A Century of Progress

by Fred Saberhagen

  The blue-eyed young woman leaned closer to Jerry, putting a hand on his arm. “Jerry? Come along with me now, won’t you?”

  “Okay.” He sure as hell didn’t have anyplace else in mind to go. He let go the concrete wall that had been supporting him.

  With the young woman holding Jerry’s arm, the two of them walked inland through the park, following a paved path. Not very far ahead, the path descended into a pedestrian underpass. Now Jerry could vaguely remember coming through the underpass earlier, to get out here to the park. Waiting for them just where the path started to dip was a young man, who also appeared relieved at the sight of Jerry. The young man had longish hair; Jerry could see he was going to have to stop noticing hair. He wasn’t sure if he could recall the young man’s face or not, from that interval he had once taken to be a dream.

  With Jerry in the middle the three of them walked down into the pedestrian tunnel that burrowed beneath what a glimpsed street sign said was Lake Shore Drive. Yeah, Jerry reassured himself again, this was Chicago.

  The young woman had a firm hold on his arm. “Jerry, do you remember my name? It’s Ginny, Ginny Butler. Now we’re going to take you to where you can lie down and get some rest. After that I’ll be able to explain things to you better. We’re your friends. Everything is going to be all right.” Her voice was full of soothing tones.

  “Can I go home?”

  They were already at the end of the short tunnel, emerging from under the multi-lane drive of traffic into bright sunlight, amid tall apartment buildings.

  Ginny replied carefully. “We’re going to work on getting you home right away. As soon as you’ve had some rest. You did a good job with Mr. Norlund, by the way. He’s told me so himself.”

  “He’s here?”

  “Unfortunately, not right now. But he was okay when last I saw him.”

  Jerry’s hands were in his trousers pockets. “What happened to my money? I had a buck and a half.”

  “We were intending to return that to you, with your other things. You can have them all as soon as we get back to my place. You see, I didn’t realize you’d wake up so soon.”

  “Oh.” Her place meant that he’d awakened in her bed. He looked at her again, more closely, but he still couldn’t remember anything else.

  The young man explained, “We had to look at all your things, see, to try to make sure of who you were.”

  Jerry nodded. His head was swimming and his eyes ached, as if he’d been staring for a long time into the sun. Maybe that was from the crying. He wasn’t crying any longer, but to rest his eyes he walked without raising them from the sidewalk just ahead of him.

  He asked: “Anybody got a cigarette?”

  “Afraid not,” said the young man.

  “Sorry, I don’t,” said Ginny Butler. Without a pause she continued. “Jerry, it must have been something of a shock for you, waking up like that, in a strange place. What have you been doing since you woke up?”

  He got the impression that much might depend on his answer to that question, though she had put it casually enough. He thought his answer over carefully. “Walking,” he said at last.

  “Talk to anyone?”

  “Hardly anyone. Just those two women, I think. Couple of words.”

  Now the young man was unlocking the door of an automobile, one of a line of low vehicles parked along a curb. The young man held the door for Jerry, who had to bend his head way down to get in. It was a painfully cramped vehicle inside, though on the outside almost as bullet-smooth as the aircraft Jerry had just been watching.

  A tiny female voice spoke from the mysterious dashboard, telling Jerry to put on his seatbelt, please. The young man had to show Jerry how the belt worked, and help him to fasten it. Then they were on their way, with Ginny driving. The gearshifting arrangement, Jerry noted, was strange. Even with seatbelts on they didn’t go very fast, or very far for that matter. Presently they were nosing down into an underground garage beneath a tall apartment building. Jerry assumed it was the one he’d walked away from.

  They led him into an elevator at one side of the underground garage, and a minute later they were all back in the apartment, entering this time by way of a fancy hallway and the front door. An old man with white hair, unfamiliar to Jerry, was sitting in the living room as the three of them came into the apartment; he got to his feet, looking at them as if he’d been expecting their arrival. He was taller than Norlund, and even older-looking. So far no one had told Jerry either of the men’s names.

  After a brief whispered conference with the old man, Ginny led Jerry into the kitchen, and marched him right up to face the calendar on the wall. He hadn’t really looked at the calendar before, not to take in any of the numbers.

  She held his arm and spoke to him gently. “Do you understand what you’re looking at, Jerry? Does it start to explain some things for you?”

  “I understand. Nineteen eighty-four.” And he repeated the year to himself, under his breath. “But I already figured it out. I didn’t know exactly what year it was, but . . . nineteen eighty-four.” He said it to himself again, and nodded as if with satisfaction.

  Ginny studied him for a moment. Then she pointed a red fingernail at one square in the monthly chart. “This is today,” she told him softly.

  The particular day she had pointed at didn’t really stay with Jerry. He didn’t really take in the month, either. He was still looking at the year. “That’s fifty years,” he said, in a wistful, abstracted voice. “Fifty-one years, really.”

  “Yes,” said Ginny encouragingly. She and the old man, who had come into the kitchen after them, exchanged what looked like hopeful nods. “Yes, it is,” she repeated.

  “Holy cow,” said Jerry. Somehow in this situation he felt reluctant to swear, and not just because there was a lady present. It was because the situation went beyond any swear words that he could possible have come up with.

  He moved away a little, to the nearby dining alcove, and sat down in one of the funny metal-tubing chairs. Ginny presently came to stand over him, holding out money. It was, he realized, the dollar and a half that he’d been missing. Jerry took it, and the young man came, holding the other items that had been in Jerry’s pockets. He stowed the stuff away, except for one cigarette, which he lit up. Someone brought him a small ashtray. “

  Then Jerry realized that he was still wearing his cap in the house, and he took it off. Not that it mattered at all, but . . . he lost the train of his thoughts, and just sat there looking at his cap, twirling it slowly in his fingers.

  He looked up to see Ginny and the old man looking at him. The young man was now nowhere to be seen.

  “My kid,” Jerry said at last, “will be grown up. Grown up, hell—he’ll be a paunchy old man probably. And Judy . . .”

  The two people were listening to him with sympathy, he thought. But he realized with a shock that they were not interrupting him with soothing protests and telling him that everything was certain to be all right.

  “I gotta get back,” said Jerry, with an edge of panic in his voice. And he got swiftly to his feet.

  “We want to help you do that.” Ginny reacted at once, like a kind nurse, and stood beside him patting his arm. “That’s one of our highest priorities. And the first step toward helping you is giving you a little test. Unless you’d like to take a rest first?”

  Jerry fought down incipient panic. “No. Let’s get on with it.” Still he held back, irrationally reluctant, when Ginny tugged gently at his arm. But after a moment he let himself be steered down the hall and into the second bedroom, where the deformed typewriter waited on a table. The old man was already seated in front of it, doing something with it.

  “This won’t hurt,” Ginny assured Jerry brightly. “It won’t even tickle. It’ll help you remember certain things better, and it may cause you to forget a few things too—just sit down here, will you Jerry? But the things you forget won’t be anything you care about. And there won’t be many of them anyway.�
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  Jerry, reluctant again, momentarily hung back. But what else was he going to do? He sat down. The old man—Ginny now called him Dr. Harbin—came and helped adjust bands on Jerry’s wrists and forehead, connecting him to the machine.

  “Like a lie detector,” Jerry muttered. At least it was like a version of the lie detector that he’d seen in movies.

  “Something like that,” Ginny agreed cheerfully.

  With his eyes Jerry followed the smoothly insulated wires that connected him to the typewriter. Now the glass screen on the little box came alive with rows of letters and numbers; Jerry caught just a glimpse of it before Dr. Harbin turned the box away from him.

  Then the old man raised his hands over the keyboard and began to type.

  When next Jerry looked up, he felt disoriented. Ginny and the old guy were already rolling up wires, putting things back into boxes, and he realized that the test must be over.

  “How’d I do?” he asked.

  “Just fine,” said Ginny. “Lean back and rest.”

  Eventually it had grown dark outside, and only he and Ginny were left in the apartment. The old man, like the nameless young one, had departed without Jerry noticing exactly when or how. Now Jerry was sitting in a deep chair in the living room, while Ginny moved around him, turning on lights. “Come into the kitchen and talk to me,” she said, “while I fix dinner.”

  He came along, and sat nearby in the dining alcove, on one of the tubular chairs turned backwards, while Ginny bustled about in the kitchen. She had a neat shape, Jerry thought, watching her turn and move. But right now he couldn’t really get interested. There was too much else on his mind. Including Judy.

  He tried to distract himself. “Boy,” he said, “I used to read in magazines, you know, about the future. I didn’t think my first day in the nineteen-eighties would ever be like this.” Jerry paused, then in a different tone added: “Hey—”

  “What?” Ginny gave him a quick smile in passing.

  “It just hit me,” Jerry said. “I mean, to wonder whether I’m still alive around here somewhere? I mean, I could be walking around out there—” he gestured toward the darkening windows, “—seventy years old. Am I? I mean . . .”

  Ginny paused with the refrigerator door open. Outside of its funny color, Jerry thought, the appliance didn’t look all that different from the one Ma Monahan was hoping to buy. “I understand what you’re asking. But it’s not a question I’d want to answer for you. Even if I knew the answer, which at this minute I don’t. In this game it’s sometimes dangerous to know things.”

  Jerry chuckled suddenly. “I played games like that before, doll.” He wished he felt as confident as he now sounded.

  Ginny got moving again. “I hope you like chicken.”

  “Crazy about it.”

  While the chicken was cooking she kept bustling around, getting other things ready. Meanwhile they talked, mostly about him. What magazines he’d liked to read in the Thirties, that had given him his ideas of what the Eighties and other decades might be like—stuff like that. And how he’d met Judy, and what objections her family had had to her marrying someone outside the Church. What kind of jobs Jerry had worked at—he decided not to mention the bootlegging just now. Maybe later, when he knew more about what kind of an operation was going on here. How he’d met Norlund, hitchhiking . . .

  Then dinner was ready, which was fine with Jerry, who by now felt starved. The food was served in what he considered a very fancy style, with a glass of wine, good-tasting wine, beside each plate. Ginny had the knack—hell, she was a genius at it—for making a guy feel at ease, ready, eager to do whatever she wanted him to do. Jerry had now and then encountered other people with the same skill, his own sixth grade teacher especially. But never before anyone who could do it as smoothly as this.

  When dinner was over, he even found himself volunteering to help with the dishes. Wow, if Judy could have heard him say that . . . He’d volunteer to help Judy too, yes by God he would, as soon as he got back to her.

  Actually the kitchen clean-up didn’t take long. When Ginny had the coffee started, she asked, “How about if we watch some television?”

  “Great.” Maybe, thought Jerry, at least the television would be the way it had been in some of the stories.

  “Let’s see what’s on.” She led the way back into the living room.

  Jerry seated himself with a good view of the screen. Sure enough, the picture came in sharper than on a movie screen, and in bright, real-looking colors. Ginny could switch from one station to another just like that, without any fumbling around trying to tune them in. She settled on some kind of story in which people were frantically chasing each other around, while in the background waves of laughter ebbed and flowed, evidently coming from some unseen studio audience. Actually Jerry couldn’t understand what they all thought was so funny, but then he supposed he’d missed the early part of the story.

  Ginny brought in the coffee. He was sitting at one end of the sofa, but she sat in a separate chair. Don’t worry, lady, I got enough on my mind without . . . It was safer to watch television than to start thinking of Judy.

  He wanted to get interested in the story, such as it was, but ads kept breaking in. Jerry was reminded of one summer when, as a kid, he’d visited relatives in a small Illinois town. On clear Saturday nights, movies sponsored by local merchants had been shown, free to anyone who wanted to sit on the grass in an empty lot. There were breaks for slide-projected ads—not as many breaks as this. A lot of these television ads looked like cartoons, but Jerry couldn’t figure out how anyone had ever managed to draw them.

  After a while, Ginny looked over as if checking on him. She found Jerry watching her intensely.

  Jerry said, “Look, if you send me home, I’m gonna keep quiet about all this, if that’s what you want. I swear it.”

  “I know you’d keep quiet. You don’t have to swear to that.”

  “Hey, no, I mean it.”

  “I’m sure you do. But it doesn’t really matter whether you do or not. Because if we do send you home, we’ll insist on treating you to a little forgetfulness therapy first. You won’t remember where you’ve been. You couldn’t talk about this if you wanted to.”

  “Whaddya mean, if you do send me home?”

  She remained calm. “I mean if. It’s not at all a certainty. You should understand that. There are a lot of things that have to be taken into consideration, and the final choice isn’t up to me.”

  Jerry tried digesting this. “What about that test you gave me? I thought that was what decided.”

  “The results of that test will have a lot to do with the final decision. And one of the things we were testing you for was how well you’d take to the forgetfulness treatment. On some people it doesn’t work too well.”

  “So, how did I do?”

  “The results aren’t in yet. We’ll hear when they are.” And with an appearance of calm, Ginny turned her attention back to the television screen. She appeared to be really interested in hearing how the bubbles of gas in the intestine had some resemblance to beer.

  Next thing, some woman jumped off a motorcycle and started complaining about her hemorrhoids. Jesus, this television was just too embarrassing and disgusting for Jerry to cling to it as a distraction. Suddenly feeling trapped, he got up and wandered off through the apartment. He didn’t want to stay in the apartment and he didn’t dare try to leave. There was literally no place for him to go if he did run out. Jesus . . .

  As long as he was passing the bathroom anyway, he went in to take a leak. Then he washed his hands and came back out to the living room. His first day in the future.

  Ginny was still watching the screen as if she were interested. There was a different program on now; it looked like a regular movie in black and white. There was background music, like a movie would have, but no waves of laughter.

  Ginny turned her head. “I thought maybe you’d find this more interesting.”

  He aske
d her: “What if, when the results of the test come back, the answer’s no?”

  “It won’t be an absolutely final no. There’ll still be things we can try.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “We’ll see. If it becomes necessary.”

  “When’ll we know the test results?”

  “Probably in a few hours. I’ll get a phone call.”

  Jerry nodded wearily. He wondered if he wanted to sit on the sofa again. He started watching the movie while standing. Presently he asked, “Who’s this guy? The star?”

  “Humphrey Bogart. This is quite an old movie, actually. Almost from your time.”

  “I don’t remember him. I don’t know who he is.” Jerry wasn’t sure if he remembered the leading actress’ face or not.

  Ginny considered calmly. “I think he’s on stage, on Broadway, in Thirty-three. Not terribly famous yet.”

  “Yeah. Well.” Jerry did sit down, then looked around him restlessly. “You got a drink around somewhere? I think maybe it’d help.”

  She looked at him. “Yes, perhaps it would. Then I think you’d better get some sleep, even if it’s early in the evening. I don’t have to remind you that you’ve been through a hard day.”

  “Yeah.” But he knew he wasn’t going to sleep any time soon. There was a nice soft bed in her room, where he’d spent last night—without her, by all indications—and some kind of a cot in the other. Eventually he supposed he would head for the cot.

  Ginny had gone into the kitchen, presumably to see about a drink, and Jerry looked at the television. Now some guy had come on in full color, sounding very sincere, to say how the Democrats just had to be elected this year, to save the country from the awful mess that the Republicans had created over the last four years.

  Ginny was back, carrying two glasses; Jerry was glad to see that she was joining him.

  “Hey,” he called, struck by a sudden curiosity. “You guys still got Prohibition?”

  “One problem,” said Ginny, “that we are spared. Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” echoed Jerry, and their glasses clinked. On the little television screen, by coincidence, Humphrey Bogart—what a name—was hoisting his glass, too.