A Century of Progress (19 page)

Christmas. Yes, Christmas. That night a week ago had been pretty grim around here, with the word from Germany short and almost formally cheerful. Longer messages were promised soon.

People in the other room, Holly among them, were arguing. Some of them wanted to go next week to see the newly opened play,
Tobacco Road
, on Broadway.

Some other woman, getting drunk, was bemoaning the fact that her children weren’t around. Or else the fact that she’d never had any, Norlund couldn’t tell for sure.

The Victrola was playing in one room, the radio in another, the piano in a third. Who were all these people, anyway? There seemed to be at least a score of Holborn’s distant relatives, business associates, friends of one kind or another.

Holly came from nowhere to sit next to him again.

Norlund asked her, “What’s the word from Germany?”

“Does it show?” Her beautiful face was slightly flushed. “I’m getting so I can’t hide anything from you. What’s your wife like, anyway?”

“No wife, not any more. She’s dead.”.

“Killed in London, you said.”

“That,” said Norlund with a sigh, “was someone else.”

“Didn’t you once tell me you had a daughter, twelve years old?”

“Did I really? I suppose I did. I’m getting so I can’t hide anything from you.”

“I’m having trouble getting the chronology of your life all straightened out the way it should be.”

He realized she was a little tight. Perhaps more than just a little. Change the subject. “There’s something about the way you gesture with your hands. Always makes me think you ought to be holding a cigarette.”

Holly made a face. “Have you seen all those damned cigarette ads, aimed at women? The ads without the smoke are enough to turn my stomach.” She fluttered fingers in a maidenly gesture, and put on a voice. ” ‘She was all tired out from diving at the Olympics—and then she smoked a Camel. It gave her energy enough to—’ Never mind.”

A couple of more people were coming into the library. The door, recently almost closed, was now wide open, so that voices came in more clearly from the noise outside.

“Roosevelt is a radio crooner—his legs are the strongest part of him.”

Laughter.

Someone else, angered, spouting liberal dogma with the fervor of a new convert, denounced the Nazis. Roosevelt didn’t matter. They’d all see, in a few years, that a new world was being born in Russia. The future was visible there already, and it worked.

What was going to happen to the League of Nations now?

Steer clear of foreign entanglement, that’s what Washington warned this country.

Norlund’s old leg wound was paining him tonight, in an unusual way. Tingling. He wondered if the weather was going to change, a giant blizzard bearing down on the city. He wondered if Ginny Butler had forgotten where she’d left him. There was a comfort in that thought tonight, but he didn’t really suppose that she had.

Someone—yes, Jeff’s voice—spoke up now, in a hesitant, reasonable tone, for Hitler. “You must admit he’s really straightened Germany out. Look at the terrible problems they were having. The aftermath of the War. Inflation. Reds and Jews. Now there’s peace, people are working, they have some sense of pride in themselves again.”

“Rearming, too,” someone objected mildly.

“I think it’s part of the sense of national pride.”

“Is Roosevelt really going to invite him to this country, do you suppose?”

“There are a lot of German voters.”

Holly was still beside Norlund. He took her hand, and pursued her quietly: “What’s the word?”

She looked at Norlund more directly than before, and now he could see the redness in her eyes. “The word is that they’re not coming home. Willy talks about sending me a ticket so I can join them there, as if lack of a ticket were all that held me back. He writes like he’s issuing orders now. As if I were the deserter, but he’s willing to overlook it. Oh, he isn’t really like that. Not when you know him.”

“I’m sure he’s not.” The bastard. A pilot, too. Maybe some day in Forty-three young Norlund would aim a machine gun at him. But no, in a decade Willy would certainly be thought too old for fighters. He’d be some strutting, high-rank friend of Goring, maybe.

People across the room were starting to turn and look at Holly, and she got up from the arm of Norlund’s chair and went to the fireplace, where coals were dying down. She started to grab the poker, and burned her hand on it and dropped it with a little cry.

Norlund was at one side of her in a moment, with Dr. Niles at the other. Between them they led her to a chair, from which she immediately jumped up again.

“Stay here,” said Dr. Niles to her firmly. “I’ll get my bag.” He moved off quickly.

Norlund examined the burned finger, which looked white along one side. Taking Holly by the arm, he led her unresisting into the kitchen. He put ice cubes into a clean glass, ran some water on top of them, took Holly’s hand and immersed the finger.

“Ah.” Her blue-green eyes trusted Norlund. “That does relieve the pain.”

“It’ll do more than that. It’ll help the healing. Better than anything he can put on it.”

It took Niles a couple of minutes to find them, having missed them in the library. An authority figure with black bag now in hand, he demonstrated outrage at Norlund’s practice of medicine. “Who told you to do that? Do you want the worst blistering you can imagine? Holly, give me your hand.”

When she wouldn’t, he tried to pull her finger forcibly out of the healing cup. But Holly snatched her arm away. “Don’t ever grab at me again.”

It was said in a way that compelled the doctor to retreat, black bag and all.

It was hours later, well past midnight and into the New Year, but Norlund didn’t really feel tired. The party had sagged a little and had then swung on. Jeff had actually been somewhat relieved to see Niles go away mad. Scandal, you know; Holly was after all a married woman. Not that Jeff had actually said anything. A few other people had departed, but other celebrants had arrived from another party elsewhere.

Now what promised to be a die-hard group was singing around the piano in the other room.

Holly and Norlund had both gravitated back to the library. She had brought along her cup of icewater, into which she still plunged her finger at intervals. A maid came around now and then, replacing melted cubes.

At the moment Holly was studying her finger curiously. “That was a bad burn, but it hardly hurts at all now. There’s a mark. But nothing much.”

“I’m glad.”

“That’s not what they tell you to do for burns. I burned my arm on an engine manifold once, and there was no end of salves and dressings and bandages. And pain and blisters, too.”

“Depends on who you listen to,” said Norlund, unable to resist.

Jeff came and went in the background, his expression hard to read.

Norlund poured himself a little more scotch, after helping himself to one of Holly’s ice cubes. At the moment she didn’t want any more to drink.

She turned to Norlund. “Tell me about you. I’ve been aware for some time that that’s really a forbidden topic. But tell me anyway.”

“And violate my oath?” He tried to make it sound like a joke.

And at that moment the pain hit him. It struck up under the breastbone like the thrust of a jagged dagger. It twisted, and then a piece of the blade broke off and flew down through the veins of his left arm.

He wasn’t fainting, not yet anyway, but he had his eyes clamped shut and he knew that his drink had spilled. It was his heart. It was a heart attack, and this was it, he was dying and at the moment none of the rest of it, none of anything else, mattered in the least. People were bending over him, but he couldn’t really hear what they were saying.

Now he was stretched out on his back on the sofa, and with every breath the world was slipping a little farther away. The jagged knife had stopped thrusting and twisting, but it was still heavily embedded in the wound.

Holly was bending over him. He could smell her, and he opened his eyes. “Alan, just lie still. We’re going to get you help.” As she ought to be, she was cool when the crisis came. Norlund watched her, while she undid his tie and collar.

“I’ll call for an ambulance; I’ll do the calling.” That was Jeff, over in the corner by the phone, taking the phone away from someone else. And Jeff was dialing now. It was as if he had the number already memorized.

IN A YEAR UNKNOWN

Norlund rode the train across Manchuria again. He felt confident of being able to defend the train, because he knew he’d ridden it before. His fifty-caliber Brownings were ready, one swivel-mounted at the waist position on each side of the Pullman car, and he stood keeping watch out of one of the side windows, looking for the hordes of mounted Japanese that ought to appear at any moment. But the attacking cavalry didn’t come. There was only the gray steppe, slow gentle waves of land going on forever like the sea, out to the gray horizon.

At last Norlund began to grow tired of standing at the window, and, when he remembered that he was now a heart patient, a little worried. But his heart continued to beat. He realized now that it was keeping time to the pulsation of the rails that carried the train forward so endlessly . . . so endlessly . . . he had just decided that he was never going to wake up, when deep night cut off everything.

When darkness lifted again, he saw enough to know that he was not dead, but in a hospital room, real and brightly lighted. He could tell also that it was a modern hospital, not some Thirties horror. Ginny Butler was at his side—yes, really there; she took his hand and told him that he was going to be all right. Thus reassured, he slept.

But dreams were not through with him yet, though from now on they were mixed in with reality. There was a large woman, a nurse or perhaps a doctor, anyway a large woman who had a Chinese face and dressed in a flowing gray gown of interesting pattern. She came to Norlund’s bedside frequently, and fed him things and gave him drinks and talked to him. But right now he had to get back into his Radio Survey truck, and play his equipment, which was really nothing but a giant video game. President Roosevelt spoke to Norlund out of the truck’s receiver, delivering a fireside chat. Another familiar voice came on with play-by-play action, and said that the Cubs were threatening to score. Lines marching across his little screen, converging on the Empire State, showed where the recording devices were. And now Adolf Hitler, his face part of a newsreel, gray and grainy, looked up at Norlund from the screen. Hitler spoke to him only in German, but still Norlund could recognize the word
zeppelin
when he heard it.

And now Norlund awoke, more fully than before, gasping and trying to wave his arms about. He was in his modern hospital bed, in some gray time that felt like the middle of the night.

And he thought that he understood at last what job he had been doing for Ginny Butler.

Ginny came to visit him briefly fairly often, at various times of day and evening, but Norlund didn’t try to talk to her about what he thought he had inferred. Later would be time enough for that. He lay continually in his bed, stark naked and very weak, between sheets that seemed never to be changed but still remained unalterably crisp and cool and clean and comforting. The bed kept putting forth padded extensions of its elegant machinery, and these stroked at Norlund, nuzzled at him, blessed him with tingling anaesthesia whenever pain threatened to arise, which was fairly often. His chest was kept tingling almost all the time. The tingle was in its own way a nice sensation, but whenever it gave promise of becoming outright pleasure something happened to moderate it back again toward nullity, the absence of sensation.

From time to time he was quite sure that he was helplessly wetting or soiling his bed. But if there was any stain or mess, it was gone again within moments from the impossibly white sheets, and from his body. Norlund dreamed again, this time that he was visiting Sandy in her own hospital room . . .

And woke up, thinking that he’d just seen Sandy, and that she and her mother were visiting him. But the more fully awake he became, the better he understood that no such visit would be possible. Not here, in this hospital. This was not Chicago, at least not in nineteen eighty-four.

Ginny Butler had no trouble getting to see him, though. She came in again, in a dress of decorated gray, to stand real and solid beside his bed.

Again she took his hand. “How are you, Alan?”

“Pretty good.” Feebly he pressed her fingers, glad to see her, glad to see anyone. “I’ve been dreaming a lot. Outside of that, you tell me.”

Three more people were following Ginny into the private room.

“I am Dr. Cucusus.” This was a black woman, almost- as large as the oriental nurse. From the way this woman introduced herself, there was no doubt that she was in charge, medically at least; her tone suggested that Norlund had been wondering all his life who Dr. Cucusus really was.

Norlund nodded.

Ginny gestured. “This is Mr. Tak, and Mr. Schiller.”

Tak was thin and brown, his features suggesting Southeast Asia to Norlund’s not very expert eye, and he sat apparently half-crippled in a small conveyance vastly different from any wheelchair that Norlund had ever seen before. From the way Mr. Tak nodded, and the way the others looked at him, Norlund assumed that he was in charge of the world, medical affairs being only one department thereof. Schiller was colorless, and not very large. He nodded to Norlund too.

Ginny continued. “Alan, there’s a decision you’re going to have to make. No one else can do it. We’ve waked you up completely for that purpose.”

And indeed his mind felt perfectly clear. It was only that he was weak. He said: “I’ve had a heart attack.”

“Yes, a very severe one,” agreed Dr. Cucusus. “And now you have a new heart.”

“Ah,” said Norlund, and pulled in his chin to look down at his naked chest. The hair on his chest had all been shaved away. A huge capital I of a scar, its lines very narrow and delicately pink, marked him as if he were a letterman from Illinois. Or as if he had been pretty well eviscerated while he slept, his innards somehow reprocessed and then packed back in.

“The scar will be all gone when we’re through,” Dr. Cucusus soothed him.

“A new heart,” said Norlund. At the moment it seemed no more than his due. “So what’s the decision that I have to make?”

“Medically speaking,” the large black woman informed him, “there are two ways that we can go from here. And we can’t, or we shouldn’t, put off deciding between them any longer. The first way would involve leaving you basically as you are. With your new heart, we project that you may have twelve or fifteen more years of life—perhaps more than that, perhaps less.”

“Twelve years,” said Norlund.

“Your arterial system,” explained Dr. Cucusus. “It is not an immediate threat to your life, but it is not all that good, either.” She stopped there, and looked at Mr. Tak.

“Another important thing about the first way,” said Mr. Tak, speaking in a dry penetrating voice, “is that when you are up and about afterwards, you may still be able to go home, should you choose to do so. I emphasize
may
. I should estimate the odds as approximately even. But on the other hand, if the second course of medical treatment is adopted, your return home becomes definitely impossible.”

Mr. Schiller spoke up for the first time. “The second course of treatment will not be available to you unless you volunteer for a certain combat mission to be performed when it’s completed. A mission for which you seem to be uniquely qualified, but not physically fit for presently.”

Dr. Cucusus: “The second medical path we can take is rather difficult, and very expensive in terms of resources. In most cases it would be prohibitively expensive. It is really a rather general rejuvenation treatment. Blood vessels. Endocrine system. Muscles. All systems must be integrated into the treatment as much as possible, if it is to be successful. Roughly speaking, the effect will be to make you thirty years younger.”

“Of course,” put in Ginny, “there’s no guarantee that you are going to survive the combat mission afterward. But you will have a fighting chance.”

“There are no guarantees of anything,” said Norlund. “I know that much.” He tried to think about what rejuvenation might be like, but he was too weak to imagine it very well. He thought things over while they all waited. Then he asked: “What if you try to send me home, and it doesn’t work?”

“We’ll have a job for you,” said Mr. Tak. “Somewhere. Behind the equivalent of a desk. Good routine medical care. I suspect you might live longer than twelve years.” Norlund couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not.

“Well,” said Norlund. “Suppose I take the second course. And the combat mission. And I do survive it. What do I do if I can’t go home?”

“The war will go on,” said Mr. Tak. “There will be other missions for you, other jobs—some with desks and some without. You’ll have some choice. Eventually retirement, somewhere you find pleasant.”

Ginny, standing closer than the others, was nodding. “It’s not a bad life,” she said calmly. “I’ve been at it for a few years now, in Recruiting.”

Norlund looked at her, then back at Tak. “So what is this big combat mission that you need me for?”

Tak’s face creased with the wisp of a smile. “An old soldier like you should know better than to ask. You volunteer first, then find out.”

“Okay. Then where is it? Where and when? Can you tell me that much?”

A brief whispered conference took place among the three non-medical visitors. “Somewhere in the United States,” said Tak at last. “In New York, most probably. In nineteen thirty-four.”

Norlund lay back and closed his eyes. “If you can make me young again,” he said, “let’s do it.”

Undergoing the second course of treatment proved to be more uncomfortable than the mere aftermath of heart-replacement surgery. Not that the machinery permitted anything like real agony. Norlund was for the most part unconscious during actual treatments, and was told little about them. There were long stretches of dull discomfort. Gradually impatience came to dominate.

Some time passed before they let him see a mirror. When they did, a strange face peered back at him—half-recognizable, like the face of some unknown relative—peeling as with sunburn, but with the old skin pale over the stubble of a new brown beard. The face was certainly not sixty, not old any longer. Whether it was young was quite another question.