Martian Time Slip

Doreen said, "Did you see how jealous he was, when Arnie said he was putting you on the payroll?"

"No. Glaub?" But he was not surprised. "I get this way," he said to the girl, by way of apology. "Something to do with my eyes; it may be astigmatism. Due to tension."

The girl said, "Do you want to sit at the bar? Or go outside?"

"Outside," Jack said.

Presently they stood on the rainbow bridge, over the water. In the water fish slid about, luminous and vague, half-real beings, as rare on Mars as any form of matter conceivable. They were a miracle in this world, and Jack and the girl, gazing down, both felt it. And both knew they felt this same thought without having to speak it aloud.

"It's nice out here," Doreen said finally.

"Yeah." He did not want to talk.

"Everybody," Doreen said, "has at one time or another known a schizophrenic... if they're not one themselves. It was my brother, back Home, my younger brother."

"I'll be O.K.," Jack said. "I'm O.K. now."

"But you're not," Doreen said.

"No," he admitted, "but what the hell can I do? You said it yourself. Once a schizophrenic, always a schizophrenic." He was silent, then, concentrating on the gliding, pale fish.

"Arnie thinks a lot of you," the girl said. "When he says his talent is judging the value of people he's telling the truth. He can see already that that Glaub is desperately eager to sell himself and get on the staff, here in Lewistown. I guess psychiatry doesn't pay anymore, as it did once; too many in the business. There are twenty of them here in this settlement already, and none do a genuinely good traffic. Didn't your-- condition cause you trouble when you applied for permission to emigrate?"

He said, "I don't want to talk about it. Please."

"Let's walk," the girl said.

They walked along the street, past the shops, most of which had closed for the day.

"What was it you saw," the girl said, "when you looked at Dr. Glaub, there at the table?"

Jack said, "Nothing."

"You'd rather not say about that, either."

"That's right."

"Do you think if you tell me things will get worse?"

"It's not things; it's me."

"Maybe it is the things," Doreen said. "Maybe there is something in your vision, however distorted and garbled it's become. I don't know. I used to try like hell to comprehend what it was Clay--my brother--saw and heard. He couldn't say. I know that his world was absolutely different from the rest of ours in the family. He killed himself, like Steiner did." She had paused at a newsstand, to look over the item, on page one, about Norbert Steiner. "The existential psychiatrists often say to let them go ahead and take their lives; it's the only way, for some of them... the vision becomes too awful to bear."

Jack said nothing.

"Is it awful?" Doreen asked.

"No. Just--disconcerting." He struggled to explain. "There's no way you can work it in with what you're supposed to see and know; it makes it impossible to go on, in the accustomed way."

"Don't you very often try to pretend, and sort of--go along with it, by acting? Like an actor?" When he did not answer, she said, "You tried to do that in there, just now."

"I'd love to fool everybody," he conceded. "I'd give anything if I could go on acting it out, playing a role. But that's a real split--there's no split up until then; they're wrong when they say it's a split in the mind. If I wanted to keep going entire, without a split, I'd have to lean over and say to Dr. Glaub--" He broke off.

"Tell me," the girl said.

"Well," he said, taking a deep breath, "I'd say, Doc, I can see you under the aspect of eternity and you're dead. That's the substance of the sick, morbid vision. I don't want it; I didn't ask for it."

The girl put her arm within his.

"I never told anybody before," Jack said, "not even Silvia, my wife, or my son David. You know, I watch him; I look every day to be sure it isn't showing up in him too. It's so easy for this stuff to get passed along as with the Steiners. I didn't know they had a boy at B-G until Glaub said so. And they're neighbors of ours for years back. Steiner never let it out."

Doreen said, "We're supposed to go back to the Willows for dinner. Do you want to? I think it would be a good idea. You know, you don't have to join Arnie's staff; you can stay with Mr. Yee. That's a nice 'copter you have. You don't have to give all that up just because Arnie decides he can use you; maybe you can't use him."

Shrugging, he said, "It's an interesting challenge, building a conduit for communication between an autistic child and our world. I think there's a lot in what Arnie says. I could be the intermediary--I could do a useful job there." It doesn't really matter why Arnie wants to bring out the Steiner boy, he realized. Probably he's got some solid selfish motive, something that will bring him a profit in cold hard cash. I certainly couldn't care less.