A Century of Progress

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Jeff, don’t do it!” Brandi ordered. But the local was already out of his reach, moving swiftly along the other side of a kind of metal fence or railing that divided the platform, and heading for stairs and elevator.

  Brandi shot him silently in the back. Jeff crumpled to the platform.

  The Lindbergh Light swept round again, showing the gray face of the Graf a minute closer than before, out over the plain of water. Now its engines could be heard, their waterfall-roar mingling with the renewed noise of the crowd.

  Brandi glanced round. It was highly unlikely that anyone anywhere could have noticed the shooting. He pocketed his weapon and made his way around the railing, approaching the fallen man with professional caution. Looking down, he was sure that Jeff was still conscious, though he had hit his head in falling and his forehead was bleeding slightly. The eyes were open, and able to move, and Jeff was breathing.

  The small secret communicator in Brandi’s pocket was signalling for his attention, and he whipped it out and spoke into it, again using the language that Jeff had not been able to understand.

  “Hail the Lawgiver, Brandi here. I still cannot report success . . .” There was a pause, during which the blond man listened intently while his eyes widened. “I understand, sir, the Lawgiver’s personal wish that Hitler land here . . . yes sir, if you wish to explain, of course. Because . . .”

  Again a pause. Then Brandi swiveled on taut muscles to the south railing of the platform. His eyes, suddenly awed, bored down into the night, where scattered pieces of the crowd stood near the seaplane landing at the edge of the South Lagoon. His voice became a whisper of exultation. “The Lawgiver himself? Here? Yes, we will of course give up our lives if need be to provide security, but . . . here. He is, of course, incognito . . . yes, sir.”

  Hardly had he closed the communicator when it throbbed again for his attention. “Hail the Lawgiver, Brandi here . . .” Now his tone became savage, the words altering to the familiar, contemptuous form provided in his language for addressing a subordinate. “If you’ve found one unit, then remove it, fool! It will at least weaken the effect, and we won’t have to report complete failure. The House of Tomorrow?” Again his gaze swiveled, raking the ground and the structures within the broad roped-off area below. “Well, fool, if there are two men defending it, kill them!” he snarled. “I’m on my way!”

  Brandi took a long stride toward the stairs and elevator. Then he turned and, almost as an afterthought, lifted the paralyzed body of Geoffrey Holborn in his strong arms and put it quickly over the safety railing at the platform’s edge. No one was at all likely to see anything that happened on this shadowed portion of the tower; all eyes were on the approaching silvery shape, now steadily visible above the lake. Skyrockets were going up, at a carefully emphasized safe distance from the landing area and the Graf, and boat whistles were sounding.

  The still-living body struck one of the horizontal Skyride cables a hundred feet down, and went caroming off. Brandi did not delay to witness the final impact.

  The House of Tomorrow was within the area that had supposedly been cleared of people for the dirigible’s arrival, but Jerry Rosen had still managed to get inside the building and find a hiding place. There was a stunned Fair policeman sleeping things off in a closet, who could expect to wake up tomorrow sometime, with stiff muscles and a headache, wondering what had happened to him.

  Jerry would have been tempted to switch places with that cop right now, if he’d been made the offer. He was hiding in another closet with the door cracked, able to watch from where he hid the single doorway to the room in which he’d hidden the last ceramic pulser, back in those dear innocent days when he’d just been working for a man named Norlund . . . Now somebody was coming through the house, trying to be quiet.

  Jerry tensed, a weapon in each hand. These future guns were really neat, but one of the first things he’d done on getting back to Chicago was to visit an old bootlegging friend and arrange to borrow something a little heavier and simpler. He’d come to like the feel . . .

  It was two of Brandi’s people who were coming, detectors in their hands, and Jerry eased open the closet door and let them know that he was there. Lethal sizzle from his left hand, bang from his right.

  And fire came back from one of Brandi’s men and struck him down.

  When Fritz saw the men hurrying grim-faced toward him through the narrowness of the keel passage, he pressed himself and his dishes back against the fabric wall and girders in surprise, making as much room as possible for them to pass him. Dietrich came first, moving in long strides. Next, one of the SS adjutants, looking just as somber; and after him, the Fuhrer, eyes fixed straight ahead, now wearing a long coat over his blue linen jacket. Hitler was carrying a small dispatch case in one hand. The second SS man followed Hitler.

  “Baur has the engine running,” someone muttered, as the small cavalcade pushed past the flattened Fritz. And the engine noise from outside now did seem to be varying strangely. As if, thought Fritz, some airplane could be buzzing us. Dangerous; they shouldn’t do that, especially now.

  Looking after Hitler and the others, he saw them descending a small ladder; the Fuhrer was, then, about to get into the seaplane and depart. Fritz set down his tray and darted aside to where he could get a good look outside through another window—by now he knew where all the good places for observation were.

  The partly cloudy sky had become an entrancing show of lights. The moon, the distant beacons, the welcoming searchlights on ship and shore. The glow reflected from the approaching Fairgrounds, which made a glorious sprawl now close at hand. There were even fireworks at some distance. And, reflecting on one small cloud, Fritz thought that he saw lightning.

  One of Hitler’s angels had locked onto the Vega, and through Norlund’s small video-game screen he willed death and destruction back at it. From the corner of his eye he saw within the cabin the vivid backflash of his lasers, first right then left as the enemy hurtled past. His beams struck home, and on his screen he saw the enemy escort fighter crumpling, not going down in flames but sliding sideways off the stage of nineteen-thirty-four reality, disappearing with a whisper into thin twentieth century air.

  Holly’s shaken voice came to him over the intercom. “The seaplane’s just launched!”

  “Go after it.”

  This, Norlund thought, would be the last shot of the game—win, lose, or draw. He concentrated on his screen, then saw it go blank as he felt the Vega lurch and shudder with some terrific impact.

  They were still in the air, but even the intercom was dead, and they were going down. Not in a spin, anyway; not quite in a hopeless dive. Maybe Holly could some-how pull it up enough to make it a ditching and not a hard crash into water . . .

  There were more of Brandi’s men inside the House of Tomorrow now, trying to get at Jerry. Though hit, he had not lost consciousness, and he kept rolling half-paralyzed from one side to the other of his chosen room, trading fire with them. He thought that his two weapons confused them, so that they thought there were two of him, and this slowed them down. And he thought, too, that he had hit them more than once.

  Now he heard them calling to each other, urgently, in some language that sounded funnier than Polish. Now it sounded like they were going away. Some kind of trick, Jerry thought . . .

  And then for a time he could think nothing.

  Jerry came to himself, if that was the right description of the process, feeling very strange indeed. Now he was able to sit up again, in this strange, darkened, unfamiliar house, and now he could even begin to think. There had been a fight. Yes, he had been fighting for his life . . . but over what?

  Stumblingly Jerry got himself erect. The house, whatever house this was, was quiet now. But somewhere in the distance there was a sea-like murmuring, as of a vast crowd gathered, expecting something, waiting for it.

  He could walk a little, too, though it took sustained conscious effort to force the large muscles of his limbs to work, and
periodically stabbing pains transfixed his body. There had been shooting, he could remember that much now, and somehow he must have gotten himself shot.

  At least he wasn’t bleeding, at least not anywhere that he could see. Maybe inside, judging from the way he felt. He wondered which beam weapon had hit him. It must have been a beam reflected, like a ricochet, or he’d be dead. He realized that much in a flash of clarity. When he touched the skin on his back on one side it hurt like fire.

  The world around him grew strange and muddled again, while he stood swaying. If he was hurt, the thing to do was get home . . . Where was he, anyway? Oh yeah, the Fair. But he was very tired now, from . . . so much sight-seeing, maybe.

  On his way out of the glass-walled, curtained house Jerry stumbled over something and looked down. Hajo Brandi’s dead face looked up at him, a neat hole as from a thirty-eight right in the forehead. Jerry found this discovery vaguely alarming. The urge to get home suddenly became desperate, and he hurried on.

  He was just emerging from the House of Tomorrow when a vast orange glow lit up the entire sky.

  Baur had just landed the seaplane, with great skill and almost inconspicuously, right at the edge of the South Lagoon. This was an area of water well outlined by floating and shore-mounted lights, and the water was quite calm.

  At the moment when the Junkers’ floats touched down, the Graf was just easing through the final feet and inches toward contact with the mooring mast. And at the very moment of that contact, a ball of fire appeared amidships on the dirigible, the striking of some titanic spark. Almost before the first cries of alarm went up, the whole airship appeared to be in flames.

  Inferno. A thousand voices screamed. The mooring failed; the airship was released from trailing ropes that had been already gripped by hundreds of hands below. The sailors below let go, and ran to get themselves out from underneath the flames. The dirigible drifted gently back to the east, so it was again entirely over water. The Graf’s engines, or some of them, could be heard still running, even while the gasbag burned. Only half a minute had passed since the first ignition. Flaming, falling scraps of fabric drifted over the crowd on shore, starting new surging panic. Half melted sticks and spars of duralumin splashed hissing into the lake.

  It took long seconds for the enormous shape, still half-supported by the rising air of its own firedraft, to fall six hundred feet, going down stern first. On shore the panic grew, as quickly as the fire above. By the thousands people screamed, milling, running at cross purposes. From the shore they could see men, some with their clothing already on fire, dropping from the burning zeppelin into the lake.

  It was at this moment that the Junkers seaplane with Hitler in it came taxiing up to the small dock. The cabin door, opening, was surrounded at once by a huddle of men. When Hitler emerged from the huddle he was safe.

  In a moment he had stepped up onto a nearby picnic bench, the better to see the fire’s last moments, the climax of the disaster that he had just escaped.

  “My fate holds good! My fate holds good!” He murmured the words over and over, as he stared with wondering, almost triumphant eyes at the vast, slow, quenching plunge that put the fire out, darkening the sky again.

  The Lawgiver, with his own agents recalled from other efforts and scattered thickly through the small crowd here, got discreet help in moving up close beside the Fuhrer. Most of the official welcoming committee, dozens of important men, were trapped in the surging confusion up there by the Skyride.

  “Fuhrer,” someone muttered urgently in German, “this is Herr Zeitgeist of—of Milwaukee. He would like very much to meet you.”

  The Lawgiver reached up his right hand. It was an awkward pose for him, this, with himself physically below the other, but that could hardly have been foreseen and in any case it did not really matter.

  He seized and pressed Hitler’s hand. In his own recently acquired German he pronounced: “In our own New World, Fuhrer, we are waiting eagerly for you to accomplish what you can in yours. We intend to build upon the fruits of your labors. Despite what all our enemies can do, we intend to support you in maintaining your rightful place.”

  “Thank you,” said Hitler. It was a brief, abstracted reply, but under the circumstances nothing more could have been expected, and the Lawgiver was satisfied.

  He stepped back, giving an inconspicuous signal. His own men now aided the locals’ effort to get the Chancellor bundled away somewhere to safety.

  The Lawgiver looked on contentedly; once again his power to mold events had been satisfactorily demonstrated. He had wanted this meeting, and now he had it, his enemies and Hitler’s notwithstanding.

  An aide, one of the modified Brandi-clones, was at his side. The man indicated by a certain breathless, doglike attitude in his silence that he wanted to be told what had to be done next.

  “Now,” said the Lawgiver, “I have seen Hitler, and shaken his hand.”

  “Yes, Lawgiver.”

  “I wonder if one day it may not be possible for us to talk at some greater length . . .”

  “Does the Lawgiver wish a plan developed for bringing Hitler to our own time?”

  There had been a kindred spirit there behind those startling blue eyes, someone he could really talk to . . . but, perhaps, on second thought, too close a kinship.

  “No,” the Lawgiver said aloud. “That will not be necessary.” He looked around. “Get me home,” he ordered, “before they realize that they can strike at me.”

  There was a streetcar terminus very close to the Eighteenth Street exit from the Fair, and Jerry, moving automatically, boarded a waiting car. He was almost alone on it; few people were leaving the Fairgrounds just now.

  Streetcars were never delayed for any humanly understandable reason like burning dirigibles and assassination plots, and this one started west promptly on schedule. Delirium began to set in almost at once as Jerry rode. And long shivering spasms came, threatening to stop his breathing—it took him a conscious effort at breathing to get through them. Don’t pass out, he warned himself.

  When he got to the Monahans’, he would be able to see Judy, and the kid. That thought kept him awake.

  He swayed along on the streetcar’s deafening, jolting ride, under an occasional shower of blue sparks from the overhead trolley. It was the same old city, the same old streetcars—it was great to be back. He looked out the window. Now and then, through broken clouds and city glare, it was possible to see the pale and distant moon. I wonder, thought Jerry, if people are ever going to . . . but someone, somewhere, sometime, had already told him that they had . . .

  Instinct saw him through the necessary transfer point, where he clung like a drunk to a streetlamp’s pole until the proper northbound car approached. Jerry presented his transfer, and then stood on the rear platform of the car, afraid that if he sat down again he wasn’t going to be able to get up.

  Then the familiar stop drew near. He stood on the step, hanging on to the pole there, and when the car stopped to let him do so he dropped off.

  His legs felt like they belonged to someone else, but still they served to get him home. Up the front steps at last. He didn’t have a house key any longer, he remembered after fumbling for it in his pocket. It was Ma Monahan who answered the door, took one look at her returned son-in-law, and recoiled yelling.

  Mike came from somewhere, and between the two of them they got Jerry into the living room and stretched out on the sofa, shedding his tattered suit jacket somewhere along the way. The radio in the living room was turned on, but Jerry noticed in a dazed way that it didn’t sound like any normal program. Dillinger was dead, some announcer was saying. Hitler was alive and safe. The loss of life from the Graf Zeppelin was being counted up.

  When they laid Jerry down on the sofa, the borrowed thirty-eight slid out of the waistband of his pants to land on the carpet with a revealing thud. The old lady pointed at it and yelled again, this time something about Dillinger.

  “Shuddup for Christ’s sake!�
� Mike roared back. Half-grown kids who had started to come into the room fell back in fright. “What’s going on?” he demanded of Jerry in anguish.

  “I been shot.” Things were slowly starting to refocus.

  Why, why, Ma demanded, had he given up boot-legging, only to take up with Dillinger? Now Federal agents were going to be coming with machine guns to her house.

  “No, Ma.” Something worse than Federal agents might be coming, he realized dimly. He shouldn’t have come here . . . but now there was nothing he could do about it. Judy came hurrying into the room, driving all other thoughts out of Jerry’s mind.

  The women peeled off his shirt as he lay raving. There were some burned-looking places on Jerry’s ribs, but nothing that Mike would accept as real evidence of shooting. Mike had already hidden the thirty-eight somewhere. Judy was kneeling at her long-lost husband’s side, crying over him and jumping up now and then to keep her mother from doing something daft.

  Under these conditions Judy and her parents debated whether a doctor should be called. They had about agreed that it was unavoidable, when there came a knocking at the back door, and a man’s voice called in: “Ambulance!”

  Peering out through the glass panels with the porch light turned on outside, they made out the face of a tough-looking young man. He impressed them all in one way or another as vaguely familiar.

  “We’re friends of Jerry’s,” this man called in. “My name’s Norlund—my father was here once, visiting; maybe you remember him. No, no cops! Far from it, lady. We got an ambulance waiting for Jerry out here in the alley. We’ll take him to a hospital.” And indeed, between garages the lights of a standing vehicle, its motor running, could be seen.

  The people inside were reassured enough to open the door and talk. And then the young medical attendants who came in with their stretcher were more reassuring still. No hoodlums, these people, and apparently no cops either.

  Young Norlund talked to the Monahans. “Jerry’s done a great service for his country—no, m’am, we’re not the Dillinger gang. Nothing to do with them.”