He built the first of the shrines in Rachel Vaisey’s bidet, an ugly assemblage of hypodermic syringes, fractured sunglasses and blood-stained tampons. Other shrines appeared in corridor alcoves and unoccupied beds, relics of a yet to be experienced future left here as some kind of psychic deposit against his treatment’s probable failure. After an outraged Dr Vaisey insisted on a thorough inspection Slade discharged himself from the clinic and made a new home in the sky.
The shrines were cleared away, but one alone had been carefully preserved. Franklin opened the centre drawer of his desk and stared at the assemblage laid out like a corpse on its bier of surgical cotton. There was a labelled fragment of lunar rock stolen from the NASA museum in Houston; a photograph taken with a zoom lens of Marion in a hotel bathroom, her white body almost merging into the tiles of the shower stall; a faded reproduction of Dali’s Persistence of Memory, with its soft watches and expiring embryo; a set of leucotomes whose points were masked by metal peas; and an emergency organ-donor card bequeathing to anyone in need his own brain. Together the items formed an accurate anti-portrait of all Franklin’s obsessions, a side-chapel of his head. But Slade had always been a keen observer, more interested in Franklin than in anyone else.
How did he elude the fugues? When Franklin had last seen him at the clinic Slade was already suffering from fugues that lasted an hour or more. Yet somehow he had sprung a trapdoor in Trippett’s mind, given him his vision of green fields.
When Rachel Vaisey called to complain about the unauthorized drive Franklin brushed this aside. He tried to convey his excitement over Trippett’s outburst.
‘He was there, Rachel, completely himself, for something like thirty seconds. And there was no effort involved, no need to remember who he was. It’s frightening to think that I’d given him up for lost.’
‘It is strange — one of those inexplicable remissions. But try not to read too much into it.’ Dr Vaisey stared with distaste at the perimeter camera mounted beside its large turntable. Like most members of her staff, she was only too glad that the clinic was closing, and that the few remaining patients would soon be transferred to some distant sanatorium or memorial home. Within a month she and her colleagues would return to the universities from which they had been seconded. None of them had yet been affected by the fugues, and that Franklin should be the only one to succumb seemed doubly cruel, confirming all their longstanding suspicions about this wayward physician. Franklin had been the first of the NASA psychiatrists to identify the time-sickness, to have seen the astronauts’ original fugues for what they were.
Sobered by the prospect facing Franklin, she managed a conciliatory smile. ‘You say he spoke coherently. What did he talk about?’
‘He babbled of green fields.’ Franklin stood behind his desk, staring at the open drawer hidden from Dr Vaisey’s suspicious gaze. ‘I’m sure he actually saw them.’
‘A childhood memory? Poor man, at least he seems happy, wherever he really is.’
‘Rachel…!’ Franklin drove the drawer into the desk. ‘Trippett was staring at the desert along the road — nothing but rock, dust and a few dying palms, yet he saw green fields, lakes, forests of trees. We’ve got to keep the clinic open a little longer, I feel I have a chance now. I want to go back to the beginning and think everything through again.’
Before Dr Vaisey could stop him, Franklin had started to pace the floor, talking to his desk. ‘Perhaps the fugues are a preparation for something, and we’ve been wrong to fear them. The symptoms are so widespread, there’s virtually an invisible epidemic, one in a hundred of the population involved, probably another five unaware that they’ve been affected, certainly out here in Nevada.’
‘It’s the desert — topography clearly plays a part in the fugues. It’s been bad for you, Robert. For all of us.’
‘All the more reason to stay and face it. Rachel, listen: I’m willing to work with the others more than I have done, this time we’ll be a true team.’
‘That is a concession.’ Dr Vaisey spoke without irony. ‘But too late, Robert. You’ve tried everything.’
‘I’ve tried nothing…’ Franklin placed a hand on the huge lens of the perimeter camera, hiding the deformed figure who mimicked his gestures from the glass cell. Distorted reflections of himself had pursued him all day, as if he were being presented with brief clips from an obscene film in which he would shortly star. If only he had spent more time on Trippett, rather than on the volunteer panels of housewives and air force personnel. But the old astronaut intimidated him, touched all his feelings of guilt over his complicity in the space programme. As a member of the medical support team, he had helped to put the last astronauts into space, made possible the year-long flights that had set off the whole time-plague, cracked the cosmic hour-glass.
‘And Trippett? Where are you going to hide him away?’
‘We aren’t. His daughter has volunteered to take him. She seems a reasonable girl.’
Giving in to her concern, Dr Vaisey stepped forward and took Franklin’s hand from the camera lens. ‘Robert — are you going to be all right? Your wife will look after you, you say. I wish you’d let me meet her. I could insist…’
Franklin was thinking about Trippett — the news that the old astronaut would still be there, presumably living up in Soleri II, had given him hope. The work could go on He felt a sudden need to be alone in the empty clinic, to be rid of Dr Vaisey, this well-meaning, middle-aged neurologist with her closed mind and closed world. She was staring at him across the desk, clearly unsure what to do about Franklin, her eyes distracted by the gold and silver swallows that swooped across the runways. Dr Vaisey had always regretted her brief infatuation with Slade. Franklin remembered their last meeting in her office, when Slade had taken out his penis and masturbated in front of her, then insisted on mounting his hot semen on a slide. Through the microscope eyepiece Rachel Vaisey had watched the thousand replicas of this young psychotic frantically swimming. After ten minutes they began to falter. Within an hour they were all dead.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. Marion knows exactly what I need. And Slade will be around to help her.’
‘Slade? How on earth…?’
Franklin eased the centre drawer from his desk. Carefully, as if handling an explosive device, he offered the shrine to Dr Vaisey’s appalled gaze.
‘Take it, Rachel. It’s the blueprint of our joint space programme. You might care to come along…’
When Dr Vaisey had gone, Franklin returned to his desk. First, he took off his wristwatch and massaged the raw skin of his forearm. Every fifteen minutes he returned the hand of the stopwatch to zero. This nervous tic, a timetwitch, had long been a joke around the clinic. But after the onset of a fugue the accumulating total gave him a reasonably exact record of its duration. A crude device, he was almost glad that he would soon escape from time altogether.
Though not yet. Calming himself, he looked at the last pages of his diary.
June 19 — fugues: 8-30 to 9-11 am; 11-45 to 12-27 am; 5-15 to 6-08 pm; 11-30 to 12-14 pm. Total: 3 hours.
The totals were gaining on him. June 20 — 3 hours 14 mins; June 21 3 hours 30 mins; June 22 — 3 hours 46 mins. This gave him little more than ten weeks, unless the fugues began to slow down, or he found that trapdoor through which Trippett had briefly poked his head.
Franklin closed the diary and stared back at the watching lens of the perimeter camera. Curiously, he had never allowed himself to be photographed by the machine, as if the contours of his body constituted a secret terrain whose codes had to be held in reserve for his last attempt to escape. Standing or reclining on the rotating platform, the volunteer patients had been photographed in a continuous scan that transformed them into a landscape of undulating hills and valleys, not unlike the desert outside. Could they take an aerial photograph of the Sahara and Gobi deserts, reverse the process and reconstitute the vast figure of some sleeping goddess, an Aphrodite born from a sea of dunes? Franklin had become obsessed with the camera, photographing everything from cubes and spheres to cups and saucers and then the naked patients themselves, in the hope of finding the dimension of time locked in those undulating spaces.
The volunteers had long since retired to their terminal wards, but their photographs were still pinned to the walls — a retired dentist, a police sergeant on the Las Vegas force, a middle-aged hair stylist, an attractive mother of year-old twins, an air-traffic controller from the base. Their splayed features and distorted anatomies resembled the nightmarish jumble seen by all patients if they were deliberately roused from their fugues by powerful stimulants or electric shock — oozing forms in an elastic world, giddying and unpleasant. Without time, a moving face seemed to smear itself across the air, the human body became a surrealist monster.
For Franklin, and the tens of thousands of fellow sufferers, the fugues had begun in the same way, with the
