A Century of Progress

by Fred Saberhagen

  “My wife likes this one,” said Jerry. “She’s probably listening to it now . . . Jeez, I’m on the payroll now?”

  Norlund consulted his wristwatch. “It’s just about two o’clock. Starting at two, okay?”

  “Jeez, yes,” said Jerry. And he made a mental note to himself to make sure that this nice-sounding old guy actually paid him for this first half-day’s work when quitting time came around.

  Presently Norlund pulled over to the curb. Now he let Jerry take over the driving. Jerry eased the truck ahead, block by block, going slowly at Norlund’s direction, while Norlund sat in the chair in the rear of the truck and twiddled dials and read things off and called out orders. Jerry couldn’t really see what Norlund was doing back there, but then he wouldn’t have been able to understand it anyway. He wished for the millionth time that he had a real education of some kind. But he didn’t have one, and that fact wasn’t about to change. Not having much school just meant that you had to be that much smarter than you’d have to be otherwise, use willpower and determination, and look out for yourself every minute.

  “Now take it across the street, Jerry. Stop by that vacant lot on the corner. That should be about it.”

  “Okay, Boss.”

  They were still well out in the suburbs, but the houses were gradually getting closer together and the streets busier. The empty lot beside which Jerry stopped the truck was crisscrossed by paths worn in the grass and weeds, and littered with a moderate amount of junk. In the middle a few trees were growing, and in the largest tree some kids had once put up a treehouse. It was now collapsed—like a lot of other housing plans, thought Jerry.

  The old man was sweating when he emerged from the hot back of the truck to squint in the sunlight toward the lot. “Tell you what, Jerry, put it right up in one of those trees. Here, I’ll help you get the ladder out.”

  The ladder slid out from a long storage compartment in the back of the truck under the electrical stuff, and then unfolded. Like the other tools Norlund now brought out, it appeared almost new. Norlund brought out some dull gray coveralls, too, with the company name on them as it was on the truck, in letters that didn’t stand out very well.

  Jerry found a pair of coveralls of the right size and pulled them on, meanwhile pondering to himself: Why have a name showing at all, and then tell me to keep it a secret? Something was not quite kosher here. Maybe his first suspicion about bootlegging was right. Maybe the racketeers now needed fancy radio communications systems to keep ahead of highjackers and the Feds. Well, that was all right with Jerry; everybody, or almost everybody, had something to do with boot-legging, and right now a job was a job. Just make sure, Rosen, he cautioned himself sternly, that you get out of sight before the highjackers show up and the shooting starts. Not that he thought that was really likely.

  Presently Jerry was standing atop the ladder, his head among tree branches, a modest assortment of tools and fasteners stuffed into his coverall pockets. Norlund had gotten back into the truck. He stuck his head out every few seconds to call directions to Jerry, saying move it right or left a little, or up or down. If any of the neighbors were at all curious about what was going on, none of them bothered to come out and ask—anyway, Jerry thought, the whole thing looked pretty official.

  “That’s it right there! Take some screws and put it in tight now. Do a solid job of it.” Norlund got out of the truck again and came to stand right beside the ladder, supervising this first effort closely. Jerry, as soon as he had the little banana-shaped thing fastened to the treetrunk, took a grip on the device and wobbled his whole weight back and forth on it, demonstrating solidity.

  Even so, Norlund had to climb the ladder and take a close-up look himself before he was completely satisfied. That was all right with Jerry, who had done a good job; he always liked to do a job well, if he was going to do it at all.

  Norlund had to stand on tiptoe atop the ladder, to get a good look at what the taller Jerry had been doing. “Good,” the old guy said at last, and came down briskly. “Well, on we go. Only nineteen more to put in.” And he looked at his watch.

  Jerry was pleased, too. Nineteen more would mean that the job was certainly good for one more day at least; obviously Norlund was concerned that it be done right, and there’d evidently be a lot of driving in between.

  They loaded their tools back into the truck, and Jerry drove on, at Norlund’s direction. They were entering a different suburb now.

  “We’re probably not gonna get lucky with too many more empty lots,” Norlund mused aloud, studying his map as Jerry drove. “Well, we’ll figure out something.” He looked up. “Seen the Fair yet?”

  “Hah, you kiddin? Who can spare half a buck for a ticket, just to get on the grounds? I wouldn’t mind gettin’ a look at Sally Rand. But I hear they charge extra for that.”

  “Well, I can’t promise you Sally Rand. But it looks like we’ll be going on the fairgrounds at least, toward the end of this job.”

  “Great. Hey, Mr. Norlund? Would you mind if I stopped someplace and phoned home? Just to tell ‘em I’m working. I’ll keep all the details quiet like you told me. But otherwise they’re gonna start to wonder what’s happened to me.”

  “Sure. Stop somewhere when you see a phone.” And Norlund, staring at his map again, was wondering privately if getting onto the fairgrounds, where the last units had to go, and working there, was going to pose a problem. He’d have to bring the truck with its equipment on too, to determine the exact placing of those last units. There’d have to be a service gate of some kind, and he could probably bluff his way through that. He’d hand out a few bucks if necessary to smooth the way.

  “There’s a phone booth right over there, Mr. Norlund.”

  “Okay, stop. Make your call. Just don’t take all day.”

  The youngster pulled the truck over. He hesitated, then fished in his shirt pocket and pulled out a metal matchbox that proved to hold not only matches but a couple of cigarettes. He made a gesture of offering one to Norlund, and when that was refused quickly lit up himself.

  Looking after Jerry as the wiry kid went trotting off to the phone booth, Norlund found himself reflecting on youth and its eternal difficulties. Jerry was a strong kid, with a head of wiry, almost-blond hair. After people had learned his name, he probably often heard from them that he didn’t look Jewish. A tough young guy, thought Norlund; well, Jerry was headed into years when toughness was certainly going to be an asset. Of course, if you thought about it, that was the predominant kind of year in human history.

  This kid Jerry must have been born in nineteen ten or thereabouts, and was therefore chronologically—if that was the right word—somewhat older than Norlund himself. And on the tail of that thought came another one, that brought with it a fresh sense of logical vertigo: There might be, in fact there probably was, a septuagenarian Jerry Rosen alive somewhere in that distant land of nineteen eighty-four—an aged Jerry Rosen who probably reminisced from time to time about his weird experiences during the Great Depression.

  Just as there was now a ten-year-old Alan Norlund only a few miles away . . .

  Norlund didn’t even want to think about seeing that kid or his young parents. There was only so much that the psyche could take at one time.

  The Time Machine, thought Norlund wryly. H. G. Wells. When Norlund was younger he had read a fair amount of science fiction.

  Here was Jerry, still moving at a trot in the baggy coveralls, coming back from the phone booth before Norlund had really expected him.

  “Hey, Mr. Norlund? I’m supposed t’ bring you home for dinner. If you can come, that is. They said if it was at all possible.”

  Norlund was on the verge of making some easy excuse. But then he thought, why not? He’d have to eat dinner somewhere, and there” was nothing in his orders against fraternizing with the natives. And anyway, he felt a need for human society, to fix him in this version of reality.

  “Okay,” he said. “Sure. If it’s no trouble with th
e women folks.”

  “No trouble. They’re the ones who told me. Whenever we get there is fine.”

  Jerry got behind the wheel again. They drove on, soon nearing the place where the second unit would have to be installed. The instrumentation in the back of the truck indicated to Norlund that the ideal place for this device was right in the middle of a large suburban house. Well, forget that ideal place. One part of Norlund’s job was to overrule the machinery in a case like this, and force it to come up with a suitable compromise.

  Coaxing the instruments as he’d been taught to do, Norlund got them to admit as an acceptable alternative the mounting of this unit in a large tree overhanging the sidewalk directly in front of the house. Once again Jerry climbed the ladder and went to work. If people saw him, maybe they thought that he was trimming trees.

  On to the third site. Here the perfect location would have been in someone’s back yard, and here Norlund directed Jerry to mount a telephone pole in the adjoining alley.

  Norlund was working back and forth between the converging lines in the planned pattern, filling in both of them from west to east. The truck, with Jerry driving most of the time, zigzagged north and south, gradually working its way east.

  By the time they had the first eight units planted, darkness was threatening. They had worked right through what must have been Jerry’s regular dinnertime, and through lunchtime by Norlund’s biological clock. At last he noticed that he was hungry.

  “Jerry, I think we got to knock off for the day. No way we can go on doing this after dark. Tell you what, I’ll drive you home and pick you up again in the morning.”

  “Great. Sure.” And Jerry watched avidly as Norlund counted out dollar bills into his hand, one for every hour that they’d worked together. “Hey, don’t forget, you’re having dinner with us. Judy and her old lady are really expecting you.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.” And strangely enough he really was. Usually Norlund didn’t particularly enjoy meeting strangers. But right now he had the sensation that if he closed his eyes and relaxed for more than a second, the world of the Thirties might evaporate away from around him, leaving him God knew where. Contact with other people might make a web to hold him in.

  They had already reached the western boundary of Chicago, and now they drove on into the city. The only immediately apparent indication was in the design of the street signs. Norlund continued to let Jerry do the driving, while he himself sat in the right seat, observing and contemplating. “Where you from, Mr. Norlund?” “New York. The company’s based there.” If he’d told the truth, that he was a native Chicagoan, efforts to pin him down further would have followed.

  “Yeah? My Mom lives in New York now. My Dad’s still over in the old country. He went back a few years ago.”

  Norlund did not respond, and conversation died for a time. He found it easy to fall into his own thoughts. Watching the twilight streets go past, the old-fashioned streetlights coming on, mile after mile of houses and stores and shops and small factories, lights everywhere coming on against the night, he beheld a half-remembered city. The buildings were mostly smaller and dingier than those of the Chicago he thought he could remember from his childhood. There were the street names, time-proof incantations he had used and lived with for most of his life.

  With each block he traveled, the sensation was stronger of imminent return to a childhood home, though his own neighborhood had been some distance from this one. This world was saying to him that yes, he could go home again . . .

  So familiar were the endless blocks of working-class houses, mile upon mile of them. And yet, so different was this from the childhood world that he had thought he remembered. Even now, with darkness fully fallen, he could see how many FOR RENT signs were on houses, apartments, stores. There was furniture, piled on a sidewalk, a human figure in a rocking chair beside it with blanket over knees. Eviction, nowhere to go; it happened. This year the hard times of the Depression were at their hardest. The people Norlund saw were generally shabbier than he remembered people being, the children more ragged . . . and it struck him now, as it had never struck him in his childhood, that he had yet to discern a black or an oriental face among the thousands to be seen along these streets. Chicago’s black ghettos in nineteen thirty-three, he seemed to recall, would be limited to the south side, and form only a comparatively small part of that vast region. And nobody in America would call a black slum a ‘ghetto’ yet—a ghetto was still a European Jewish quarter.

  “What’s your wife’s name, Jerry?”

  “Judy. Her family name is Monahan. Her folks are Irish, I told you that. Norlund’s Scandinavian, ain’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  A streetcar, a lumbering rectangular dinosaur of wood and metal, groaned around a corner nearby, steel wheels fighting with screams of rage against unyielding steel tracks. The single eye of the dinosaur glared at them, the overhead trolley threatened them with blue-white lightning as it stuttered along its wire.

  Now Jerry was driving past a huge brick Catholic church, St. Something-or-other, Chicago pseudo-Gothic. Norlund had gone to a Lutheran church early in life, when he’d been made to go to church. He had alternated between feeling rather superior to those who were led from Rome, and vaguely envious of them for some reason he couldn’t quite pin down.

  On the next intersection, each corner building held a storefront. One small bakery, one barbershop with painted pole, a placard in the window advertising LEECHES. Two other stores with whitewashed windows, closed and FOR RENT.

  Now down a side street Norlund glimpsed an enormous factory building, fairly new, eight or ten stories high and a block square, almost completely dark now and grim as a prison. There were probably ten thousand potential workers within walking distance, among these blocks of houses, two-flats, and small apartments. The factory reared up among them as Norlund imagined that a medieval cathedral might have risen from its town or village. And suddenly another eerie twinge went through his spirit—the realization that as far as he knew, travel into the past was not limited to only fifty years . . .

  Jerry turned a corner, and Norlund saw the factory again. One entrance of the huge building was a cave-like door big enough for trucks, and from this mouth a small body of workers was now issuing. Norlund could see them plainly under the garish streetlight that guarded the factory entrance. They had, almost to a man, lunch pails under their arms, cloth caps or battered hats on their heads. Their feet were dragging now, their movements slowed by what must have been a long punishing shift at whatever machines they served inside. These men were the lucky ones, the employed. Norlund wondered if Jerry’s father-in-law might be among them.

  Jerry swerved the truck suddenly. He swore at a passing horse-drawn wagon, illegally lightless and hard to see in the dark street. Some junkman or peddlar, crying his daily chant no more, quietly heading home.

  And then Jerry was pulling the truck over to the dark curb, parking in front of a close-packed row of small houses. There was no problem in finding a parking space.

  On the front steps of the nearest house sat a figure mottled by leaf-shadows from the nearest streetlamp. A stocky, graying man rose to greet them as they alighted from the truck. He had a quart beer bottle on the step beside him, and a glass in hand.

  “Mr. Norlund, this’s Mike. Judy’s dad.”

  Mike Monahan was muscular, going to fat. As his evening leisure suit he wore a white cotton undershirt with narrow shoulder straps, over his work pants. His handshake was firm, and his greeting hearty, though most of it was drowned out by the shrieking of children going up and down the sidewalk on roller skates. Their noise was very little different from that of their grandchildren half a century away.

  Monahan still shook Norlund’s hand. “Sit down, have a beer.”

  “Be glad to.”

  But it was not to be, not yet. The two women of the house had been watching for the arrival and had come out, and now Norlund was going to have to go into the house
and be welcomed properly. Mrs. Monahan was small, mousy, and apologetic as she insisted on having her own way. Judy looked worn and brave. Her prettiness was of a type that Norlund thought might fade quickly. Several half-grown children that Norlund took for Judy’s younger siblings also milled about, indoors and out, taking off roller skates and wanting to know if this was the weekend they would at last get to go to the Fair, and when the ice cream was going to be opened. The two girls were in dresses, the two boys in knickerbockers with largely destroyed knees—school’s out for the summer, save your good clothes was evidently the plan. Norlund had completely forgotten knickers, though he’d worn them often enough himself, God knew. How things were starting to come back now . . .

  At last he was able to get back out of the house, full glass of beer in hand, to rejoin Monahan on the cooler front porch . . . but the women had faked them out; it was now time to go back inside and eat dinner. Since the arrival of the eminent visitor, Mrs. Monahan had been in open debate with herself as to whether the kitchen would do for him to eat in, or whether the cloth-covered table in the dining room would be required. Norlund now settled the matter by plunking himself down at the kitchen table, establishing his beer glass on the worn oilcloth there, and letting those who would come and join him.

  Everyone besides he and Jerry had already eaten dinner, but there were two pork chops apiece being kept warm for them—Norlund suspected that Jerry would have gotten only one if he hadn’t been bringing an employer home. There were mashed potatoes with butter—it was real butter, naturally—and fresh peas with the irregular look and fine taste of having just come from someone’s garden.

  Judy had damp brown curls, and a graceful way of leaning sideways as she moved about helping with kitchen tasks while balancing her baby on one hip. She paused, standing over Norlund, in the act of giving him his knife and fork. “Jerry didn’t say much on the phone about what kind of work it is.”