A Century of Progress (17 page)

Holly continued to study him, and whatever she saw evidently intrigued her. “Mr. Norlund, do you fly?”

“Call me Alan, please. I’ve been up, but I’m no pilot. Why, do I look like one?”

“Yes. I’m not sure what a pilot ought to look like, but I think you do. But then, I’m quite good, and people tell me I don’t look the part. Anyway I admire you for flying; a lot of older people won’t consider trying anything new. Well, don’t look at me that way, Jeff. You’ve never been sensitive about age yourself, and I’m sure Alan already knows that he’s older than a lot of people—chronologically, that is.”

“Thank you,” said Norlund, half-abstractedly. Then a moment later he had to make a conscious effort to recall just what he was thanking the young lady for.

Sitting on the edge of Holborn’s desk, he had just seen something that distracted him from conversation. Being used as a paperweight on the desk was a small, nearly cylindrical object, made of what looked like dark ceramic, with slightly tapered ends and mounting flanges. It looked exactly like the devices that he and Jerry had worked for two days installing in Chicago.

TO A YEAR UNKNOWN

Jerry Rosen, on the morning that he agreed to work for Schiller, was given time for a shower, shave, and breakfast. Then he left Ginny Butler’s apartment in company with Andy Burns and other people. They went down in the elevator to the underground garage, and crossed its parking area to a different corner, where a small, unmarked van awaited them. Jerry and Andy got into the almost windowless rear of the van, along with a nameless young man who saw to it that the two of them were blindfolded as soon as the doors were closed. There followed a ride of what Jerry privately estimated as one to two miles, all in city traffic. Then the van pulled inside another building and stopped. Jerry could hear the large garage doors opening for them, and closing again behind them after they’d pulled in.

Next he and Andy, still blindfolded, were helped to grope their way out of the van and into some other vehicle. Another van, or else some kind of a truck, Jerry couldn’t tell for sure.

Their new transportation started up, and drove out when the doors opened again. Or maybe these were different doors. Because as soon as they were left behind, the sound and the
feel
of the unseen world around Jerry changed abruptly.

This time the ride lasted for no more than a city block. Whatever carrier they were riding in stopped, and he and Andy, both of them with eyes still covered, were helped out of it. Jerry could feel that he was now standing on a comfortably soft surface, but he didn’t know if he was indoors or out. The silence around him was inappropriate for the middle of a big city. A hand rested lightly on his arm, and a voice murmured something commonplace by way of reassurance as he listened to the truck that had brought him drive away.

The hand fell free. “You can take off the blindfolds now,” said the young man who was their guide, speaking in a normal voice. Jerry was startled to see that this was a new guide, with an oriental face.

The world as revealed by sight was now gray and timeless-looking. Underfoot, slightly yielding dark gray, like a smooth seamless carpet. An overcast sky above. Between ground and sky ran high gray walls like dark concrete, forming a smooth concave curve a hundred feet ahead of Jerry. The curve of those walls if carried on would have defined a circle perhaps half a mile in diameter. Directly ahead of Jerry as he faced the wall it was marked with a pattern of thin lines, like the sketch of a tall gate. He wondered if the van or truck had gone out that way.

“This way, gentlemen, please.” Andy was still at his side, but their guide had moved behind them. Jerry turned to confront more curved gray walls. These were closer and convex, and given a more human scale by an almost ordinary door that now stood open at ground level. Jerry realized that the three of them were standing in a kind of courtyard, adjoining a large building. The shape of the building, perhaps two stories high, blurred almost indistinguishably into that of the higher wall surrounding; from where Jerry was standing, he could only guess at the full extent of either.

He looked up again, at the gray sky overhead. Or was it a natural sky at all?

“This way, please.”

With Andy he walked forward, over the courtyard’s gray carpet—or was it pavement?—toward the open door.

“Where are we?” Jerry asked the question urgently, but it wasn’t answered.

Andy didn’t appear to be all that much impressed by his surroundings. “Ah been here before, when they was givin’ me mah new arm,” he told Jerry. Then Andy looked around. “Or was it here? It was a lot like this.”

The inside of the building, white-walled and plain—at least in the first few rooms they entered—seemed a much more normal environment. In part, Jerry realized, this was because when they entered, normal background noise re-established itself: the sounds of a large building with people in it.

Other people came to meet them, conduct them, talk about how they were going to be checked in. Everyone here except their oriental guide—who had now disappeared—wore some variation of gray garments, almost a uniform. Most people looked distinctly informal, nothing was tightly buttoned up. Along with the gray appeared brighter colors, but whether worn as insignia or simply decorations Jerry couldn’t tell.

Getting the two newcomers checked in appeared to consist, for the time being at least, of issuing them their own uniforms of decorated gray, and leading them to the rooms in which they were going to live for some unspecified period of time.

Jerry, hauling an armload of new clothes that he had been assured would fit him perfectly along a commonplace corridor, tried again: “What is this place?”

A colored man with a dazzling smile and a wrestler’s build reassured him. “This place is a school—among other things. I’m sure you were told that you’d get some training. You’ll get the best that we can give you, until you’re ready to do your job.”

“My job? What’s my job?”

“You’ve agreed to do one, I’m sure. Else you wouldn’t be here. If they haven’t told you what it is yet, you’ll have to talk to someone else about it.”

It was suggested that they change into some of their new clothes, and hang up the rest in their closets. Things like laundry were explained. Andy and Jerry had been assigned adjoining rooms on the long corridor that no longer looked quite commonplace. It was gently curved, making it impossible to see how long it really was.

The two of them were left more or less alone. Andy Burns, leaning in the doorway of his newly assigned room, had pulled his own shirt off already. Across his thinly muscled right shoulder and the upper part of his right arm ran a line defined by two slightly but definitely different skin tones. Andy was frowning at this area, pinching and rubbing at the skin just below the line, like someone worried about sunburn. And now something that he had said earlier fully registered with Jerry for the first time:—
when they was givin’ me mah new arm—

When he saw Jerry looking at him, Andy said: “Mah new arm. Lost mah own in the war. Don’t know if Ah told you about that yet.”

Jerry watched the fingers of the right arm flex. The whole arm looked good, natural. Yet when Jerry looked at it very closely he could see that there was a mismatch with the left arm. A slight one. He had to believe that Andy was perfectly serious, that the arm had been somehow grown or grafted on.

“You know,” said Jerry with a sigh, “I think we aren’t even in nineteen eighty-four any longer.”

“Ah think you’re right. Not that Ah know which year this is. Sometimes they just won’t say.”

“Jeez,” said Jerry. He stood in the hallway, forgetting about putting his new clothes away. People going by looked at him in passing. Some of them smiled lightly, in a friendly way. All went on about their business. And here came, yes, it had to be, a robot, a metal shape rolling on swift wheels, threading its way among human traffic. No one gave it a second glance.

After a while Jerry asked, “I wonder if, by
now
maybe, someone has got to the Moon?”

Their first class, in what was called Weaponry, was scheduled not many hours after their arrival. Jerry was impressed with how well things were organized here. People evidently got to where they were supposed to be, and did what they were supposed to do, but nobody kept hounding you all the time. There was none of the continual nagging by authorities which was the thing he remembered best from the few schools he had attended. Maybe, he thought, this is the way a real college is always run. Jeez, me in college. You had to call it a college, didn’t you, if adults were here as students?

The first class, at least, wasn’t conducted in a schoolroom, but at an indoor firing range. The instructor turned out to be a woman, and at first it struck Jerry as odd and humorous that she was going to teach the three of them—Andy was there too, and a third student, also a woman—how to shoot guns. But Jerry was not dumb enough to comment on the instructor’s sex, or to let his amusement show. From what he’d seen of what these people could do, he was willing to let them conduct classes in any way they wanted. Besides, here was Andy who had been in the army and had fired a good many guns, and he took this dame very seriously. Besides again, the weapons she had on display didn’t look like any firearms either of the men would have seen before.

The first one up for consideration, what the teacher called a creaser, looked to Jerry more like a skeletal model of a flashlight, or the rings and spine left over from one of those snap-shut notebooks. There were variations of the creaser with pistol grips, and others that you just pointed, like magic wands or something. Again, having read some science fiction was a help in taking these things seriously.

The instructor told them that the operation of the real guns, out in the field, would be almost soundless. The models used here on the range for training were harmless and emitted little signal beeps when triggered.

“Point-blank range is always best, but this particular weapon can be used effectively up to one hundred meters—that’s a little over a hundred yards.”

“What does it do?”

“All you need to know, basically, is that the creaser here has an effect on the human mind, which usually results in a reversal of loyalties. It’s not a long-term effect, and it’s not very dependable either. But it could make you turn around and shoot your buddy, instead of the enemy.”

“Who’s the enemy, anyway?” This was Jerry.

The instructor faced him squarely. “Hitler. I think you’ve been told that much. You’ll get the rest in History. Hitler, and the people who are fighting for him, whether they realize they’re fighting for him or not. Imagine a world where Hitler is brought into the future, instead of being killed in nineteen forty-five or earlier. Brought forward in time, established in power, with everything that the people of the future know about maintaining power used to maintain him? Think about it.” And with scarcely a change of tone she turned back to the weapon under discussion. “A second creaser jolt will often reverse the effects of the first one, so you can try that if your partner starts after you some day. But a second jolt may well take the recipient out of action completely, perhaps fatally. A third jolt within a matter of an hour will almost certainly finish anyone off.”

There were a couple of other weapons to be discussed today, and there was range-firing with several. Tomorrow would be Armed and Unarmed Tactics, and History. Next the three students were to be allowed a break, and were then to report to another room for Discipline. Jerry didn’t like the sound of that one especially. He wondered if they were going to be sent outdoors to march.

On their way out of what passed for a coffee shop, Andy and Jerry rejoined the young woman who was their fellow student for the day. Her name was Agnes Michel, and she spoke English with a more pronounced accent, and a different one, than most of the people here had. In today’s Weapons class Agnes had impressed Jerry as being one tough gal, maybe almost as tough as the instructor herself.

Now, as Jerry wondered how to go about opening some kind of a conversation, Agnes took the initiative. “This is the Legion of the Lost, guys. Nobody who’s sent to this place ever gets home again—did you know that?”

Andy took it calmly. “Ah knew it ‘bout mahself,” he said. But he looked across at Jerry with concern.

“I’m going home,” said Jerry, walking toward Discipline.

“You think so,” said Agnes, keeping pace in her gray slacks. Agnes was small. She looked mousy, when she wasn’t looking tough, which was most of the time. Not bad-looking, with qualifications.

“They told me I am.”

Agnes didn’t seem to find that worth any direct comment. “This army is your home from now on. At least until you retire.”

The option of eventual retirement somehow made the grim prediction more believable. Jerry felt a chill. He repeated: “I’m going home.”

“And, when they do let you retire, if you should live so long, it’ll be to some place that you’ve never been before anyway.”

“How do you know?” asked Andy, curious at least about retirement. But he got no answer.

Jerry wasn’t going to let her leave it at that. He kept after her. “Where are we now? Do you know where we are?”

She nodded, smiling, as if she had gotten him to admit that he agreed with her. “Those big gray doors you saw, outside, when you arrived? It’s twenty thirty-three outside those doors.”

Now it was Andy’s turn. “How do you know?” “They can’t send you home, man, knowing about this place. At least they’re not going to. They won’t send any of us home, no matter what they’ve said.”

1933-34

The phone rang in Norlund’s bedroom in the middle of the night, and he struggled into wakefulness to answer it.

It was Jeff’s voice that he heard from the receiver, and in the circumstances this was disorienting. Jeff ought to be in his own bedroom two doors down the hall, and how was he managing to phone from there? Then Norlund remembered. Holborn had been called away on one of his fairly frequent business trips, this time to Chicago. It was the fourth or fifth time he’d gone out of town during the ten weeks or so that Norlund had been staying with him.

“Yes, Jeff . . . what is it?”

“Can you talk freely?” asked the voice on the phone. “I take it you’re alone?”

Norlund had a lamp switched on now, and squinted into its glare at his bedside clock. It was two in the morning; he felt vaguely complimented. “Yes, I’m alone. What’s going on in Chicago?”

“I’m here making sure for the Fair people that the mooring mast on the Skyride tower is ready. We don’t know if the
Graf Zeppelin
is going to want to use it or not, and it hasn’t really been tried as yet. Anyway, I’m sorry about the hour, but this is important. I’m calling on a private line, you see.”

“A private line?”

“I’m saying that a special phone arrangement has been made, to connect me with you directly, privately. Understand? To conduct business of the kind that brought you to my house.”

“Yes, all right. I’m awake now.” They’re about to send me somewhere else, thought Norlund. He didn’t look forward to hearing where they wanted him to go now. I’m going to have to insist on seeing whoever it is that makes these decisions, he thought; I’m going to have to get my career settled.

“There’s an important job you have to do, Alan. Tell Holly that I called, and that I want you to take a close look for me at the top of the mooring ring on top of the mast on the Empire State. It’s a copper-plated structure, holding heavy pulleys and so on, about ten feet in diameter, almost at the very top of the mast. To do it from the air will be the most practical way; she’ll have to fly you. You’re going to have to use her plane, because the equipment for the real job’s installed in it;”

“What equipment is that?”

“I’m told you’ll recognize it as soon as you see it, and that its use is already familiar to you. If you want to prove to Holly that you’re interested in the mooring ring, you can find some drawings of it on my desk in my study there at home. Take the drawings along.”

“All right, but what’s the real job, that I’m to do with this special equipment?”

“I’m to tell you that you’ll get your final instructions when you turn the equipment on, after you’re airborne.” Holborn paused. When he spoke again it was in a less constrained, more open tone. “Does that make sense to you?”

“I’ll know for certain when I try it. But yes, I think it makes a kind of sense.”

“Good. It didn’t make much to me. And Norlund.”

“Yes.”

“Holly knows nothing of what’s really going on here. She must know nothing. She thinks that all that special gear in her plane is for some kind of survey of the strength of radio broadcast signals.”

“I understand,” said Norlund.

“Good night, then. Or good morning. Tell Holly I’ll be seeing her in a few days.”

“Yes. Good night, then, Jeff.”

It wasn’t a regular click when the connection broke, but a smooth fade into dial tone.

As usual, Norlund once awakened had difficulty in getting back to sleep. He was awake when Holly came home, not long after the phone call. He could hear her quiet movements down the hall, and the closing of her bedroom door. As far as Norlund could tell, no one had entered the apartment with her. Doubtless she had been out with Dr. Niles, a young bachelor physician who was coming round more and more.

Norlund had learned early on in his stay that Holly was married but separated. Mrs. Rudel. Husband Willy, a native of Germany and a pilot too, had gone back to his homeland some months ago to assist in building the New Order, the Third Reich as it was sometimes called. Either by direct action or subterfuge he had succeeded in taking seven-year-old Willy Jr. along with him. Norlund had heard mention of divorce proceedings, though they weren’t really started yet, he gathered. He would have highly recommended them in this case if he had dared. Doubtless Dr. Niles would have, too.

Norlund got snatches of sleep off and on through the wee hours. Then he got himself up early, afraid of missing Holly, who seldom slept very late even on the infrequent occasions when she came in that way. He went to have his breakfast in the room they called the library, overlooking the yellowing October leaves of Central Park. This room did have more bookshelves and books in it than any other in the apartment, but Norlund had yet to see either Holborn or his daughter sitting still anywhere long enough to read a book. Holborn himself had read some of the books during the last ten weeks, and had taken long walks, and seen some shows, and had spent some of his money. He thought that a middle-aged but not unattractive widow he’d met at one of Holborn’s friends’ parties a couple of weeks ago was probably interested in him. Norlund, though, wasn’t interested in her.

Now he sat looking out the window at autumn leaves and sipping his coffee while he waited for Holly to appear, and listened to the radio. The radio was giving the news.

“—the British government today continued to preserve an attitude of calm toward the crisis precipitated by the German withdrawal from the arms conference, and from the League of Nations—

“—meanwhile, the
Graf Zeppelin
, after battling strong winds yesterday to reach Akron on the second leg of its goodwill tour of this country, was off again today, attempting to reach Chicago. Its appearance there in conjunction with the World’s Fair is scheduled for tomorrow—

“In other news: near Springfield, Illinois this morning, some ten thousand striking coal miners are still confronting troops in labor unrest that continues to sweep the country—”

“They’re all Communists, that’s what Dad would say.” Holly had arrived. She had materialized before the library mantel while Norlund’s thoughts were elsewhere, puzzling over the mooring mast and Skyride tower. And in the second before he looked at her, she might have been looking at the photo on the mantel, of Willy and little Willy Jr. Norlund had once heard her say that it was the best picture of her son she had.

She had dropped her gaze into the dark empty fireplace now. “Almost cold enough for a fire these mornings,” she said. And in almost the same tone added: “Yesterday I got a letter from Willy.”

For a moment Norlund looked at her hands, expecting to see in one of them a letter ready to be crumpled up and consigned to flames. “Bad news, evidently,” he said with sympathy.

“Oh, Alan, I’ve been hoping, expecting, that when he’d been in Germany a while he’d wake up and see what a . . . I’ve never been there myself, what do I know? But I can’t believe this Hitler is really any good. He has done some good for Germany, I guess, got the people standing up on their feet again . . .”

“Those who haven’t been knocked down by Storm Troopers.”

“What? Oh, I suppose.” Holly, in the way she had, paused and seemed really to focus on Norlund for the first time. “Well, good morning, Alan. You’re up early.”

“I had a call from Jeff last night.”

“Oh. Did he ask for me?”

“No, just business. And it was two in the morning.”

“Funny I didn’t hear the phone ring. Of course I was out late.”

Norlund, avoiding any comment on that, gave the explanation that Jeff had prescribed of what they wanted to do. “And besides getting a look at the mooring ring . . . I take it that there’s some special radio gear that’s been installed in the cabin of your ship?”

“Oh, that. Yes. Dad asked me a couple of months ago if I would mind. I told him no; after all, it’s still mostly his money that keeps me flying. Are they really broadcasting from that mast already?”

“So, it’s possible for you to give me that ride as Jeff requested?”

She hesitated, lifting the cover of one of the breakfast dishes, sniffing the aroma with healthy appetite. “Today?”

“Jeff did sound in a hurry. I think he would like it to be taken care of today, yes.”

“All right. I’ll go phone the airport now.” Holly went to the window and took a quick look at a partly cloudy sky. “Doesn’t look bad. Then I’ll grab some breakfast and change, and we’ll be off.”

“Thanks. I suppose you had something else planned,” Norlund said when Holly came back from phoning. A silent maid had by now arranged her breakfast for her, across from Norlund’s place at the library table. His dishes had already been collected. He marveled, in passing, at how quickly and easily he had gotten used to being waited on.

“It can wait,” she said, sitting down. “Your project will take my mind off things.”

“Dr. Niles last night?” Norlund asked, and then instantly regretted it. “It’s none of my business.”

“No, it isn’t.” But she didn’t sound angry. “Maybe later I’ll start talking about it all.”

After breakfast Holly changed into garments that Norlund had seen her in before, and recognized as flying gear: what looked almost like army pants, and a man’s shirt. “Let’s go,” she said.

The lobby of the apartment building was lifeless as usual. A uniform opened the front door for them. Griffith was already waiting with Holly’s roadster in front of the building, at a curb kept clear of casual parkers. After holding the car door for Holly, the chauffeur saluted and walked away.

“You don’t mind if I drive, do you Alan?”

“You’re going to have to do all the driving when the time comes to switch vehicles. But if you want to drive this one too, suit yourself.”

“I like to drive.”

“I’ve noticed.” They had been together on a number of outings of one kind and another, most recently to the Whitney Museum. Norlund wondered if his name and Holly’s would someday appear, linked, in somebody’s gossip column. Maybe they already had; he never read the damned things and thought that she didn’t either. Jeff probably did. Or would, if he ever had the time, and perhaps would have seen his own name more than once. His wife, Holly’s mother, had been dead now for a good number of years.

Holly, as usual driving a little too fast, said, “I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that you could handle the airplane, too.”

“You would be surprised, if you bailed out up there and left me to try it. I think you’d be out one . . . you’ve never told me what kind of a ship you have.”

“Lockheed Vega.” Smiling a little smugly, she glanced over at him. “I think you’ll like it. No, it’s not a seaplane.” Her enthusiasm for the waterfront skyport in Manhattan had become a gentle standing joke between them.

She never does talk to me, thought Norlund, as if there were forty years of chronology between us. That was probably why certain fantasies on his part were becoming harder and harder to dismiss, and why he had disliked Dr. Niles from their first brief meeting.

“It’s strange, in a way, that you and Jeff are working together.”

If there were any logical consistency behind the way she sometimes called her father by his first name and sometimes did not, Norlund hadn’t yet figured it out. Anyway he couldn’t very well deny now that he and Jeff were partners in some enterprise. “How so?” he asked.

“Just that you’re so different from each other.” Holly paused with traffic, shifted expertly, and was off again. “In one way you’re alike. Good at keeping secrets. There’s a whole area of Dad’s life that he never allows me to get into. I don’t mean his girl friends; I can pretty well see what’s going on there. I used to think it was something to do with the War, that maybe he’d been in Intelligence work, though he never would admit to that, and some of it was still going on somehow . . . but now I wonder.” She looked over at Norlund. “Whether it was the War or not, I think it was something to do with you.”

He tried to frame his answer carefully. “I can’t talk about my work. Not much, anyway. Not even to you.”

“I didn’t expect you would. You probably wouldn’t be much good at your work, whatever it is, if you did.”

They rode in silence for a while, into and out of the Holland Tunnel. West of the river the land was largely flat and empty marsh, with screaming birds hovering above it. When Norlund turned his head to look back from the curving highway, he could see the Empire State hovering on the horizon, standing above the flatness to what appeared to be a mountain’s height.

Holly spoke again. “Well, Dad never begrudges me my own life, my own secrets.”

Norlund asked on impulse: “Have you heard very often from your kid since they’ve been gone?”

“When his father has him write. Or lets him. Or makes him. I don’t know. They both talk about my going over there to join them.”

“What will you do?”

“I’ve been unable to make myself do anything. I don’t want it to wind up with lawyers and courts.”

In the next fifty years the Newark Airport was going to change by an even more mind-boggling amount than the metropolis across the river. For one thing, thought Norlund, the airport was going to become vastly less convenient to use. As it was now, Holly knew the people who ran it, and they knew her, and the necessary things got done with a minimum of fuss and formality.

Cloud-shadow alternated with sunshine out on the ramp where the Vega stood waiting for them. It was a big high-wing monoplane, thick-shouldered, and the single air-cooled radial engine looked enormous. The craft was painted white with stripes of red and blue. Norlund looked for some kind of name on it, but there were only the official numbers.

Norlund felt reassured to see Holly doing a thorough walk-around check before they boarded. She even pulled the caps off the fuel tanks and checked the levels inside directly; the fuel gauge must be unreliable, he thought, or non-existent.

They entered the plane by the cabin door, in the side of the fuselage toward the rear. Inside there was plenty of room for four passenger seats, but only one on each side had been installed. A lot of the remaining cabin space was taken up with what looked like radio gear; it was the back of the Radio Survey truck all over again. With a difference. Each side of the cabin had a row of small windows, and the center window in each row was furnished with a special small mount, bolted in place, and holding what looked like a telescopic camera on a swivel. The lenses stared out through the flat glass. The rest of the equipment was neatly safety-wired into racks, in the best military aviation style. There, on one cabinet accessible from a seat, was his row of dials that ought to be settable like the combination on a safe.