There was a momentary drop in rough air, and Norlund felt a pang of motion sickness. Even through it he remained acutely conscious of the pressure of Holly’s leg on his. An angry thought followed: Does she think I’m so old that I can’t react, it doesn’t matter?
They circled the Empire State at a distance of no more than a few hundred feet, with Norlund looking under the banked-down wing at the great copper mooring ring. Fortunately the regulations on flying were non-existent compared with what they’d be in fifty years. As far as Norlund could tell, the mooring ring looked just as the drawings suggested that it should.
Still he went through the farce of jotting down notes, as if he were paying attention to details. Then he yelled into Holly’s ear that she should just circle over the city for a while at about two thousand feet. Then he pulled himself out of the seat and got back into the cabin.
There he strapped himself into the handiest chair, turned on the equipment, and set up his old combination on the dials. The screen immediately lit up with text:
NORLUND: YOU WILL SURVEY THE RECORDING DEVICE NETWORK HERE AS YOU DID AT THE PREVIOUS INSTALLATION. IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT EACH RECORDING DEVICE BE IN WORKING ORDER. IF ANY ARE DEFECTIVE OR MISPLACED REPORT THROUGH HOLBORN. IF ALL DEVICES IN GOOD ORDER, REPORT SO.
HARBIN
At last, some word from those people. Norlund began to operate the equipment, in the routine that he’d been taught. Again a pattern of “recording device” installations appeared, marching across countryside, suburbs, and city in a pair of miles-long lines. Again the lines pointed roughly east, converging on a point. And it was obvious that this time the convergence point was the Empire State.
Two pairs of lines—one in Illinois, one in New York. Two convergence points. Two towers, two mooring masts. What—
Norlund’s screen went blank, about two seconds before the aircraft lurched. But his equipment was not dead, far from it. Thrown sideways in his seat by what felt like the sudden start of a spin, he saw that the telephoto cameras had come alive, twirling on their gimbals. One of them projected what looked like a concentrated spotlight or a laser beam out through the side window glass in front of it, swerving on its mounting, spinning the beam from right to left.
Holly pulled out of the spin, into a tight, steep-banked turn. In a shadowplay that raced across white cloud below, Norlund saw the aircraft that he was in, and something else. A roaring, crackling something that passed the Vega with the speed of a jet fighter or a bullet. Around the Vega’s shadow was a haze of red. Or was it only the after-image of the beam that the swiveling lenses in the cabin projected outward?
Now the Vega was flying almost steadily. It climbed, on the verge of stalling, groping for flying speed. Taking a chance, Norlund unstrapped himself from his safety belt, grappled his way forward, and opened the communicating hatch. “Are you all right?”
Holly’s face, whitened by fear and shock, turned to look at him over her thin shoulder. “What was that?”
“Stay out of clouds. Get down on the deck, in view of lots of people. Get back to Newark, fast, and land.”
Norlund could scarcely speak. It wasn’t fear or shock so much as anger at himself. Ten weeks of safety and luxury had made him fat, dumb, and happy, and now he had almost been a party to getting Holly killed.
She didn’t argue or question. The plane was nosing down already, in a new banking turn, and Norlund had to fight his way uphill to get back to his seat in the cabin. The waist-gunner’s position, he thought. There were the little telephoto devices on their swivels, but no place for human hands to grip them, even if human hands could have swung them fast enough.
His little screen had now turned itself on again.
ATTACK IMMINENT MAN DEFENSIVE POSITIONS
Which would be fine, if he just knew how.
He strapped himself into his seat again, and sat there trying not to hold his breath, until he saw a windsock out the window, with the ground not fifty feet below. In another few seconds they had landed. Smoothly. Holly was undoubtedly a good pilot. Cool under fire, once given a chance. She would have done well in combat.
His screen said: ALL CLEAR. AUTOMATIC DEFENSES OFF. Then it went dead.
Before they had finished taxiing, Norlund had stuck his head forward into the cockpit again. As soon as they had stopped, and Holly had cut the engine, she turned to him. “What was that?” she repeated.
He couldn’t tell if she really thought he knew. His own hands were trembling now with delayed reaction; his gut felt as if he’d swallowed lumps of lead.
Holly said: “I’m reporting it to the Department of Commerce, whatever it was.”
That, of course, would be this decade’s equivalent of the FAA. Norlund had had a little time already to think up an answer to that one. “It wasn’t something that I’d want to describe.” He put just a little emphasis on the personal pronoun. At the same time he did his best to look calm. There was an inference for Holly to draw: hysterical women, pilots or not, saw things like that, and a lot of people had known all along that all women were hysterical.
“Alan, you saw it too.”
“I saw nothing that I could describe very well. Oh God, Holly, I’m sorry. For getting you into this. It’s not going to do the least bit of good to try to report it.” He was coming close to letting out secrets, and Ginny Butler, perhaps still with her hand on the valve of Sandy’s life, was going to be angry. Well, to hell with her. Norlund was angry, too.
Driving the roadster back toward New York, Holly began to talk. “What makes you tick, Norlund? You can tell me that, even if you can’t tell me what almost killed us both just now.”
Still gripped by rage, at himself and at the world, he started, “Every time I—” and then he couldn’t go on.
“What?”
He tried again, more slowly, getting a grip on himself. “I suppose I’ve loved five or six people in my life.”
She glanced at him, waiting, listening in silence, evidently satisfied that in his own way he was trying to answer her question.
“There was a girl. When I was young.” Ten years in the future from the year he spoke in now. “There was a war on. She lived in London, doing war work. There was—an aerial attack.” In his mind he could still hear the buzz-bombs, as he had really heard them sometimes. When the engine sputtered and then cut off, that was the time to duck. Before that, Norlund had killed a German or two but had not hated them. After that it had been different.
“Those zeppelin raids, yes. I remember hearing about them. How sad.”
“I was off—getting shot at, sometimes expecting to be killed. But she was the one who was killed. Holly, I’m trying to tell you what makes me tick. I really wish I could.”
She asked: “How did you meet Dad?” And when he didn’t answer, added: “Never mind.” In a moment she went on, in the same tone, with what at first seemed a change of subject. “I’ve had one bad crash since I’ve been flying. It was in upstate New York, the Adirondacks. Really out in the sticks. Jeff happened to be with me. The plane was really a total loss, and I was knocked out for some time. When I came to, I had a lump on my head and a ghastly headache, and my nose was bleeding too. The front of my clothes looked like rags out of a slaughterhouse. My father didn’t have a scratch on him, but he was practically in hysterics when I came round at last. He’d really thought that I was dead.” Holly paused. “Sometimes I wonder if he didn’t get a knock on the head, too. Ever since then . . .”
She didn’t finish, and Norlund didn’t ask.
On New Year’s Eve Norlund was sitting in a chair in Holborn’s library. A good part of the time he looked out into the darkness over the snowy park. Now and then he faced back into the lighted rooms of the apartment, and talked with people, while Holborn’s annual holiday party raged near him and around him. Norlund had a scotch-on-the-rocks in hand, quite legally. Prohibition had finally died, a matter of weeks ago. It seemed that everyone who arrived at the party had some comment to make on that
subject, most of them the same one.
“All legal now, hey? Takes some of the fun out of it.”
“I suppose it also lessens the chance of being quickly poisoned.” That was from Dr. Niles, who had just come in dashingly bareheaded, snow on his young black hair, his black bag in hand from making house-calls. Through the library door Norlund watched the maid taking his coat.
“I like that, quickly! Ha hahh!”
Jeff was off in yet another room, livening up with a few drinks in him. Norlund could hear his voice. The two of them hadn’t exactly sought out each other’s company since Jeff had gotten back from Chicago and Norlund had privately expressed his anger about Holly’s being brought into this. This was about all they could call it, this secret and plainly deadly game that both of them were in, for presumably separate reasons which they had never revealed to each other. There wasn’t a name for this project to which they were bending their lives—or if there was, Norlund at least had never heard it.
It had been borne in on him that neither of them knew what they were really about in what they did for Ginny Butler and her associates. Norlund didn’t even know if Jeff had ever met or heard of Ginny Butler, or if his orders came through someone else. And how had Jeff been recruited? By the promise of someday being shown what streamlined design would really look like in fifty or a hundred years?
“Jeff, you kept telling me that Holly knows nothing, must know nothing, of what we’re really doing.”
“That was my intention. It still is.”
“Did you or did you not know that our airplane was likely to be attacked? Just answer me that.”
“I will not tell you anything about that. I will say only that this is a matter of honor to me. Of . . . vital importance. And I am going on with it.” Jeff was plainly under a great strain in this confrontation, which had already gone on for some time. But he was also obviously determined to stick to his position.
There was a pause, that seemed to Norlund himself long, before he answered. “All right. We’ll go on with it. Wait for our next orders.”
Holly, like Sandy, like all the rest of the world, was caught up in war and subject to its blows. Whether most of them knew about it or not.
Now at the party Holly was acting as hostess, wearing a dazzling red evening gown supported by one shoulder strap. Her bare feet were encased in high-heeled gold sandals that she wore as skillfully as if they were her everyday footgear instead of practical shoes or even flying boots. She moved in and out of the library now and then, as other people were doing. There were enough people in the room, coming, lingering, going, so no one could accuse Norlund of hiding from the party. An old man, let him sit still if he wanted to.
Holly stopped and spoke to him now and again, as others did, and once she rested her hand on his shoulder. That horror they had faced in the sky over the Hudson back in October had not recurred. Norlund had worried about it, and had insisted on going along with her next time she flew. With Holly, insisting hadn’t done him any good, and she had gone up alone. And, fortunately, returned without incident. While she was in the air he had belatedly realized that she might be a lot safer without him along.
Dr. Niles, following Holly into the library, had smiled indulgently when she touched old Norlund on the shoulder. Norlund could have stabbed him at that point. With every passing week, with every passing drink tonight, the doctor’s attitude of possessiveness toward Holly became more open. And her attitude toward the doctor? Neutral, at least whenever Norlund was around.
Christmas. Yes, Christmas. That night a week ago had been pretty grim around here, with the word from Germany short and almost formally cheerful. Longer messages were promised soon.
People in the other room, Holly among them, were arguing. Some of them wanted to go next week to see the newly opened play, Tobacco Road, on Broadway.
Some other woman, getting drunk, was bemoaning the fact that her children weren’t around. Or else the fact that she’d never had any, Norlund couldn’t tell for sure.
The Victrola was playing in one room, the radio in another, the piano in a third. Who were all these people, anyway? There seemed to be at least a score of Holborn’s distant relatives, business associates, friends of one kind or another.
Holly came from nowhere to sit next to him again.
Norlund asked her, “What’s the word from Germany?”
“Does it show?” Her beautiful face was slightly flushed. “I’m getting so I can’t hide anything from you. What’s your wife like, anyway?”
“No wife, not any more. She’s dead.”.
“Killed in London, you said.”
“That,” said Norlund with a sigh, “was someone else.”
“Didn’t you once tell me you had a daughter, twelve years old?”
“Did I really? I suppose I did. I’m getting so I can’t hide anything from you.”
“I’m having trouble getting the chronology of your life all straightened out the way it should be.”
He realized she was a little tight. Perhaps more than just a little. Change the subject. “There’s something about the way you gesture with your hands. Always makes me think you ought to be holding a cigarette.”
Holly made a face. “Have you seen all those damned cigarette ads, aimed at women? The ads without the smoke are enough to turn my stomach.” She fluttered fingers in a maidenly gesture, and put on a voice. ” ‘She was all tired out from diving at the Olympics—and then she smoked a Camel. It gave her energy enough to—’ Never mind.”
A couple of more people were coming into the library. The door, recently almost closed, was now wide open, so that voices came in more clearly from the noise outside.
“Roosevelt is a radio crooner—his legs are the strongest part of him.”
Laughter.
Someone else, angered, spouting liberal dogma with the fervor of a new convert, denounced the Nazis. Roosevelt didn’t matter. They’d all see, in a few years, that a new world was being born in Russia. The future was visible there already, and it worked.
What was going to happen to the League of Nations now?
Steer clear of foreign entanglement, that’s what Washington warned this country.
Norlund’s old leg wound was paining him tonight, in an unusual way. Tingling. He wondered if the weather was going to change, a giant blizzard bearing down on the city. He wondered if Ginny Butler had forgotten where she’d left him. There was a comfort in that thought tonight, but he didn’t really suppose that she had.
Someone—yes, Jeff’s voice—spoke up now, in a hesitant, reasonable tone, for Hitler. “You must admit he’s really straightened Germany out. Look at the terrible problems they were having. The aftermath of the War. Inflation. Reds and Jews. Now there’s peace, people are working, they have some sense of pride in themselves again.”
“Rearming, too,” someone objected mildly.
“I think it’s part of the sense of national pride.”
“Is Roosevelt really going to invite him to this country, do you suppose?”
“There are a lot of German voters.”
Holly was still beside Norlund. He took her hand, and pursued her quietly: “What’s the word?”
She looked at Norlund more directly than before, and now he could see the redness in her eyes. “The word is that they’re not coming home. Willy talks about sending me a ticket so I can join them there, as if lack of a ticket were all that held me back. He writes like he’s issuing orders now. As if I were the deserter, but he’s willing to overlook it. Oh, he isn’t really like that. Not when you know him.”
“I’m sure he’s not.” The bastard. A pilot, too. Maybe some day in Forty-three young Norlund would aim a machine gun at him. But no, in a decade Willy would certainly be thought too old for fighters. He’d be some strutting, high-rank friend of Goring, maybe.
People across the room were starting to turn and look at Holly, and she got up from the arm of Norlund’s chair and went to the fireplace, where coals we
re dying down. She started to grab the poker, and burned her hand on it and dropped it with a little cry.
Norlund was at one side of her in a moment, with Dr. Niles at the other. Between them they led her to a chair, from which she immediately jumped up again.
“Stay here,” said Dr. Niles to her firmly. “I’ll get my bag.” He moved off quickly.
Norlund examined the burned finger, which looked white along one side. Taking Holly by the arm, he led her unresisting into the kitchen. He put ice cubes into a clean glass, ran some water on top of them, took Holly’s hand and immersed the finger.
“Ah.” Her blue-green eyes trusted Norlund. “That does relieve the pain.”
“It’ll do more than that. It’ll help the healing. Better than anything he can put on it.”
It took Niles a couple of minutes to find them, having missed them in the library. An authority figure with black bag now in hand, he demonstrated outrage at Norlund’s practice of medicine. “Who told you to do that? Do you want the worst blistering you can imagine? Holly, give me your hand.”
When she wouldn’t, he tried to pull her finger forcibly out of the healing cup. But Holly snatched her arm away. “Don’t ever grab at me again.”
It was said in a way that compelled the doctor to retreat, black bag and all.
It was hours later, well past midnight and into the New Year, but Norlund didn’t really feel tired. The party had sagged a little and had then swung on. Jeff had actually been somewhat relieved to see Niles go away mad. Scandal, you know; Holly was after all a married woman. Not that Jeff had actually said anything. A few other people had departed, but other celebrants had arrived from another party elsewhere.
Now what promised to be a die-hard group was singing around the piano in the other room.
Holly and Norlund had both gravitated back to the library. She had brought along her cup of icewater, into which she still plunged her finger at intervals. A maid came around now and then, replacing melted cubes.
At the moment Holly was studying her finger curiously. “That was a bad burn, but it hardly hurts at all now. There’s a mark. But nothing much.”
A Century of Progress Page 18