And the man himself, this Mr. Glescu, was about the same height as-Morniel and me and he seemed to be not very much older. But there was a something about him—I don’t know, call it quality, true and tremendous quality—that would have cowed the Duke of Wellington. Civilized, maybe that’s the word: he was the most civilized-looking man I’d ever seen.
He stepped forward. “We will now,” he said in a rich, wonderfully resonant voice, “indulge in the twentieth-century custom of shaking hands.”
So we indulged in the twentieth-century custom of shaking hands with him. First Morniel, then me—and both very gingerly. Mr. Glescu shook hands with a peculiar awkwardness that made me think of the way an Iowan farmer might eat with chopsticks for the first time.
The ceremony over, he stood there and beamed at us. Or, rather, at Morniel.
“What a moment, eh?” he said. “What a supreme moment!”
Morniel took a deep breath and I knew that all those years of meeting process servers unexpectedly on the stairs had begun to pay off. He was recovering; his mind was beginning to work again.
“How do you mean ‘what a moment’?” he asked. “What’s so special about it? Are you the—the inventor of time travel?”
Mr. Glescu twinkled with laughter. “Me? An inventor?
Oh, no. No, no! Time travel was invented by Antoinette Ingeborg in—but that was after your time. Hardly worth going into at the moment, especially since I only have half an hour.”
“Why half an hour?” I asked, not so much because I was curious as because it seemed like a good question.
“The skindrom can only be maintained that long,” he elucidated. “The skindrom is—well, call it a transmitting device that enables me to appear in your period. There is such an enormous expenditure of power required that a trip into the past is made only once every fifty years. The privilege is awarded as a sort of Gobel. I hope I have the word right. It is Gobel isn’t it? The award made in your time?”
I had a flash. “You wouldn’t mean Nobel, by any chance? The Nobel Prize?”
He nodded his head enthusiastically. “That’s it! The Nobel Prize. The trip is awarded to outstanding scholars as a kind of Nobel Prize. Once every fifty years—the man selected by the gardunax as the most pre-eminent—that sort of thing. Up to now, of course, it’s always gone to historians and they’ve frittered it away on the Siege of Troy, the first atom-bomb explosion at Los Alamos, the discovery of America—things like that. But this year—”
“Yes?” Morniel broke in, his voice quavering. We were both suddenly remembering that Mr. Glescu had known his name. “What kind of scholar are you?”
Mr. Glescu made us a slight bow with his head, “I am an art scholar. My specialty is art history. And my special field in art history is…”
“What?” Morniel demanded, his voice no longer quavering, but positively screechy. “What is your special field?”
Again a slight bow from Mr. Glescu’s head. “You, Mr. Mathaway. In my own period, I may say without much fear of contradiction, I am the greatest living authority on the life and works of Morniel Mathaway. My special field is you.”
Morniel went white. He groped his way to the bed and sat down as if his hips were made of glass. He opened his mouth several times and couldn’t seem to get a sound out. Finally, he gulped, clenched his fists and got a grip on himself.
“Do—do you mean,” he managed to croak at last, “that I’m famous? That famous?”
“Famous? You, my dear sir, are beyond fame. You are one of the immortals the human race has produced. As I put it—rather well if I may say so—in my last book, Mathaway, the Man Who Shaped the Future: ‘How rarely has it fallen to the lot of individual human endeavor to—’ ”
“That famous.” The blond beard worked the way a child’s face does when it’s about to cry.“That famous! ”
“That famous!” Mr. Glescu assured him. “Who is the man with whom modern painting, in its full glory, is said to have definitely begun? Who is the man whose designs and special manipulations of color have dominated architecture for the past five centuries, who is responsible for the arrangement of our cities, the shape of our every artifact, the very texture of our clothing.”
“Me?” Morniel inquired weakly.
“You!” No other man in the history of art has exerted such a massive influence over design or over so wide an area of art for so long a period of time. To whom can I compare you, sir? To what other artist in history can I compare you?”
“Rembrandt?” Morniel suggested. He seemed to be trying to be helpful. “Da Vinci?”
Mr. Glescu sneered. “Rembrandt and Da Vinci in the same breath as you? Ridiculous! They lacked your universality, your taste for the cosmic, your sense of the all-encompassing. No, to relate you properly to an equal, one must go outside painting, to literature, possibly. Shakespeare, with his vast breadth of understanding, with the resounding organ notes of his poetry and with his tremendous influence on the later English language—but even Shakespeare, I’m afraid, even Shakespeare—” He shook his head sadly.
“Wow!” breathed Morniel Mathaway.
“Speaking of Shakespeare,” I broke in, “do you happen to know of a poet named David Dantziger? Did much of his work survive?”
“Is that you?”
“Yes,” I told the man from 2487 A.D. eagerly. “That’s me, Dave Dantziger.”
He wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t seem to remember any—What school of poetry do you belong to?”
“Well, they call it by various names. Anti-imagist is the most usual one. Anti-imagist or post-imagist.”
“No,” said Mr. Glescu after thinking for a while. “The only poet I can remember for this time and this part of the world is Peter Tedd.”
“Who is Peter Tedd? Never heard of him.”
“Then this must he before he was discovered. But please remember, I am an art scholar, not a literary one. It is entirely possible,” he went on soothingly, “that were you to mention your name to a specialist in the field of minor twentieth-century versifiers, he could place you with a minimum of difficulty. Entirely possible.”
I glanced at Morniel, and he was grinning at me from the bed. He had entirely recovered by now and was beginning to soak the situation in through his pores. The whole situation. His standing. Mine.
I decided I hated every single one of his guts.
Why did it have to be someone like Morniel Mathaway that got that kind of nod from fate? There were so many painters who were decent human beings, and yet this bragging slug …
And all the time, a big part of my mind was wandering around in circles. It just proved, I kept saying to myself, that you need the perspective of history to properly evaluate anything in art. You think of all the men who were big guns in their time and today are forgotten, that contemporary of Beethoven’s, for example, who, while he was alive, was considered much the greater man, and whose name is known today only to musicologists. But still—
Mr. Glescu glanced at the forefinger of his right hand where a little black dot constantly expanded and contracted. “My time is getting short,” he said. “And while it is an ineffable, overwhelming delight for me to be standing in your studio, Mr. Mathaway, and looking at you at last in the flesh, I wonder if you would mind obliging me with a small favor?”
“Sure,” Morniel nodded, getting up. “You name it. Nothing’s too good for you. What do you want?”
Mr. Glescu swallowed as if he were about to bring himself to knock on the gates of Paradise. “I wonder—I’m sure you don’t mind—could you possibly let me look at the painting you’re working on at the moment? The idea of seeing a Mathaway in an unfinished state, with the paint still wet upon it—” He shut his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe that all this was really happening to him.
Morniel gestured urbanely and strode to his easel. He pulled the tarp off. “I intend to call this—” and his voice had grown as oily as the subsoil of Texas—“Figured Figurines No. 29.”
Slowly, tastingly, Mr. Glescu opened his eyes and leaned forward. “But—” he said, after a long silence. “Surely this isn’t your work, Mr. Mathaway?”
Morniel turned around in surprise and considered the painting. “It’s my work, all right. Figured Figurines No. 29. Recognize it?”
“No,” said Mr. Glescu. “I do not recognize it. And that is a fact for which I am extremely grateful. Could I see something else, please? Something a little later?”
“That’s the latest,” Morniel told him a little uncertainly. “Everything else is earlier. Here, you might like this.” He pulled a painting out of the rack. “I call this Figured Figurines No. 22. I think it’s the best of my early period.”
Mr. Glescu shuddered. “It looks like smears of paint on top of other smears of paint.”
“Right! Only I call it smudge-on-smudge. But you probably know all that, being such an authority on me. And here’s Figured Figurines No.—”