A Century of Progress (4 page)

“To me it would be foreign. But I think you’ll fit right in, Alan, with just a little preparation before you go.” A light tap sounded on one of the closed doors at the far end of the room, and Ginny hopped briskly off the table. “Excuse me, be right back.” Opening the door, she put her head out and murmured something to whoever was out there. Norlund couldn’t make out any of the words.

Gazing at Ginny Butler’s back, he thought momentarily of shifting his position to where he might be able to see past her, discover who she was talking with. He decided not. Let them play their games. Instead he went back to drinking coffee, and studying the naggingly half-familiar photomural, while in the background he was aware of the tones of a male voice that spoke to Ginny from just outside the door. Again Norlund was haunted by a sense of cognition; deep in his memory a search was going on, some connection fell just short of being made . . .

He heard the door close. In a moment Ginny was back at his side, gazing at him as if she expected something of him.

He said: “You were going to tell me what country this is in.”

She said decisively: “A far country indeed. But the city is Chicago.”

He looked at her; he couldn’t believe that she had suddenly started talking total nonsense. But if it was logic that she was talking, it had to be the logic of a dream. Norlund cleared his throat. “I still don’t get it. I live in Chicago now. Whereabouts are these buildings in Chicago?”

Ginny moved to stand beside the picture. “They were put up on Northerly Island, for the World’s Fair in the early Thirties. Maybe you can remember going to it as a boy. They called it A Century of Progress.”

“Where they’re talking about having the new fair in Ninety-two.”

“That’s right.”

“Oh.” He shook his head. “But those buildings aren’t there
now
. On Northerly Island there’s the Planetarium, and a beach, and a small airfield. You said I was going in
among
them—?”

“You are.”

It was quiet in the room, except for the faint murmur of traffic from outside. “I repeat, I still don’t get it. You mean they’ve been—reconstructed somewhere? Or what?”

“No, I don’t mean that.” Ginny was standing now at the huge photo’s right-hand edge. Her hand reached down, pointing. “I said ‘a far country’, remember, Alan? The name of it is printed down here.”

Her voice was encouraging, but still Norlund knew fear, or something very like it. It was not an overpowering feeling, but it was deep. The woman who faced him was not playing games; she was as deeply serious as anyone Norlund had ever seen. This was no cultist’s pitch—or, if it was, there was a frightening intensity behind it.

He leaned forward in his chair, trying to see what she was pointing to. There were symbols on the photo at her fingertip. The lettering must have been very small to start with, because even enlarged as it was now, Norlund had trouble reading the dark shapes against the poorly contrasting background of foliage in the picture.

Norlund got up from his chair and moved closer. ” ‘A Century of Progress’ “, he read aloud, and once more knew the feeling of recognition. ” ‘Chicago, Summer—’ “

Ginny’s fingernail, a youthful, red-polished instrument of fate, tapped inexorably at the photo-board. “Here, Alan. Here. You’re going here.”

And just at her fingertip were four more symbols. Norlund was never sure, afterward, if he had read them aloud or not.

1933

There was traffic again on the road outside, a motorcycle blatting. Norlund had raised his eyes to the face of Ginny Butler.

“Alan, I promised you an explanation of how we were able to help Sandy. She was treated by medical techniques of the year two thousand and thirty. Exactly how treatment was administered, I’m not free to say, but that’s what she’s getting. She’s a very fortunate little girl. Lucky for her that we wanted to recruit her grandpa.”

Norlund shook his head, feeling stupid. He didn’t know what he thought, and he certainly couldn’t find anything to say. He was slumping slightly now, leaning back on the conference table for support. With a feeling of relief he gave up and let himself sit down.

Ginny came closer, peering into his face. She nodded slightly, like a doctor satisfied with the progress that a patient was making.

“Your heart’s in good shape,” she murmured, half to herself. “And we don’t have a whole lot of time locally. Alan, I’m going to prove to you that we can travel in time. I’m going to bring in someone you’ll remember.”

Norlund felt a new clutch of unreasoning fear as Ginny turned toward the door where the whispered conference had been conducted. “Come in!” she called in a clear voice, and phantoms of the dead chased through his imagination . . .

The door opened. The figure that entered was not one of the phantoms, but a young man of about nineteen. He moved tentatively, hesitantly closer. He was wearing ordinary modern jeans and a long-sleeved sport shirt, and he kept staring at Norlund with a strange expression.

Norlund found himself getting to his feet, the connections of dream or madness finally being made deep in his memory. That voice, when he’d heard it outside the door . . . but . . .

The youth who had entered was no taller than Norlund, and thin with the springiness of youth. His light brown hair was just starting to grow out of a crewcut. His right arm, Norlund saw with a shock like that of fear, ended in what was either an odd glove or a very advanced type of artificial hand. The arm lay in a supporting sling at elbow level.

Norlund managed to take in all these things while hardly taking his eyes from the young man’s face. He kept on staring at that face, and it was as if the last forty years had gone by in some strange, distorted dream, gone by overnight . . .

The world had turned gray in front of Norlund, and then briefly disappeared. He was aware of Ginny Butler guiding him, supporting him, helping him back to a chair.

Presently the world was steady again and he looked up. The young man was still there. He was standing even closer now and peering down at Norlund anxiously.

“Al?” the young man asked. It was a familiar voice. Just a minute ago, from outside the door, it had nagged at Norlund’s subconscious with its familiarity. The youth leaned a little closer. Norlund felt like an accident victim, with this face looming over him with a look of pity and muffled terror. “Al? It’s me. Andy.”

“Andy.” Norlund nodded. It wasn’t that Andy had been hard to recognize. The problem was that he couldn’t help recognizing him. And that was a very great problem indeed, requiring some adjustment. Andy Burns stood before him, solid and three-dimensional, as real as he had been that day over Regensburg in nineteen forty-three when Alan Norlund had tried to tighten the tourniquet on the stump of Andy Burns’ right arm, then had tightened up his chute harness for him, clamped his left hand on the D-ring and then had put him out through the right waist gun opening of the burning Fortress. And Andy was not only still alive but not a day older than he was that day forty years ago. Or not many days older; his hair had grown longer . . .

Norlund didn’t know that he had finally completely fainted. He knew only that he was coming out of a faint, and that he was once more alone in the room with Ginny Butler. He was lying slumped back in his chair, and his belt had been loosened, and there was dampness on his face and in his hair as if someone had just sprinkled him with water. The old man can’t take it any longer, he thought with momentary shame.

Then that feeling was swallowed up in wonder. He stirred under Ginny’s touch on his hair, and sat upright. “That was . . .”

She waited for him to complete the statement. When he didn’t, she said: “You know who it was. You recognized him instantly.”

“Where’d he go?”

“He was called away. You can talk to him again later.” Ginny paused. “Like your granddaughter, Andy’s very lucky that we need you for a job. You’re the main reason that we went back and saved him, out of the air over Germany. It cost to do that.”

“Andy Burns.” Norlund was sitting a little forward now, leaning his face in his hands.

“I hope that, having seen him, you’ll be ready to believe we can send you to the Century of Progress.”

“I guess I have to.” Norlund looked up. Andy Burns. Two proofs, Sandy and Andy. It sounded like the title of a Thirties comic strip. “I put him out of the aircraft myself, but I never saw his chute open . . .” His voice trailed off. “My war story,” he concluded.

“You flew twenty missions as a waist gunner,” Ginny said. “I’m sure there’s more than one war story you could tell.” For a moment she looked at Norlund almost tenderly. The moment ended in a return to briskness. “However, there’s another job to be done now.”

She led Norlund out of what he thought of as the planning room, down a rather long hallway to a small bedroom. There was an attached bath, making the quarters look rather like a room in a modern motel.

“Your medical checkup is next, Alan, so get undressed if you will. The doctor will be along in a minute.” The room’s door closed behind her.

He followed orders in a daze, still too much in shock for examining-room embarrassment. Andy Burns . . .

The door opened again, without a knock. The white-coated man who entered was in his seventies, if appearance could be relied upon after today, but erect and trim. He wasted no time in introductions or other chitchat, but issued terse instructions and began to administer a physical.

In addition to making tests, he took some of Norlund’s body measurements, as if he might be fitting him for a suit of clothes. He checked Norlund’s teeth, which were still original issue. Some of the instruments that were used in the exam looked strange and unfamiliar to the patient, but that was nothing out of the ordinary these days. When the examiner had finished, he brusquely told Norlund to get dressed, advised him to get a haircut within the next few days, and departed as uninformatively as he had entered.

Ginny returned not long after the silent man’s departure, knocking before she entered.

“How’d I do?” Norlund asked.

“Fine. You’re in good health.”

“I thought I was. What was that about a haircut? He told me I ought to get one.”

“Oh. Well, men’s hairstyles are somewhat different in the Thirties, as I’m sure you’ll remember. Not that yours is
very
long, but—”

“Oh.” And somehow the whole prospect suddenly became real.

Ginny was holding open the door to the hall. “Let’s get moving,” she murmured abstractedly. “We’ve got to speed things up.”

She led him down again to the garage where the old truck waited. “Let’s see how you start the truck, Alan. Then put it in gear and ease it backward and forward a foot or so. We can’t open the garage doors just now, but don’t worry about the carbon monoxide. We’re well ventilated.”

“If you say so.” He climbed aboard the truck, while Ginny watched from the center of the floor. “Shouldn’t be much different from driving a modern stickshift,” he told her out the window. “Except here you have a hand choke to fool with too. And a hand brake, I see.”

But he had no trouble getting things to work. All the machinery seemed to be in excellent condition, and memory came back as if the skills had been used only yesterday. Every now and then Norlund paused for about two seconds, thinking to himself: What in the
hell
have I got myself into?

Ginny, watching him handle the truck, seemed reassured. “Good, I think we can assume that the driving
per se
is not going to present a real problem.” And she looked at her watch.

“Ginny?” It was the first time he had called her by name.

“Yes?”

“How did you manage that? With Andy?”

“We haven’t time to go into that now. You’ll talk to Andy again before you go. We went and got him, that’s all.”

“And now there’s no time.”

Her manner softened briefly. “I realize it may sound crazy. But there are ways in which we can manipulate time, and ways in which we can’t, and right now we’re in something of a bloody hurry. I’ve got to start teaching you how to operate the equipment in the rear of the truck.”

A door in the inner wall of the garage opened, to admit the septuagenarian medic, still in his white coat. Ginny went to him and they spoke together in low voices. Norlund shut off the truck engine and heard her call him Dr. Harbin. Norlund got out of the truck, not knowing what else he was supposed to be doing.

The doctor approached. He looked into Norlund’s eyes for a moment, nodded as if satisfied, and said: “I want you to listen to these numbers. They’ll come in three groups. Ready?”

“Whatever.”

Harbin then indeed pronounced three groups of numbers, sixteen digits in each group. Norlund to his own amazement found himself effortlessly counting and keeping track. When Norlund had heard all three groups recited, Ginny approached him with a small notebook and pencil in hand. He was expecting to be asked to play the numbers back, but instead she interviewed him on his personal preferences in clothing.

“You know what I was doing in nineteen forty-three and you don’t know what color shirts I like to wear?”

“That’s not so crazy, if you think about it.”

“It isn’t?”

“Just answer, please.” And Ginny wrote down his answers, as if they mattered, and hurried off.

Harbin confronted him again. “Repeat the second group of numbers for me, please.”

To Norlund’s considerable surprise, he could still do so, without even hesitating. When he looked for the numbers they were there, sitting in his mind as if projected on a screen.

“Good. Fine. And now the first group, backwards?”

Norlund could rattle those off just as readily. Ginny came hustling back from somewhere while he was at it. “He’s ready to learn,” the doctor told her.

“Great,” she rejoiced quietly. Efficient as usual, she already had the truck door open, gesturing Norlund in. “Step into the back of the vehicle, please, Alan, and sit in the seat there. You’ve got to learn that equipment.”

He went in. The high body of the old vehicle gave Ginny room to stand behind his swivel seat, lean over his shoulder and point things out. The proximity of her young body was pleasant, yet somehow not distracting.

The first thing that became obvious to Norlund about the equipment was that the ancient wires and tubes, even though the filaments were glowing, were no more than window-dressing; modern gear must somehow lie concealed beneath. The modern gear was evidently complex, but he learned how to operate it very quickly—too quickly.

Feeling actually frightened, he interrupted the lesson once. “What’ve you done to my brain? I can’t forget anything if I try.”

“Then don’t try. It’s nothing harmful, Alan, when it’s used sparingly. We’ve just given you something to speed up the learning process temporarily, make it more efficient. Now, these dials here have a code setting, like a safe. They must be set properly for any of the other gears to work.”

As soon as the dials were at their proper settings, what had looked like a primitive oscilloscope built into the console in front of Norlund cleared its round gray screen and showed him a color-graphics display as sophisticated as anything he’d seen on equipment of the Eighties.

Ginny started to explain to him how he was going to use it. After she’d made the scope turn gray again, displaying one primitive green-line trace like an ancient A-scan radar, Norlund interrupted the lesson to point at it. “They had scopes like this in nineteen thirty-three?”

“I see you weren’t doing advanced electronic research in that year. Yes, they did. Would you believe they had something almost like it in eighteen ninety-seven?”

Ginny went on showing him what he was expected to do with the equipment; the way she talked about it, it didn’t sound particularly hard. And maybe he didn’t yet believe wholeheartedly in the reality of all that she was telling him, but he remembered everything she said. He also lost track of how much time was passing. When he began to get overpoweringly sleepy, she calmly sent him back to his room to rest.

Lying on his bed, he tried to think. But too much had happened to him today; he couldn’t think straight about any part of it . . .

He awoke with the feeling that he might have slept for half an hour. The phone at bedside was chiming musically. When Norlund answered, Ginny’s voice invited him to come downstairs for dinner.

It was still daylight outside, and Norlund’s wrist-watch indicated seven o’clock. He washed up and put on a clean shirt, choosing one of several that he now found hanging in the room’s closet. He didn’t think they had been there when he came upstairs, but he had been so sleepy he hadn’t even noticed what time it was. Ginny had said that everything was going to be provided for him, and he decided to take her at her word.

Had he been dreaming Andy Burns?

It was just a few minutes after seven when he located some stairs and went down them. They brought him to the ground floor in sight of a rather ordinary dining room, with a table big enough for eight or ten. Only three places were set, and two of those were occupied by Ginny and Dr. Harbin.

They both looked up as Norlund approached. Ginny asked: “How’re you feeling, Alan?”

“Pretty good, after that siesta. I don’t know what happened. I don’t usually . . .”

“Common reaction,” said Harbin, clearing his throat as if it were rusty with disuse, “after a learning session like the one you had. Sit down.”

Norlund sat. A casually dressed young man Norlund hadn’t seen before appeared in the capacity of waiter, outlined some limited choices in the way of food, and went casually away.