Читать книгу The Walking Shadow - Brian Stableford - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

Adam Wishart lurched to his seat, and wriggled as he tried to squeeze the bulk of his hindquarters into a space that had been designed with some standard mesomorphic frame in mind.

Forty per cent of adult Americans are supposed to be obese, he told himself, but nobody bothers to tell the jerks who make things.

He found the early evening heat oppressive, although the autumn was well advanced and the weather should have broken weeks before. His jowls were damp with sweat, but he didn’t bother to mop it off. For one thing, it was a losing battle; for another, someone—probably Paul—had told him that if he let the sweat evaporate it would help to cool his flesh.

He was late. The preliminaries were over and Paul was already into his spiel. Wishart tuned in for the briefest of moments to check the stage that the speech had reached. Half a dozen words were enough. Paul changed the words a little every time, but the message was the same and the rhythm was the same and everything was measured out for maximum effect. If pressed, Wishart could recite a version of the speech with no more hesitation than Paul, but to him it was without feeling, just a pattern of noises.

He checked his watch and noted the time. Only then did he look up at the platform.

Paul was dressed in his usual white outfit, his loose sleeves rippling as he supplemented his words with graceful gestures, emphasizing the key phrases and cueing the responses embedded in the reactions of those members of the audience who were already familiar with the message. The halo-effect wasn’t working quite right, and Wishart squirmed as he tried to figure out which light wasn’t in position. He caught the eye of the engineer, but the other merely shrugged and jabbed a thumb at Paul, indicating that the lights were right but that Paul had drifted from his spot.

Wishart sighed, knowing that there was no possibility of catching Paul’s eye. It was just a matter of waiting for him to drift back. That was Paul’s one fault; most performers had an instinct for finding the position that would show them off to their best advantage, but Paul was a little shy of the lighting. He made up for it with his voice, which he used as well as anyone Wishart had ever seen, but he was some way short of perfection. Wishart had told him over and over how important the lighting was in creating the overall effect, and Paul knew it on the intellectual level, but he just didn’t quite have the feel.

Wishart felt good about promoting Paul, and making a good job of it. It needed a lot of work, but it was a real challenge to his cleverness and artistry. Wishart liked to think of himself as an artist; the commercial aspect of his work didn’t seem to him to vulgarize the endeavor in any way at all. He knew that he looked like a slob, and his way of fighting that had been to make sure that the things he controlled went to the opposite extreme, working smoothly and efficiently. He had an elegant staff, and he specialized in elegant performers, who made money as gracefully as money could be made.

He turned in the seat to look at the members of the audience behind him. The plastic arm-rest dug painfully into his flesh beneath the bottom rib on the left side, but he ignored it. He squinted into the light as he tried to measure the extent of Paul’s hold over the assembled multitude. There was still some restlessness about—oddballs who hadn’t caught the mood of the crowd as a whole and who weren’t yet participating in the atmosphere of awed tranquility—but it was good. Most of them had already relaxed into the flow of the honeyed words.

The most dedicated of them were worshipping Paul, in a perfectly literal sense. For them, he had become the focal point of their feelings, not just now but as they went through the routines of their everyday lives. He had given them the chance to love, which those routines of everyday life denied them. He had given them the chance to hope, which the desolate world no longer seemed to hold for the young, the unemployed, the disaffected and the cowardly. That was practically everyone, since the nuclear holocaust in Africa had reminded the world how close it stood to the brink of self-destruction. Insecurity was rife throughout the world, in economic and existential terms. The old religious systems, ill-fitted to the world of technological complexity, provided no antidote, but Paul was different, because he spoke the mesmeric language of scientific mysticism, and his message was adapted to the web of electronic media which carried it across the world.

Wishart’s underpants were sticking to his skin, making him feel dirty. He hated to feel dirty, but his flesh had sweated all summer and there’d never been a day when he’d felt really clean. It was a psychological quirk, he knew, but knowing it didn’t lessen the feeling, and he prayed for winter to come. He thought of Herdman sitting alone in the office above the west stand, casually washing his thoughts down the internal sewer that soaked up all the whisky without ever letting him get truly drunk. Wishart felt sticky, and stale, and lonely.

In a sense, he was alone. He was a rock in the ocean of feeling that moved over him, dragged by the tide of Paul’s presence. He was untouched, his surface so hard as to be immune from erosion. Paul was talking directly to eighty thousand people, while a further six million looking in through TV were as far on the way to being spellbound as anyone could be watching a TV set, but he was talking right past Adam Wishart.

Wishart wasn’t tuned in. He couldn’t afford to be converted. In the same way that people who handle dynamite couldn’t afford impetuousness, and people making tear gas lost the ability to cry, Wishart had long ago learned to kill the spontaneous reactions evoked within his head by music or rhetoric. All sound reverberated within his consciousness now like echoes in an empty drum.

The halo effect was okay now, and Wishart settled himself to watch Paul’s face. In spite of the glare of the lights, Paul’s pupils were dilated for the benefit of the TV audience. People responded better to people whose pupils were dilated, because it constituted a subliminal signal of attraction. It meant, of course, that Paul was practically blind because of the dazzle, but that didn’t matter. He knew his script, not just because he had memorized it but because he felt it, deep down. His heart was in it, every time he spoke.

Paul was talking now, as he always did, about the need for belief. He made people feel that need, and made them realize that it was the greatest need they had. Then he offered them something to believe in. It was a soft sell, a coaxing invitation. He never told them that what he offered them to believe was true, just that it would answer their need. That was good, because the reason virtually all these people had stopped believing in everything else was that they could no longer accept the truth of anything, or even the very notion of truth. Paul swept the whole problem of truth out of the way, dismissed it as irrelevant, and for that they were grateful, because truth had become their nightmare. Paul asked people to believe what he said not because it was true, but because it felt right, because it answered the need to believe.

And they did.

Wishart looked sideways at the make-up girl who sat beside him. Her own make-up was cracking and sweat was beginning to show, but her eyes were riveted to Paul’s gesturing hands high above. She was a long way from the mundane world of perspiration, cruising toward spiritual orgasm. The magic was working, as it was working on everyone. Three-dollars-and-a-half for the experience, fifteen for a video-cassette that would recall it again and again and let them relive it a hundred times, until, in the fullness of time, it decayed into mere noise and a pretty face and ridiculous gesticulations.

All things, thought Wishart, must pass. It was a tenet of faith that he had always taken for granted. He had lived more than fifty years in the world and had never found cause to challenge it. He knew that Paul’s message, like all the others, would eventually fail to answer the undiminished need for belief, which would call for something new, and even more desperate, to fight the threat of the decay that seemed to have seized the whole human world.

Wishart blinked away the sweat that had oozed into the corner of his right eye.

Somewhere in mid-blink, he missed the event, which seemed to take no time at all.

At one moment, there was the pure white of Paul’s costume, the artificial halo, the blond hair and the smooth flesh of the made-up face; then there was a blaze of light that dazzled, reflected from the face and hands that were suddenly mirror-bright.

The arms, which had reached out but a moment before as if to embrace the vistas of the hopeful future, were frozen now as if time itself had been interrupted.

Among the eighty thousand people who were physically present there were some who screamed and some who sighed. The TV viewers, inevitably, reacted more slowly.

Where Paul Heisenberg had stood there was now a silver statue, dressed in the same white tunic, but reflecting from the surface that had once been bare flesh all the light that had been carefully directed to compose the glowing nimbus.

The glow was even brighter now, and in the stillness which followed the abrupt interruption of the beautiful voice, there was a profundity that seemed terrible even to Adam Wishart.

He knew, as they all did, that he had witnessed—or failed to witness in the unfortunate blink of an eye—a miracle.