The Green Man (24 page)

I
hurried over to the door and opened it and was about to make off down the
passage when something made me halt abruptly—a subliminal sound-effect or
air-movement. I put my hand forward and the finger-tips touched an invisible
barrier, hard and totally smooth, like plate-glass but without any trace of
reflection. It filled the doorway. Uncertain what to do next, I turned aside,
looked up and saw that somebody was sitting in the armchair on the far side of
the fireplace. This person, a young man with silky fair hair and a pale face,
could not (of
course) have come into the room without my knowing it.

‘Very
good,’ said the young man heartily. He was watching me with a faint down-turned
smile. ‘A lot of people, you know, would have gone walking straight into that
thing. Shows you’ve got good reflexes and all that. Now, if you’d like to sit
down there, we can have a bit of a talk. Nothing too serious, I assure you.’

At the
outset I had let out a girlish shriek of alarm. The alarm was sincere enough,
but it immediately passed, to be replaced by an intensification of the
charged-up feeling I had had the previous morning before setting off for
Cambridge: nervous energy with nervousness but without nerves. Perhaps my
visitor had brought this about. I came forward and seated myself in the
opposite chair, looking him over. He was, or appeared to be, about twenty-eight
years old, with a squarish, clean-shaven, humorous, not very trustworthy face, unabundant
eyebrows and eyelashes, and good teeth. He wore a dark suit of conventional
cut, silver-grey shirt, black knitted silk tie, dark-grey socks and black shoes,
well polished. His speech was very fully modulated, like that of a man
interested in discourse, and his accent educated, without affectations. Altogether
he seemed prosperous, assured and in good physical shape, apart from his
pallor.

‘Are
you a messenger?’ I asked.

‘No. I
decided to come, uh … in person.’

‘I see.
Can I offer you a drink?’

‘Yes,
thank you, I’m fully corporeal. I was going to warn you against making the
mistake of supposing that I come from inside your mind, but you’ve saved me
that trouble. I’ll join you in a little Scotch, if I may.’

I got
out the glasses. ‘I suppose I couldn’t get into the passage because all
molecular motion outside this room has stopped?’

‘Correct.
We’re not subject to ordinary time in here. Makes us pretty safe from
interruption.’

‘And
all radiation has likewise ceased, outside?’

‘Of
course. You must have noticed the way the sound packed up.’

‘Yes, I
did. But in that case, why hasn’t the light packed up too, outside? And in here
as well, for that matter? If all wavelengths are affected, I can’t see how the
sun can get to us, any more than the sound of the tractor can. Everything would
be dark.’

‘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 slightly
cross. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like to be faced with a set of choices that
are irrevocable and also unique.’

‘Well,
you’re supposed to be brighter than I am, though one would hardly think so,
judging by results. But I had no idea you hadn’t always been … wherever you
are. And whatever that means.’

‘It
means everywhere, if we’re going to go into it, as you know perfectly well,
though not everywhere equally all the time, of course. As for my always having
been around, I have. But there have been developments. You could put a date to
the point at which I found out I was around, so to speak. Quite a while ago,
that was. It was at the same stage, in fact it was the same thing, as my
discovery of what I was and what I could do.’

‘All
that part of it, the doing, must be pretty satisfying.’

‘Oh
yes, very, in a way. But it does go on rather. An awful lot of it’s not much
more than duty, these days.. And I keep thinking of things it’s too late to do.
And things I oughtn’t to do, but which have a certain appeal. Sweeping changes.
Can you imagine the temptation of altering all the physical laws, or working
with something that isn’t matter, or simply introducing new rules? Even minor
things like cosmic collisions, or plonking a living dinosaur—just one—down in
Piccadilly Circus? Not easy to resist.’

‘What
about making life a little less hard on people?’

‘No
prospect of that, I’m afraid. Much too tricky from the security point of view.
I daren’t take the chance of coming that far out into the open. Some of your
chaps have found out quite enough already. Your friend Milton, for instance.’
The young man nodded over at my bookshelves. ‘He caught on to the idea of the
work of art and the game and the rules and so forth. Just as well it never
quite dawned on him who Satan was, or rather who he was a piece of.. I’d have had
to step in there, if it had.’