A Century of Progress

by Fred Saberhagen

  “I’m glad.”

  “That’s not what they tell you to do for burns. I burned my arm on an engine manifold once, and there was no end of salves and dressings and bandages. And pain and blisters, too.”

  “Depends on who you listen to,” said Norlund, unable to resist.

  Jeff came and went in the background, his expression hard to read.

  Norlund poured himself a little more scotch, after helping himself to one of Holly’s ice cubes. At the moment she didn’t want any more to drink.

  She turned to Norlund. “Tell me about you. I’ve been aware for some time that that’s really a forbidden topic. But tell me anyway.”

  “And violate my oath?” He tried to make it sound like a joke.

  And at that moment the pain hit him. It struck up under the breastbone like the thrust of a jagged dagger. It twisted, and then a piece of the blade broke off and flew down through the veins of his left arm.

  He wasn’t fainting, not yet anyway, but he had his eyes clamped shut and he knew that his drink had spilled. It was his heart. It was a heart attack, and this was it, he was dying and at the moment none of the rest of it, none of anything else, mattered in the least. People were bending over him, but he couldn’t really hear what they were saying.

  Now he was stretched out on his back on the sofa, and with every breath the world was slipping a little farther away. The jagged knife had stopped thrusting and twisting, but it was still heavily embedded in the wound.

  Holly was bending over him. He could smell her, and he opened his eyes. “Alan, just lie still. We’re going to get you help.” As she ought to be, she was cool when the crisis came. Norlund watched her, while she undid his tie and collar.

  “I’ll call for an ambulance; I’ll do the calling.” That was Jeff, over in the corner by the phone, taking the phone away from someone else. And Jeff was dialing now. It was as if he had the number already memorized.

  IN A YEAR UNKNOWN

  Norlund rode the train across Manchuria again. He felt confident of being able to defend the train, because he knew he’d ridden it before. His fifty-caliber Brownings were ready, one swivel-mounted at the waist position on each side of the Pullman car, and he stood keeping watch out of one of the side windows, looking for the hordes of mounted Japanese that ought to appear at any moment. But the attacking cavalry didn’t come. There was only the gray steppe, slow gentle waves of land going on forever like the sea, out to the gray horizon.

  At last Norlund began to grow tired of standing at the window, and, when he remembered that he was now a heart patient, a little worried. But his heart continued to beat. He realized now that it was keeping time to the pulsation of the rails that carried the train forward so endlessly . . . so endlessly . . . he had just decided that he was never going to wake up, when deep night cut off everything.

  When darkness lifted again, he saw enough to know that he was not dead, but in a hospital room, real and brightly lighted. He could tell also that it was a modern hospital, not some Thirties horror. Ginny Butler was at his side—yes, really there; she took his hand and told him that he was going to be all right. Thus reassured, he slept.

  But dreams were not through with him yet, though from now on they were mixed in with reality. There was a large woman, a nurse or perhaps a doctor, anyway a large woman who had a Chinese face and dressed in a flowing gray gown of interesting pattern. She came to Norlund’s bedside frequently, and fed him things and gave him drinks and talked to him. But right now he had to get back into his Radio Survey truck, and play his equipment, which was really nothing but a giant video game. President Roosevelt spoke to Norlund out of the truck’s receiver, delivering a fireside chat. Another familiar voice came on with play-by-play action, and said that the Cubs were threatening to score. Lines marching across his little screen, converging on the Empire State, showed where the recording devices were. And now Adolf Hitler, his face part of a newsreel, gray and grainy, looked up at Norlund from the screen. Hitler spoke to him only in German, but still Norlund could recognize the word zeppelin when he heard it.

  And now Norlund awoke, more fully than before, gasping and trying to wave his arms about. He was in his modern hospital bed, in some gray time that felt like the middle of the night.

  And he thought that he understood at last what job he had been doing for Ginny Butler.

  Ginny came to visit him briefly fairly often, at various times of day and evening, but Norlund didn’t try to talk to her about what he thought he had inferred. Later would be time enough for that. He lay continually in his bed, stark naked and very weak, between sheets that seemed never to be changed but still remained unalterably crisp and cool and clean and comforting. The bed kept putting forth padded extensions of its elegant machinery, and these stroked at Norlund, nuzzled at him, blessed him with tingling anaesthesia whenever pain threatened to arise, which was fairly often. His chest was kept tingling almost all the time. The tingle was in its own way a nice sensation, but whenever it gave promise of becoming outright pleasure something happened to moderate it back again toward nullity, the absence of sensation.

  From time to time he was quite sure that he was helplessly wetting or soiling his bed. But if there was any stain or mess, it was gone again within moments from the impossibly white sheets, and from his body. Norlund dreamed again, this time that he was visiting Sandy in her own hospital room . . .

  And woke up, thinking that he’d just seen Sandy, and that she and her mother were visiting him. But the more fully awake he became, the better he understood that no such visit would be possible. Not here, in this hospital. This was not Chicago, at least not in nineteen eighty-four.

  Ginny Butler had no trouble getting to see him, though. She came in again, in a dress of decorated gray, to stand real and solid beside his bed.

  Again she took his hand. “How are you, Alan?”

  “Pretty good.” Feebly he pressed her fingers, glad to see her, glad to see anyone. “I’ve been dreaming a lot. Outside of that, you tell me.”

  Three more people were following Ginny into the private room.

  “I am Dr. Cucusus.” This was a black woman, almost- as large as the oriental nurse. From the way this woman introduced herself, there was no doubt that she was in charge, medically at least; her tone suggested that Norlund had been wondering all his life who Dr. Cucusus really was.

  Norlund nodded.

  Ginny gestured. “This is Mr. Tak, and Mr. Schiller.”

  Tak was thin and brown, his features suggesting Southeast Asia to Norlund’s not very expert eye, and he sat apparently half-crippled in a small conveyance vastly different from any wheelchair that Norlund had ever seen before. From the way Mr. Tak nodded, and the way the others looked at him, Norlund assumed that he was in charge of the world, medical affairs being only one department thereof. Schiller was colorless, and not very large. He nodded to Norlund too.

  Ginny continued. “Alan, there’s a decision you’re going to have to make. No one else can do it. We’ve waked you up completely for that purpose.”

  And indeed his mind felt perfectly clear. It was only that he was weak. He said: “I’ve had a heart attack.”

  “Yes, a very severe one,” agreed Dr. Cucusus. “And now you have a new heart.”

  “Ah,” said Norlund, and pulled in his chin to look down at his naked chest. The hair on his chest had all been shaved away. A huge capital I of a scar, its lines very narrow and delicately pink, marked him as if he were a letterman from Illinois. Or as if he had been pretty well eviscerated while he slept, his innards somehow reprocessed and then packed back in.

  “The scar will be all gone when we’re through,” Dr. Cucusus soothed him.

  “A new heart,” said Norlund. At the moment it seemed no more than his due. “So what’s the decision that I have to make?”

  “Medically speaking,” the large black woman informed him, “there are two ways that we can go from here. And we can’t, or we shouldn’t, put off deciding between
them any longer. The first way would involve leaving you basically as you are. With your new heart, we project that you may have twelve or fifteen more years of life—perhaps more than that, perhaps less.”

  “Twelve years,” said Norlund.

  “Your arterial system,” explained Dr. Cucusus. “It is not an immediate threat to your life, but it is not all that good, either.” She stopped there, and looked at Mr. Tak.

  “Another important thing about the first way,” said Mr. Tak, speaking in a dry penetrating voice, “is that when you are up and about afterwards, you may still be able to go home, should you choose to do so. I emphasize may. I should estimate the odds as approximately even. But on the other hand, if the second course of medical treatment is adopted, your return home becomes definitely impossible.”

  Mr. Schiller spoke up for the first time. “The second course of treatment will not be available to you unless you volunteer for a certain combat mission to be performed when it’s completed. A mission for which you seem to be uniquely qualified, but not physically fit for presently.”

  Dr. Cucusus: “The second medical path we can take is rather difficult, and very expensive in terms of resources. In most cases it would be prohibitively expensive. It is really a rather general rejuvenation treatment. Blood vessels. Endocrine system. Muscles. All systems must be integrated into the treatment as much as possible, if it is to be successful. Roughly speaking, the effect will be to make you thirty years younger.”

  “Of course,” put in Ginny, “there’s no guarantee that you are going to survive the combat mission afterward. But you will have a fighting chance.”

  “There are no guarantees of anything,” said Norlund. “I know that much.” He tried to think about what rejuvenation might be like, but he was too weak to imagine it very well. He thought things over while they all waited. Then he asked: “What if you try to send me home, and it doesn’t work?”

  “We’ll have a job for you,” said Mr. Tak. “Somewhere. Behind the equivalent of a desk. Good routine medical care. I suspect you might live longer than twelve years.” Norlund couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not.

  “Well,” said Norlund. “Suppose I take the second course. And the combat mission. And I do survive it. What do I do if I can’t go home?”

  “The war will go on,” said Mr. Tak. “There will be other missions for you, other jobs—some with desks and some without. You’ll have some choice. Eventually retirement, somewhere you find pleasant.”

  Ginny, standing closer than the others, was nodding. “It’s not a bad life,” she said calmly. “I’ve been at it for a few years now, in Recruiting.”

  Norlund looked at her, then back at Tak. “So what is this big combat mission that you need me for?”

  Tak’s face creased with the wisp of a smile. “An old soldier like you should know better than to ask. You volunteer first, then find out.”

  “Okay. Then where is it? Where and when? Can you tell me that much?”

  A brief whispered conference took place among the three non-medical visitors. “Somewhere in the United States,” said Tak at last. “In New York, most probably. In nineteen thirty-four.”

  Norlund lay back and closed his eyes. “If you can make me young again,” he said, “let’s do it.”

  Undergoing the second course of treatment proved to be more uncomfortable than the mere aftermath of heart-replacement surgery. Not that the machinery permitted anything like real agony. Norlund was for the most part unconscious during actual treatments, and was told little about them. There were long stretches of dull discomfort. Gradually impatience came to dominate.

  Some time passed before they let him see a mirror. When they did, a strange face peered back at him—half-recognizable, like the face of some unknown relative—peeling as with sunburn, but with the old skin pale over the stubble of a new brown beard. The face was certainly not sixty, not old any longer. Whether it was young was quite another question.

  1934

  Holly, in the gray dawn of the New Year, was arguing with her father. She was still wearing her one-strap red gown, but the gold sandals had been kicked off somewhere, making it easier to stalk around, which she liked to do while arguing. She had plenty of latitude, social as well as physical, in which to move around and yell; the servants, dismissed the night before somewhere around midparty, were not yet back from their own celebrations or their rest to commence the cleanup job. The apartment was a terrific mess, but Holly and her father had the freedom of being alone in it.

  So far Jeff’s attitude had remained one of patient soothing, though Holly was really flaring at him.

  “There’s something very funny about it, Jeff. You had hardly hung up the phone before those men with the stretcher were coming in the door.”

  Her father was sitting wearily on the sofa in the library. Sometimes he looked toward the window, as if he wished he could be out there somewhere. “Holly, if I just tell you that he’s getting the best care possible, isn’t that enough? Can’t you just accept that for now?”

  She paused in her angry movement, to look at Jeff. “Oh? And how do you know that he’s getting the best of care?”

  Jeff sighed and shook his head, looking old and tired. Obviously he hadn’t expected this much of an argument.

  Holly could feel sorry for him, but she wasn’t going to let up. “Why don’t you tell me what hospital they took him to?”

  They had been over this ground several times before; still Jeff remained, in Holly’s view, surprisingly patient. He said: “I don’t know where the hospital is.”

  “And I suppose you don’t know what it’s called, either.”

  “Actually, I . . . no.”

  “Who runs it?” Holly asked sweetly.

  He shrugged.

  “Oh Jeff! For God’s sake! You don’t know where or how or who, but you do know he’s getting the best of care. Do you expect me, anybody, to believe that?”

  Her father had turned his face to the window again. He stared out of it, into space, at nothing, as if he were just waiting for her to get tired of this.

  She was very tired, but not going to give up. “Why were they just waiting in the wings to rush him off? Did they know that he was going to get sick? How did they know?”

  Jeff’s eyes came slowly back to her face. “No, they didn’t know that. Not until I called them.”

  “I suppose they just happened to be driving by. With a radio in their ambulance, I suppose.”

  “They do have a radio, I’m sure. As you say, how else could they have been so quick?” Jeff paused, then, as if unable to help himself, asked, “What did the ambulance look like?” The tone of the question was almost wistful.

  Holly stared at her father. She knew that look; it was his usual expression when he wanted to see something very new, an invention or a design, that he thought was going to be important.

  Against Jeff’s urging she had gone down in the elevator with Norlund and the attendants who had come for him, and she had tried to follow when they put him into the ambulance. In this case her usual forceful ways hadn’t done her the least bit of good. The attendants had calmly but forcefully put her aside, and slammed the doors, and sped away. There had been no cabs in sight, or she would have tried to follow.

  “It looked quite ordinary,” she said now. “On the outside, at least. There were . . . respirators, I guess, and things inside. I didn’t get a very good look. Why, are you wondering if it was streamlined properly, according to your rules?” If she had to fight, she might as well be nasty about it.

  Her father didn’t appear to notice. He had forgotten, at least for the moment, about the ambulance, because a sudden overriding suspicion had seized him. “Holly.” His voice dropped. “There wasn’t anything between the two of you, was there? You and Norlund?”

  She could feel the unaccustomed tears start in her eyes. “And what if there was?”

  Jeff was, predictably, aghast. “He’s more than old enough to be your father. And Wi
lly. What if Willy should find out?” Jeff had always been certain that there would be a reconciliation.

  Rage came back, to dry tears like the heat of flames. “Dad, I’m not just going to drop this. You know me. I’m warning you that I’ll go to the police, the newspapers, wherever else I have to go, to find out what’s happened to him.”

  “Alan Norlund,” Jeff said, as if to himself. Still he stared at his daughter in disbelief. Then another urgent question started to grow behind his eyes.

  Holly forestalled it. “No, Alan and I haven’t slept together. But that’s not the point right now. The point is that I’m going to find out where he is, and how he is.”

  Jeff was pulling himself together. “Holly. Look. Sweetheart. It won’t be good for Norlund, or for me either, if you make too much of this. In time we’ll find out how he’s doing.”

  “How will we find out?”

  “It won’t be good for you!’

  “You’re going to have to explain to me why. Convince me. Or I’m going for the police, right now. You’re talking as if you and Alan are involved with gangsters, and I won’t believe that of either of you.” And she started for the door, not bluffing.

  Jeff, who knew her, gave up. “All right!” he called after her. When she stopped and turned, he held out his arm to her. It was a slow, old man’s motion. “All right,” he repeated. “I’ll tell you what I can. But you must sit down and listen. Hear me out, and don’t jump up and do anything until I’ve finished. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Holly said softly. She took her father’s hand and held it, and sat down close to him.

  “The reason I haven’t told you any of this before,” he began slowly, “is that I’m afraid, as I just said, that I could be putting your life in danger if I do. Still want me to go on?”

  Memory flashed in her mind: the strange attack during her flight with Norlund. But she only said: “Go on.”