A Century of Progress

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Of course. It was a silly question. All right.” He sighed deeply. “It all goes back to that day we crashed.”

  For some reason Holly felt no surprise. She had long realized that day marked some kind of a watershed. “All right. When you thought that I was dead.”

  Her father was looking at her very strangely now. He let go of her hand, and got to his feet as if with some definite purpose in mind. But then he only paced a lap around the room and came back to stand in front of her.

  When he spoke, his voice was so low that Holly could barely distinguish the words. “I still believe that you were dead.”

  “What?”

  “Listen to me, my dear. You were just lying there, all covered with blood. I couldn’t find any pulse. And as far as I could tell, you were not breathing.”

  “But I was only knocked out. I woke up.”

  Her father was shaking his head. “Listen to me, I say. While you were—lying there—two people arrived.”

  “What two people?”

  “A man and a woman. I thought at first that they were only hikers; there were no roads, and they arrived from somewhere, I couldn’t quite see how. And they offered to help me. But only under certain conditions.”

  “Dad, you must have been hurt yourself.”

  “No. I know it sounds that way. I was in a tremendous state of shock, certainly. Beside myself with grief, because I was sure that you were dead. At first I wasn’t quite sure that the people talking to me were real. But, as it turned out, they are very real indeed. Just as real as those ambulance attendants that you just saw. As all that special gear, installed in the cabin of your plane.” Jeff’s voice dropped again. “As real, God help me, as whatever it was that attacked you when you were on that flight with Norlund. I never expected that, I swear.”

  He had never raised the subject with her before. “I didn’t know you knew about that. Do you know what it was?”

  Her father shook his head helplessly. “Let me finish telling you what little I do know.” He drew a breath, and went on. “The two people who arrived at the crash. I’ve said I couldn’t quite see how they got there. But there was a sort of . . . rushing sound, I thought, in the sky. A moment of oddly colored light. And then there they were.”

  “A rushing,” Holly murmured. And an odd light? If she had been trying to describe the strange phenomenon in the sky during her flight with Norlund, she might well have chosen the same terms.

  Jeff misinterpreted what must have been the odd way that she was looking at him. “I tell you, those people were real enough. I’ve seen one of them since then, and I’ve talked with her many times.”

  “A woman.”

  “A young woman, of fairly ordinary appearance. Her name is Ginny Butler, or so she says. I never learned the man’s name. The pair of them bent over you, looking at you closely. The man took one instrument after another out of a backpack that he was wearing, and he kept probing at you with them. I remember asking if he was a doctor, but he didn’t answer. Instead he conferred for a moment with Ginny Butler, and then she led me a little distance away and talked with me. She told me you were beyond ordinary medical help.”

  “Oh, Jeff.”

  “But, she told me, there was still one chance. If I helped them, worked for them afterwards, she swore that they would do everything they could for you. She assured me that there would be nothing wrong or illegal in any task they would ever assign me. Of course I raged at them for making conditions. But then I swore I would do anything.

  “With that, the man went to work on you at once. The woman kept me from watching very closely. She kept telling me what a great cause it was, that I was now going to work for, how it would one day make the whole world a better place. Well—one’s heard all that before, of course. Still, I did swear a solemn oath to help them, and to keep their secrets.” Jeff paused, sagging. He moved again to the sofa and sat down. His voice had fallen to a whisper. “Now I’m breaking my oath, and I don’t know what the result is going to be. Are they perhaps going to—withdraw their investment?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Jeff looked sadly at his daughter. “When I was first pleading with them for help, they put it to me this way: they couldn’t afford to help all the accident victims in the world. Therefore they—invested their help carefully. It was given only in cases where they could expect a return, in the form of help for their own great cause.”

  “Which is—?”

  Her father’s smile was ghostly. “I’ve never found that out, exactly.”

  Despite herself, Holly was growing afraid. It was not that she did not believe her father. It was that she did. “And you’ve been helping them?”

  “Yes. Doing things that seem harmless in them-selves, if sometimes strange. Allowing that equipment to be put in your plane, for one thing. They of course sent men to do it—what it’s supposed to do, I really have no idea. Norlund does. He’s one of them. Or else he’s simply working for them, recruited by them as I was, perhaps. It was their phone number that I dialed last night, when he collapsed—a number that Ginny Butler had given me to memorize. And it was their ambulance that you saw, taking him away.”

  Holly sat down beside her father. “This woman, Ginny Butler. You say you’ve seen her many times, since the crash?”

  “Seen her a few times. Talked to her often, mostly on the phone. They like to do business by phone.” Jeff pushed himself to his feet once more and went to an abandoned bar-cart, where he managed to put together a glass of ice and mineral water. “An ambulance came for you too, you see. It wasn’t an ordinary vehicle—there was no road, remember? And it wasn’t an autogyro. I never really saw how they did it, but I know they took you away, somehow, to somewhere else, while the woman kept on talking to me, distracting me. Then almost before I could be sure that you were gone, they were bringing you back. You were still all bloody, and unconscious. But now you were obviously alive.”

  The whole thing sounded very unreal to Holly. And at the same time she could not seriously doubt it. “They aren’t bringing Alan back that fast.”

  Jeff examined his icewater as if it might possibly be of some rare vintage. “No, they’re not. It occurs to me that there were other people here last night, who saw him taken away with what certainly looked like a heart attack. If he were brought back very quickly, in good health, it would look strange.” He drank quickly, and paused. “I’m sure we’ll get news of him quite soon. Almost sure,” he added in a low voice. He looked at his daughter. “I’m rather surprised that you’re not telling me I’m crazy.”

  There was the equipment in her plane, like nothing else she had ever seen before. There was the sense of strangeness about Norlund, and his work with her father. And one thing more, the clincher. “When I was flying with Alan,” she told her father, “that thing that came after us in the sky . . . I can’t imagine any reasonable, natural explanation for what it looked like. And I’ve tried.”

  Jeff seemed suddenly on the verge of being crushed by remorse. “The people who recruited me are fighting against some other force, some other group, with the same kind of powers. It’s a kind of war I’ve gotten you into, I see that now. God, Holly, at least I can tell you now how sorry I am about that. But it was either that or—or—”

  On impulse, Holly flew to his side, and gave him an enormous hug. The impulse was genuine, but in a moment she pulled back. “What else can you tell me?”

  “I think not much. I think nothing at all. We’ll just have to see where we go from here.” Jeff sucked at his icewater, and she thought that he was still concealing something. He went on. “We’ll wait. We’ll hear, in time, about Alan.” Then he demanded suddenly: “Why can’t you make things up with Willy? He’s your husband.”

  Holly was not going to be distracted right now. “That phone number you have, the one you dialed for the ambulance.”

  Jeff shook his head vigorously. He looked horrified. “You wouldn’t get any questions answered with that.


  I’m afraid you’d just create serious trouble for both of us by trying to use it. It’s for dire emergencies.”

  “The phone company . . .”

  “You might just as well go to the harness and buggy-whip company for help.” Then the bitterness in Jeff’s voice was abruptly transmuted into enthusiasm; it was as if he could not help himself. “Holly, the things that Ginny Butler and her people can do. They’re—” He checked himself, as if on the verge of some improvident guess, or revelation. “Knowing what can be done, I’d give my right arm to see what the future is going to be like. Generations from now. The science, the healing, the discoveries . . .”

  Holly’s fingers, nervously clasping, had rediscovered her small burn. Already it felt more like a healed scar than a recent injury.

  Jeff, in spite of everything, could still be distracted, almost enraptured, by thoughts of the future. “Would the people of five hundred years ago have believed someone who claimed to come from the future? They’d have cried witchcraft. But today we ought to know better. Today we ought to believe in the future that science can create.” And with that he shut up suddenly, like a man who knew that now he’d said too much.

  Suddenly Holly had to get away. “Dad, I’m going out. No, it’s all right, I’m not going to repeat to anyone what you’ve been telling me. But I have to get out, walk, get some air, think. I’ll be all right.”

  She hurried out of the library, to grab boots and a fur coat from a closet and put them on. There was a last hurried exchange of waves between her and her father, assuring each other that they were all right. Then she was gone.

  At this early hour on a holiday morning she had expected to have the elevator to herself, but it stopped at the floor immediately below hers and a man got on. He was youthful in appearance, and well-dressed in homburg hat and topcoat, as if he might be going to work today, holiday or not. Not your ordinary overstayed party-goer heading home at dawn, but quite sober and wide awake and freshly shaven. He was a little taller than average, blond and lean, but not exactly German-looking. Not exactly handsome, either, to Holly’s taste. She couldn’t recall seeing him around the building before.

  He gave his homburg a little tip. “Mrs. Rudel, good morning.” His voice had authority in it, and a trace of indefinable accent—again, she thought, not German.

  “Good morning,” Holly answered automatically, mildly startled. She studied the man again. “I’m sorry, but ought I to know you?”

  “I am very glad to meet you at last, Mrs. Rudel. My name is Hajo Brandi, and I represent the law.”

  IN YEARS UNKNOWN

  Jerry Rosen was seated inside what looked to him, by God, like an almost recognizable phone booth—one big difference was that this was too comfortable. He was physically alone, though he knew that Ginny Butler or one of her people would be listening in when his call went through.

  He was at last, after being here in this still-unnamed school or whatever it was for several weeks, getting his chance to phone home.

  Just above Jerry’s eye level, as he sat comfortably in the booth, were certain numbers and indicators on its wall. What their current readings meant, as he had been taught to interpret them, was that the call he was trying to place, if it could be completed on schedule, would be received at the Monahan residence in Chicago at some early hour in the evening of Christmas Eve, nineteen thirty-three.

  There was no need in this booth for him to hold a receiver to his ear. Just sitting there, hands nervously clasping and unclasping on his knees, Jerry waited, listening. The quiet in the booth was almost absolute, except that now he could hear the ringing of that distant phone. Jerry kept hoping that the call was going through early, as the indicators said, before Judy and her Ma set out for midnight mass. They would probably leave the baby at home, for the half-grown girls to watch, but they might take old Mike along if they judged him sober enough—Christmas Eve was a special occasion—and if he felt like going. They might—

  Someone picked up the distant phone. And in another moment Jerry could hear his wife’s voice, as if she were right there in the booth with him, saying: “Hello?”

  “Judy? It’s me.”

  He had been warned to expect a certain delay in response time, probably enough to be noticeable. One component of the delay was deliberately built in, so he could be cut off if he tried to say something he wasn’t supposed to say. Another component was apparently inherent in the way this cross-time communication worked. Still, the pause that followed after Jerry had identified himself was a little more than he had been expecting.

  Then his wife was able to talk. “Jerry. Oh my God. Where are you? What’s happened?”

  “Listen, I’m all right. I may not be able to get home for a while yet, but I’ll get there. Did you report me missing?”

  “Jerry, it’s been five months. Yes, we reported you. Where are you? Are you coming home?”

  “I can’t come home right now. I’m gonna, later, I swear it. Are you and the kid all right?”

  There was a burst of something like radio static, which immediately cleared up again.

  “—yeah,” Judy was saying. “The other kids had measles, we just got the quarantine sign down off the door.” Her voice shifted off-phone. “Ma, Ma, it’s Jerry.” Back again. “Yes, we’re all right. Jerry, my God, my God, I made novenas . . .” A new change in Judy’s voice. “There was a telegram came, about your father. Did you get that news?”

  “My old man? What about him?”

  This time the delay stretched on and on, to conclude not with Judy’s voice but in a vast explosion. Not at the Monahans’, either; a hell of a lot closer than that. Jerry could feel the floor, the whole booth, quiver with it. All the lights in the booth, including the digital readouts, momentarily went dead, leaving him in pitch blackness. A moment later the emergency lights from outside the booth came stabbing through the dark, penetrating transparent panels.

  Jerry found that the door was slightly stuck now, but he forced it open and got out. The people who had been in the larger room that contained the booth were gone, and in the distance an alarm was hooting. Just like the practice alerts they had been holding during the past few days, thought Jerry, with an effort recalling himself from thoughts of his father and his wife to face his present situation. But this time, with the lights gone out, and starting with a bang like that, he doubted that it was practice.

  Something outside the high gray walls was battering at them like a gigantic tank, and they were going down.

  Norlund observed this from a distance, over a remote monitor, while he was pausing to regain some breath after a considerable run. He took one look at the image of those crumbling walls and then ran again, on legs newly taut with youth, their firm muscles fueled by fear. Corridors flowed past him, holding a scattering of other people, some of them running too. By now Norlund had been up and about long enough to know his way around here pretty well. Just as in a normal alert drill, he was heading for the weapons rack where his sidearm was ordinarily kept.

  He reached the rack, and amid other scrambling hands and arms snatched his assigned weapon out. He automatically checked the charge, even while jostling his way past other people, away from the arms rack and on toward his next destination.

  Which was not far. Norlund hurried among other scrambling bodies through the wide entrance to the huge Operations Room, then across the hangar-like spaces of Operations to the particular launch rack where his assigned vehicle waited. This was an armored personnel carrier with time-travel capability, much different from anything that Norlund had ever ridden in or ever seen. The elephant-sized body of the APC was all slanted planes of dull gray, with the protrusion here and there of a weapon nozzle or some kind of sensor. The two large front wheels were gray, also, and almost spherical. The rear of the body rode on extended, shapeless globs of something that took the place of the endless armored treads of an old-style military halftrack.

  The uppermost hatch of the APC was open, and
Norlund quickly clambered atop the vehicle and slid down inside. Ginny Butler was already occupying her assigned place, the observer’s position toward the front of the cabin, while Andy Burns was in one of the seats toward the rear. The two other assigned members of the combat team, Jerry and Agnes, had not yet arrived. Norlund had just time to get himself secured in his own seat when Jerry came bursting in through the hatch above, swearing energetically at things in general.

  A moment later, Ginny turned round in her chair to hand Norlund a moderately large white envelope. He thought that the expression on her face as she looked at him was odd.

  He accepted the envelope, with some surprise. “What’s this?”

  “This is obviously more than an alert, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So I’ve opened our sealed combat orders.” Ginny nodded toward the envelope now in Norlund’s hands. “The first one appoints you to take over this group as RM.”

  “What?” Norlund felt dazed. “You’re the ranking member.”

  “As long as we’re in training. But no longer. At this point I just wish you good luck, and stand by for orders myself.” She nodded at the envelope again. “There are the rest of the orders, still sealed. They’re for you to open now.”

  Norlund looked down at the envelope he was holding. Then he pulled out the first sheet of paper that it held; the paper unfolded and uncreased itself to comfortable flatness as its corners cleared the enclosure. The message printed on it was short. In terse language it made official what Ginny had just been telling him: as soon as combat started, at the base or elsewhere, Norlund was to take over as commander of their small group, and was charged with immediately moving to carry out their assigned mission.

  Under that first sheet of paper, an inner envelope, still sealed, was thick with detailed orders—or something. Norlund pulled out the inner envelope only far enough to read the warning that it bore: FOR COMBAT RM ONLY. OPEN ONLY AFTER FIRST COMBAT LAUNCHING AND RE-EMERGENCE.

  Ginny, Andy Burns, and Jerry Rosen were all looking at Norlund when he raised his eyes. He thought he saw in their faces less surprise than he felt himself. Well, maybe it was logical. He did have real combat on his record, even if it had been in a different army and . . . a different war? No, perhaps not even that. And he was older than the others, and they knew it, even though he no longer looked as much older as he was. The mirror these days showed him the face of a man of thirty, a hard-bitten face that he supposed could easily look authoritative enough.