‘Excellent, Maurice.’ The young man laughed in what was clearly meant to be a relaxed, jovial. way, but I thought I could hear vexation in it. ‘Do you know, you’re almost the first non-scientist to spot that one? I’d forgotten you were such a man of education. Well, I thought things in general would just look better if I arranged them like this.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I said, holding up glass and water-jug and starting to pour. ‘Is this a test of some sort?’
‘Thank you, that’s fine … No, it isn’t a test. How could it be? What do you suppose would happen to you if you passed a test I’d set for you? Or failed it? You of all people know I don’t work that way.’
I moved back with the drinks and held one out. The hand that came up and took it, and the wrist and lower forearm that disappeared into the silver-grey shirt-cuff, were by no means complete, so that the fingers clicked against the glass, and at the same time I caught a whiff of that worst odour in the world, which I had not smelt since accompanying a party of Free French through the Falaise Gap in 1944. In a moment it was gone, and fingers, hand and everything else were as they had been before.
‘That was unnecessary,’ I said, sitting down again.
‘Don’t you believe it, old boy. Puts things on the right footing between us. This isn’t just a social call, you know. Cheers.’
I did not drink. ‘What is it, then?’
‘More than one thing, of course. Anyway, I like to make these trips every so often, as you’re well aware.’
‘Keeping in touch?’
‘Don’t fool about with me, Maurice,’ said the young man, with his downward smile. His eyes were a very light brown, almost the colour of his hair and his thin eyebrows. ‘You know I know everything everybody thinks.’
‘So you haven’t come because you’re particularly interested in me.’
‘No. But slightly because you’re particularly interested in me. In all my aspects. You’d agree, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’d have thought only in the one you demonstrated to me a moment ago,’ I said, drinking now.
‘I’ll be the judge of that. Whether you like it or not, and whether you’re aware of it or not, being interested in one means being interested in them all. You’re in quite a common situation, actually.’
‘Then why pick on me? What have I done?’
‘Done?’ He laughed, altogether genially this time. ‘You’re a human being, aren’t you?…Born into this world, and so forth. And what’s so terrible about my popping in to see you like this? Worse troubles at sea, you know. No, I picked on you, as you rather ungraciously put it, partly because you’re, uh …‘ He paused and rotated the ice in his drink, then went on as if starting a new sentence, in the way he had. ‘A good security risk.’
‘Drunk and seeing ghosts and half off my head. Yes.’
‘And not what anybody in their senses would take for a saint or a mystic or anything. That’s it. I have to be careful, you see.’
‘Careful? You make the rules, don’t you? You can do anything you like.’
‘Oh, you don’t understand, my dear fellow. As one might expect. It’s precisely because I make the rules that I can’t do anything I like. But let’s leave that for now. I want to talk for a moment, if I may, about this chap Underhill. Things have been getting a bit out of hand there. I want you to be very careful with him, Maurice. Very careful indeed.’
‘Steer clear of him, you mean?’
‘Certainly not,’ he said, with emphasis and, it seemed, in complete earnest. ‘Quite the contrary. He’s a dangerous man, old Underhill. Well, in a mild way. A minor threat to security. If he’s left to himself, it’ll be just that much more difficult to keep going the general impression that human life ends with the grave. A very basic rule of mine says I have to maintain that impression. Almost as basic as the one about everything having to seem as if it comes about by chance.’
‘I see that one, but you must admit that impression about the grave is comparatively recent.’
‘Nonsense. You only know what people said they believed. There’s never been any real difficulty from that direction. Now then, I want you to stand up to Underhill and, uh … Put paid to him.’
‘How?’
‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. Sorry to be a bore, but I’ll have to leave the whole thing to you. I hope you make it.’
‘Surely you know? Whether I will or not?’
The young man sighed, swallowed audibly and smoothed his fair hair. ‘No. I don’t know. I only wish I did. People think I have foreknowledge, which is a useful thing for them to think in a way, but the whole idea’s nonsense logically unless you rule out free will, and I can’t do that. They were just trying to make me out to be grander than I could possibly be, for very nice motives a lot of the time.’
‘No doubt. Anyway, I don’t much care for doing what you want. Your record doesn’t impress me.’
‘I dare say it doesn’t, in your sense of impress. But all sorts of chaps have noticed that I can be very hard on those who don’t behave as I feel they should. That ought to weigh with you.’
‘It doesn’t much, when I think of how hard you can be on people who couldn’t possibly have done anything to offend you.’
‘I know, children and such. But do stop talking like a sort of anti-parson, old man. It’s nothing to do with offending or punishing or any of that father-figure stuff; it’s purely and simply the run of the play. No malice in the world. Well, I think you’ll take notice of what I’ve said when you turn it over in your mind afterwards.’
I could hear my watch ticking in the silence, and thought interestedly to myself that it was the only one on the planet still going. ‘The run of the play can’t be going all that well for you if you have to keep taking these trips of yours.’
‘The play is all right, thank you. In fact, I’ve been able to cut the trips down a good deal in the last hundred or two hundred years. It’s still patchy, mind you. Nothing for nearly three months, and now today, besides you, in fact at this very moment, if I can use the expression, I’m dropping in on a woman in California who’s got the wrong idea about something. Just —how shall I put it?—saving myself a bit of sweat. Oh, and don’t waste your time trying to get in touch with her, because she won’t remember anything about it.’
‘Shall I remember?’
‘I don’t see why not. I’ve been assuming so, but it’s really up to you. We can leave it until just before I go, can’t we? See how you feel.’
‘Thanks. Would you like another of those?’
‘Well, yes, I think perhaps just one more, don’t you? Marvellous.’
I said from the drinks cupboard, ‘But you must be able to save yourself sweat without having to turn up in the flesh like this. Distance and time and so on are no object with you, after all.’
‘Distance agreed. Time’s another matter. Oh, there’s a lot in what you say. The truth is, I enjoy my trips for their own sake. Self-indulgent of me, which is why I try to limit their number. But they are fun.’
‘What sort of fun?’
He sighed again and clicked his tongue. ‘It’s difficult without denaturing the whole thing. Still. You’re a chess-player, Maurice, or you were in your undergraduate days. You remember, I mean you must remember wishing you could be down on the board among the pieces, just for two or three moves, to get the feel of it, without at the same time stopping running the game. That’s about as near as I can get.’
‘The whole thing’s a game, is it?’ I had returned with the drinks.
‘In the sense that it’s not a particularly, uh … edifying or significant business, it is, yes. In other ways it’s not unlike an art, an art and a work of art rolled into one. I know you think that’s rather frivolous. It isn’t really. It’s entirely a matter of how it’s all grown up,’ said the young man, lowering his voice and staring into his whisky. ‘Between ourselves, Maurice, I think I took some fairly disputable decisions right at the start, not having foreknowledge. Honestly, this foreknowledge business is too absurd. As if I could carry on at all if I had that! Well, then I was stuck with those decisions and their results in practice. And I couldn’t go back on them; one thing nobody’s ever credited me with is the power of undoing what I’ve done, of abolishing historical fact and so on. I often wish I could— well, occasionally I do. It’s not that I want to be cruel, not that so much as finding that’s what I seem to be turning out to be. Not an easy situation, you know. I just realized that I was there, or here, or wherever you please, and on my own, and with these powers. I must say I wonder how you’d have managed.’ He sounded
