Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (53 page)

“I'll have the cheese and biscuits,” I said.

“And you, Mr. Goldstein?”

“The same—yes. Would you have any Italian coffee?”

“I'm afraid not, Mr. Goldstein. You know, we make it only for dinner.”

He left for the food, and Goldstein said, smiling slightly, “You know, we're good actors. All of us. Naturally, there's a difference between the dilettante and the professional, but we're all quite good, don't you think?”

“I never thought of it quite that way.”

“No, of course not. But this thing of Italian coffee only for dinner—well, now!”

“Yes, oh, yes,” I agreed. “I hear you flew up from Miami.”

“Yes. Very good flight. Very smooth. I dislike flying, but this was very smooth.”

“Vacation?”

“No, no indeed. You know, I thought I would do one of those Jewish comic-tragic things about a Miami Beach hotel. You know the kind of thing, mostly schmaltz and bad jokes and maybe two percent validity so your audience will shed a tear or two if they're in the right mood. It's very much my line, and having done one on a Second Avenue restaurant and two on the Garment District, I find it the path of least resistance. Oh, it's not playwriting in your terms, but it does want a bit of skill and a bit of staging, and there's never been a good one about Miami. I found some delicious stuff—” His voice trailed away.

“And on the way back they were rolling up Florida?”

“Yes.”

“It must have been an odd thing to see. From the air, I mean.”

“Damned odd. Oh, yes. I mean, it was like an old piece of carpet. You know, at twenty-five thousand feet your whole scale changes.”

“I wonder what they'll do with New York?”

“I suppose it's been done already in some places—I mean Rome or London or even Boston. You drove in from New England, I hear. Boston?”

I shook my head. “We could call someone—”

“No one does. You know how you can never get at a phone on a busy day. All four of them are yours to choose from.”

“I just don't like to think that they'll roll it up.”

“No. I can see that.”

“They might move it aside somewhere.”

“I'd like to think so. You were born in Maine, weren't you?”

I nodded.

“Well, I'm the third generation born right here in the city. I hate to think that it will be all smashed up.”

“We're simply being sentimental. That's no use, is it?”

“No use at all.”

The waiter brought our food. The cheese was good and I've always liked Bath Biscuits, and I was hungry; but Goldstein barely touched his food. He sat in silence for a while, and then he said:

“I get a bit indignant over it, and then I remember our profession. We have no right to be indignant over it, have we?”

“You know, I read a good bit of history,” I replied, “and the people of the theater always occupied a very special position. A place of privilege, you might say. Oh, I don't mean that there weren't times when they were looked down upon, and respectability was never truly a part of it; but they always had a path of privilege. They were a sort of class apart from all other classes and they hobnobbed with kings and dukes and all that sort of thing. It gave them a rather distorted view of themselves—oh, all of them, writers, scenic designers, stagehands, actors—and they would find it blurring. You know what. I mean—which is the play and which is for real. Am I asleep and dreaming that I am awake, or is it the other way around?”

“Yes, I've had the feeling,” Goldstein agreed.

“You've acted?”

“The coffee's delicious,” Goldstein said, tasting it. “Yes—when I was a kid. I had three years of summer theater and road show. I know exactly what you mean. You look at the footlights, and there's nothing there but that blur of light, and then your eyes adjust and you see them out there and there's that moment of confusion as to place and part.” He closed his eyes a moment, and then he went on, “You don't mind if I go back downstairs. I really think that Cunningham will take Jerry. It never happened before and the money on Cunningham is very attractive. Will you come along?”

I shook my head. Goldstein signed for both of us and then left, and after I sat for a while, I decided to go upstairs to the library. The Mummers' is very old, and the library is still full of overstuffed leather chairs and nineteenth-century portraits. There were five members there, all of them the older type and therefore very much like myself. Two of them nodded and the others never looked up from their reading. I dropped into one of the big chairs, trying to think of something I wanted very much to read—but my interest had lagged, and the night had been so long that now finally I felt weary and hardly able to keep my eyes open. I was dozing when I heard the kind of distant crash that might have come from a tall building shaken badly, so that its brickwork and stonework tumbles away; but in that nowhere between sleep and awakeness I might have been dreaming.

I opened my eyes then. The other members were still absorbed in their reading.

I leaned back and allowed myself to doze off again. How annoyed I would have been if anyone had done that during a scene of one of my plays! Yet I always had a nod of sympathy for the older folks, many of them lifelong devotees of the theater, who nevertheless caught forty winks during the intermission, when the set was being changed.

24
The Egg

I
t was fortunate, as everyone acknowledged, that Souvan-167-arc II was in charge of the excavation, for even though he was an archaeologist, second rank, his hobby or side interest was the eccentricities of social thinking in the latter half of the twentieth century. He was not merely a historian, but a man whose curiosity took him down the small bypaths that history had forgotten. Otherwise the egg would not have received the treatment it did.

The dig was in the northern part of a place which in ancient time had been called Ohio, a part of a national entity then known as the United States of America. The nation was of such power that it had survived three atomic fire sweeps before its disintegration, and it was thereby richer in sealed refuges than any other part of the world. As every schoolchild knows, it is only during the past century that we have arrived at any real understanding of the ancient social mores that functioned in the last decades of the previous era. A gap of three thousand years is not easily overcome, and it is quite natural that the age of atomic warfare should defy the comprehension of normal human beings.

Souvan had spent years of research in calculating the precise place of his dig, and although he never made a public announcement of the fact, he was not interested in atomic refuges but in another, forgotten manifestation of the times. They were times of death, a quantity of death such as the world had never known before, and therefore times of great opposition to death—cures, serums, antibodies, and—what was Souvan's particular interest—a method of freezing.

Souvan was utterly fascinated by this question of freezing. It would appear, so far as he could gather from his researches, that in the beginning of the latter half of the twentieth century, great strides had been made in the quick-freezing of human organs and even of whole animals; and the simplest of these animals had been thawed and revived. Certain doctors had conceived the notion of freezing human beings who were suffering from incurable diseases, and then maintaining them in cold stasis until such a date when a cure for the particular disease might have been discovered. Then, theoretically, they would have been revived and cured. While the method was available only to the rich, several hundred thousand people had taken advantage of it—although there was no record of anyone ever being revived and cured—and whatever centers had been built for this purpose were destroyed in the fire storms and in the centuries of barbarism and wilderness that had followed.

Souvan had, however, found a reference to one such center, built during the last decade of the atomic age, deep underground and supposedly with compressors functioning by atomic power. His years of work were now drawing toward consummation. They had sunk their shaft one hundred feet into the lava-like wasteland that lay south of the lake, and they had reached the broken ruins of what was certainly the installation they sought. They had cut into the ancient building, and now, armed with powerful beacons, laser-cutters, and plain pickaxes, Souvan and the students who had assisted him were moving through the ruin, from hall to hall, room to room.

His research and expectations had not played him false. The place was precisely what he had expected it to be, an institution for the freezing and preservation of human beings.

They entered chamber after chamber where the refrigeration caskets lay row upon row, like the Christian catacombs of a barely remembered past, but the power that drove the compressors had failed three millenniums ago and even the skeletons in the bottom of the caskets had crumbled to dust.

“So goes man's dream of immortality,” Souvan thought to himself, wondering who these poor devils had been and what their last thoughts were as they lay down to be frozen, defying that most elusive of all things in the universe, time itself. His students were chattering with excitement, and while Souvan knew that this would be hailed as one of the most important and exciting discoveries of his time, he was nevertheless deeply disappointed. Somewhere, somehow, he had hoped to find a well-preserved body, and with the aid of their medicine, compared to which the medicine of the twentieth century was rather primitive, restore it to life and thereby gain at firsthand an account of those mysterious decades when the human race, in a worldwide fit of insanity, had turned upon itself and destroyed not only 99 percent of mankind but every form of animal and bird life that existed. Only the most fragmentary records of those forms of life had survived, and so much less of the birds than of the animals that those airy, wonderful creatures that rode the winds of heaven were much more the substance of myth than of fact.

But to find a man or a woman—one articulate being who might shed light upon the origin of the fire storms that the nations of mankind had loosed upon each other—that was Souvan's cherished dream, now shattered. Here and there important parts of skeletons remained intact, a skull with marvelous restoration work on the teeth—Souvan was in awe of the technical proficiency of these ancient men—a femur, a foot, and in one casket, strangely enough, a mummified arm. All this was fascinating and important, but of absolutely no consequence compared to the possibilities inherent in his shattered dream.

Yet Souvan was thorough. He led his students through the ruins, and they missed nothing. Over twelve hundred caskets were examined, and all of them yielded nothing but the dust of time and death. But the very fact that this installation had been constructed so deep underground suggested that it had been built during the latter part of the atomic age. Surely the scientists of that time would have realized the vulnerability of electric power that did not have an atomic source, and unless the historians were mistaken, atomic power was already in use for the production of electricity. But what kind of atomic power? How long could it function? And where had their power plant been located? Did they use water as a cooling agent? If so, the power plant would be on the shore of the lake—a shoreline that had been turned into glass and lava. Possibly they had never discovered how to construct a self-contained atomic unit, one that might provide a flow of power for at least five thousand years. It is true that no such plant had ever been found in any of the ruins, but so much of ancient civilization had been destroyed by the fire storms that only fragments of their culture had survived.

At that moment in his musings, he was interrupted by a cry from one of the students assigned to radiation detection.

“We have radiation, sir.”

Not at all unusual in a ground-level excavation; most unusual so deep in the earth.

“What count?”

“Point 003—very low.”

“All right,” Souvan said. “Take the lead and proceed slowly.”

There was only one chamber left to examine, a laboratory of sorts. Strange how the bones perished but machinery and equipment survived! Souvan walked behind the radiation detector, the students, behind them—all moving very slowly.

“It's atomic power, sir—point 007 now—but still harmless. I think that's the unit, there in the corner, sir.”

A very faint hum came from the corner, where a large, sealed unit was connected by cable to a box which was about a foot square. The box, constructed of stainless steel, and still gleaming here and there, emitted an almost inaudible sound.

Souvan turned to another of his students. “Analysis of the sounds, please.”

The student opened a case he carried, set it on the floor, adjusted his dials, and read the results. “The unit's a generator,” he said with excitement. “Atomic-powered, sealed, rather simple and primitive, but incredible. Not too much power, but the flow is steady. How long has it been since this chamber was last entered?”

“Three thousand years.”

“And the box?”

“That poses some problems,” the student said. “There appears to be a pump, a circulating system, and perhaps a compressor. The system is in motion, which would indicate refrigeration of some sort. It's a sealed unit, sir.”

Souvan touched the box. It was cold, but no colder than other metal objects in the ruins. Well insulated, he thought, marveling again at the technical genius of these ancients. “How much of it,” he asked the student, “do you estimate is devoted to the machinery?”

Again the student worked at his dials and studied the fluttering needles of his sound detector. “It's hard to say, sir. If you want a guess, I would say about eighty percent.”

“Then if it does contain a frozen object, it's a very small one, isn't it?” Souvan asked, trying to keep his voice from trembling with eagerness.