A Century of Progress (9 page)

He could feel himself putting out mental and spiritual feelers, tentacles, reconnecting himself to his earliest memories. Here. He lived here. Not really in this particular house, no, but if he were to leave this house and walk down the street, his own house would be there somewhere. Or it could be. It really could . . .

Amos n’ Andy concluded in organ music. The adults adjourned back to the kitchen to consume coffee, beer, or just plain water, according to taste. Norlund chose water for this round. Judy was getting milk out of the icebox, to mix up a bottle for the baby. She had to shake the quart milk bottle first, to blend the cream back into it. Of course she wouldn’t be breast-feeding. These people would consider themselves too modern and well-educated for that.

“Whaddya think about Repeal?” Monahan suddenly demanded of Norlund.

Norlund considered. The beer they had been drinking this evening had been legal now for several months. He knew that the rest of Prohibition couldn’t have long to go, though he couldn’t remember the exact date of its demise.

“Oh, I think it’s coming,” he answered cautiously. They hadn’t told him, back in Eighty-four, that he had to be wrong every time someone in the past asked his opinion of the future.

They had cautioned him against setting up as any kind of seer or fortune teller. And had added something like: “Don’t rely, even for your own purposes, on your knowledge of history being correct in every detail. You may remember perfectly who wins the big game, or on what day a war began, and you may be quite wrong. The past is no more immutable than the present; of course not, it
is
the present while you’re living in it. What we’re doing now is history to other people. Life in any year is reality, and people can act on reality and change it.”

The more Norlund had thought about it, the more his mind had seemed to knot in paradox. “Look here,” he’d said. “Suppose I’d gone back and—and—”

“The usual form of the argument you are trying to formulate” (this was Dr. Harbin speaking) “concerns one who goes back in time and shoots his or her own grandparent, before his own parent is conceived. This supposedly precludes the time-traveler’s own existence, creating a paradox. There are different answers, on different levels of profundity. The answer on the practical level, the one you need, is that shooting the grandparent in early youth has no more or less effect on reality than shooting the same person in modern times—what you consider modern times. If you’re there to pull the trigger, you’ll still be there afterwards, unless the shot goes through your own body. After the shot there may be another world in which you don’t exist, but that’s hardly startling; there may be an infinity of such worlds anyway. You didn’t exist in this one, either, for most of its history.”

Now, seated at the Monahan kitchen table with his glass of water, half-listening as Monahan argued with the big corporations, Norlund was enjoying himself. No, he wouldn’t want to live in this household, but right now as a place to visit it was fine. He could hear the radio in the front room being retuned to a different station. A half-familiar voice came at him out of memory, that of some old news commentator. Walter Winchell? Boake Carter? Gabriel Heatter? He’d forgotten their exact respective time-frames. He heard the voice mention the word Repeal.

Mrs. Monahan, not one to let a guest remain for long content with water, came fussing toward him, coffee cups in hand. Norlund nodded wisely, and agreed with her opinion that sometimes when it was hot drinking hot coffee could actually make you feel a little cooler.

This idea was soberly debated by the other people sitting round the table. In the background Norlund heard the sound of the radio changing again. Not simple music or talk now. Sound effects? he wondered vaguely. Maybe one of those early mystery programs.

There were two sounds in alternation. First a short one something like
eeeh
, and then a long, polyphonic
ahhhh
, deepening toward the end and seeming to break down into its myriad voices.

The big corporations, said Monahan, were going to own everything when the Depression was over. Jerry disagreed. Mrs. Monahan fussed. Meanwhile that radio sound kept nagging at Norlund’s attention. It went on and on, and he found himself listening to it as if it were something he ought to recognize. He even thought of making some excuse and going into the living room.

But he was still listening from the kitchen when the voice on the radio began to speak. It began almost too quietly for Norlund to hear it from two rooms away, but it soon grew louder. It rose and fell, contorting itself as if there were obstacles that it must squeeze past or overcome.

Norlund soon recognized that the voice was speaking German. Norlund did not understand German, but when he recognized the language, a light dawned.

He felt a chill that had nothing to do with the possible effects of hot coffee.

He sat there, staring unseeingly at the coffee cup in front of him, losing track of what was being said around him. The voice paused, and someone else, probably a translator, came on speaking English, though Norlund could not make out many of the words. And then the cheers again. It wasn’t really
eeeh
and
ahhhh
, though. It was
Sieg
. . . heil. Sieg . . . heil. Sieg . . . heil
. . .

And soon Norlund, more or less abstractedly, was saying goodnight to his hosts. Yes, he was going to have to be on his way. He’d come round in the morning, Sunday morning, and pick Jerry up on the corner, and he’d be sure to phone ahead so Jerry would know what time to be out there waiting for him.

Three-fourths of the family came outside with Norlund to see him off, waving goodbye from the sidewalk as he got into the truck alone and drove away. At the first cross street he turned east, just exactly as if he knew where he was going. All he really felt certain about was that he was going to be sleeping in the truck tonight. It had been suggested that that would probably be the wisest thing to do, barring unforeseen complications. And the truck had been designed with this in mind; the operator’s seat in the rear folded down into a narrow cot that Norlund thought would probably be fairly comfortable if you weren’t too big. So all he had to worry about now was where to park.

When he came to a large diagonal street he read its name as Lincoln Avenue, and turned southeast onto it, heading in the general direction of the center of the city. Within a block he had passed another big church, this one of stone and true cathedral size, though it served only a neighborhood. In front of the church an illuminated signboard gave the schedule of services in both English and German.

In the four or five blocks after that were three or four movie theaters. Lincoln was mostly a business street. Some of the stores were open on Saturday night, and one or two of them even looked busy. This was a working city, and a majority of its people were still employed. Except for teachers and a few others, those employed would have been paid.

Lincoln Avenue went on for miles, cutting diagonally across everything else. The continuous flow of it brought Norlund into a state of mild exhilaration. He felt half hypnotized by the endless array of neon lights, antique cars, groaning streetcars, costumed people. The women’s summer dresses hung to within a few inches of the ground; their short hair was often so tightly curled that it fit their heads like caps. There was another pile of furniture on the sidewalk, with hopeless-looking people standing guard.

There were hot-dog carts and ice cream carts on the street, all powered by bicycle mechanisms or by the even more direct push of the owner’s muscles. There was a blind man selling pencils, and there a legless man doing the same. On one corner a man sold apples, or tried to, from his outthrust hat. The legs of a derelict protruded from under a pile of newspapers. There were shoeshine boys and paper boys too numerous to try to count, and there a young woman who looked as if she were peddling something else—the areas of family trade were falling behind Norlund now. He now drove among places where harder business was transacted. Not an openly labeled tavern, of course, to be seen anywhere, but he guessed there’d be a speakeasy at least every couple of blocks.

Abruptly Lincoln Park was just ahead of him. Had he subconsciously selected it as destination? Already, with the proximity of the lake, he could feel a touch of coolness in the air. Other people, a slow, trickling throng moving mostly on foot, were entering the park ahead of him. The Fair was miles to the south of here, and probably about to close for the night; they must have some other goal. Looking at the pillows, blankets, and baby equipment that many of them were carrying, it didn’t take much thought to figure out that they were planning to escape the heat by sleeping in the park. A single strolling policeman looked on benevolently. No one appeared to be worried by the thought of camping out all night amid big-city shrubbery.

Norlund drove on slowly into the park, following a curving drive under streetlamps shaded by tall trees. Vehicular traffic was light. He was almost at the lake before he parked, in a small open lot that was evidently intended primarily for daytime beachgoers. There were only a couple of other cars parked in it now.

When he shut off the truck’s motor, he could hear the lake’s recurrent waves working, irregularly and methodically, on sand and stone. The lake itself was invisible, a huge gulf of utter blackness just beyond the shoreline’s concrete wall and the tumbled boulders that had been put there to break the surf on rougher days. Norlund left the truck and walked over to the top of the wall, trying to see out into the night. A couple of small and lonely lights were visible out there—some kind of boats.

Every minute, with regular timing, the whole sky was swept by the Lindbergh Light, from its place atop the tall Palmolive Building to the south. Norlund remembered watching that same beacon when he had been small, lying in his bed . . .

Other powerful beacons shone in the clear night sky from farther south. Those of course would be from the Fair itself. Norlund realized that he was looking forward to going there tomorrow, like a kid. He wondered what it meant that the lines of recording devices—or whatever—that he was constructing converged on the Fair. He would be wondering about it more, he supposed, if he didn’t have so much else to wonder about.

How was Sandy doing tonight? Why, tonight Sandy wasn’t doing at all. Sandy wouldn’t be born for a long, long time yet.

Were they recording devices? If so, what did they record? Well, he’d go on thinking of them that way. That made as much sense as any other explanation that had yet occurred to him.

Not many yards away along the seawall, someone laughed in the darkness. Lovers, maybe. Or just friends. There were a few dots of lanterns in the distance, illuminating small groups of people out to fish or just to relax in coolness amid the sound of waves. Along the miles of lakefront, Norlund realized, there was not a portable radio to be heard—oh, that people might realize their blessed state while they had it. There was a trustfulness in the night, thought Norlund, and in the occasional human voice that could be heard in speech or laughter.

With the sound of waves as background, Norlund did what he had to do to get ready to sleep, opening his folding bed inside the truck. The strain of the day was overtaking him and he was tired.

The waves were in his ears as he drifted off to sleep. They might have been of any year, a thousand in the past or two thousand in the future . . .

Churchbells woke him from some deep dream of youth, and he found himself in the gray coolness of early morning. He lay there, listening to the bells and the patience of the waves. Last night, he thought, I heard the voice of Hitler on the radio. And not on some old recording, either. Not until now had Norlund been able to try to think about that fact.

Norlund moved the truck to a space just outside the nearest park toilet. Inside the building were cold-water sinks and metal mirrors, and with these aids he washed and shaved as well as possible. He had never been a fussy shaver, and the process went reasonably well. Once Norlund was up and moving he felt hungry, and surprisingly energetic. More benefits from the yellow pills? Even his bowels had moved on schedule. While perusing the graffiti in the stall he reflected that some things seemed to change very slowly or not at all.

Dressed with fresh underwear and a clean shirt, Norlund drove out of the park to breakfast at one of the middle-sized hotels nearby. He splurged, and for thirty-five cents enjoyed pancakes as well as eggs and bacon. Putting down a nickel tip, he stood up feeling like a plutocrat. Before he left the hotel he found a public phone and dialed the Monahan’s number. As he had expected, his helper sounded wide awake and eager to go to work.

Jerry was waiting on the corner near his house when Norlund drove up. The young man’s face lighted up as soon as the truck hove into sight.

Norlund continued to fill in both legs of his pattern at the same time, zigzagging the truck from north to south and back again, slowly working his way east. This morning he found himself actually whistling, sitting in the sweaty rear compartment, taking readings that he only half understood. Whatever the work ultimately meant, it was something to do, and important because it helped Sandy if for no other reason. From time to time Jerry in the driver’s seat turned his head, glancing back at his whistling boss with discreet curiosity.

Putting in place one unit after another, they worked their way steadily into and across the city. Jerry in his company coveralls climbed utility poles and scaled, to modest heights, the sides of buildings. So far none of the units had actually required placement indoors, for which Norlund was grateful. Jerry fastened one, with considerable difficulty, to a girder of a railroad bridge spanning the Chicago River. Another went under a bridge abutment, right above a miniature Hooverville.

The huts of the unemployed here were fabricated of old auto carcasses, scrap lumber, tar paper and sheet metal. Stovepipes stuck out of packing boxes. A pole was flying, for some reason, a torn black flag.