A Century of Progress

by Fred Saberhagen

  But it was the vehicle that drew most of Norlund’s attention. It looked at least as old as the grease pit—probably older. It was a small truck, of the kind that in a modern version would have been called a van—a tall, dull black, slab-sided squarish machine that indeed looked as if it had been built sometime around nineteen-thirty. RADIO SURVEY CORPORATION, read the legend painted in hard-to-see dark red on the flat black side, along with an uninspired zigzag of yellow lightning.

  Ginny would have led him across the garage to exit by another interior door, but Norlund delayed, looking at the truck. It appeared to have been quite well cared for, but it was no museum piece. There were small dents in the large rounded fenders, and a film of gray road dust on the dark paint. A small old-fashioned nameplate informed Norlund that the vehicle was a Dodge.

  Ginny had paused, waiting for him patiently. “Think you can drive it without any trouble?”

  Stepping closer to the vehicle, Norlund looked in through the open side window. From the design of the gearshift, and the other old controls, he judged the truck to be even a few years older than his first estimate. Behind the two front seats for driver and passenger, the large windowless interior held two floor-to-ceiling equipment racks with a short aisle between them. Almost in the very rear, at the end of the aisle, was another seat, facing toward the rear with its high back concealing whatever it faced. The two side racks, of three or four shelves each, were mostly filled with what looked like appropriately antique radio equipment. Not for decades had Norlund seen gear remotely like this: wooden cabinets, alternating with black crackle-finished metal boxes, bulky transformers nested in cloth-insulated wiring, exposed vacuum tubes the size of sixty-watt light bulbs. From all this stuff archaic power cables led down into lower wooden cabinets, in which Norlund could picture primitive lead-acid batteries arrayed in series and parallel.

  “Don’t see why I couldn’t drive it,” he answered. “But what’s all this junk here in back?”

  “Come along, Alan. We’re going to start explaining that right away. Among other things.”

  “Good.” He followed.

  The old building was even larger than it had appeared from the outside. They ascended a narrow stair, old enough to show deep wear on wooden treads. At one place the head clearance closed to a minimum, but Norlund was short enough to negotiate it handily. Once they were upstairs, modernity reasserted itself in the form of a vinyl-floored hallway with fluorescent lighting. The doors on either side of the hall were closed. Norlund hadn’t seen anyone else since entering the building, but now he could hear brief footsteps, and a door closing a couple of rooms away.

  He looked round sharply when Ginny led him into a large room, sunlit from a row of windows fronting on trees and lawn, but unoccupied. This room, thought Norlund, looked like the place where the sales force might meet to plan monthly strategy. In the center was a large conference table, the wooden top shiny and unmarred though the edges and legs were definitely experienced. The room still had plenty of space for assorted other furniture; one table against a wall held a small modern coffee-maker, contents looking ready to pour. A light breeze came in through the well-screened windows, to stir casual scatterings of papers on various desks and tabletops.

  The most eye-catching thing in the room was a huge photomural that all but completely covered the wall opposite the windows. Blown up black-and-white photographs had been put together on a special board to form a montage of a single scene. It was some kind of a street, or a pedestrian promenade, with a waterfront in the foreground and a row of unusual buildings in the rear. No people or vehicles were to be seen. There was a scattering of trees in full summer leaf, and what appeared to be flowerbeds among the walks. Central among the buildings was a skeletal tower, its top too high to be visible in the picture. In the background beyond the buildings there was more water, some kind of lagoon perhaps, and beyond that land again, with at least one more rank of exotic architecture. The buildings that were clearly visible were a varied lot, and certainly not ordinary houses. The whole thing reminded Norlund somewhat of a zoo—but there were no cages. A design for a museum? The world of tomorrow? Wait a minute . . .

  “Have a seat, Alan. Coffee?”

  “Sure. Thanks.” He pulled out one of the ordinary chairs that surrounded the conference table, and seated himself so he could keep looking at the giant picture. “Sugar and milk if you’ve got ‘em.” He couldn’t puzzle the picture out.

  Norlund glanced around at the empty room at the couple of silent typewriters. “Is your organization somewhat undermanned? Or aren’t they back from lunch yet?” Suddenly he was a skeptic again, feeling an urge to needle, to demonstrate independence. Any moment now, he thought, the fanatics are going to burst out of concealment and start teaching me the true path to salvation.

  Ginny had removed her raincoat and hung it in a small closet. Now she was busying herself around the coffee-maker. “We come and go. You’ll meet some of your co-workers later.” She turned her head to Norlund briefly. “I expect you’ll be able to recognize one of them.”

  “Oh?” But it appeared that no details were going to be provided just now. “All right, lady, you know how to keep me interested.” Norlund found his eyes kept coming back to the huge picture. Something about it nagged him, as if the scene it showed ought to have been familiar.

  He gave up on it for the time being and looked around at the room again, at the papers on a small nearby table. The top one looked like some kind of printout, with columns of incomprehensible numbers. In through the windows came the genteel murmur of traffic from the suburban residential street, invisible behind the summer screen of trees.

  “Inconspicuous,” Norlund pronounced. “Though not really secret. Is that the note you guys are striving for?”

  “All organizations have certain secrets.” Ginny came to set down a steaming styrofoam cup on the big table near his hand. “We do have some we consider vitally important, but we try not to work at it unnecessarily.”

  Then, with her other hand, she placed another object on the table for his inspection. Somewhat smaller than a banana, it was vaguely the same shape, dark, smooth, hard-looking, a near-cylinder with tapering ends and a light curve. On each end there were a couple of small flanges with holes in them, evidently for mounting. “These will be a part of the job you do for us—a large part. Go ahead, pick it up and look it over.”

  Norlund first took a sip of his coffee, which was hot and good. Then he picked up the so-far unnamed object. It was indeed hard and smooth, and moderately heavy. Metal? No, he decided, some unusual ceramic.

  He asked: “What is it?”

  Ginny had perched sideways on the big table now, swinging one foot lightly and sipping from her own styrofoam cup. The jeans and sweater showed her figure to good advantage. “It’s a kind of recording device. Think of what we’re doing as taking a kind of survey; your part of the job will be to distribute a number of objects, twenty or so, similar to this one, according to a plan that you’ll be given.”

  “A survey of what? What do they record?”

  “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Huh. So I’ll be driving around in that truck downstairs, distributing these?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “Forget what I just said about you guys trying to be inconspicuous.”

  “To distribute the devices properly, you’re going to need help. Either you or your partner will have to take certain readings on the truck’s electronic equipment, while the other person puts the devices in place.”

  Norlund drank coffee again. “First I’ve heard about a partner.”

  “You’re going to need one. It could be someone from here—it could, as a remote possibility, even be me. More likely it’ll be some local man that you hire when you get where you’re going.”

  “Or woman, I suppose?”

  Ginny’s smile returned faintly. “Anyone you hire locally for this particular job will almost certainly be
a man.”

  “Let me guess. Saudi Arabia?”

  “Oh no.” She turned, directing his attention to the huge photo on the wall. “You’re going there, in among those buildings—you’ve been there before, actually. You used to live in that city.”

  “Mystery, mystery. Is it all right if I have another cup of this? You make good coffee.”

  “Sure, help yourself. I don’t want to be mysterious, really, Alan. I want to get on with the job. It’s just that there’s a right way and a wrong way to explain things.”

  “Sounds like I’m being prepared for a shocker.” He poured himself coffee, then judiciously measured in a little sugar. He’d go without cream this time. “Sounds foreign. Not that I’d necessarily mind. I’ve lived in a fair number of countries at one time and another.”

  “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 a
lone 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.