no fear even though I’m left with only six or seven hours of conscious time each day. Marion comes and goes, we literally have no time to talk to each other. A day passes as quickly as an afternoon. At lunch I was looking at some album photographs of my mother and father, and a formal wedding portrait of Marion and myself, and suddenly it was evening. I feel a strange nostalgia for my childhood friends, as if I’m about to meet them for the first time, an awakening premonition of the past. I can see the past coming alive in the dust on the balcony, in the dried leaves at the bottom of the pool, part of an immense granary of past time whose doors we can open with the right key. Nothing is older than the very new — a newborn baby with its head emerging from its mother has the smooth, time-worn features of Pharaoh. The whole process of life is the discovery of the immanent past contained in the present.
At the same time, I feel a growing nostalgia for the future, a memory of the future I have already experienced but somehow forgotten. In our lives we try to repeat those significant events which have already taken place in the future. As we grow older we feel an increasing nostalgia for our own deaths, through which we have already passed. Equally, we have a growing premonition of our births, which are about to take place. At any moment we may be born for the first time. Total time lost 10 hours 5 mm.
Slade has been here. I suspect that he’s been entering the apartment while I fugue. I had an uncanny memory of someone in the bedroom this morning, when I came out of the 11 a.m. fugue there was a curious after- image, almost a pentecostal presence, a vaguely bio-morphic blur that hung in the air like a photograph taken with the perimeter camera. My pistol had been removed from the dressing-table drawer and placed on my pillow. There’s a small diagram of white paint on the back of my left hand. Some kind of cryptic pattern, a geometric key.
Has Slade been reading my diary? This afternoon someone painted the same pattern across the canted floor of the swimming pool and over the gravel in the car park. Presumably all part of Slade’s serious games with time and space. He’s trying to rally me, force me out of the apartment, but the fugues leave me with no more than two hours at a stretch of conscious time. I’m not the only one affected. Las Vegas is almost deserted, everyone has retreated indoors. The old geologist and his wife sit all day in their bedroom, each in a straight-backed chair on either side of the bed. I gave them a vitamin shot, but they’re so emaciated they won’t last much longer. No reply from the police or ambulance services. Marion is away again, hunting the empty hotels of the Strip for any sign of Slade. No doubt she thinks that he alone can save her. Total time lost 12 hours 35 mm.
Rachel Vaisey called today, concerned about me and disappointed not to find Marion here. The clinic has closed, and she’s about to go east. A strange pantomime, we talked stiffly for ten minutes. She was clearly baffled by my calm appearance, despite my beard and coffee-stained trousers, and kept staring at the white pattern on my hand and at the similar shapes on the bedroom ceiling, the car park outside and even a section of a small apartment house half a mile away. I’m now at the focus of a huge geometric puzzle radiating from my left hand through the open window and out across Las Vegas and the desert.
I was relieved when she had gone. Ordinary time — so-called ‘real time’ — now seems totally unreal. With her discrete existence, her prissy point-to-point consciousness, Rachel reminded me of a figure in an animated tableau of Time Man in an anthropological museum of the future. All the same, it’s difficult to be too optimistic. I wish Marion were here. Total time lost 15 hours 7 mill.
August 21 Down now to a few stretches of consciousness that last barely an hour at the most. Time seems continuous, but the days go by in a blur of dawns and sunsets. Almost continuously eating, or I’ll die of starvation. I only hope that Marion can look after herself, she doesn’t seem to have been here for weeks — - the pen snapped in Franklin’s hand. As he woke, he found himself slumped across his diary. Torn pages lay on the carpet around his feet. During the two-hour fugue a violent struggle had taken place, his books were scattered around an overturned lamp, there were heel marks in the cigarette ash on the floor. Franklin touched his bruised shoulders. Someone had seized him as he sat there in his fugue, trying to shake him into life, and had torn the watch from his wrist.
A familiar noise sounded from the sky. The clacking engine of a light aircraft crossed the nearby roof-tops. Franklin stood up, shielding his eyes from the vivid air on the balcony. He watched the aircraft circle the surrounding streets and then speed towards him. A molten light dripped from the propeller, spraying the motel with liquid platinum, a retinal tincture that briefly turned the street dust to silver.
The plane flew past, heading north from Las Vegas, and he saw that Slade had recruited a passenger. A blonde woman in a ragged fur sat behind the naked pilot, hands clasped around his waist. Like a startled dreamer, she stared down at Franklin.
As the microlight soared away, Franklin went into the bathroom. Rallying himself, he gazed at the sallow, bearded figure in the mirror, a ghost of himself. Already sections of his mind were migrating towards the peaceful geometry of the bathroom walls. But at least Marion was still alive. Had she tried to intercede as Slade attacked him? There was a faint image on the air of a wounded woman Las Vegas was deserted. Here and there, as he set off in the car, he saw a grey face at a window, or a blanket draped across two pairs of knees on a balcony. All the clocks had stopped, and without his watch he could no longer tell how long the fugues had lasted, or when the next was about to begin.
Driving at a cautious ten miles an hour, Franklin slowed to a halt every five miles, then waited until he found himself sitting in the car with a cold engine. The temperature dial became his clock. It was almost noon when he reached the air base. The clinic was silent, its car park empty. Weeds grew through the fading marker lines, an empty report sheet left behind by those unhappy psychiatrists and their now vanished patients.
Franklin let himself into the building and walked through the deserted wards and laboratories. His colleagues’ equipment had been shipped away, but when he unlocked the doors to his own laboratory he found the packing cases where he had left them.
In front of the perimeter camera a rubber mattress lay on the turntable. Next to it an ashtray overflowed with cigarette ends that had burned the wooden planks.
So Slade had turned his talents to a special kind of photography a pornography in the round. Pinned to the walls behind the camera was a gallery of huge prints. These strange landscapes resembled aerial photographs of a desert convulsed by a series of titanic earthquakes, as if one geological era were giving birth to another. Elongated clefts and gulleys stretched across the prints, their contours so like those that had lingered in the apartment after Marion’s showers.
But a second geometry overlayed the first, a scarred and aggressive musculature he had seen borne on the wind. The aircraft was parked outside the window, its cockpit and passenger seat empty in the sunlight. A naked man sat behind the desk in Franklin’s office, goggles around his forehead. Looking at him, Franklin realized why Slade had always appeared naked.
‘Come in, doctor. God knows it’s taken you long enough to get here.’ He weighed Franklin’s wristwatch in his hand, clearly disappointed by the shabby figure in front of him. He had removed the centre drawer from the desk, and was playing with Franklin’s shrine. To the original objects Slade had added a small chromium pistol. Deciding against the wristwatch, he tossed it into the waste basket.
‘I don’t think that’s really part of you any longer. You’re a man without time. I’ve moved into your office, Franklin. Think of it as my mission control centre.’
‘Slade…’ Franklin felt a sudden queasiness, a warning of the onset of the next fugue. The air seemed to warp itself around him. Holding the door-frame, he restrained himself from rushing to the waste basket. ‘Marion’s here with you. I need to see her.’
‘See her, then…’ Slade pointed to the perimeter photographs. ‘I’m sure you recognize her, Franklin. You’ve been using her for the last ten years. That’s why you joined NASA. You’ve been pilfering from your wife and the agency in the same way, stealing the parts for your space machine. I’ve even helped you myself.’
‘Helped…? Marion told me that—’
‘Franklin!’ Slade stood up angrily, knocking the chromium pistol on to the floor. His hands worked clumsily at his scarred ribs, as if he were forcing himself to breathe. Watching him, Franklin could almost believe that Slade had held back the fugues by a sheer effort of will, by a sustained anger against the very dimensions of time and space.
‘This time, doctor, you can’t ground me. But for you I would have walked on the moon!’
Franklin was watching the pistol at his feet, uncertain how to pacify this manic figure. ‘Slade, but for me you’d be with the others. If you’d flown with the space-crews you’d be like Trippett.’
‘I am like Trippett.’ Calm again, Slade stepped to the window and stared at the empty runways. ‘I’m taking
