A Century of Progress

by Fred Saberhagen

  Norlund considered this as he held his aching head. “You mean I might be able to phone home? From one year, one decade, to another?”

  “It might be possible. If you think your relatives would be comforted more than unsettled to hear from you that way. You’d have to plan what you were going to say to them. You couldn’t tell them what you were really doing, of course, or where you really were.”

  “Wow.”

  “Think about it.”

  “I’ll try. Where am I going now?” Even as he spoke he realized that they were now in a line of other taxicabs, working their way slowly toward the curb in front of a giant building—a railroad station, he realized.

  “You’re going to your fallback position. I’m sure you remember what that is.”

  He did; it was one of the things they had engraved upon his memory. If something had gone wrong in Chicago, if Ginny hadn’t contacted him and he hadn’t known what to do next, he had been ordered to make his way east, to New York, as best he could. “All right. The Empire State Building lobby, at noon. Who’s meeting me?”

  Ginny gave him a look, but that was all.

  “All right, so you won’t tell me. It seems absolutely insane to me, the things you insist on keeping secret and the things you don’t care about—my name for instance.”

  No reply. The line of taxicabs was momentarily stalled.

  “All right. Tell me instead how you did that switch with the truck back there. Maybe the other side will try it on me some day. When Hajo Whatsisname wants to arrest me again, he shouldn’t have much trouble finding me.”

  That got a response. “Oh, his people will know approximately where you are, and when. Getting at you will be another matter. You’ll be safe for a while. As for the truck, Jerry drove it back to Wheaton, and inadvertently took it clockwise—that is, forward in time. We knew Brandi had already seen it, so we loaded it up and brought it back anticlockwise to the same day, trying to trap him. But you won’t see a stunt like that very often, from either side. It’s too costly and too risky. In this case we decided that the costs and the risks were justified.”

  “To save me. Because, as you say, I’ve become rather important.”

  “You have. But I must admit that might not have been enough. When there was also a chance of trapping Brandi . . .”

  She let it trail off. The other taxis ahead of them were moving and now Harbin had his chance to pull up to the curb. Just ahead of and behind them, other cabs were letting out passengers and taking them in, redcaps and drivers shuffling baggage.

  Norlund delayed getting out. “What about Jerry? You said he wasn’t in that truck just now.”

  “We’re doing what we can for him, Alan. He’s not hurt. But he’s in a time-bind situation. That means we could have trouble sending him home.”

  “Like me.”

  “We know there’s a problem in your case. I’m not sure yet about him. When he showed up in Eighty-four and we realized what had happened, we put him to sleep with drugs, to keep him from learning too much, and just to keep him out of the way until we can deal with his case.”

  “Learning too much?”

  “Sometimes, in this crazy business, knowing too much can be as bad as knowing too little. So I’ve got him stashed away in my own place in Eighty-four Chicago. The condominium I usually live in when I’m there. I hope to be able to get back to him within a couple of hours after I left him. There was just no one to spare for baby-sitting.”

  “Brandi’s side is keeping you all busy.”

  Ginny ignored that, except for a small sigh. “Now to business, quickly. You’ll go into the station here and get yourself a compartment on the Twentieth Century. That’s a crack train on the New York Central railroad, and it departs for New York in about twenty minutes.” She handed Norlund a scrap of paper. “Use this name until you reach New York. Then use your own.”

  “What if there’s no compartment available?”

  “There will be. If not, get to New York some other way.”

  Harbin was already out on the sidewalk, in his character of taxi driver holding the rear door open for Norlund.

  “Okay,” said Norlund, and got out. His hat was in his hand, and now he put it on. He took the traveling bag from Ginny’s hand and nodded to her and Harbin. His feelings were a curious mixture. Relief at being rescued, anger at being put in a situation where rescue became necessary. There were other feelings in the mixture too. Somehow, and this was the odd part, he just wasn’t as outraged as he might have been about the way these people had treated him—drugging him and sending him into danger for some unexplained purpose. Was he drugged now? He didn’t think so. It was as if, from the start, he had really been looking for some kind of all-out test.

  Harbin was getting back into the driver’s seat. Now all the cab’s doors slammed and it pulled away, frustrating the efforts of a woman who tried to flag it down.

  Norlund stared after it, but only for a moment. Then he straightened his rumpled garments as best he could, hoisted his bag, and strode into the railroad station, along with an intermittent stream of other weekend travelers.

  Inside, the station was a temple of light-colored stone. Dim and lofty, like a museum, but smelling faintly of disinfectant and cigars and coal. Obviously, some people were not suffering from the Depression;

  Norlund saw no signs of poverty among the people entraining, with their expensive-looking luggage.

  He stood briefly in line at one of the several ticket windows that were open in the vast marble concourse, and without any trouble bought the ticket that he was supposed to buy. Glancing at the scrap of paper given him by Ginny, he reserved the compartment in the name of Earl Greenidge. Briefly, Norlund wondered if that man still existed, or ever had, and what had happened to him. A new timeline is being erected here. I don’t think we’ve ever really discussed timelines with you.

  Someday she would, though. As soon as she really wanted to get around to it.

  Bah. They kept manipulating him. Yet here he was, still following orders. And, yes, looking forward to what might happen next.

  Consulting the timetable he’d been given with his ticket, and looking at a poster or two displayed in the station, Norlund confirmed that the train he was about to board was one of the crack specials. According to the schedule it should take him only about twenty hours to reach New York. Briefly he wondered if regular airline service between the two cities had yet been established. He doubted there was regular passenger service but he wasn’t sure. Too bad Ginny hadn’t arranged for him to go by air—that would have been something of an adventure.

  His train was boarding already, a giant’s voice booming almost unintelligibly over the station loudspeakers to announce the track number. Still moving with a trickle of fellow passengers, Norlund showed his ticket and was allowed to pass the gate. Moving from a temple of light marble into an even vaster cavern of steel girders and tracks and steam, he passed along a broad concrete walk, stretching into an invisible distance. There were tracks to right and left, and gray, grimy skylights far above. An engine bell was clanging, and the hiss and smell of steam hung in the air, along with the psychic electricity of a sooty airport. Norlund’s bag was snatched from his hand by an insistent porter, who carried it on ahead, leading him to his Pullman car.

  1984

  Later, much later, when Jerry had been granted the time and a platform of relative sanity from which to look back, he could not remember in which direction he had turned first on leaving the tall apartment building. Nor could he recall exactly what had influenced his decisions at the time, or what he had been thinking. Nor which shock was the most decisive, among all the shocks that he was subject to within the next few minutes. Nor just how far he had walked, nor on what erratic course, before he came at last to a halt.

  When he did halt he was on the lakefront, leaning his elbows on a low concrete wall that ran just inland of a broad paved walk. Just beyond the walk were piled boulders and low wooden pilings
and lapping waves. To Jerry’s right, as he faced the lake, there began a border of sand beach.

  Farther south, perhaps a mile away in the same direction, a building of glass and black steel went up to something like a hundred stories, dwarfing the recognizable Drake Hotel in front of it. Jerry knew, he knew damn well, that there was no building anything like that black monster in Chicago. Yet here was the lake, and he’d seen some familiar street names. And down there was the Drake, a footstool now instead of a tower . . . Nor ought there to be so many buildings of the size of those surrounding the black giant. And their grouping strongly suggested to Jerry that they were only the front ranks, that more like them would be massed behind them to the south, around the Loop.

  Jerry stood there for some time, leaning on the wall. For a while he would gaze at the tall buildings, and try to think about them. But his ability to think seemed to exist only intermittently, and he’d find himself staring at something else, not thinking about anything at all.

  Just in front of Jerry, a little complex of concrete game tables adorned the strip of parkland that separated the lake and a wide, busy street. The wall that Jerry leaned on was part of this table complex, which was shaded by trees and more concrete. Game boards were inlaid into the tabletops, and there were concrete benches for the players to sit on. A couple of chess sculptures of the same material, almost life-sized, looked on over the players’ shoulders just as Jerry did. Most of the boards were currently in use, and kibitzers had accumulated from the trickle of people passing on the walk. Most of the people nearby were wearing beach clothes, hot-weather clothes, clothes that looked quite strange to Jerry.

  Among all the thousands of people Jerry had seen on the street and in the park since leaving the apartment, he couldn’t remember anyone who had been dressed very much in the way that he was dressed. On the other hand, no one had really appeared to think his clothes were odd. There’d been such diversity that maybe it just didn’t matter.

  A good number of people were out today, enjoying the park and the beach and the nice weather. Most of them were young adults, or maybe high school kids. Some cruised along the broad lakefront walk on bicycles. Some, whether biking or walking, wore earphones, as if they might have little radio sets hidden in their handlebars or somehow concealed on their bodies, and faraway listening looks on their faces.

  Not all the radios were connected to headsets and inaudible to others. Jerry could hear music . . . of a kind. Mostly it sounded like little kids whining, unable to sound grown-up, while instruments banged with the monotony of punch presses.

  On the beach Jerry could see niggers, playing around and stretched out on the sand, mixed right in among the white people, who seemed to be paying them no attention at all. Jerry might have stared longer at this phenomenon, but he was distracted by the girls. Most of the girls on the beach, white and colored, were wearing about as little as Sally Rand probably had on behind her fans. And no one but Jerry seemed to be paying much attention to the girls, either.

  And now he momentarily forgot even about the girls. An airplane had come along; there seemed to be quite a lot of airplanes, and Jerry raised his head to gape at it. The sounds these aircraft made were like their shapes, smooth and quick as bullets—but again, nobody cared.

  Jerry removed his elbows from the wall and slowly turned around. He took off his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. He could see no other caps like his anywhere. No regular fedora hats, either. Most men were bareheaded, and needed haircuts. There were a few straw hats and odd caps. So there could be another cap like his around here somewhere . . .

  Here came a young guy walking by, wearing a kind of undershirt with short sleeves, colored yellow. Across his chest like advertising a message was emblazoned in blue: SPOCK LIVES. And a picture of a hand, raised in what Jerry Rosen thought looked like an old Jewish prayer sign. Whatever in the hell . . .

  And now a pair of young men walking by together. Their hair was so long that you’d think they had to be fairies—or at least something very odd, like violin players. God, they must be fairies; one of them was wearing a necklace, a thin gold chain round a tanned, brawny neck. But nobody even looked . . .

  Between the moments in which he took in all these marvels, Jerry’s eyes kept coming back to the chess players. They were doing something that he could understand. They were being calm about it, once in a while getting quietly excited, just like the chess players he’d known when he was a kid. Jerry’s father played, and when he was a little kid living with his father, Jerry himself had gotten quite good at it. Good for a little shaver, anyway. Right now chess was one of the few things in this new world that Jerry felt able to recognize with any certainty. The lake was another. Maybe that was why the sight of chessplayers beside the lake had brought him to a halt.

  A blond girl on the beach screamed something, throwing a beach ball, and one of her tits almost fell out of its tiny halter—chalk up one more thing recognizable, unchanged. Even if Jerry wasn’t capable of enjoying it right at this moment.

  Now another fancy undershirt came past, this one reading DRACULA SUCKS. Jerry got the point; he’d seen Dracula just last year when it first came out. And now a guy could put on a shirt like that, that made jokes about cocksucking, and walk around in public with it on and not be arrested. Nobody even looked up from their own concerns to notice him . . .

  One of the chessplayers was a nigger, wearing a gold wristwatch on one brown arm coming out of a short-sleeved pink shirt. Nobody cared what color the player was, or his shirt either. The pieces that brown arm reached for and picked up were just the same shape, the same style, as those that Jerry’s father had taught him to play with. Except maybe these pieces were not real ivory. Or maybe they could be.

  Jerry watched the chess games. He began to get interested, following their progress, switching his attention from one board to another. Leaning on the wall again, he was able to become absorbed in the play for long seconds at a time, thereby dulling his awareness of other problems, and maybe incidentally keeping himself from going nuts.

  His problem was not that he didn’t know where he was. Or that he hadn’t grasped what must have happened to him. He had grasped those things all right; he had gotten the basic fact, though he didn’t begin to understand it. And despite the fact that, in his science-fictional imaginings, Jerry had never pictured it this way.

  No, he had never pictured it like this.

  And now Jerry found the craziest goddamn thing happening to him. Leaning there against the wall in the sunshine, watching the sailboats playing out there on the calm lake, and the girls walking by in G-strings, and the sleek airplanes cruising overhead and the giant buildings and the calm chessplayers—watching all that, Jerry Rosen began to cry.

  He wasn’t noisy about it. He usually hadn’t been noisy about crying, as a kid. The tears just oozed and trickled out, and he had the old childhood tight, burning feeling in his throat. The people around him, used to ignoring marvels, ignored this one, too: a grown man standing here and blubbering.

  The chessboards blurred now when he tried to look at them. And Jerry was mad as hell at himself for crying, and madder because he didn’t even know what he was crying for.

  Was it for Judy, who might be dead and gone by this year, whatever this year was? No, he had no gut feeling that Judy was lost to him. However he had arrived here, she was waiting for him at home. And if he had been able to get here, he would be able to get back.

  Maybe he was bawling for all those great big beautiful buildings, for the guys who had built them all and now nobody cared. Maybe for the girls on the beach, who had taken almost everything off, and now nobody bothered to look. Maybe for the kids who wandered around with earphones on so they could listen to punch presses. As if they wished that they were somewhere else, as if they were still living in the Depression instead of having all of this . . .

  “Sir, are you all right?” The blurry forms of two women, one white, one colored, had stopped at Jerry’s
side.

  In an outrage of shame he tried to clear his vision, to wipe tears from his face. More still oozed and trickled. To stand here crying like some goddamned baby . . . The two women were probably in their thirties, Jerry thought. Dressed in blouses and shorts, dressed younger than their age, though they were not in G-strings.

  “I . . . ” In his hurt confusion his first impulse was to snap some obscenity at the two women and drive them off. But he choked on the words and could not get them out.

  “What’s wrong?” This, the second to speak, was the colored one. They both sounded alert and practical. Schoolteachers maybe, or nurses, off duty.

  “I said I’m all right. All right. Just lay off me. Forget it.” Jerry had started to pull himself together. He thought that his face must still look strange, but give him a minute. He was making progress.

  “ . . . stoned.” This was from the white woman, speaking in a low voice toward her companion’s ear, meanwhile tugging gently at the colored’s arm. And Jerry, not understanding, for one imaginative moment could imagine a crowd suddenly forming around him—except for the chessplayers, who would go on playing—and gathering up stones to hurl at him, Jerry, the outsider, as soon as these women gave the order.

  The two women retreated slightly. Had he scared them off? No, they were just making room in front of him for someone else.

  This was a younger woman, with dark hair and blue eyes, blurrily familiar to Jerry. Not from his own world, but from somewhere earlier in this mad adventure . . . from the dream. She was wearing blue jeans and a blue shirt, and was looking haggard and relieved at the same time.

  “Jerry? We’ve been looking for you.”

  “Oh,” he said. And was suddenly wary. When the people in his dream had been arguing about his fate, which side had this woman been on?

  “Oh, good,” murmured one of the first pair of women, half to herself, half to the newcomer. “We were wondering . . .”