Читать книгу The Walking Shadow - Brian Stableford - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

Joseph Herdman sat back in the chair and felt it give way under the pressure, remolding itself to suit his semi-reclining position. He crossed his legs at the ankles and placed his left heel on the corner of the desk-top. Then he poured himself a drink. The bottle was still three-quarters full.

The stadium manager, whose desk it was, wondered why he didn’t quite have the guts to complain. Herdman hadn’t even bothered to offer him a drink.

“Aren’t you going out to watch?” he asked.

“No,” said Herdman. The flatness of the reply was an obvious discouragement to further enquiry.

The manager couldn’t work out precisely what it was about Herdman that he found so intimidating. Herdman wasn’t a big man and there was nothing out of the ordinary about his looks—his face was thin and sallow, but not mean; his eyes were an ordinary shade of brown. It was just the way he handled himself, somehow radiating contempt. Herdman seemed to look down on people as if they were insects—as if their continued existence depended upon the whim that stopped him from stepping on them. What he said with his mouth was always polite, but it was always mocking politeness he didn’t really mean. It had infuriated less sensitive men than the manager.

“I suppose you’ve seen it all before?” he said, continuing the conversation as a token protest.

“All of it,” confirmed Herdman.

“We got eighty thousand people out there. Eighty thousand at three-dollars-and-a-half a head....”

“Loose change,” said Herdman, as if he didn’t want to be bothered with details. “Aren’t you going out to watch?”

The manager attempted to fan the flames of his smoldering resentment, hoping to find courage in anger, but he couldn’t make the emotion swell inside him. In the end, although he said what he planned to say, it came out weak and stupid.

“I seen it all too. Week in, week out. Synth music, ball games, fan dancers, bible freaks. They’re all the same.”

Only the echo of a sneer was there. Herdman could have said it in his level voice and made it mean whatever he wanted it to. From the manager it was just a poor performance. Herdman poured himself another large Scotch.

“Paul’s good,” he said. “It’s worth your while to see it.”

“He don’ do nothin’ but talk. He’s nothin’ special. We had a hundred like him these last ten years. Religion is big—’specially crank stuff like this. Ev’ryone’s lookin’ for a new Jesus. It’s the African war an’ the atom bombs—ev’ryone knows it could be us next. An’ the depression, too. They all wanna be saved, an’ they don’ care who does it. We get the same crowd cryin’ the same tears ev’ry time. I seen it all before.”

Herdman didn’t get irritated. Herdman had a shell around him that was impervious to any possible inflection of the human voice.

“Paul’s special,” he said, quietly. “They’re all special. It’s the only thing that qualifies them to stand up on the stage and look down at the crowds. It’s not easy to sell hope. It’s a talent. It needs presence, it needs a message, but most of all it needs something special, which lets people believe in him. Those people out there find believing very difficult; they don’t offer their faith easily. That’s why they keep coming back. The faith drains away too quickly. It’s the times we live in; we’ve all learned to be cynical, to doubt everything. That helps us to be right, because in the final analysis, nothing’s true. But being right isn’t really what we need. What we need is to believe. Paul can make some people believe, and that’s what’s special about him. The world needs what he has to give more than anything else.”

“An’ it’s makin’ you an’ him rich.”

“That’s right.”

As if in reflex reaction to what the other had said, Herdman reached out and touched his glass to the neck of the whisky bottle, and then raised it into the air—a small, perfunctory toast.

“Jesus didn’t need sellin’ the way you’re sellin’ the kid,” said the manager. “He didn’t need a Joe Herdman or an Adam Wishart.”

“He didn’t have to make any television appearances,” said Herdman. “He didn’t have to book three months in advance to deliver the sermon on the mount. He didn’t have to release cassettes or publish books or sue newspapers for libel. But he did need St. Paul as his chief propagandist.”

The manager sneered. “I suppose you already got your writers workin’ on the script for the crucifixion?”

“He writes his own scripts,” replied Herdman. “Have you read the book?”

Not his book, the manager noted, but the book. He didn’t answer. He didn’t read that kind of book, or any other kind of book. Reading was for kids and kooks—who, of course, were buying the book in millions and reading it cover to cover, probably without understanding one word in five. They loved the gobbledegook, loved to think that there was something in there that was so wise that they couldn’t make head nor tail of it. If they could understand it, it wouldn’t be worth a damn—they knew full well that there was no hope at all in anything they knew or understood. If there was hope, it had to be in something beyond them, something with impressive long words, something with a nice rhythm to it, something glowing with optimism but clouded with obscurity. But what did he care? They were filling the stadium at three-dollars-and-a-half a head. The profits of prophecy.

There was another small clink, but this time it wasn’t the small ritual of the private toast. It was the bottle touching the rim of the glass while pouring another double. Herdman’s hand was perfectly steady, but he was pouring from an awkward position.

“It’ll be another nine-day wonder,” prophesied the manager, his voice sour but losing the slovenly twang that was at least half affectation. “These things don’ last. This guy will burn out in a couple of years. He can’t make no comeback for nostalgia’s sake, like all the singers do. His pretty-boy face will fade away.”

“You don’t understand,” said Herdman, gently, as if he were trying to reason with a small child barely on the threshold of rationality. “Of course he won’t last. Nothing does. We live in a society of disposable objects, disposable relationships, disposable ideas. We’ve conquered nature, but the technology we’ve built has been endowed with the same built-in obsolescence as nature’s. Even our myths no longer endure; they’re subject to waves of fashion like everything else we make. But for the moment, Paul Heisenberg’s mythology seems to be the right one, and no matter how ephemeral it is, it’s pretty much the mythology of the moment, the crystallization of the spirit of the age. What does it matter if the age whose spirit it is only lasts a year, or a month, or a day? We have to learn to accept the essential transience of the present, and the fact that nothing endures. When there’s no forever to look forward, to, only a fool despises the ephemeral. You have to live in the moment, and be prepared for tomorrow to be another and quite different moment, if tomorrow comes at all.”

“Is that what he thinks, when he ain’t on stage?”

“Certainly not. He believes in himself, with all his heart. How could he attract the faith of others if he didn’t have faith in himself?”

“He hasn’t attracted your faith.”

“I wouldn’t say that. I believe in him Mondays and Thursdays. Tuesdays and Sundays I think the bombs will start to fall and we’ll all be blown to hell or rotted by radiation and plague. Wednesdays I’m an orthodox doubter. I live in the moment, and I’d live one step ahead of it if I could, so that I could look back on it with equanimity.”

That seemed to the manager to be Scotch talk. Alcoholic eloquence, Herdman might have called it himself. Crazy, in other words.

Outside, there was a massive swell of applause that signaled the appearance on stage of Paul Heisenberg.

“Go on,” said Herdman, softly. “Go and listen. Really listen. Try to see what he’s doing...examining our existential predicament, diagnosing its deficiencies, constructing his vision of imaginary futures, specifically tailored to meet and soothe our anxieties. It really is an art, you know. If you can just fall under his spell he’ll take you out of your narrow little mind on a voyage beyond the horizons of your imagination. He’ll show you infinity, and eternity, and put you in touch with the ineffable. That’s what you need. It’s what we all need. It’s the only way to make the year of our lord nineteen ninety-two at all tolerable.”

“You seem to be doin’ okay on whisky,” said the manager. His voice was dull, now, and he had already accepted defeat. In a minute he was going to stamp out of the office—his office—and find himself something to do that looked like work.

“It helps to keep me alert,” said Herdman, easily. He relaxed further into the yielding chair, preparing to enjoy his isolation.

The manager closed the door as he left.

Out on the catwalk, the air seemed pregnant with the adulation of the crowd. A long way away the tiny white dot that was Paul Heisenberg raised his arms, to begin gathering in that adulation, and began to speak. His words were magnified by the microphones, carried into every last corner of the covered stands, leaked up into the empty sky—where the stars, at least, were not listening.