voice he had heard from the tape recorder.

  “I know. But....” She hesitated. “I thought—maybe—you were so good to my daughter when she had ... her trouble...."

  “Anyone would have wanted to help,” he said.

  “I know but—she thought—we thought....” Johnson spread his hands helplessly, as if he saw time passing and was unable to stop it. “I'm sorry. I have to leave."

  “You been a good tenant,” the woman said. “No complaining about the brownouts, which nobody can help God knows, or the gas shortages. You're quiet. You don't take girls to your room. And you're easy to talk to. Mr. Johnson, I hate to see you go. Who will I talk to?"

  “There are always people to talk to if you give them a chance. Good-bye,” he said. “May the future be kind."

  Only when Bill Johnson was alone did he feel like a person. When he was with people he felt that he was being watched. Those occasions had a peculiar quality of unreality, as if he were an actor speaking lines that someone else had written for him and he was forced to stand off and watch himself perform.

  Seeing himself at the corner of the block, windswept paper and dust swirling around his legs, waiting without impatience for a city bus to come steaming around the corner. Sitting uneasily over torn plastic, protecting the seat of the pants from the sneaky probe of a broken spring, arriving at last at the interstate bus terminal surrounded by buildings with plyboarded windows scribbled with obscene comments and directions. Purchasing, with the aid of his credit card, a ticket automatically imprinted with a Las Vegas destination. Waiting in a television-equipped chair—the viewer long broken and useless—until a faulty public address system announced the departure of his bus in words blurred almost beyond understanding.

  Hearing the unending whine of tires on interstate concrete, broken only by chuckhole thumps and the stepdown of gears as the bus pulled off the highway for one of its frequent stops to expel or ingest passengers, to refuel with liquefied coal and resupply with boiler water, to allow passengers to consume lukewarm food at dirty bus stations or anonymous diners. Enduring the procession of drowsy days and sleepless nights. Watching people enter and depart, getting on, getting off, individual worlds of perceptions and relationships curiously intersecting in this other world on wheels careening down the naked edges of the world.

  Feeling bodies deposited in the seat beside him, bodies that sometimes remained silent, unanimated lumps of flesh, but sometimes, by a miracle as marvelous as the changing of Pinocchio into a real boy or the mermaid into a woman, transforming themselves into feeling, suffering, rejoicing, talking people.

  Listening to the talk, this imperfect mechanism of communication, supplemented in the light by gesture and expression and body position, anonymous in the night but perhaps thereby as honest as the confessional.

  Listening to an old man, hair bleached and thinned by the years, face carved by life into uniqueness, recalling the past as the present rolled past the window carrying him to the future, a retirement home where he never again would trouble his children or his grandchildren.

  Listening to a girl, with blonde hair and blue eyes and a smooth, unformed face ready for the hand of time to write upon, anticipating rosily her first job, her first apartment, her first big city, her life to come with its romances, pleasures, possessions, and faceless lovers.

  Listening to a man of middle years, dark-haired, dark-eyed, already shaped by a knowledge of what life was about and how a man went about facing up to it, touched now by failure and uncertainty, heading toward a new position, determined to make good but disturbed by the possibility of failing again.

  Listening to a woman of thirty, her life solidified by marriage and family but somehow incomplete and unsatisfying, achieving neither the heights of bliss nor the bedrock of fulfillment, unconsciously missing the excitements of youth, the uncertainty of what the day would bring, the possibilities of flight and pursuit, looking, although she did not know it, for adventure.

  The young man inspected the unrolling fabric of their lives and past it to that part yet concealed from them, and he was kind, as everyone must be kind who knows that the future holds bereavement, disappointment, disillusion, and death.

  Besides, the times were hard: like the curse of the witch who had not been invited to the christening, the Depression had lain like death across the land for five years, the unemployment rate was nearly eighteen percent, and the energy shortage was pressing continually harder on the arteries of civilization. A little kindness came cheap enough, but it was scarce all the same.

  Between conversations on his rolling world, the man named Bill Johnson occasionally removed a newspaper clipping from his billfold and read it again.

  CALIFORNIA GIRL ABDUCTED

  Death Valley, CA (AP)—The four-year-old daughter of Ellen McCleary, managing engineer of the Death Valley Solar Power Project, was reported missing today.

  McCleary returned from her afternoon duties at the Project to discover her housekeeper, Mrs. Fred Ross, bound and gagged behind her own bed and the McCleary girl, Shelly, gone from the home.

  Authorities at the Project and the local sheriff's office have refused to release any information about the possible abductor, but sources close to the Project suggest that oil interests have reason to desire the failure of the Project.

  McCleary was recently divorced from her husband of ten years, Stephen Webster. Webster's location is unknown.

  Authorities will neither confirm nor deny that the abductor left a message behind.

  Below the hill the valley was a lake of flame as Bill Johnson climbed toward the cottage some two hundred yards from the little group of preformed buildings he had left behind. Then, as the path rose, the angle of vision changed and the flame vanished, as if snuffed by a giant finger. Now the valley was lined with thousands of mirrors reflecting the orange-red rays of the dying sun toward a black cylinder towering in their center.

  The air coming up the hill off the desert was hot, like a dragon's breath, and brought with it the scent of alkali dust and the feeling of fluids being sucked through the skin until, if the process continued long enough, only the desiccated husk would be left behind for the study of future archeologists. Johnson knocked on the door of the cottage. When there was no answer he knocked again, and turned to look at the valley, arid and lifeless below him like a vision of the future.

  A small noise and an outpouring of cool air made him turn. In front of him, in the doorway, stood a middle-aged woman with a face as dry as an alkali flat.

  “Mrs. Ross?” Johnson said. “I'm Bill Johnson. I talked on the telephone to Ms. McCleary from Las Vegas, but the connection was bad."

  “Ms. McCleary gets lotsa calls,” the woman said in a voice like dust. “She don't see nobody."

  “I know that,” Johnson said. He smiled understandingly. “But she will want to see me. I've come to help in the disappearance of her daughter."

  Mrs. Ross was unmoved. “Lotsa nuts bother Ms. McCleary about stuff like that. She don't see nobody."

  “I'm sorry to be persistent,” Johnson said,
and his smile illustrated his regret, “but it is important.” His body position was relaxed and reassuring.

  The housekeeper looked at him for the first time and hesitated about closing the door. As she hesitated, a woman's voice came from within the darkened house, “Who is it, Mrs. Ross?"

  “Just another crank, Ms. McCleary,” the housekeeper said, looking behind her, but grasping the door firmly as if in fear that Johnson would burst past her into the sanctity of the cool interior.

  Another woman appeared in the doorway. She was tall, slender, dark, good-looking but a bit haggard with concern and sleeplessness. She stared at Johnson angrily as if she blamed him for the events of the past few days. “What do you want?"

  “My name is Bill Johnson,” he said patiently. “I called you from Las Vegas."

  “And I said I didn't want to see you,” McCleary said and started to turn away. “Shut the door, Mrs. Ross—” she began.

  “I may be the only person who can get your daughter back for you,” Johnson said. It was as if he had leaned a hand against the door to keep it from closing.

  The tall woman turned toward him again, her body rigid with the effort to control the anxiety within. Johnson smiled confidently but without arrogance, looking not at all like a nut or a crank or a criminal.

  “What do you know about my daughter?” McCleary demanded. Then she took a deep breath and turned to Mrs. Ross. “Oh, let him in. He seems harmless enough."

  “The sheriff said not to talk to anybody,” the housekeeper said. “The sheriff said you was to—"

  “I know what the sheriff said, Mrs. Ross,” McCleary interrupted. “But I guess it won't matter if I talk to this person. Sometimes,” she continued, her voice detached and distant, “I have to talk to somebody.” She brought herself back to this place and time. “Let him in and go stand by the telephone in case I find it necessary to call the sheriff.” She looked at Johnson as if warning him against making that step necessary.