Just inside the front door of the House of Tomorrow, Jerry Rosen stood looking out through a small gap in the drapes that covered most of the glass walls, watching the abduction. Jerry’s hand was in his coverall pocket, clutching the truck keys. When he’d gotten out of the truck to do this last installation he’d brought the keys along unthinkingly . . . well, almost unthinkingly. There just might have been some half-thought-out compulsion to make sure that his final day’s pay was going to be forthcoming after his final day’s work. Not that it had seemed at all likely that Norlund would try to stiff him on it, but years of hard times made people suspicious, almost a little crazy sometimes.
The three flatfeet had driven up in their gray car just as Jerry was about to go outside and report that his job was done. Instead he waited and watched while, sure enough, they went for Norlund. Jerry supposed that they were some kind of special Fair cops. Whatever was wrong, they were really pinching Norlund for something, shaking him down and everything. They looked in the truck but they didn’t leave a man with it when they drove away.
If they’d been smart . . . but Jerry had learned long ago that most cops, like most other people, were dumb and clumsy most of the time, and if you relied on them to be half asleep you’d come out ahead more often than not. Of course there was always the time they weren’t asleep and they surprised you. You had to consider what the stakes were, whether the risk was worth it.
Jerry no longer held to the theory that Norlund was a bootlegger. Jerry knew something about that business, and what Norlund was doing didn’t really seem to connect with it. But the old guy was up to something besides a radio survey. Or else the radio survey business was a lot different than Jerry would have imagined it to be. But whatever game Norlund was really into, he obviously had plenty of money behind him, and in Jerry’s book he was a good man and an employer who deserved loyalty. Growing up on the streets of New York and Chicago, Jerry had acquired a fierce sense of loyalty, as long as he considered it deserved.
And this was the moment when he had to consider what the stakes were, and the risks, and then act.
He could, of course, simply abandon the truck. Shed his coveralls and drop his tools here inside the building, and stroll off the Fairgrounds with the thousands of visitors—not a chance in a million that he’d be caught if he did that, assuming they were even looking for companions of Norlund who might be around. He would, of course, be leaving without collecting an earned day’s pay.
On the other hand, there was not only his day’s pay, but that truck, with what had to be a fortune in fancy equipment inside it. Norlund had to have friends, and they had to have a strong interest in that, as well as in hearing what had happened to their man.
Jerry acted. The gray Packard—and what kind of police force sent those out as patrol cars?—was hardly out of sight before he was out of the House of Tomorrow and down its front steps. When he reached the truck he pulled out the keys and hopped in. Now was the moment for the hidden plainclothesman to pop up out of hiding and pinch him. If that happened, Jerry would be surprised as hell, just an ignorant worker with no idea of what his boss had been up to or where he came from. The business card that might have suggested otherwise was a small, crumpled ball of waste up inside one of the indirect lighting coves just inside the House of Tomorrow’s super-modern entrance.
Jerry’s first instinct, as he started driving slowly away, was to look for a different gate to exit from the grounds. The truck might be more likely to be recognized at the gate where they’d driven in, if the gate people were supposed to be looking for it.
He got onto a service road, and decided to follow it north through the Fairgrounds. He thought he ought to be able to get out at the Twelfth Street gate . . .
. . . and the more he thought about those three cops, the more he wondered about them. Driving very, carefully and slowly, Jerry shivered a little and looked in his rearview mirror. Capone had been put away in the Federal pen in Atlanta by Uncle Sam, and anyway it wasn’t St. Valentine’s day. But other guys could have picked up the idea of putting a rub-out squad into police uniforms. Something about those three birds who’d picked up Norlund just wasn’t kosher.
When the service drive came out from behind a building, Jerry suddenly got a clear view of the Havoline Thermometer in the middle distance. Two hundred feet high, with electrically switched neon tubing up and down its sides instead of mercury—he’d read about it somewhere—it showed eighty-four degrees right now. A mile or so inland, the city would probably be really sweltering. Coming in sight of a clock now, Jerry noted that the time was just a little after four.
Sure enough, there was another service gate at Twelfth Street. He drove right up to it, and was motioned right through with only a casual wave of the guard’s hand. As Jerry had expected, they didn’t give a damn who they let out, as long as they hadn’t been told to watch for some person or vehicle in particular. Maybe in another five minutes they’d be alerted for the truck. He wondered how far Norlund had been taken. Probably just to somewhere on the grounds. If those were really the Fair police . . .
Jerry drove inland. He was worried, and using all his eyes and wit to try to make sure that he wasn’t being followed. There was a lot of traffic here near the Fair, and it was hard to be sure.
He was just crossing Michigan Avenue, going west, when he saw something ahead that took his mind for the moment off the possibility of being followed. A gray Packard, and, son of a bitch, it looked just like the one they’d hauled Norlund away in. He couldn’t get a good look at who was inside, but he thought it might be uniforms. No police force that Jerry had ever heard of gave its men Packards to drive around in. He found himself sweating in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.
Would he dare to try to follow them, just to see where they went? The idea crossed his mind. But no, the truck he was in felt painfully big and conspicuous; a sign was painted on its side. Jerry was sometimes a little too cocky about what he could get away with, but he wasn’t crazy. He’d gotten away with the truck, it looked like, and that was enough. He switched lanes, getting ready to turn down a side street before the guys in the Packard spotted him in their rearview mirror.
When he turned, the gray car passed out of his sight. He kept watching for it as he drove north for a while, but it did not reappear. At last he turned west again, toward Wheaton. The address from Norlund’s business card was firmly in Jerry’s mind. Whoever the boys in Wheaton turned out to be, he’d bring them back their truck, and word of what had happened to their man Norlund. Jerry didn’t doubt they’d appreciate the information, and maybe they could even do something for the old guy.
When he saw a handy-looking phone booth, he pulled over. He had the phone number from the card firmly in mind too.
The number was busy. He got his nickel back, paused to slip out of the labeled coveralls, threw them in the back of the truck, and jumped back into the driver’s seat.
As he drove he kept checking the time, whenever he caught sight of a clock. It was about five when he reached Wheaton; the day seemed to be getting hotter, if anything. Jerry located the road named in the address, and drove slowly west along it, looking at the numbers on houses and stores and shops.
Now open countryside was just ahead, and he felt on the verge of giving up. But wait, there was something up ahead, an isolated building. An old farmhouse, he thought, but maybe it wasn’t used for farming any more.
As Jerry approached the turn onto the driveway of the old house, he became aware of a car behind him. It wasn’t the gray Packard, and he had no special reason to believe that it was following him, but he couldn’t shake the feeling, the fear. The car was gaining on him now.
Should he drive on past the farmhouse and then loop back? The car behind was accelerating now, catching up faster. And there, half a mile ahead, another car turned out of a drive as if it possibly meant to block the road.
Jerry didn’t always make right decisions, but he was willing to make them qu
ickly. He turned on suddenly, sharply squealing tires, and went plowing up the long cinder drive in front of the old farmhouse. The place looked deserted, but he saw with a shred of hope that it did have a big garage, roomy enough for several cars, looking as if it had been recently added on.
Jerry had the truck halfway up the drive, still moving at a good clip, when something struck him. For an instant he thought he had been shot, and then he knew he hadn’t. The striking force was not a bullet, but something intangible and soundless. But it was real, like a wave of dizziness thick enough to be thrown like a net and stun a man. Could a guy possibly be shot, and never hear the bullet passing through his car?
And now the air around Jerry was flashing, turning impressive colors. Just ahead of him the garage doors were swinging open by themselves—a good thing, because he didn’t know if he could find the brakes—and inside the garage everything was color . . .
And now the whole damn building seemed to blow up, carrying him away . . .
1984
The dream was vague, but no less terrible for that. In it people were arguing about Jerry, while he lay helpless. Some of them wanted to do away with him entirely. Later he was unable to remember any of their words, but the sense of their purpose remained horribly clear.
In a physical sense, too, the argument was over him. Men and women were actually shouting at each other across his prostrate body, as he lay on some kind of bed or stretcher. And he knew that, just out of his range of vision, some kind of horrors were walking past.
Then at another time he was being carried on a stretcher, or something like one. There followed a ride in some peculiar vehicle. It wasn’t Norlund’s truck; it wasn’t quite like anything else that Jerry had ever seen. During this ride a woman who was sitting near bent over him to whisper in his ear, words that were meant to be reassuring, and then she pulled a cloth up over his face so he couldn’t see or hear what was going on around him, and he wondered if he was dead. Had he been able to move his arms, he would have pushed the cloth aside. Had he been able to worry, he would have worried like hell. As matters stood, he couldn’t do either one. Even fear was gone, so that was that.
Then in the dream Jerry started to laugh, and he laughed and laughed at all the things that were just too damn funny to worry about.
Until, in the midst of laughter, he almost choked. The choking lasted for a while, with the cloth pulled back from his face again and anxious voices and people fussing around him.
Then he was able to breathe easily again.
But by that time, all he wanted to do, all he really cared about in the world, was to be able to go to sleep . . .
Until a time came when he was trying to wake up.
Jerry had a headache. It wasn’t a killer, but it was enough to let him know that he must have hoisted a few too many last night. That didn’t happen to Jerry very often, especially since he’d been married. But on special occasions it could happen. Trust old Mike, when there was a wedding or some other really special reason, to get out one of the bottles of real Irish whisky, a family legacy kept hidden in the cellar. And then old Mike might want to prove that he could still drink the young guys under the table. Even a young guy who was good enough to marry Mike’s oldest daughter, and especially a young guy who was Jewish, and . . . and . . .
Jerry’s efforts at thought, such as they were, dissolved back into muddle. And headache. And maybe the headache was going to be a killer after all.
Jerry groaned. It probably hadn’t been the good old Irish, then. That had never done anything to him like this. What had he been drinking, bathtub gin?
With his forehead still buried in the pillow, his eyelids still uncracked, Jerry reflected that this time Judy was really going to be pissed off at him. Judy’s mother would put up with Mike’s drinking, though she grumbled. But Judy’s husband had to—wait a minute, it was a weekend, wasn’t it? Not that it mattered to Jerry, he didn’t have a job—hey, wait, like hell he didn’t.
Now memory was returning in great chunks that tumbled over each other in a confusing rush. Norlund. The Fair. The House of Tomorrow. Norlund being bundled off in a car, Jerry following in a truck.
And the old farmhouse. Nothing after that, except the dream.
Sitting up quickly, in a spasm of anxiety, didn’t do the headache any good at all. A fiend armed with a can opener took a close interest in the victim’s brain. For long seconds Jerry’s eyes remained clenched shut.
When at last he could see, he was in a room that, to the best of his recollection, he had never seen before.
He was in his underwear, lying between pink sheets . . . He looked at them again. Yeah, that’s right, pink instead of white. And the small bedroom was utterly unfamiliar. It was high-class, with a kind of feminine flair about the strange decorations.
For a little while Jerry just sat there, unable to make any kind of connection between this situation and his last waking memories. All he could think of at first was that he might somehow have wound up in a high-class whorehouse. He hadn’t been in one of those places, high-class or low, since he’d married Judy, not even once. Somehow he must have got hold of some really rotten booze, yack yack bourbon or bootleg jake.
Oh Christ, his head. How was he supposed to think?
By this time he had progressed as far as sitting on the edge of the bed. The bedroom had one window, the fancy blind of which was closed against bright sunlight. The thinnest possible needle of the sun, coming in past the blind’s edge, was enough to make Jerry wince. He observed that there were two doors in the bedroom, besides the closet door. One of them was closed, the other partly open on a bathroom with weird fixtures, yellow instead of white. With relief Jerry recognized his own clothes, piled more or less neatly on a chair near the bed. His shoes were under the chair.
In another moment Jerry was on his feet, ignoring the headache, lunging for his pants and going through the pockets. Goddamn it! He’d been cleaned out, every nickel. Even his pocket comb and his handkerchief were gone. Oh, the sons of bitches, he was going to, was going to . . .
Fact was, he still didn’t even know who they were, or even where he was. Dimly he groped toward the start of an explanation: he’d reached the headquarters of Norlund’s people, and something had happened to him there, a fight, a drugging, an accident. They were keeping him on ice until he woke up and they could decide what to do next. This place he was in might be some kind of hotel or whorehouse that they ran, a handy place to let him lie. It didn’t really look like a whorehouse, though. He didn’t know what it looked like.
Never mind what it was, for now. He was going to get himself out of it and head for home.
But another urgency took precedence, even over that. Jerry barely made it into the bathroom in time.
He was still in there, starting to feel a little better, when the oddness, the real strangeness of this place started to sink in. The fixtures, the lights, everything in its own way was funny-looking. There was no window at all in the bathroom, but you could hear a ventilating fan come on somewhere when you flicked the peculiar light switch by the door. The switch moved almost silently. And the sink, the washbasin, whatever you ought to call it, was of one piece with the countertop surrounding it, and it was made out of—well, it looked like marble, but it didn’t really feel like any kind of stone.
No window. Huh. This sure as hell was not the all-glass House of Tomorrow.
Back in the bedroom he grabbed up his pants again, now happy to have them even if the couple of dollars he’d had in his pocket was gone. He’d get home somehow, and then he’d try finding out what had happened to Norlund. Eventually he’d work things out with these people, explain to them that he’d just been trying to help by bringing back their truck.
Cautiously Jerry eased the blind on the bedroom window sideways a little, and peeked out into the sun. What he saw only added to his confusion. He was no longer out in the suburbs, he was looking down from some hotel or apartment building so high that it had to be
located in the middle of the city. There were treetops, well below him, and other tall buildings were standing around—now what in hell was he supposed to make of this? How long had he been knocked out, and why? And why had he been brought here and left in this bed?
He didn’t know what time it was. Jesus, he didn’t even know what day. Suppose he’d been gone from home all night. Judy would kill him, and Mike . . . nobody would believe a story like the one Jerry was going to have to tell.
While he was pulling on his shirt and stuffing the tail of it into his pants, his eye fell on a telephone. Yean, dammit, that had to be a phone there on the little bedside table. He’d missed it at first, because the instrument was a funny color instead of black, and an odd shape too. Maybe he ought to call home right this minute, from here, just to let them know that he was still alive. But maybe, on the other hand, he ought to just scram out of here without wasting a second, while he had the chance.
He put on his shoes, tying them quickly. Right beside the telephone on the little table was a funny little box made out of some smooth material. On the front of this box was what Jerry, desperate to know the time, at first thought might be a clock face. But it wasn’t a clock. Instead, the numbers on it were almost like those on a radio dial. Next to one row of numbers were the large letters FM, with AM beside the other row . . . instead of AM and PM? It didn’t seem to make sense.
There were more urgent things than strange gadgets to worry about. When, a moment later, Jerry did see a clock atop the dresser on the other side of the bed, he didn’t even recognize it as a clock at first. But it displayed what might be a time—10:18—even though it had no face or hands. There were just the numbers, glowing like a little neon sign. Jerry couldn’t see any neon tubes, though. Just the numbers themselves, in what looked like pure orange light. And now the last digit melted away, changing instantly to a 9.
He was fully dressed now, and he was getting out of here. One stride from the closed bedroom door, he obeyed a last-moment impulse in a way that he thought must mean his nerves were shot. Changing directions, he grabbed up the telephone after all. At that point, Jerry’s finger, poised to dial his home number, found itself aimed at a neat little rectangle of pushbuttons instead of a dial. Well, he could push buttons, too. The receiver beeped musically into his ear as he did so.
A Century of Progress Page 10