The Walking Shadow Read online

  Wishart wasn’t tuned in. He couldn’t afford to be converted. In the same way that people who handle dynamite couldn’t afford impetuousness, and people making tear gas lost the ability to cry, Wishart had long ago learned to kill the spontaneous reactions evoked within his head by music or rhetoric. All sound reverberated within his consciousness now like echoes in an empty drum.

  The halo effect was okay now, and Wishart settled himself to watch Paul’s face. In spite of the glare of the lights, Paul’s pupils were dilated for the benefit of the TV audience. People responded better to people whose pupils were dilated, because it constituted a subliminal signal of attraction. It meant, of course, that Paul was practically blind because of the dazzle, but that didn’t matter. He knew his script, not just because he had memorized it but because he felt it, deep down. His heart was in it, every time he spoke.

  Paul was talking now, as he always did, about the need for belief. He made people feel that need, and made them realize that it was the greatest need they had. Then he offered them something to believe in. It was a soft sell, a coaxing invitation. He never told them that what he offered them to believe was true, just that it would answer their need. That was good, because the reason virtually all these people had stopped believing in everything else was that they could no longer accept the truth of anything, or even the very notion of truth. Paul swept the whole problem of truth out of the way, dismissed it as irrelevant, and for that they were grateful, because truth had become their nightmare. Paul asked people to believe what he said not because it was true, but because it felt right, because it answered the need to believe.

  And they did.

  Wishart looked sideways at the make-up girl who sat beside him. Her own make-up was cracking and sweat was beginning to show, but her eyes were riveted to Paul’s gesturing hands high above. She was a long way from the mundane world of perspiration, cruising toward spiritual orgasm. The magic was working, as it was working on everyone. Three-dollars-and-a-half for the experience, fifteen for a video-cassette that would recall it again and again and let them relive it a hundred times, until, in the fullness of time, it decayed into mere noise and a pretty face and ridiculous gesticulations.

  All things, thought Wishart, must pass. It was a tenet of faith that he had always taken for granted. He had lived more than fifty years in the world and had never found cause to challenge it. He knew that Paul’s message, like all the others, would eventually fail to answer the undiminished need for belief, which would call for something new, and even more desperate, to fight the threat of the decay that seemed to have seized the whole human world.

  Wishart blinked away the sweat that had oozed into the corner of his right eye.

  Somewhere in mid-blink, he missed the event, which seemed to take no time at all.

  At one moment, there was the pure white of Paul’s costume, the artificial halo, the blond hair and the smooth flesh of the made-up face; then there was a blaze of light that dazzled, reflected from the face and hands that were suddenly mirror-bright.

  The arms, which had reached out but a moment before as if to embrace the vistas of the hopeful future, were frozen now as if time itself had been interrupted.

  Among the eighty thousand people who were physically present there were some who screamed and some who sighed. The TV viewers, inevitably, reacted more slowly.

  Where Paul Heisenberg had stood there was now a silver statue, dressed in the same white tunic, but reflecting from the surface that had once been bare flesh all the light that had been carefully directed to compose the glowing nimbus.

  The glow was even brighter now, and in the stillness which followed the abrupt interruption of the beautiful voice, there was a profundity that seemed terrible even to Adam Wishart.

  He knew, as they all did, that he had witnessed—or failed to witness in the unfortunate blink of an eye—a miracle.

  AN EXTRACT FROM SCIENCE AND METASCIENCE BY PAUL HEISENBERG

  Science is knowledge, and what qualifies a statement as a scientific statement is contained within the process by which we have arrived at the conclusion that it is true. The credentials of a scientific statement are established by the method we have used in order to prove it. Basically, this method consists in the rigorous testing of the statement in competition with other statements that claim to describe or explain the relevant sensory evidence. All scientific knowledge is empirical (which is to say, based on sense-data) and systematic (which is to say, concerned with organizing such data by means of generalizations). Any statement whose truth cannot be established by reference to sensory data falls outside the scope of science.

  At one time, it was believed by the most enthusiastic champions of science that the answers to all conceivable problems lay within its scope. Science, it was said, would in the fullness of time reveal the grand plan of the universe and permit perfect understanding of the system of systems. It was recognized that people could devise questions that science could not hope to answer, but those questions were ruled out of court, as illegitimate and essentially meaningless. All that was not knowable was held to be nonsensical. Metaphysics, the speculative philosophical discipline that attempted to investigate what lies beyond the scope of scientific enquiry—the reality “behind” the perceived world—was deemed to be a barren and sterile pursuit. The questions of metaphysics, it was said, were questions that could not sensibly be asked, because they could not sensibly be answered.

  That era of confidence in science is now past. It is not that the character of science has changed, but that we have changed. Once, a majority of intelligent people could feel secure within the horizons of expanding scientific knowledge, but now we feel insecure. We have discovered that the system of systems offers us less self-satisfaction than it once did. We have discovered indeterminacy in the physical world and uncertainty within ourselves.

  We now feel that the limits placed by the philosophy of science on what we can know are narrower and more restrictive than we require. We have become uncomfortable within the world-view of modem science.

  It is by no means simple to find a cure for this discomfort, and the one thing that is certain is that more scientific knowledge cannot ease the situation in the least; the fault is in ourselves.

  It is in response to this gathering sense of insecurity that there has been in recent years an increasing interest in the speculative disciplines of metascience. It is, I think, more reasonable to talk of metascience than of metaphysics, firstly because the new metascience is quite unlike the classical metaphysics, and secondly because our new speculations are more concerned with reaching through and beyond the biological and the social sciences than with the shadowy area of first causes that lies beyond the physical sciences.

  There is, however, another reason why the renaissance of interest in metascience was inevitable, and which sustained metascientific speculation even through the era of its disreputability. This reason is that the perfectly true allegation that the statements of metascience could never be known to be true is and always has been quite irrelevant. We can never have certain answers to the questions of metascience, nor, indeed, any answers which we can rely upon in the slightest degree to inform us as to the nature of the world in which we find ourselves, but that does not affect the need that drives us to ask such questions in the least. The fact that metascientific statements can never be verified in no way threatens their psychological utility. In purely pragmatic terms they remain not merely valuable but absolutely necessary to our well-being.

  In a sense, we are the victims of a cruel situation, in that we so desperately want to know things we cannot know. Such questions as the existence of God, the purpose of life and the ultimate destiny of the universe are devoid of scientific significance, but we feel them to be important, and by virtue of that fact they become important. The situation of craving answers we cannot have is an unhappy and distressing one, and if we accept the situation at face value we are driven to the conclusion that the human condition i
s unfortunate and irredeemable.

  There is, however, a way out of the trap if we are simply prepared to recognize that the value of metascientific speculations is not in the least reduced by their having the status of speculations rather than facts. It does not matter in the least that metascientific statements are created rather than discovered, for the need which we have for them is psychological, not technological, and the statements need only be believed and never applied. We never have to expect or demand that the perceived world will comply with our metascientific speculations, provided that we are careful never to include statements within our metascientific systems that are not metascientific, but hypotheses that can actually be tested by reference to sensory experience and experiment.

  Much confusion has arisen in the past by virtue of the fact that we have habitually construed the word “believe” as “believe to be true”. This has led us to assume that, in order to believe in a metascientific statement, we need to assert that it is true, which, by definition, we cannot justifiably do. It is time now to recognize that this is a mistaken notion of what belief involves and of what beliefs consist, and for what purpose they are useful.

  If we know something to be true, because it has been established by the methods of science, we do not need to add something extra which converts that knowledge into a belief. If we do “believe” it, we do so in the special sense that the knowledge must always remain provisional, dependent upon further data. Scientific knowledge is always subject to revision or rejection in the light of further discoveries, and any commitment of faith to the current body of knowledge is both superfluous and dangerous.

  By contrast, commitment is exactly what is involved—and exactly what is needed—in holding to a metascientific statement. Belief in a statement involves shielding and protecting it, holding it invulnerable against criticism. There can never be any logical warrant for such a strategy, which is, of course, completely out of place in science, but in metascience we need only seek a warrant on pragmatic grounds.

  If, because of an excessive admiration of science, or because we have excessive expectancies of its rewards, we find ourselves unable to make a commitment to metascientific speculations of one kind or another, then we are the poorer for our failure. Indeed, it might be that such a psychological stance is literally impossible to maintain, for what is actually involved in the rigorously skeptical world-view of the determined empiricist is not an absence of metascientific commitment but a metascientific commitment to the present state of scientific knowledge, which reads into that state an authority and invulnerability to falsification which science simply cannot possess. People who can do that are doubly unfortunate, firstly because they delude themselves as to the extent of their own metascientific commitment, and secondly because their commitment is tied to a speculation which is likely to be psychologically unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, such people are certainly better off than they would be if they genuinely had no commitments of the kind we call belief.

  To sum up, therefore, the situation is this. We need metascientific beliefs. We cannot get by in life without them. We cannot select these beliefs on the grounds of their truthfulness or their likelihood, because there is no way that we can establish the truth or likelihood of metascientific statements. That such statements do sometimes seem likely or unlikely is a function of their aesthetic appeal, not of their logical appeal. It follows, therefore, that the most reasonable strategy is to select beliefs for commitment on the grounds of their psychological utility, in purely pragmatic terms. If asked what our warrant is for the commitments which we make, we need only answer: I believe it not because it is true, but because it is necessary.

  It is the only answer we can give, but it is the only answer we need.

  PART TWO

  THE WRECKAGE OF THE WORLD

  CHAPTER THREE

  He was crawling, dragging himself over jagged rocks and sills while a terrible wind lashed sand into his face and about his body, stinging and scourging. He had been crawling for a long, long time, and exhaustion made every movement difficult.

  In and behind the wind there was another force: a sluggish but relentless current, which tugged at something inside him.

  He hooked his bleeding fingers over sharp spurs of rock and hauled himself forward, his legs dragging and barely able to push at all. The hot sand swirled over his bare forearms, stirring the fine blond hair.

  He felt as if he was aging, the years coursing through his body as he headed for the night of time. He knew that he had a destination but he did not know what or where it was, or even that he was going in the right direction, although he had to believe that he was, for without that belief he would simply have stopped and died. He felt that the current plucking at his soul was carrying his goal away from him, bearing it into the mists of eternity, which were forever inaccessible, but still he kept himself moving, still he would not yield.

  He had seen glimmering lights above the horizon from time to time, but they were gone now, faded into a draining twilight that cast wan shadows beneath the serrated ridges of bone-white rock. Perhaps they had never been anything more than mirages, shimmering in layers of air undisturbed by the fierce wind that attacked him down here in the valley.

  Night came, but still he struggled. The wind of time would bring day again, and then the night, but there was no relief from the heat and the sand and the sharp stone spurs which had already begun to lacerate his fingers. His fingers, though, did not pause in their grappling, and he was almost grateful for the ridges which allowed him purchase to drag himself along.

  Beneath his body something was slithering: something massive, conjoined with the substance of the desert itself, an essence or a spirit within the rock. Because it slithered he named it a snake, but it had no form as yet.

  The snake cradled him in its shapeless coil, ready to engulf him when the desert gave it birth.

  His movements grew fevered and desperate as the need to rest grew within him. He knew that he must not stop, that sleep would be fatal, but even the fear of sleep spread a numb drowsiness through his lean frame. His arms jerked spasmodically as the muscles corded and cramped momentarily.

  After one last agonized heave, he was still, face down against the slithering scaliness of the desert’s skin.

  The current ceased to grip him. The slithering ceased. A brief, fugitive instant of panic was lost in a swirl of time and space.

  With the most delicate of emetic shudders, the other world spat him out.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sheehan attempted to pull the collar of his greatcoat a little tighter as he stood back in the shadow of the tunnel mouth and listened to the ring of Boulton’s approaching footfalls on the frosted concrete.

  Boulton walked with the precisely measured stride of an old army man. He should have retired when the last state of emergency passed peacefully away, but instead he had come to the capital and joined the police force. He was twenty years older than Sheehan, but he hardly seemed to feel the cold.

  Sheehan came forward out of the tunnel to meet Boulton, and the other paused. For a moment they didn’t speak, but glanced instead at the concrete pedestal supporting the cage that enclosed the glittering statue.

  The pedestal had been built so that Paul’s feet were resting on its surface, but it would not have mattered had it been an inch or two shorter; he would simply have remained suspended there, locked into Earth’s gravitational field: immutable, immovable, unreachable.

  Boulton inclined his head slightly toward the gleaming statue. “Be a fool to come back tonight,” he observed. “Freeze to death inside the cage.”

  Sheehan laughed, dutifully but uneasily.

  “They should put some clothes on him,” he said.

  “They used to. Made him look like a scarecrow. Can’t keep them all clothed, anyhow. A third of all the jumpers in the country are in this city. More jumpers here than living people, I reckon. Anyhow, clothes’d spoil that pretty glow.”

  There were
no electric lights out in the open expanse of the stadium, but there were dozens of wax candles that people had brought and lit early the previous evening. There were no people about now, but well over half the candles burned on, and some were long enough to last until the dawn. The perfectly reflective surface of Paul Heisenberg’s body reflected the candlelight as if it were itself a faintly glowing object: a human body, limned in fire. The effect was rather eerie.

  Paul was not alone—there were more than a hundred similar static figures scattered over the flat surface of the arena, and a couple of hundred more in the derelict stands—but it was to see him that the crowds came, and they stationed their candles to illuminate him, not his companions.

  “Hope there’s no trouble,” said Sheehan. “If I had to draw, my hand would freeze to the butt.”

  “No trouble tonight,” said Boulton confidently. “Too cold.”

  “I hate this place,” muttered Sheehan. “Standing guard over hundreds of statues. I’ve never been here when one of them came out of it, but I’m not looking forward to it. Who cares, anyhow? Let the bastards freeze to death, teach them to think before they jump.”

  “They don’t matter,” said Boulton, waving an arm in a horizontal arc. “Just him.” He pointed up at Paul, though there was no mistaking his meaning.

  “There’s an alarm system in the cage,” said Sheehan.

  “If you only knew how often that alarm’s been triggered falsely, or jiggered so that it couldn’t sound even if he did come out....”

  “Yeah,” agreed Sheehan, morosely, “but you said there’d be no one out tonight.”

  Boulton shrugged. Then he stepped out from the wall, raised his arm in a cursory salute, and went on his way around the arc of the low wall. Sheehan stepped back into the tunnel, seeking the shelter of its black pit of shadow. Cold like this, he thought, is enough to make anyone turn jumper. But who can guarantee he’ll come out in summer?