A Century of Progress (6 page)

He tried on the fedora, which fit perfectly, and now the image in the mirror reminded him somewhat of his own grandfather. And reminded him also of how as a kid he’d always looked forward to being able to wear a grown-up hat.

A leather traveling-bag was in the closet. Norlund put it on the bed and packed it with clothes from the closet and drawers—shirts, underwear, socks, a sweater, a couple of pairs of pants. He found and packed a new old-fashioned shaving kit and toothbrush. He reminded himself to get a haircut soon after arrival . . . God, but he was taking this thing seriously! He really thought that he was going to—

Struck by a sudden idea, he got out his newly acquired driver’s license and looked at it again. The date of his birth was given as eighteen seventy-three, and, yes, there was a place where he was supposed to sign. Getting out the fountain pen that had been provided on the tray, he took care of that detail.

He was all ready now, as far as he could tell. He stood for a moment looking at the modern bedside phone, then picked it up and punched out the number of the hospital. It was Sunday morning; he just might catch one of the first-team doctors making rounds.

This time he got through directly to Sandy’s room, and it was Marge who answered. “Our girl is looking pretty fine this morning, Dad. Maybe that little setback is all in the past.” And Marge’s tone was even happier than her words.

“Can I talk to her?” And he did. Sandy sounded chipper, very good indeed. Then he had Marge back on. “She sounds like she’s getting well,” said Norlund to his daughter. “Jeez, I hope so. Hey, I love you guys.”

“Well then. Dad, I think you ought to hurry back to us. Where are you now? You didn’t really say.”

Norlund cleared his throat. “I hope I’ll see you soon. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Chicago, I think. Maybe the day after that.”

When he arrived downstairs in search of some breakfast he found the dining room deserted. Finding his way into the kitchen, he discovered a pot of coffee on the stove, but no other signs of activity. He poked around in cabinets, getting out a few utensils and some instant oatmeal, and made himself a bowl of it. If they wanted him they could find him, and he was a touch hungry; breakfast was usually his favorite meal. He made two pieces of toast and then discovered he could eat only one. Again he thought vaguely that today was like the morning of a combat mission. Fear was present, but something else too, something to be savored. And where was Andy Burns this morning? Already out on the ramp and loading ammo?

He finished eating and cleaned up after himself a little, as much as he felt like cleaning up. Then he picked up the traveling bag that he’d carried downstairs, and headed in the direction of the garage housing the old truck. He’d thought he’d heard a voice or two from that direction while he was in the kitchen.

The first thing he noticed on entering the garage was that the Dodge truck had somehow been turned, so now it faced the overhead doors. It was still the only vehicle in sight. A hunched, white-coated form that looked like that of Dr. Harbin was doing something inside the cab while Ginny, in worker’s coveralls this morning, stood outside talking to him.

She saw Norlund as soon as he entered, and came over to him. Her manner as she looked him over was all business. “You look okay,” she decided.

Norlund asked, “What’s been decided about my partner? Who do I get?”

“You’ll hire someone there. Follow the rules we gave you yesterday in choosing someone. None of our people here can be spared—Andy with his artificial arm is certainly not a candidate. Now let’s run through some of the procedures on the machinery again.”

Norlund still hadn’t forgotten anything from yesterday’s lessons; he had no trouble in playing back to Ginny his operating knowledge of the gear in the back of the truck. As for the ultimate purpose of it all, he hadn’t been taught anything and he didn’t ask now.

Ginny was unfolding a paper. “Here’s a map of the approximate route that you should drive once you get there. I think you might be able to finish the job in one day. Here are shown the approximate locations where the recording devices must go. Of course, you have to use the equipment to decide on the exact best positioning.”

Presently Harbin came to take a turn at catechizing Norlund. From time to time Harbin or Ginny would drop other tasks and go over to the wall at the far side of the garage, where there was a phone. Whatever they learned in their brief phone conversations didn’t do their morale any good, for Norlund could see strain growing progressively in their faces.

Then Harbin, returning from one of these conversations, had suddenly acquired a gunbelt strapped round his waist, over his long white lab coat. The doctor silently handed a similar belt to Ginny, who accepted it without comment and calmly put it on. Norlund thought that the weapons in the holsters looked something like Israeli machine pistols that he’d seen on television or somewhere; not that he was an expert on any kind of modern firearms.

He waited for a moment, but when it was clear that they weren’t going to volunteer any explanation of the weapons, he commented: “Doesn’t look good, hey?”

Ginny looked up from a checklist that she was going over. “Doesn’t feel too good, either, Alan. But you know I never promised you that this job was going to be perfectly safe.”

“I never really suspected that it would be all that safe. And I know exactly what you promised me and what you didn’t.”

She was about to answer, but Harbin—on the phone again—was gesturing violently, calling her into conference.

In a few moments she was back. In a voice more tightly controlled than ever she ordered: “Here, Alan, take these pills.” Her smallish hand held out two yellow capsules in front of him, and then produced from somewhere a styrofoam cup of water. “For launching we want you at peak alertness.”

“Instead of at peak learning ability.”

“What was that?”

“I said”—he swallowed pills and water—”I have to be not quite so impressionable now. Or when I get there. Someone might tell me to do the wrong thing. Not so damn suggestible.”

And Ginny surprised him by being briefly delighted, as if she were rooting for him personally. “You’re right. Oh, beautiful, Alan, you’re with us, I know it for sure now. This is going to work.”

And Norlund, even knowing that he judged from an abyss of ignorance, felt pleased that he thought so too.

He was up in the driver’s seat of the big old Dodge, fumbling briefly for a seatbelt that of course did not exist, when some kind of almost silent hell began to break loose just outside the doors of the farthest bay of the garage. And all at once those doors were rolling up by themselves, moving to the accompaniment of slow warbling sound effects. The light that came in from outside was not a normal light; it was mottled, and though at moments it might have been acceptable as normal, it changed swiftly. It did not look like ordinary daylight, or moonlight, or even any kind of artificial lighting that Norlund had ever seen before.

The doors were not yet fully open when the odd sounds stopped, and to Norlund’s astonishment a large old-fashioned black sedan, a car that Cagney or George Raft might have driven through a gangster movie, came rolling in under them. Ginny and Dr. Harbin, looking as much surprised as Norlund felt, jumped back out of the car’s way.

The old-fashioned sedan entered the garage bouncing on stiff springs, as if it had had to negotiate some kind of large hump just outside the doors. From where Norlund was sitting in the Dodge it was impossible to see outside through those doors, but now the entering light was going mad, putting on a syncopated disco show. And the instant that the sedan was fully inside, the doors came rolling down, this time with the slamming speed of a guillotine.

Men were already piling out of the black sedan. Not Raft or Cagney, but these characters’ clothes would have fitted them: all three of them were wearing dark topcoats, along with other winter garments, and two of them were carrying the third. On second glance Norlund was sure that he saw snow melting on the black car’s roof, while mist formed on its windows as they warmed.

The first man out of the car was a beefy character about thirty years old. Before he was completely out he was shouting excitedly at Ginny and Harbin: “When do we transship? He’s got two creases on ‘im!”

Harbin raised an authoritative voice “We’re in the middle of a launching here—”

The two new arrivals who could stand stood holding their helpless comrade who might have been dead for all that Norlund could tell. They responded to Harbin in what quickly became a shouting match.

“—attack’s going to diffuse this far—”

“—pack-year has precessed out of range—” At least that was one set of words that Norlund’s ears seemed to be recording.

“—transshipment clockwise is not an option—”

Abruptly Harbin turned back to Norlund. Leaning in through the truck’s open window, the white-coated man spoke with superbly controlled haste. “We’re going to have to launch you immediately. Roll up your window till you get clear of the garage. When you drive out, you’ll be in nineteen thirty-three. We’re all depending on you to complete this mission properly; if we should lose this—”

A klaxon interrupted, deafeningly loud. It had to be some kind of alarm. The doctor backed away from the truck, motioning for Norlund to raise his window and get moving. Norlund, cranking up the glass with his left hand, noted that the window on the other side of the cab was closed already, and reached with his right for the gearshift. The shooting had started. Well, he’d never believed that this goddamned survey they were sending him on was as simple as it sounded. This was war. Well, he’d survived war before . . .

The doctor was still yelling final words toward him, but the words were lost and Harbin’s tense figure obscured behind a red translucent wall that was condensing like moisture out of the air in the garage. The red wall was hot; Norlund could feel its radiance on the left side of his face before he got his window up, the heat coming and going in waves like the light that had come from beyond the doors. Now Norlund had closed his window and a lid of the same translucent red had clamped down across the truck’s flat windshield. That, as Norlund remembered perfectly from yesterday’s briefing, was the signal for him to start his engine. The four-cylinder plant under the hood turned over, coughed once, and settled into a vibrant purr that had the feel of dependable power.

Now, put it in gear. Now, foot ready on the clutch . . .

The red lid on the windshield was darkening toward purple, growing more opaque. Through it Norlund saw that the garage doors directly ahead of him were starting to open. They rose revealing brilliance. Norlund eased in the clutch and drove slowly forward. Then for a moment he was almost blinded, as they had warned him he might be, by the shifting light of a rainbow that surrounded his vehicle, making it impossible for him to see anything else. The world was silent but for the sound of the truck’s engine.

Then he was driving into bright but perfectly natural summer sunshine. Exterior sound came back. He could hear the crunch of his tires on a cinder drive, and the lazy drone of a cicada in one of the tall trees nearby.

Increased warmth engulfed the truck, the sun shining down on it from high in a clear sky. The truck was rolling slowly along a cinder drive, which just a few yards ahead entered a country road, hardly more than a single lane of hard-packed clay and gravel.

Norlund glanced behind him. He had just driven out of a garage attached to an isolated farmhouse. It was a narrow garage, big enough for only one car, and its single set of doors were already closed.

He looked to right, to left, and forward. In every direction weedy meadows and shabby cornfields stretched into the distance.

1933

Norlund fought back his first impulse, born of shock, to slam on the brakes. True to his brief training he kept on driving, and turned left out of the driveway. At thirty miles an hour he followed the otherwise deserted narrow country road, in what was supposed to be an easterly direction. Glancing back once again, wildly, he saw the old farmhouse receding behind him, looking abandoned, altered, shrunken.

Now oncoming traffic appeared on the narrow road, in the form of an old Ford, and Norlund automatically steered past it. When the dust raised by the Ford had settled, the road ahead was empty again. Norlund drove through a deserted crossroads that displayed road signs of forgotten types. A little farther on, another intersection was also empty of buildings, but marked the beginning of paved streets. Now there were narrow, weed-rimmed sidewalks bordering empty fields—doubtless some housing development had been started here during the prosperous Twenties and abandoned when things fell apart. Another quarter of a mile and Norlund drove past a filling station with antique pumps, advertising twelve-cent gas.

It was about at that point that the shock of it all overtook him. It hit him so hard that he gave up and pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. He just sat there. His hands were shaking, and he put his head down on them as they gripped the steering wheel.

It wasn’t so much the shaking hands that had forced him to stop, though that was bad enough. It felt as if his mind were shaking too, in danger of giving up on the effort to keep track of swiftly altering reality. Reality was what could kill you, and he feared that if he went on driving he ran a risk of careening head-on into a truck, like that big square-nosed whatever-it-was approaching now. A sanely fearful part of Norlund’s mind knew that he had no seat belt, and wasn’t even sure that the big flat windshield in front of him was safety glass. But the demonstrated mushiness of reality had evoked another component of his mind, and with it he felt no more apprehension about crashing into the truck than if he had been watching a movie or playing some damn video game.

Jesus. Jesus Christ. He didn’t know if he was praying or swearing, but he did know that he had to rest for just a minute. He clenched his eyes shut against his knuckles. He had to think.

I think you’ll fit right in when you get there. With just a minimum of preparation before you go.

Sounds foreign to me.

To me it would be.

But to him, to Alan Norlund, it wasn’t foreign at all. He clung to the thought that he had lived in this strange country as a child, that he was—or ought to be—acquainted with its natives. This fact of his origin was, he supposed, one of those important qualifications that Ginny Butler had been so sure he had.

The truck naturally had no air conditioner, and it was growing hot inside. Norlund moved mechanically to crank down both side windows. After that he felt a little better, a little more in control. He looked around.

Everything around him was still nineteen thirty-three. And, somewhat to his own surprise, he found himself already beginning to cope with and accept that fact. The sudden fancy came to him that the half-century he had lived through following this year had been one vast dream . . . but judging from the appearance of his hands, still locked on the steering wheel, it was a dream that had aged him pretty severely.

Norlund drew a deep breath. He was still a long way from calm, but ready to drive again. This time he didn’t even fumble for the non-existent seatbelt. Did he need to consult his map? No, not yet, he decided. It had been fixed quite firmly in his memory.

Half a mile or so ahead of where he had pulled over, he could see some buildings clustered among trees. It looked like, and probably was, the tail end of some suburban residential street. He was heading east, toward the city, and the countryside would soon come to an end.

Norlund got the truck going again, proceeding with what seemed to him more or less normal care. Here was another gas station. But he had almost a full tank.

He had been warned that one of the first things he must do upon arrival was to check the date, make sure that he’d reached the target day or was at least within the window extending a few days on either side. A newspaper was the recommended way. He was coming in among the houses now. Here the streets were decorated with someone’s collection of old cars, many of the specimens not very well kept up. The houses were a little strange also—that one, good God, had an outhouse behind it. There were no television antennas to be seen. Paint tended to be peeling and fading. Still, not counting the outhouse and the old cars, Norlund might have accepted this scene as current if he had run into it in nineteen eighty-four.

At the first stop sign he came to, he turned left onto a larger street, not forgetting to hand-signal for the turn. Now, a couple of blocks ahead, there appeared a block of stores, a modest business district; Norlund saw it first framed through a gothic cathedral arch of elm trees, and somewhere in one of the trees a mourning dove was moaning a soft lament.

At the block of stores the street was wider, painted into diagonal parking spaces along each curb. Norlund pulled into an empty space—there were a lot to choose from, and no parking meters. Slowly he disengaged his fingers from the wheel—his hands were cramped from the way he had been gripping it. He turned off the ignition.

No one in nineteen thirty-three appeared to be taking any notice of his arrival.

On the side of the street that he was facing from his driver’s seat, two of the stores were empty, and their for rent signs appeared to have been up for a considerable time. The next thing that caught Norlund’s eye was the small movie theater halfway down the block from where he’d parked. The theater was open this summer afternoon, and there were black letters on the white marquee:

SHE DONE HIM WRONG

MAE WEST

Turning to the other side of the street, Norlund spotted a small newspaper and magazine stand opposite the theater—and, sure enough, next to the newsstand was a barber’s painted pole.

He got out of the truck, setting foot in territory that, he kept telling himself, ought to be basically familiar to him. He crossed the street and entered the barber shop, interrupting a conversation between two old cronies. One of them, in a white coat—Norlund kept trying to see the elderly man as Dr. Harbin—came to help Norlund off with his jacket.

“Yessir. What’ll it be?”

“Trim it all the way around.”

He heard talk about baseball. The Cubs were in second place. He saw brass spittoons, and lazy flies. The calendar on the wall, as it should, said July of nineteen thirty-three. He checked the time on the majestically ticking wall clock, and reminded himself to reset his wristwatch later.

He also looked over the list of prices posted on the wall. And presently, trimmed, brushed, and redolent of bay rum, he gave the barber a quarter and told him to keep the change.

From the barber shop Norlund stepped next door to the newsstand and picked up a paper off a pile, meanwhile handing another quarter to the old man tending the stand. The old fingers trembled back his change, two silver dimes, two pennies. Norlund, struck by a sudden thought, delayed, staring impolitely at those fingers and their owner. He couldn’t help himself. The man he was looking at had perhaps been born in eighteen sixty. As a child he might well have seen

Lincoln, and his father had as likely as not fought in the Civil War . . .

Norlund got hold of himself, and made himself walk away, giving his attention to the paper he had just purchased. Yes, right on the money, Saturday, July 22, nineteen thirty-three.

WORLD FLYER ON HOMEWARD LAP

Wiley Post Hops off for Edmonton

STAGE SET FOR ROOSEVELT SON

TO WED TODAY

He’d read more of it later. He returned to his truck and got into the rear seat, taking off his coat and loosening his tie. It was time to get some of the electronics up and running on battery power. With the equipment running, he calibrated it according to instructions, and took some preliminary readings. Curiosity about what he was really doing began to nag him. The readings he took were recorded somewhere, he was sure, perhaps also transmitted somewhere. They hadn’t told him anything about that, or even explained to him exactly what it was that the machinery was supposed to be recording. Well, as long as he got paid . . .

The preliminary session completed, Norlund turned the electronics off and went back to the driver’s seat. There he got out his map and spread it on his knees. The areas where he was to install recording units were not marked on this map, or anywhere but in his newly strengthened memory. But having the map in front of him helped Norlund to visualize the pattern that those areas made. They formed two lines, with ten units in each, each line several miles long and not quite straight. The fines converged upon a point of intersection on the Lake Michigan shoreline, right next to downtown Chicago. Ginny Butler in her teaching had never mentioned the existence of any such convergence point. Nor was it marked on the map. But it obviously had to be right on the peninsula called Northerly Island, that had been built out into the lake by landfill as a site for the Century of Progress—the site shown in the photographic blowup that Ginny had on the wall of her conference room fifty years in the future.

It was a job, and the thing to do was get on with it and finish it. Looking up and down the quiet elm-arched street, Norlund could see no roaring black sedans, no men staggering with the burden of wounded comrades. Well, most of war was always dull. If Ginny hadn’t issued him a gun she must have figured that he wasn’t likely to need one. He was an important man—at least until he finished his job for her.

His next step was to pick out someone suitable and hire him as temporary helper. The choice could not be very long delayed. Fanning himself with his hat, Norlund again looked up and down the street, but saw no one at the moment who looked like a likely prospect. But after all this was nineteen thirty-three. He didn’t think for a moment that he’d have a hard time finding someone to take a job.

Jerry Rosen, trudging eastward through the weeds lining the highway slab, thought he could feel at least two blisters starting to develop, one on his right foot, one on his left. He was heading back for the big city, slowly making his way home. With every step, another drop of sweat trickled down from under his cap. What a day for hiking. Still, he kept trying not to think about the heat and the blisters. It was Jerry’s firm conviction that if your willpower was great enough you could do anything. Well, almost anything. Maybe anything at all except find a job. Each time he heard another eastbound car approaching, overtaking him from behind, Jerry paused, smiled and turned, sticking out his thumb. So far he was striking out every time. Each car’s passage hit him with a blast of hot air, momentarily cooling, as he faced east again and prepared to trudge some more. If no one gave him a ride, eventually he would walk all the way to the western edge of Chicago, where the streetcar lines started, and there he would spend seven cents and be able to ride most of the rest of the way home. Maybe he’d spend a whole dime and get a transfer. Hell, he knew he would, if he had to walk that far.

What a goddamned waste of a day, not to mention the carfare coming and going. Not that Jerry really had anything better to do with his days than waste them, and it had got him out of the house, at least. Maybe Judy and her mother could sit there in the heat listening to the baby crying, and the radio, all the goddam day when they weren’t doing housework, but he couldn’t. And then in the evening when Judy’s dad came home from the factory . . .

Jerry could and did feel guilty about wanting to get out and away from his own wife and kid, sometimes telling them he’d been looking for work when he’d just been going through the motions, or just sitting somewhere doing nothing. But what else could a guy do? And today he really had been looking. He’d packed a sandwich, and had eaten it for lunch in an opportunely discovered suburban park, washing it down with water from a drinking fountain there. He could tell old man Monahan that he’d really tried hard today, and look him right in the eye when he said it. And old Mike would believe him; he nearly always did. He pretty well had to. Everyone knew that there were no jobs.

If Jerry couldn’t really believe in the possibility of finding work any more, after a year and a half of trying, well, he couldn’t really stop believing in it either. Some guys, like Judy’s dad, were working. If one out of four workers were unemployed, like they said, well, that meant that there were still jobs for three of four. And once in a while one of those jobs just had to open up.

Even this morning Jerry had felt real hope when a friend had suggested to him that chances in the suburbs might be a little better than in the city. His friend had been able to get a couple of days’ work landscaping, that kind of thing, at a cemetery out in Westchester. It was certainly worth a try, Jerry had thought this morning, and even worth the investment of a couple of dimes in carfare. Even if things in the suburbs really weren’t any better they sure as hell couldn’t be any worse, and at least they ought to be somehow different.

Another car was approaching him from behind, this one not coming very fast. No, judging from the sound of it, a small truck. Jerry turned, with automatically extended thumb and created smile. Clipping along toward him was a black panel truck, what looked to Jerry like about a ‘27 Dodge. The truck started to slow down. The sign painted on the side was poorly contrasting and hard to read, but Jerry made out RADIO SURVEY CORPORATION.

Gratefully he grabbed at the sun-hot doorhandle as soon as the truck stopped. He yanked the door open and climbed aboard. The truck pulled back onto the narrow highway, a cooling breeze generated through its open windows as soon as it got moving.

“Thanks,” said Jerry.

The gray-haired driver nodded. He was compactly built and sort of intense-looking, one of those lively little old geezer types. The coat of his gray suit was draped over the back of his seat, and his tie was loosened as you’d expect on a day like this. Obviously a businessman of some kind; he was too well dressed to be simply making deliveries.