A Century of Progress (20 page)

1934

Holly, in the gray dawn of the New Year, was arguing with her father. She was still wearing her one-strap red gown, but the gold sandals had been kicked off somewhere, making it easier to stalk around, which she liked to do while arguing. She had plenty of latitude, social as well as physical, in which to move around and yell; the servants, dismissed the night before somewhere around midparty, were not yet back from their own celebrations or their rest to commence the cleanup job. The apartment was a terrific mess, but Holly and her father had the freedom of being alone in it.

So far Jeff’s attitude had remained one of patient soothing, though Holly was really flaring at him.

“There’s something very funny about it, Jeff. You had hardly hung up the phone before those men with the stretcher were coming in the door.”

Her father was sitting wearily on the sofa in the library. Sometimes he looked toward the window, as if he wished he could be out there somewhere. “Holly, if I just tell you that he’s getting the best care possible, isn’t that enough? Can’t you just accept that for now?”

She paused in her angry movement, to look at Jeff. “Oh? And how do you know that he’s getting the best of care?”

Jeff sighed and shook his head, looking old and tired. Obviously he hadn’t expected this much of an argument.

Holly could feel sorry for him, but she wasn’t going to let up. “Why don’t you tell me what hospital they took him to?”

They had been over this ground several times before; still Jeff remained, in Holly’s view, surprisingly patient. He said: “I don’t know where the hospital is.”

“And I suppose you don’t know what it’s called, either.”

“Actually, I . . . no.”

“Who runs it?” Holly asked sweetly.

He shrugged.

“Oh Jeff! For God’s sake! You don’t know where or how or who, but you do know he’s getting the best of care. Do you expect me, anybody, to believe that?”

Her father had turned his face to the window again. He stared out of it, into space, at nothing, as if he were just waiting for her to get tired of this.

She was very tired, but not going to give up. “Why were they just waiting in the wings to rush him off? Did they know that he was going to get sick? How did they know?”

Jeff’s eyes came slowly back to her face. “No, they didn’t know that. Not until I called them.”

“I suppose they just happened to be driving by. With a radio in their ambulance, I suppose.”

“They do have a radio, I’m sure. As you say, how else could they have been so quick?” Jeff paused, then, as if unable to help himself, asked, “What did the ambulance look like?” The tone of the question was almost wistful.

Holly stared at her father. She knew that look; it was his usual expression when he wanted to see something very new, an invention or a design, that he thought was going to be important.

Against Jeff’s urging she had gone down in the elevator with Norlund and the attendants who had come for him, and she had tried to follow when they put him into the ambulance. In this case her usual forceful ways hadn’t done her the least bit of good. The attendants had calmly but forcefully put her aside, and slammed the doors, and sped away. There had been no cabs in sight, or she would have tried to follow.

“It looked quite ordinary,” she said now. “On the outside, at least. There were . . . respirators, I guess, and things inside. I didn’t get a very good look. Why, are you wondering if it was streamlined properly, according to your rules?” If she had to fight, she might as well be nasty about it.

Her father didn’t appear to notice. He had forgotten, at least for the moment, about the ambulance, because a sudden overriding suspicion had seized him. “Holly.” His voice dropped. “There wasn’t anything
between
the two of you, was there? You and Norlund?”

She could feel the unaccustomed tears start in her eyes. “And what if there was?”

Jeff was, predictably, aghast. “He’s more than old enough to be your father. And Willy. What if Willy should find out?” Jeff had always been certain that there would be a reconciliation.

Rage came back, to dry tears like the heat of flames. “Dad, I’m not just going to drop this. You know me. I’m warning you that I’ll go to the police, the newspapers, wherever else I have to go, to find out what’s happened to him.”

“Alan Norlund,” Jeff said, as if to himself. Still he stared at his daughter in disbelief. Then another urgent question started to grow behind his eyes.

Holly forestalled it. “No, Alan and I haven’t slept together. But that’s not the point right now. The point is that I’m going to find out where he is, and how he is.”

Jeff was pulling himself together. “Holly. Look. Sweetheart. It won’t be good for Norlund, or for me either, if you make too much of this. In time we’ll find out how he’s doing.”

“How will we find out?”

“It won’t be good for
you
!’

“You’re going to have to explain to me why. Convince me. Or I’m going for the police, right now. You’re talking as if you and Alan are involved with gangsters, and I won’t believe that of either of you.” And she started for the door, not bluffing.

Jeff, who knew her, gave up. “All right!” he called after her. When she stopped and turned, he held out his arm to her. It was a slow, old man’s motion. “All right,” he repeated. “I’ll tell you what I can. But you must sit down and listen. Hear me out, and don’t jump up and do anything until I’ve finished. Okay?”

“Okay,” Holly said softly. She took her father’s hand and held it, and sat down close to him.

“The reason I haven’t told you any of this before,” he began slowly, “is that I’m afraid, as I just said, that I could be putting your life in danger if I do. Still want me to go on?”

Memory flashed in her mind: the strange attack during her flight with Norlund. But she only said: “Go on.”

“Of course. It was a silly question. All right.” He sighed deeply. “It all goes back to that day we crashed.”

For some reason Holly felt no surprise. She had long realized that day marked some kind of a watershed. “All right. When you thought that I was dead.”

Her father was looking at her very strangely now. He let go of her hand, and got to his feet as if with some definite purpose in mind. But then he only paced a lap around the room and came back to stand in front of her.

When he spoke, his voice was so low that Holly could barely distinguish the words. “I still believe that you were dead.”

“What?”

“Listen to me, my dear. You were just lying there, all covered with blood. I couldn’t find any pulse. And as far as I could tell, you were not breathing.”

“But I was only knocked out. I woke up.”

Her father was shaking his head. “Listen to me, I say. While you were—lying there—two people arrived.”

“What two people?”

“A man and a woman. I thought at first that they were only hikers; there were no roads, and they arrived from somewhere, I couldn’t quite see how. And they offered to help me. But only under certain conditions.”

“Dad, you must have been hurt yourself.”

“No. I know it sounds that way. I was in a tremendous state of shock, certainly. Beside myself with grief, because I was sure that you were dead. At first I wasn’t quite sure that the people talking to me were real. But, as it turned out, they are very real indeed. Just as real as those ambulance attendants that you just saw. As all that special gear, installed in the cabin of your plane.” Jeff’s voice dropped again. “As real, God help me, as whatever it was that attacked you when you were on that flight with Norlund. I never expected that, I swear.”

He had never raised the subject with her before. “I didn’t know you knew about that. Do you know what it was?”

Her father shook his head helplessly. “Let me finish telling you what little I do know.” He drew a breath, and went on. “The two people who arrived at the crash. I’ve said I couldn’t quite see how they got there. But there was a sort of . . . rushing sound, I thought, in the sky. A moment of oddly colored light. And then there they were.”

“A rushing,” Holly murmured. And an odd light? If she had been trying to describe the strange phenomenon in the sky during her flight with Norlund, she might well have chosen the same terms.

Jeff misinterpreted what must have been the odd way that she was looking at him. “I tell you, those people were real enough. I’ve seen one of them since then, and I’ve talked with her many times.”

“A woman.”

“A young woman, of fairly ordinary appearance. Her name is Ginny Butler, or so she says. I never learned the man’s name. The pair of them bent over you, looking at you closely. The man took one instrument after another out of a backpack that he was wearing, and he kept probing at you with them. I remember asking if he was a doctor, but he didn’t answer. Instead he conferred for a moment with Ginny Butler, and then she led me a little distance away and talked with me. She told me you were beyond ordinary medical help.”

“Oh, Jeff.”

“But, she told me, there was still one chance. If I helped them, worked for them afterwards, she swore that they would do everything they could for you. She assured me that there would be nothing wrong or illegal in any task they would ever assign me. Of course I raged at them for making conditions. But then I swore I would do anything.

“With that, the man went to work on you at once. The woman kept me from watching very closely. She kept telling me what a great cause it was, that I was now going to work for, how it would one day make the whole world a better place. Well—one’s heard all that before, of course. Still, I did swear a solemn oath to help them, and to keep their secrets.” Jeff paused, sagging. He moved again to the sofa and sat down. His voice had fallen to a whisper. “Now I’m breaking my oath, and I don’t know what the result is going to be. Are they perhaps going to—withdraw their investment?”

“I don’t understand.”

Jeff looked sadly at his daughter. “When I was first pleading with them for help, they put it to me this way: they couldn’t afford to help all the accident victims in the world. Therefore they—invested their help carefully. It was given only in cases where they could expect a return, in the form of help for their own great cause.”

“Which is—?”

Her father’s smile was ghostly. “I’ve never found that out, exactly.”

Despite herself, Holly was growing afraid. It was not that she did not believe her father. It was that she did. “And you’ve been helping them?”

“Yes. Doing things that seem harmless in them-selves, if sometimes strange. Allowing that equipment to be put in your plane, for one thing. They of course sent men to do it—what it’s supposed to do, I really have no idea. Norlund does. He’s one of them. Or else he’s simply working for them, recruited by them as I was, perhaps. It was their phone number that I dialed last night, when he collapsed—a number that Ginny Butler had given me to memorize. And it was their ambulance that you saw, taking him away.”

Holly sat down beside her father. “This woman, Ginny Butler. You say you’ve seen her many times, since the crash?”

“Seen her a few times. Talked to her often, mostly on the phone. They like to do business by phone.” Jeff pushed himself to his feet once more and went to an abandoned bar-cart, where he managed to put together a glass of ice and mineral water. “An ambulance came for you too, you see. It wasn’t an ordinary vehicle—there was no road, remember? And it wasn’t an autogyro. I never really saw how they did it, but I know they took you away, somehow, to somewhere else, while the woman kept on talking to me, distracting me. Then almost before I could be sure that you were gone, they were bringing you back. You were still all bloody, and unconscious. But now you were obviously alive.”

The whole thing sounded very unreal to Holly. And at the same time she could not seriously doubt it. “They aren’t bringing Alan back that fast.”

Jeff examined his icewater as if it might possibly be of some rare vintage. “No, they’re not. It occurs to me that there were other people here last night, who saw him taken away with what certainly looked like a heart attack. If he were brought back very quickly, in good health, it would look strange.” He drank quickly, and paused. “I’m sure we’ll get news of him quite soon. Almost sure,” he added in a low voice. He looked at his daughter. “I’m rather surprised that you’re not telling me I’m crazy.”

There was the equipment in her plane, like nothing else she had ever seen before. There was the sense of strangeness about Norlund, and his work with her father. And one thing more, the clincher. “When I was flying with Alan,” she told her father, “that thing that came after us in the sky . . . I can’t imagine any reasonable, natural explanation for what it looked like. And I’ve tried.”

Jeff seemed suddenly on the verge of being crushed by remorse. “The people who recruited me are fighting against some other force, some other group, with the same kind of powers. It’s a kind of war I’ve gotten you into, I see that now. God, Holly, at least I can tell you now how sorry I am about that. But it was either that or—or—”

On impulse, Holly flew to his side, and gave him an enormous hug. The impulse was genuine, but in a moment she pulled back. “What else can you tell me?”

“I think not much. I think nothing at all. We’ll just have to see where we go from here.” Jeff sucked at his icewater, and she thought that he was still concealing something. He went on. “We’ll wait. We’ll hear, in time, about Alan.” Then he demanded suddenly: “Why can’t you make things up with Willy? He’s your husband.”

Holly was not going to be distracted right now. “That phone number you have, the one you dialed for the ambulance.”

Jeff shook his head vigorously. He looked horrified. “You wouldn’t get any questions answered with that.

I’m afraid you’d just create serious trouble for both of us by trying to use it. It’s for dire emergencies.”

“The phone company . . .”

“You might just as well go to the harness and buggy-whip company for help.” Then the bitterness in Jeff’s voice was abruptly transmuted into enthusiasm; it was as if he could not help himself. “Holly, the things that Ginny Butler and her people can do. They’re—” He checked himself, as if on the verge of some improvident guess, or revelation. “Knowing what can be done, I’d give my right arm to see what the future is going to be like. Generations from now. The science, the healing, the discoveries . . .”