From Time to Time (11 page)

Ruben Prien; the major had some crow to eat.

Without stepping closer he reached forward and with a big blunt forefinger pushed the door hard enough to swing it wide, but he stood where he was, looking in at Rube hopping quickly from the desk, smiling that sudden fine Rube Prien smile, mouth opening to welcome him. But Dr. Danziger, face blankly unresponsive, spoke first. "May I come in?"

It flustered Rube; Danziger saw him blink. "Of course, of course!

Come in!

Walking in slowly, Danziger said, "Oh no; there's no of course anymore about me coming in here uninvited. You threw me out, didn't you?" Then, voice neutral: "How are you, Rube?"

"I'm fine, Dr. Danziger. And you're looking good."

"No I'm not. I was old when you saw me last, and now I'm older." He looked carefully around the little anteroom. "Looks the same. No change."

"Oh, it is, it is. Dr. D, we could still go have lunch somewhere.

Be a lot pleasanter to talk."

"No. I'm not ready to break bread with you, Rube: I'm still puzzling out my feelings."

"Oh?" Face uncomfortable, Rube stood wanting to ask his guest to sit down, wanting to be hospitable, to get this off dead center, but not quite daring.

"Of course. I felt confused when you phoned. Wondering as I heard your voice whether I hated you. Should I refuse right then and there to ever even look at you again? Or come here and look my fill, indulging my hatred, feeding it. And thinking of revenge.

He smiled. "Or vengeance; I like that form better, don't you? And yet as we spoke, I thought maybe what I felt wasn't hate but only powerful dislike. So unforgiving I wouldn't be able to take the sight of you . Or, if I could stand it, would still rather not. Or maybe, as you continued, your voice so happy to be speaking to me again, I wondered if perhaps the passage of time bad only left a permanent hut healed-over sear. The pain finally gone SO now I could-what? tolerate the sight of you? Come here and look at you with only simple distaste now? Curiosity with the lip curled?" Rube's courte- ous smile remained and-he managed this-seemed without strain. "Or maybe none of those. When I thought of Rube Prien these days was it, I asked myself, with only a kind of mental shrug?

A feeling of: Oh well, it was all some time ago, so what the hell."

"And what did you decide?" Now Rube indicated a wooden up- right chair. "Sit down, please, Doctor."

"No, I want to go upstairs and look around. See the Project again. It's why I decided to come. And therefore decided also on an attitude of tolerant curiosity, Rube. On viewing you with an air of faint cold amusement. That's what I'm doing now, if you can't tell. Looking you over, a little amused at your presumption. Won- dering how the hell you could possibly have the nerve to speak to me even by phone. Let alone ask me to lunch! So-speaking calmly, Rube, tolerantly amused at your presumption-what the hell do you want?"

"Your help. And, if it's possible . . . to make a beginning at re- storing a friendship that at least I still feel."

"You know, maybe I really am amused. The nerve. The fucking nerve of you. Now, once again-what do you want?"

For a moment, eyes pleasant, Rube stood looking at Danziger.

Then, on apparent impulse, he put out his hand. "To make a new start."

Danziger stood shaking his head incredulously. Then, continu- ing to shake his head, began to grin reluctantly. "The nerve," he said, but took Rube's hand. "Come on." He turned away toward a metal-sheathed door in the wall opposite the street-side wall. "Let's go up." Rube moved ahead to pull the door open, holding it for

Danziger, who stepped through to stand glancing curiously around the tiny, concrete-floored space before the closed elevator doors. Grinning now, Rube stepped in, and Danziger said, "You treacherous bastard: something I didn't quite anticipate in all my ruminations, but it seems I still retain some sort of senile liking for you. Who'da thunk it." He poked the elevator button, and the doors slipped open.

On the top floor, the sixth, they walked along a vinyl-tiled corn- dor, the tall older man glancing around, eves sharp with interest. lie earned his hat in his hand now, was bald, the to1) of his head freckled, his side hair dyed black. This looked like a floor of an office building, directional arrows stenciled on the walls indicating groups of office numbers; black-and-white plastic nameplates be- side some of the closed doors. Danziger nodded at one that read:

K. Veach. "Katherine Veach. Katie," he said, "nice girl," and stopped. "I'll just step in for a moment, say hello."

"'Fraid she's not here today, Doctor."

Just ahead Danziger stopped again, at an unmarked door. "This leads to the catwalks, I believe. I'd like to go in again, Rube, look down at the Big Floor.

"Well-"

But Danziger stood stubbornly shaking his head with something of the old authority he had once held here. "Rube, I want to see it. It won't take long."

"What I was going to say, Dr. D, is that I didn't bring my keys today."

For a moment Danziger stood looking at Rube; then they walked on, turned a corner, and stopped at the conference room door.

Danziger would not open it, and Rube Prien reached past him to turn the knob, and gestured him in. For a moment longer Dan- ziger stood looking up and down the long corridor, then walked in saying, "Rube, where is everybody today?"

"Well"-Rube followed him, closing the door-"it's the week- end, Doctor. So I expect they're home. Sleeping late. Reading the paper. Whatever." He stepped toward a chair at the long table, on which an attaché case lay, motioning Danziger to a place opposite.

Walking around the end of the table, taking off his coat, Dan- ziger looked at the walls, overhead skylights, the carpeting. He said, "Weekends didn't mean that much when I was here, Rube."

He placed hat and coat on a chair, and sat down on the chair beside them; he wore a blue suit, white shirt, and blue-and-white- striped tie. "I was here every day for at least a few hours even on

Sundays, usually a lot longer. So were you. And Oscar. Most everyone on the staff. Here at the Project because it was where we wanted to be." Facing Rube, he sat back comfortably, one long arm extended on the tabletop-a posture familiar to Rube.

"Well, it's been several years since you left. And since Si left."

Rube shoved his attaché ease aside and lay his forearms, hands folding, on the tabletop. "And things have settled down into place. So that we've all gotten pretty much used to . . . "His voice trailed off because Danziger, arm still lying on the table, was writing in the dust with the forefinger of his speckled old hand.

Rube had to lean to one side, finding the angle; then the word

Dr. Danziger had printed popped up for him, clearly defined against the dust: Bullshit. Their eyes met, and the big old man said, "You're going to have to tell me eventually, Rube. Eventu- ally, why not now? as the old ads used to say-remember? Maybe you don't. Pillsbury flour, I think."

"Okay." Rube sat nodding. "Okay. I didn't really hope to fool you, Dr. D. Or even intend to. I just put it off because I'm embar- rassed. Humiliated. If you wanted vengeance, then maybe you've got it." In sudden decision, he shoved back his chair to stand.

"You want to see the Big Floor? All right: I'll show you the Big

Floor!"

Down on the main floor again, they walked along a narrow concrete-floored tunnel-like corridor lighted by ceiling bulbs in wire cages. At a metal door labeled, Keep Out. Absolutely Keep

Out, they stopped; Rube brought out a key, unlocked the door, and stepped in, holding the door open with a foot while stooping to pick something up from the floor just inside. Following, Dan- ziger had immediately stopped to wait because the interior stood dark-solid unrelieved blackness. Then Rube switched on the big five-cell flashlight which had been standing on its wide lens-end on the floor by the door. Swinging the hard solid beam, searching,

Rube said, "This is how we have to look at the Big Floor these days. If at all." His light found a small frame house, clapboard sides, wooden-shingled, an old house of the twenties, and Dan- ziger said, "McNaughton's hou-" He went silent because the trembling white circle had steadied on the low porch roof, caved in, broken-backed over the stump of the post that had once helped support it. Then the light swung on along the side of the house across the windows glinting black and mirrorlike, then held on a smashed pane, the window frame jagged with glass shards.

Neither spoke. Rube lowered his flash to make a rhythmically skipping oval of light on the floor ahead as they walked on. He stopped again, playing his light over an Indian tepee, painted with l)nffal() silhouettes and sticklike figures of men, and torn to long ragged tongues of hanging cloth. Inside it the chromed wire basket of a tipped-over shopping cart reflected dully. The flash swung away to play over another tepee, collapsed on its side. "Rube,

I hate this," Danziger said, his voice thinned and echoless in the great space they stood in. "Hate it. Turn that damn thing off."

The light vanished, and in the utter blackness Danziger said,

"All right. What happened?"

"We went broke. Our funding cut off. Every dime. And the

Project canceled. We're out of business, Doctor. There is no Proj- ect. I'm just kind of a squatter here now; I can't keep away. I expect they know I come in sometimes. At least they haven't changed the front-door lock. But they've cut off most of the electricity, all the big lines. And the whole place is on a government surplus list. They just haven't found a buyer for a gutted warehouse with no interior floors."

"Rube, this is worse; turn the thing back on." Rube switched on the flash, and swung the beam upward. With it he searched for and found the catwalk five stories above, then slid the beam along till it reached a section with a gap of a dozen feet. "That came loose. A bolt rusted or worked loose, there've been no inspections, it dropped a little, and other bolts yanked out, I suppose. And the section fell, grazing our Denver storefront. Smashed it up good.

There's no maintenance at all, and now the catwalks are perma- nently locked." He sent the beam along the floor before them, and they walked on. They passed without stopping what looked like a section of farmland with split-rail fencing, and a tree, but in places the soil was gone, exposing the concrete floor underneath. Two beer cans lay in the no-man's-land before a World War I trench.

"Okay, Rube, enough. Let's get out."

In the conference room Dr. Danziger said, "All right, tell me."

"They started saying we'd had no results."

"No results!"

"That's right. That we'd spent a lot of mon-"

"No results! What the hell do they mean!"

"They said we didn't. I don't know who said it first: somebody.

And it was like the kid saying the emperor has no clothes-they all joined in. Yeah, look! No clothes! Hell, they're mostly politicians,

Dr. D, what do you expect! The kind who beat the rats off the ship! Remember Si? Simon Morley?"

"Of course."

"Well, he never came back, God damn him. Just stayed there back in the fucking nineteenth century. If he'd only come back!

The way he was supposed to. The way he said he would. He was committed to it! Dr. D, if he had come back with proof, as only he could, why, hell-they'd have given us everything but the Wash- ington Monument."

"Instead . .

"Instead, it was how did we know where Si was? Or McNaugh- ton? Maybe all Si ever did was hole up in the Dakota apartment building for a while-at taxpayers' expense-going through the motions, lying to us, pretending he was about to make the transi- tion. Then he ducks out one night, shows up at the Project a few days later, and says, Hooray for me, I did it! And we fell for it. In an access of wishful thinking. This senator, this guy got wind of the Project, and for a while it looked like he was going to give us that stupid Golden Fleece award. A Pentagon major general career man saw his third star fading away, and covered his ass fast, said he never had believed us and told us so, the lying son of a bitch.

Oh, they came after us good and fast. Even the academics. Prove it, prove it! God, I got sick of that word. And we couldn't. At our very last board meeting-they shut us down a day and a half later this wormy little congressman, you remember him, really got on me. Si was supposed to go back and-well, of course you know what Si was supposed to do."

"Know? I hated it."

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry. But the thing is, we had to brief the congressman. Had to. So he knew Si was supposed to go back and . . . "Rube glanced at the old man. "Go back and very slightly alter one past event, and damn it, Dr. D, it was small."

"Yes, well, let it go, let it go. Alter the past just enough so that

Cuba would have become an American possession. Wonderful. As though you could predict the consequences of that. Ridiculous.

Ridiculous and almighty dangerous. But go on.

"This little congressman kept saying stuff like, 'Major, what's

Cuba now? The fifty-first state? Yuk, yuk. And where's Fidel these days? Pitching for the Mets?'

Danziger sat grinning at him. "Served you right."

"Yeah, well, the thing is, we had no proof. No nothin'."

"What about our Denver man? He made it. And came back."

"Didn't help. Never happened either, you see, same as Si.

Where's the proof, where's the proof? Goddamn bunch of parrots.

As for our boy made it to medieval Paris for-what? Ten seconds? they laughed in our faces at that one. Make a politician look even slightly wrong, and believe me, you have not gained a friend."

"Yep. Well, Rube"-he began gathering up his hat and folded topcoat from the chair beside him-"that's that, then. It was great while it last-"

"Wait."

"Oh, Rube, Rube, Rube. The Project is finished. Forever. Can you possibly wander around it with your flashlight and see it all rebuilt? The Big Floor restored? The School back in business,

Oscar Rossoff back, a new batch of candidates arriving? It's dead!

With a stake through its heart.