A Century of Progress Read online

  “Y’know,” Jerry heard himself blurting out, “I never been unfaithful to Judy, anything like that. We been married more than a year now.”

  “You certainly were not unfaithful to her last night, if that’s what’s worrying you.” Ginny approached her own drink as if she expected to enjoy it. “What did you get her for your anniversary?”

  “Huh.” Jerry felt an odd mixture of relief and disappointment at having his innocence confirmed; he could feel his ears burning lightly. “What could I get her? I took her to a movie, lucky I could afford that. And we stopped and had ice cream.”

  Ginny said something soothing. He wasn’t listening. The movie had been interrupted again for ads. Another politician in full color, sounding trustworthy and honest, saying how under this Republican administration things were really going great again, and telling everybody to remember what a mess the Democrats had left everything in four years ago.

  The movie came back, and Jerry was able to get involved in it, at least for short stretches as he had with the games of chess. Now someone slipped Humphrey Bogart a Mickey Finn; Humphrey put down his drink, rubbed his face a few times, his vision blurred, and down he went. Then a runty, nasty-looking little guy kicked him in the head.

  Jerry looked at his own drink, which was almost finished. He was very sleepy now. But in his case, of course, feeling sleepy was only natural. Anyway Ginny Butler didn’t have to worry that he was going to make a pass at her. She was out of the room right now, but when she came back he was going to ask her if anyone had yet thought about trying to get to the Moon . . .

  When Jerry awoke, he was sprawled, fully dressed, across the getting-to-be-familiar bed. This time the door to the bedroom had been left ajar. From somewhere out in the apartment there came a murmur of voices, not especially trying to be quiet. Again it was broad daylight outside the blinds, and the funny clock on the dresser read 8:34.

  Reflexively Jerry checked his pockets. This time he still had his money, and all the rest of his stuff, too.

  No headache this time. Actually he felt pretty good, reasonably rested and unwilling to worry over whether or not he’d been slipped something in last night’s drink. Looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, he wondered . . . but it didn’t matter. At least he’d gotten a good night’s sleep.

  But he was going to have to shave soon. Running his fingers through his hair to comb it, Jerry mooched along down the hall to the second bedroom. The cot in one corner of that room now appeared to have been used, but the two other people present were up and dressed. Ginny was seated at the worktable, along with a colorless-looking man of about forty that Jerry couldn’t remember having seen before. Ginny and the man were looking at the typewriter device as if they might be studying how to work it, or maybe like two rich people at a stock ticker—not that Jerry had ever actually seen one of those. Now the machine came briefly to life, though no one was touching it, and chattered out part of a roll of paper.

  “Hello,” Jerry said.

  Both of the people at the table looked up. “Jerry,” said Ginny, “this is Mr. Schiller. He’s my boss.”

  “Rosen,” said Mr. Schiller. He had an authoritative voice, and somehow his appearance was not so colorless once he’d spoken. “Rosen. So, you’re Jewish, right?”

  In a cold voice Jerry gave his usual, automatic answer: “I don’t work at it.” And only then did he remember one conviction that he’d always held about the future; that magical world of fifty or a hundred years to come. By the time that men were getting ready to travel into space, things on Earth would have changed to the point where nobody cared any more who had a Jewish background and who did not. Maybe somewhere on the home planet there would still be people who practiced being Jews—well, let ‘em. No one else would worry about who those peoples’ relatives might be.

  “Ginny, do you mind?” asked Schiller. He spoke without taking his faintly smiling eyes off Jerry. Ginny shook her head no, murmured something and got up and went out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

  The typewriter, possessed by some ghost of science, burped out a few more lines at incredible speed. Schiller ignored it. He was still watching Jerry. “Sit down,” Schiller said. Maybe it was an order, maybe an invitation. Anyway Jerry sat.

  Schiller said: “I’m Jewish too, as it happens. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you myself. I do work at it, as you put it . . . though I suppose not in the way that someone of your time and place would expect. But never mind that. I want to begin to explain to you what this is all about. It is not by any means a strictly Jewish enterprise—though I think you’ll agree, when I’ve explained, that we as Jews do have a special stake in it.”

  This was just about the last goddamned thing that Jerry had been expecting to hear. He was so surprised that for a moment he could almost believe that the whole time-travel business was a fake.

  “All right,” Jerry said. “You can be Jewish, or not, but don’t expect me to. You be an Eskimo if you want; me, I’m just trying to get along. To get home. But these guys here tell me I’m gonna have a problem doing that.”

  Schiller faced him solemnly. “It’s quite likely that you’ll never be able to get home. I hope the people here made that clear to you.”

  Jerry felt a chill begin somewhere near the middle of his gut. It spread rapidly. “They told me they were waiting for test results.”

  “I’ve seen them. They were not good.”

  The chill spread further.

  “But,” Schiller added, deliberately, “there is, possibly, just one way.”

  Now Jerry could feel the relief, a great quivering wave of it that started down in his legs somewhere and came up through his stomach mixed with anger. He tried hard to keep the relief from showing in his face, but he didn’t think that he succeeded. To hell with it. He ought to have known. All that crap they’d been feeding him so far about how hard it would be to get him back home, how probably he’d never see his family again, all that had been just to set him up for some proposition that they were now about to hit him with. They were just like cops in some precinct station, softening up some poor son of a bitch with threats of prison, to get him to confess or else to rat on his friends.

  Jerry tried even harder to look calm. Now the hard pitch, whatever it was, was coming. He’d know in a minute what these bastards really wanted from him.

  Schiller asked him, “Have you ever heard of Adolf Hitler?”

  Jerry didn’t know quite what he’d been expecting to hear next, but that wasn’t it. He blinked. “Sure, he’s . . . I mean, in nineteen thirty-three he was the new Chancellor, whatever the hell they call it, over in Germany.”

  “Right. And what have you heard about what he and his people were doing in that year?”

  Jerry considered. “There was a lot of talk in the papers, that they were against the Jews.”

  “More than talk, wasn’t it?”

  Jerry shrugged. “If you say so. What do I know?”

  Schiller nodded agreement. “Now, have you heard anything at all about Hitler since your clockwise trip? I mean, since you arrived here in Eighty-four?”

  Ignorance can be a help in this game, Ginny had told him at some point. Well, he didn’t have to fake ignorance this time. “No. Don’t tell me he’s still alive.”

  “I trust not. Not here and now in this timeline. Jerry, I want you to watch a little historical show. Ginny ought to be getting ready now to run it on the television in the next room. It’s about the things that happened in Germany—in Europe, in the whole world—in the late Thirties and the early Forties.”

  Now Jerry could hear other voices, muted by the closed door. People certainly tended to come and go suddenly around here. Now there was a tap on the door; Schiller called out and it opened. A young guy of about Jerry’s own age stuck his head into the room.

  It wasn’t the same fellow who’d come with Ginny to the park.

  “Ginny says she’s ‘bout ready, Mr. Schiller.” This on
e had something of a southern accent, and his brown hair was just growing out of a crewcut.

  “Right.” Schiller got to his feet. “Jerry Rosen, meet Andy Burns. We picked up Andy in Forty-three, and he works for us now full time—how’s the job suit you so far?”

  “Jes’ fine, sir.” It sounded like it might possibly be the truth.

  “Andy will be able to confirm parts of what we’re about to show you, from his own experience. But he doesn’t really know the whole story himself as yet, so I want him to watch also. It’ll help fill in the picture for him. Eventually, of course, you’ll both be able to confirm all of it from other sources.” Schiller motioned them out into the living room, and followed. “If you’re ready, Ginny, let’s start the show.”

  Afterward Jerry estimated that the show could have lasted no longer than half an hour. While it was going on, though, it seemed longer than that, though it was not what he would have called boring. Sickening would be more like it. When it was over, he got to his feet from the sofa as if he were about to leave a theater, feeling somewhat shaken. Looking at Andy Burns, he could see his own feelings mirrored in the other’s face.

  The others, perhaps by design, almost at once left the two of them alone. They sat down again, looking at each other silently. Then Andy got out cigarettes, and offered one. They lit up.

  Jerry began. “You believe that, what we just saw? The shower baths with poison gas, and the ovens, and all that?” Again he felt an awed reluctance to use swear words. In his mind’s eye he could still see the piles of babies’ toys and clothes. “You believe six million people, or eight million, or whatever in hell the number was?”

  Andy, looking back at him, was thinking it over very seriously. “Well, Ah gotta believe part of it. Ah was in that ‘ere war they’re talkin’ about. In fact Ah was damn near kilt in it . . . and we knew Hitler was doin’ some of that stuff.” Andy paused. “Shit yes, Ah guess Ah gotta believe it all.”

  Schiller had re-entered the living room. “I’d like to talk to Jerry alone again.”

  Andy took his cue and left. But at the same time Ginny reappeared from the kitchen, looking over Schiller’s shoulder. Schiller, Jerry realized, was not very big.

  “Did you understand your job with Mr. Norlund very well?” the graying, smallish man asked Jerry.

  “No. I didn’t have to. I just did what he told me.”

  “What did you think those little units were, that the two of you were installing?”

  “I dunno. He said we were taking a survey. They were to record signals or whatever. I don’t know nothing about radio.”

  Schiller nodded as if satisfied. “Would it make you feel better to know that you’ve already done a lot to keep Hitler suppressed in a new timeline?”

  Ginny put in quietly, “We haven’t had a good opportunity to discuss timelines with Jerry yet.”

  Schiller gave her a look that subtly conveyed dissatisfaction. Then he addressed Jerry. “Say that there are worlds, universes, in which Hitler is successful—in some of them, beyond his own wildest dreams of world domination. And there are other worlds in which he’s cut off early, forced into total failure. There are Europes where World War Two is fought, and the death camps that you just saw really exist—and there are other Europes where humanity is spared all that.”

  “I can imagine that,” said Jerry, the experienced reader of science fiction. “Yeah, all right. I’m glad I did my part against Hitler.” And he waited warily for what was coming next.

  “You’ve contributed a lot, as I said,” said Schiller slowly. “But I don’t think your job is quite over yet.” He paused, waiting for a reaction that did not come. Then he proceeded. “Suppose it should be up to you, Jerry, to decide: which kind of world, of the two I’ve mentioned, do you want your wife to live in and your child to grow up in?”

  “I want the one where I’m going back to them,” said Jerry stubbornly.

  “The only one in which you have a chance of going back to them, is the one in which you work for us.”

  “And what would I have to do?”

  “It would work like this,” Schiller said, choosing his words slowly. “After you’ve been given some training, I would send you back to Chicago, in nineteen thirty-four.”

  “Thirty-four? That’d be a whole year I was gone.”

  Schiller held up an appeasing hand. “Meanwhile, you might possibly be able to communicate with your wife, let her know that you are coming back . . . but the big point is this. That you must be willing to do a job for us in the Chicago of that time, before you rejoin your family. Not a long job, maybe a day or two. But a dangerous one, I won’t lie to you about that. If anything should happen to you, we’ll look out for your wife and kid. And if you come through okay, you stand to collect a pretty good reward yourself. How about it?”

  “If that’s the only way I can get home, you’re really telling me I got no choice.” And then Jerry belatedly remembered something.

  Schiller saw his expression alter. “What is it, Jerry?” “I was just remembering. My Dad,” Jerry said at last. “He went back to Germany, in nineteen twenty-nine.”

  1933

  For Norlund, who could remember long train rides from his youth, this one began pretty much as expected: a promise of early boredom, and a hint of motion-sickness, flavored with a little soot from coal-burning locomotives. There was no pretense of air conditioning on his train, but fans did keep the air circulating in his compartment, and it was otherwise comfortable enough.

  The black porters who served the Pullman cars were professionally jovial, if not quite convincingly cheerful. Norlund wondered if any of them might live in the horrendous south side slums, which were almost the first scenery that the train encountered after it pulled out of the station. He decided that they probably did not. Even false joviality would have to be impossible, he thought, to a dweller in the acres of firetrap ruins and rats. Feeling the guilt of the lucky, he made a mental note to himself to tip the porters well, and continued to watch the slums with a grisly fascination.

  Presently the worst blight began to give way to more habitable housing, dingy but endurable, looking very much like the working class realms on the north side. From exclusively black, the inhabitants, were again exclusively white. And everywhere was the weedy summer greenery that always sprang up all across the city, wherever pavement or cultivation failed by an inch to cover the earth.

  The train was picking up speed now, the clicking rhythm of the wheels accelerating. Now it was gradually emerging from the inner-city tangle of the world’s largest railroad yards, making its direction clear, proceeding more and more on a clearly defined and separate line.

  We haven’t had a chance yet to talk about timelines. At some point Ginny had said that to him. When would the chance come? Whenever she was ready. And what exactly was a timeline?

  A few more miles of travel across the south side, and industry was taking over. Meanwhile the tracks were curving gradually from south to east, preparing for their passage round the south end of the lake. Norlund caught one glimpse of the lake, blue and startling between brick factories.

  South Chicago, the Indiana border. Calumet City. Gary. Miles of gigantic constructs, visions out of some cartoonist’s fevered nightmare about industry, were interspersed with rows of workers’ houses. Here in the midst of the Depression, production must be low, and most of what normally ran must be shut down now, on Sunday. Yet what looked like a permanent pall of soot and smoke, from kilns and blast furnaces, hung in the air. A blend of exotic industrial fumes infiltrated the passing train. The lake with its almost uninhabited sand dunes would be just over the horizon here, but along the tracks the world was a parody of power and pollution, a zone of factories incredibly filthier and uglier than it was going to be in fifty years.

  The people, Norlund noticed, also looked different from those of fifty years in the future, even allowing for the changes in clothing styles and relative poverty. He could see a difference in the fa
ces of those who stood here and there to watch the train go past. These people had no less anxiety than their children and grandchildren of the Eighties, but these, perhaps, were more willing to be hopeful. These people of the Thirties obviously still saw a train bound to faraway places as a symbol—more than that, a concrete expression—of hope and promise. Children black or white stood almost reverently at grade crossings to observe the flying passage of the Twentieth Century, and waved impartially at those who rode it into the future. Each time Norlund tried to wave back before his speed carried him away.

  —and then without warning his view was wiped out by a passing freight. Car after car flew past, at doubled speed. He was granted instantaneous glimpses into open boxcar doors. As in detached, flickering frames of film he could see ragged men, hobos, looking back at him, or staring to one side at something he could not guess.

  Then the freight was gone again, nonexistent, as if it had never been. The industrial heart of America flowed on, seemingly without end.

  It was, in a sense, a scene that Norlund had never seen before. Only time travelers, he thought, could ever see this; not an old movie but reality, rerun with half a century of experience augmenting the perceptions of the beholder. It was a vision of power and beauty, horror and junk, ruthlessness and hope . . . Norlund knew, for almost the first time in his life, a wish to be a composer or a novelist.

  He was roused from reverie by a porter passing in the narrow corridor outside his compartment, whanging a melodious gong.

  “Fust call t’ dinner . . . fust call t’ dinner . . .”

  Looking at his watch, Norlund decided that they must be starting to serve early. But he was hungry; lunch in the Greek restaurant with Jerry seemed a very long time ago. And he hadn’t been ordered to stay locked up in his compartment for the duration of the trip. He checked his appearance in his private mirror, made sure he had his compartment key, and went out into the corridor.