A Century of Progress

by Fred Saberhagen

  Then came clicking and buzzing noises, and then a woman’s voice: “—suggest you hang up and dial again. If you feel you have dialed correctly—”

  Jerry tried several times, with increasing urgency, to interrupt the operator’s spiel. But she droned on as if she were completely unaware of his existence. Snotty bitch! And then to top it off she just pulled the plug on her switchboard and cut him off, damned snotty bitch!

  But he had no time to waste on her. As Jerry put down the phone, one more thought struck him, and he hastily pulled open some of the dresser drawers and poked around in them, wondering if his money and stuff might have been put there. Or he might find a little loose change that he could use for carfare. What he discovered was piles of various feminine garments, and that was about it.

  At the bedroom door at last, he tried it cautiously, and found to his relief that at least it wasn’t locked. When he opened the door he found himself looking out into the hallway of what appeared to be a small apartment. Jerry stood still for a moment, listening. As far as he could tell he had the whole place to himself.

  Across the hallway was the small living room, with blinds drawn shut on both its windows. At first glance the living room furniture was more or less ordinary—a sofa, a couple of big chairs, a low table with some newspapers thrown on it. But the lamps looked odd.

  And in one corner of the living room a big radio sat on a low chest . . . but maybe it wasn’t a radio. It was some kind of cabinet with metal prongs sticking out on top like insect feelers and most of its front surface a single panel of dull glass. At the other side of the living room in a small entryway was a door that ought to lead out of the apartment. Another door, to a tiny coat closet, stood ajar, revealing garments hanging within.

  A few feet to Jerry’s left down the hall was another bathroom. And beside that a second bedroom—or was it? On tiptoe he moved closer and looked in. It was another small room, with a single bed or cot crowded into one corner. The center of the room was given to a worktable holding a kind of elaborate, deformed typewriter. This machine was flanked on the table by another glass-fronted box, this one small, and a couple of other devices Jerry found equally unfamiliar. All were connected by wires covered with strange, smooth insulation. More radio stuff, Jerry guessed. Spies? Secret messages to company headquarters? Any guess he made might be as good as another. There were some rolls and scatterings of paper on the table, but he wasn’t going to hang around to try to read them. In this room, too, the window blind was closed.

  Moving in the other direction down the short hall, past the room in which he’d awakened, Jerry came to a small dining alcove. The table and chairs were framed with bright metal tubing, making them look as if they might have come right out of the House of Tomorrow.

  Beyond this alcove was the kitchen, in which things were . . . very odd. By now, that hardly came as a surprise. The stove top was a single panel, the burners looking as if they’d simply been painted onto it. But it was obviously a real appliance. On one wall of the kitchen hung a calendar, and on another a peculiar phone—and there at last, between blinded windows on a third wall, a clock of more or less normal design. It read ten twenty-four, which more or less agreed with the odd clock back in the bedroom.

  At the far end of the kitchen a closed door of solid wood was fortified with two locks and a chain. It had to be the back way out of the apartment. In a moment Jerry was standing in front of that door and undoing its fastenings. A moment after that he was outside the door, on a small concrete-floored landing. It held a pair of garbage cans that, like so many things in the apartment, appeared to have been made of something like hard rubber. From this landing a service stairway went both up and down, in tight rectangular turns, concrete and steel inside the unpainted concrete of the building’s outer wall.

  Jerry took the downward stair. His feet moved quickly, skipping steps, passing the rear entries to other apartments. Maybe when he got outside he could bum money for carfare from somebody. He passed several exterior windows on his way down, but they were all obscured by bars and heavy screens and grime. He could see enough, though, to tell that his descent had reached the level of the treetops outside; and then, that he was almost all the way down.

  Then he was at ground level. The exit door at the bottom opened easily. And then he was outside.

  1933

  The gray Packard was creeping west through Loop traffic. The man in the passenger seat turned around again, and said to Norlund, “It might even be that you are innocent, Mr. Norlund—and I suppose that might even be your right name.”

  “It is.”

  “When I say innocent, I mean of course in the sense of your intentions. You are not innocent legally. Butler probably recruited you with the throw that what she wanted you to do for her was perfectly legal. Is that in fact what happened?”

  The throw? Norlund wondered silently. His hands were still held behind him by steel cuffs. He thought about Sandy, and said nothing.

  “Ah well, you’ll tell me soon. First I want to make sure you understand that unauthorized, unlicensed time travel is very much against the law.”

  Norlund felt a compulsion to speak. An innocent man ought to be able to say something. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  His interrogator smiled faintly, as if he had gained a point by getting Norlund to ask that question. “I am talking about the laws of human history. I have the honor to help in their enforcement. No time, no place in human history, stands outside our law. You will learn.” The man nodded at Norlund, his attitude seeming to say, I am allowing all I can for ignorance, restraining my personal anger at lawbreakers such as you.

  “Kidnapping is illegal,” Norlund said. And then, seeing the instant reaction in the other’s eyes, he was much afraid.

  Before the chief could respond to Norlund, the driver beside him interrupted. “Sir, it’s that truck. Behind us.”

  The chief’s gaze shifted past Norlund, out through the rear window. Again something altered in his eyes, and Norlund, who had been frightened, was abruptly terrified. The chief said only: “Get him.”

  The driver reacted instantly, displaying a virtuosity that had not earlier been required. He twirled the wheel, expertly changing lanes in traffic. The Packard accelerated, braked, spun into a U-turn. Norlund, having a hard time keeping his balance with his hands useless, saw the truck. He lunged awkwardly toward the open window next to him, intending to get his head out of it and cry for help.

  The chief hit him on the bridge of the nose, a backhand blow. If it wasn’t a gunbarrel that landed, it felt like one. Norlund, half-stunned, his eyes suddenly streaming water, slumped back into his seat. Meanwhile, through his pain, he was raging inwardly at Jerry—what did the damned young fool think he was doing, trying to follow this way? It was the same truck all right; there was the dimly painted sign on the side of it. Silently Norlund cursed the young guy for an idiot.

  The Packard’s driver continued to be frighteningly competent. More so than Jerry. Norlund, still half-dazed, in pain, and trying to see through streaming eyes, missed many of the details of the chase. When his vision cleared they were still somewhere in the downtown area, with the truck only half a block ahead. A light was turning red—but both vehicles got through it. The truck had lost another car-length now.

  The chief, ignoring Norlund now, looked forward, grunting with satisfaction. The uniformed man in the rear had Norlund by the collar with one hand, ready to apply a choke if necessary.

  The fleeing truck had turned down one side street after another, and now it chose to dive into an alley. Norlund groaned aloud, viewing this as evidence of Jerry’s panic—there were too many ways to be delayed, or stuck, down one of these one-lane passages between buildings.

  And there, round the first bend of the alley, the truck was stuck indeed, having chosen a blind ending. The Packard screeched to a halt some fifty feet behind it. The chief had his door open instantly, and jumped out with weapon in hand, crying triumphan
t orders to his men. The driver, on his side, was only a second behind him. Ragged forms that had been bending over nearby garbage cans straightened up in scrambling flight. Norlund, his head twisted sideways by the grip on his collar, could just see that one of these was a young man, slight of build, with short brown hair that was just growing out of a crewcut. The youth’s eyes met Norlund’s, and with a tense side-ways nod he indicated that Norlund should get the hell out of that alley, back in the only direction that was open.

  It wasn’t that Norlund was unwilling, but—

  Something that was not gunfire or any conventional explosive blew up, sizzled, blasted again. It was issuing from the truck, and the air around the Packard was filled with frying noises. The chief and his companion, their bodies glowing but apparently unharmed, were diving for cover behind loading dock and garbage cans, firing back.

  And now something else was happening at and around the car door to Norlund’s left. The uniformed man beside him let go Norlund’s collar and started to turn that way, away from Norlund. There was a staccato shrieking in the air, suggesting a wind of hurricane force being turned on and absolutely off at intervals of a small fraction of a second. First the car door, then the uniformed figure beside Norlund, disappeared and reappeared in multiple staggering images, flickering in time with the hurricane wind. Norlund saw the door open, the door closed, the man in this position, the man in that. Grabbing for Norlund, falling down, reaching for the door, drawing his gun, lying back slumped, sitting there alert. As if segments or frames from three or four different sequences of events had been chopped up and randomly spliced back together.

  Norlund could feel himself, even see himself, being sucked into the maelstrom too. Forces he had never known sawed at him. Mutually exclusive pathways opened simultaneously. He could feel himself being sliced as by a camera’s whirling shutter, divided and subdivided, minced, multiplied and integrated again. Norlund Descending a Staircase.

  The guard was gone from beside him, the car door was open. He lunged for it.

  Norlund found himself rolling out of the Packard onto the ground. He was afflicted with dirt and grit and terror, and the blasts that were not of bullets or cannon still raged in the air nearby. But he felt essentially unhurt, and the world around him had regained stability. With steel still clamping his hands behind him, he got his legs under him and ran, trying to stay in a crouch. Already he was gasping but he ran as hard as he could, heading back down the alley. The noise behind him suddenly abated, as if a heavy door had closed, but one quick glance backward showed him both truck and Packard still enveloped in special effects. Two bodies, one uniformed, one ragged, lay anonymously on the ground.

  Norlund pounded around the corner in the alley, breath sawing in his throat. He was just approaching the alley’s mouth, wondering which way he was going to turn out of it, when a green taxicab with a broad stripe of checkerboard pattern round its body pulled up in front of him on the street. A rear door of the cab opened, and Ginny Butler leaned out beckoning.

  Norlund, stumbling forward as fast as he could, gasped with dismay when he saw that the car was starting to roll before he’d reached it. He lunged. Ginny’s hand caught him by the upper arm and pulled. He was in safely and the door slammed as the cab leapt forward.

  Ginny, dressed in clothes of the Thirties, her short hair rearranged, helped Norlund up to a normal position on the seat. Harbin, dressed as a cabdriver, was up front behind the wheel. The taxi shot down the street and around a corner as if expecting close pursuit. It slowed down somewhat after that, but still kept moving right along, putting distance between its occupants and whatever might be happening back there in the alley.

  In one hand Ginny was now holding what looked like a giant Brillo pad of coiled wire. She began to pass this like a sponge over Norlund’s body, touching him quickly, gently, working from head to toe. She used her free hand to turn him this way and that, careful not to miss any spots. The process, whatever it was, was complete in a matter of seconds, and he was allowed to lie back gasping, his eyes closed. He was too old for this kind of nonsense, he told himself.

  “I never promised you it would be a safe job, Alan.” Ginny was reaching behind him now, with some other kind of instrument in her hands. There was no sound, not even a tug, but one after another the bracelets fell free of his wrists.

  He opened his eyes. “You said that before.” He wished that he could stop gasping. “What about Andy Burns?” Gasp. “I saw him back there.”

  “We have some good, experienced people there with him. Chances are they’ll do all right.” Ginny, putting tools away, rubbed her forehead wearily, “Andy is working for us willingly, you understand. A lot of things have been explained to him, and he’s accepted combat assignment.”

  “Wish I could say the same, about things being explained. What happened to Jerry Rosen? Has he enlisted in your commandos, too?”

  She shook her head. “He wasn’t in the truck when we sent it after you; he’s safe for the time being. We can’t send you to safety, but we’ve got to try to keep you safe. You’re becoming rather important.”

  “The job’s done,” said Norlund, not without pride.

  Ginny didn’t answer. She was looking back through the rear window of the cab as if checking for pursuers.

  “Always liked to think of myself as important.” Norlund got in a few more good breaths and decided that maybe he wasn’t going to faint after all. “What’s the news on my granddaughter?”

  Ginny turned back to him, and looked at her watch—at least at some device that she wore on her wrist. “As of two days after your launching from Eighty-four,” she declared, “Sandy is doing just fine. You don’t have to worry any more about her having our continued support; you’ve earned that.”

  “Thanks.” Norlund breathed a sigh. “Naturally Sandy’s mother is wondering where I am, if I’ve been gone two extra days.”

  “I suppose she is. Alan, I have to tell you that I don’t know when we’re going to be able to get you home. I thought it would be two days. But the whole situation has changed drastically since you were launched.”

  Norlund nodded, feeling almost no surprise. A little, at himself, for taking the announcement so calmly, as if he’d been expecting it all along. “In the army they used to say that your enlistment was being involuntarily extended. That was the official term for it, anyway.”

  Ginny was watching him carefully. “The job really isn’t done yet. I’m glad you can understand.”

  “When you’re sixty, you realize that you’re never going to understand very much. But you do start to have a certain feeling for how the world works.” Norlund rubbed his newly freed wrists. Then he started trying to brush some of the alley grit from his clothes. Ginny helped him. “I’d like to hear a guess, though, at when you might be able to get me home. Not that I’d necessarily believe it.” He’d lost his hat in the . . . but that looked like his hat. It was sitting atop his traveling bag at Ginny’s feet. Next to it was another bag that must be her traveling tool kit. From the latter she now withdrew another appliance, to help Norlund remove a streak of grime from his coat sleeve.

  Ginny sighed. “I’m reluctant to make such a guess. You should realize, Alan, that right now you’re rather lucky to be alive at all. Alive and coherent. However.” She paused, raising her eyes to the driver’s rearview mirror as if to consult with the silent Harbin. The cab was still in the downtown area, turning corners frequently; Norlund had no idea where they were going.

  Ginny looked back at him. “A new timeline is being created here. I don’t think we’ve ever really discussed timelines with you.”

  “I only had one day of basic training before you shipped me overseas.”

  She continued to consider him. “We chose well, I think. You’re a pretty tough man.”

  “Thank you, ma’m.” Oddly, he really felt honored. And that she was telling him something she really felt.

  “And again, I’m sorry, but getting you home as
I promised isn’t possible.”

  “I’ve grasped that point. By the way, you also promised me that what I was going to do was legal.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’ve just been told that it isn’t.”

  Harbin spoke up unexpectedly from the driver’s seat. “By that man who just now kidnapped you? I suppose he mentioned me.”

  Norlund met Dr. Harbin’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Actually he never mentioned you at all. He did ask how Ginny Butler was. Said she goes around convincing people to break the laws . . . of human history, I think he called them. Her kind of time travel does that.”

  Ginny asked quietly, “Did you think he might be right?”

  Norlund’s head still ached from the backhand blow. He could still see the blond man’s eyes. “If I have to choose between you, you’re still ahead.”

  “You do have to choose. That man’s name is Hajo Brandi.” Ginny spelled it out for Norlund. “Sound like a funny name?” She wasn’t smiling. “I hope our people back there have managed to kill him this time. That’s a faint hope, but at least getting him out alive will cost his side a great deal—energy, time, and other things. That’s something. I’m not going to try to tell you about him now; he deserves a whole chapter and we haven’t time. But he’s a mass murderer. And he likes to torture people.”

  “Well.” Norlund sighed. He could believe it.

  Ginny was looking at her watch impatiently. At the moment the cab was stuck in traffic. She switched subjects briskly. “If we do arrange to get you home, Alan, it won’t be for weeks or months. Maybe longer. Meanwhile, it’s possible that we can work out something, sometime, on the telephone.”