Across the Spectrum (66 page)

It’s disturbing even if you’ve been hitting the bottle hard
and heavy; and Dan Casey, who was an unsuccessful illustrator for some
unsuccessful magazine, hadn’t drunk anything stronger than restaurant coffee.
Not because he’d signed the pledge, but because he was—to put it mildly—broke.
Broke, on his uppers, flat. The art editors yawned in his face and indicated
where he could find the door on the way out. In fact, Casey had gone to bed
that night with his eyes sore from staring at the want ads. He liked
painting—but he also liked eating, and it was beginning to look as if he
couldn’t do both.

Granted, he hadn’t gone to bed in any happy mood. A nightmare
would have been fair enough. But waking up to delirium tremens—when he was cold
sober—that was adding insult to injury!

So he only stared glumly at the green-skinned characters and
mumbled, “So now you have names, yet. Pleased to meet you. Have a chair. Stay
awhile. My name’s Casey.”

“Oh, we know,” fluted the one called Amarga. Yes, on second
glance she was undeniably female, and she might even have been called pretty—if
you like your females eight feet tall, with green skin. Her hair was
infinitesimally longer than that of Roald Ruill—if you could call it hair; it
looked like feathers. A metallic band was wrapped around her skimpy breasts,
and there was a most unusually decorated triangle painted on the front of the
brief skin-tight bikini thing that covered her hips. Casey blinked, looked away
from it and looked back again, wondering if it was really meant to represent
what it looked like, or whether he was merely possessed of a spectacularly
filthy mind.

“Oh, we know, we
know
,” warbled Amarga again, regarding
him soulfully. “You mustn’t think us irreverent, Great Casey, if we intrude on
your hours of dedicated creative contemplation!”

“Huh. . . hoo. . . hah. . . wha. . . what?” stammered Casey.
“Uh. . . that’s all right, Miss. . . er. . . Amarga, I wasn’t, whatdyacallit,
contemplating. I was just asleep.”

Roald Ruill and Amarga exchanged bug-eyed glances of awe.
“He actually sleeps,” Amarga cooed, and Roald Ruill remarked, “Quite, quite. I
had forgotten. The fatigue-center is vestigial in our race, of course, Great
Casey.” He glanced about. “May I sit down?”

“Why, ah, sure.” For the first time since they had awakened
him, Casey began to feel as if he were really awake and not having a humdinger
of a cheese-sandwich nightmare. He began to think of unwrapping the blanket
around him and getting up; then he remembered his violently polka-dotted
pajamas. Like most men, Casey considered pajamas effeminate and preferred to
sleep in his suntan; but it was February, and the landlady was miserly with the
coal and the blankets, so it had to be either his color-blind Aunt Jane’s
present from last Christmas or freezing to death.

He swung his feet over the edge of the bed, running a hand
through dark, pillow-tangled hair.

“Look,” he said, “to tell the sober truth, friend, I’m just
now getting wide enough awake to know for sure what you’ve been saying. You
told me you came from the future, or maybe I dreamed that. What goes?”

Amarga’s whisper was clearly audible. “Roald, can he be what
the records call a madjenius?”

Roald Ruill frowned. “No, no, my dear, you don’t understand
the physiological peculiarities of
homo neanderthalensis
—no, I believe
it was almost
homo sapiens
by your time, was it not, O revered Casey?
You must forgive my daughter, Great Casey, this is only her third or fourth
journey into Time, and she has never been farther from our own era than the
Ninth Time Cycle, so of course she is still a little naïve.”

“Why, I went through the Ninth Martian transit-war,” Amarga
protested.

Roald Ruill sat down. More accurately, his elongated legs
collapsed like accordions and he squatted on the rug. Amarga perched daintily
on the edge of Casey’s bureau. Her legs were so long that it was exactly the
right height. The sight fascinated Casey. He blinked again. “Of course. From the
future. Time travel. Buck Rogers and Martians and all. Ha ha.” And suddenly he
shuddered.

“Oooh, look,” Amarga shrilled, “the inspired writings of
creative torment!”

And the green skin of the intruders from the future was
positively suffused with robin’s-egg blue.

Casey gulped. Pajamas or no pajamas, he’d face this on his
feet. He planted his feet firmly on the worn linoleum, threw off the blanket,
and stood up.

“Oooh,” Amarga tweetled, and covered her face with long
dainty hands.

Casey, in a shocked glance, saw that the exquisite fingers
were at least nine inches long. His artist’s eyes saw an elegant, surrealistic
beauty in the elongated girlish form, but he turned to Roald Ruill.

“You say you’re from the future. Okay, I’ll buy that—I mean,
I believe you, because you’re surely not like anything I ever saw in the here
and now. But would you mind telling me what you’re doing in my bedroom, and why
you keep calling me Great Casey?”

“Great Casey—” Roald Ruill began again, then his eyes
swiveled, and he said gently “I am accustomed to the lewd customs of the past,
Great Casey, but will you humor an old man’s whims and make yourself decent? My
daughter is young and naïve, and your clothedness distresses her.”

Casey gulped. Well, the pajamas were an eyesore, all right.
He reached for his robe, and Amarga blinked rapidly, turned blue, and turned
around with her back to him.

Roald Ruill’s voice grew stern. “Even the whims of a
barbarian genius cannot excuse this deliberate display of indecency before a
young female,” he thundered. “Great Casey, I implore you to remove from your
limbs enough of that lewd and superfluous organic substance to spare my young
daughter’s modesty!”

“You mean, you want me to take
off
—”

“At least enough for decency,” Roald Ruill commanded, and
Casey shook his head. Oh well, if this was a dream, it was a lulu, and what did
it matter anyway? He shrugged, hauled off his pajama shirt, paused, shrugged
again and compromised by rolling his pajama legs to the knees, feeling acutely
self-conscious about his long shanks. Amarga peered shyly at him again; even
Roald Ruill looked relieved. “Now you appear civilized,” he commented, “not
like an animal covered with—” he blushed aquamarine again, “organic substance!”

“Okay, okay,” Casey said wearily. “Now would you mind
telling me what you’re doing here in my bedroom?”

“Oh!” Roald Ruill looked startled, “I presumed you had
tele-empathized the reason for my presence. Well, we’re on a little
time-traveling jaunt to celebrate my daughter’s two hundred and fortieth
Seasonal Festival. Yes, she’s only a little chicken, but she knows what she
wants,” he added, with an air of parental indulgence, “and nothing would suit
Amarga but that she must have an Old Master to complete her collection. And
then we had the great idea!” He positively beamed with benevolence. “Antique
paintings are so expensive, and so rare, I decided we would travel into the
past, and—” he brought it out with a gurgle, “have the child’s portrait
actually painted by the greatest of all the Old Masters! Hence, Great Casey, we
are here!”

“Golly,” said Casey. It sounded inadequate.

And then he said, “Who, me?”

And then he said, “Holy smoke! Me, an Old Master?” Slowly
Roald Ruill’s words seeped in. He, Dan Webster Casey, in some
still-inconceivable future, was revered as a great painter—and judging by the
way they were bowing and scraping, an Old Master!

But what an idea! To collect art objects in Time! To
commission a chair from Duncan Pfyfe’s workshop, to watch Leonardo brushing in
the incomparable smile of the Mona Lisa, to watch the chips fall in the studio
of Phidias!

He swallowed. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll paint her portrait.
But—are you sure you mean
me?
I’m no great painter! You mean that in
your
time, I’m—an Old Master?”

“You mean that you are not yet successful?” Roald Ruill
asked in amazement. “Amarga, imagine it! We have the incredible fortune of
acquiring a portrait by the Casey of the Eternity Fragment! From a time when he
was a mere unrecognized genius!” He paused. “Can it be true, Great Casey, that
the multitudes do not yet revere your gift!?”

“They sure don’t,” Casey muttered, “I don’t know where I’ll
get my next week’s rent money!”

Roald Ruill said, “I tele-empathized that you refer to
negotiable credits. Would a few pounds of—oh, gold, or uranium, or platinum,
help you any?”

“Would they!”

“Well, we will reimburse you generously,” Roald Ruill
beamed. “When can you begin Amarga’s portrait?” His accordioned legs zoomed to
full height. “We have mastered Time to some extent, Great Casey, but we are
still somewhat limited in duration within your continuum. You accept?”

“Why—sure.”

Amarga murmured, “Is that your studio I see through the
wall? Oh, how exciting! The studio of Great Casey! Can I see it?”

“Be my guest,” Casey said expansively.

Amarga squealed and grabbed Casey’s hand. “Let’s see it
now!”

Roald Ruill faded bodilessly through the wall. Amarga sailed
after him, dragging Casey by the hand, headlong. She floated through the
wallpaper, and Casey, cracking his head against the molding, picked himself up,
half-stunned.

Amarga thrust her head back through the wall; Casey, looking
up through spinning stars, shivered at the effect of her long pale-green neck
protruding through the wallpaper.

“What’s the matter?” Amarga fretted, “I thought you said we could
come in here!”

Casey shook his head, groggily. “I can’t walk through
walls,” he said, exasperated, and disregarded Amarga’s tweetles of dismay and
curiosity, striding to the connecting door and flinging it open. He surprised
Roald Ruill light-heartedly forcing a fine sable brush into the neck of a tube
of cadmium yellow. “Don’t do that,” Casey snapped. “How do you do that
walking-through-walls trick?” After he said it, he reflected that if they could
take short-cuts through a few thousands of years, then walking through a wall
was no trick at all.

“You mean you can’t even
rearrange
your atoms?”
Amarga squeaked.

Roald Ruill put down the ruined brush. “Never mind that now.
You will paint my daughter?”

“Of course,” Casey said. “But am I—on the level? Am I
honestly a famous painter in your era?”

“The Greatest,” intoned Roald Ruill solemnly. “We have a
mere half-dozen names from all of pre-space art, and yours is among them. You
are, I believe, roughly a contemporary of Michelangelo? Is he a friend of
yours? Your pupil, perhaps?”

“Hardly,” Casey said wryly. Maybe four hundred years was
merely a flash in the pan to these people. Then he asked, curiously, “Which of
my paintings survived—you said, fourteen thousand years?”

“More or less,” Roald Ruill admitted. “As a matter of fact,
Great Casey, no single painting has survived. But the mere fact that your name
has been handed down across the ages indicates your unique greatness. In our
greatest museum, on Mars, is preserved what’s called the Eternity Fragment—generally
conceded to be of Earth-origin—containing a brief critical description of your
painting.”

Casey was suffused with awe. He would, then, outlast
Picasso, Renoir, Gainsborough, Rubens? A hint of humility made him wonder if
his name would be preserved, maybe, by mere chance—how do we know how many
great Greeks and Romans wrote or painted only to have their works perish in the
rubble of the Dark Ages?

But the pride and the humility vanished together when he got
out a stick of charcoal and fixed a sheet of rough paper on the easel. “Let me
make a rough preliminary sketch now. Yes, that’s fine, Miss—Amarga. Now—” If
she was in that position, the obscene thigh-patch didn’t show. He sketched
swiftly, drawing with long, easy strokes. It was ridiculously easy to get a
likeness; the danger would be that he’d turn it into caricature.

Amarga gurgled, “Oooh, I’m excited—”

Roald Ruill was strolling around the room, examining a few
of Casey’s sketches and paintings. “Fantastic, of course,” he remarked, pausing
before a few fashion sketches Casey had done for a newspaper assignment that
hadn’t quite come off. “Such incredibly strange people, and their—er—” again
the aquamarine blush, “attitude to clothedness. I—hem—like this very much—”

Amarga said, in an embarrassed warble, “Father, you may not
indulge your taste for pornography!”

“T-t-t-,” reproved Roald Ruill, “the Universality of Art, my
dear—the Universality of Art! And, now, I fear, we must be going. If
convenient, Great Casey, may we return tomorrow for a sitting?”

“Sure, sure.” Casey could joke about it by now. “Don’t get
mixed up and come yesterday by mistake.”

“Amarga is so fond of having her portrait painted,” Roald
Ruill said fondly. “We have twelve contemporary interpretations, each by a
different modern artist. In the most recent, by my friend Cloass Clenture, she
is portrayed as a winged lamia, with all her erotic fantasies flying around her
head. And Tarnby Torris did an impression of her in carved soapstone, with
fourteen eyes and two heads to imply that she is twice as beautiful and seven
times as foresighted. Arc you a pre-cubist or a neo-surrealist, Great Casey?”

Casey was busy sketching and, in his preoccupation, hardly
heard what Roald Ruill said. (He was to wish, later, that he had listened more
carefully.) As it was, Casey only snapped out of his concentrated effort when
Roald Ruill said, “We must go now,” and added, “I tele-empathize that you are
pressed for credit. I love to help struggling young artists, even when—” he
squeaked laughter, “they are famous Old Masters. It’s like having a part in the
cultural history of the Ages. I should like to buy one of your paintings.” He
picked up one of the illustrations, a woman swathed in a luxurious fur coat.