A Century of Progress (18 page)

Holly had already gone on forward, through the tiny hatch leading to the cockpit. And now that big radial engine was coughing into life, shaking the furniture. Norlund had forgotten how loud big engines were.

A slim arm sleeved in a man’s shirt reached back through the open hatch and beckoned to him. Norlund moved forward. He was halfway through the hatch before he realized that the tiny pilot’s compartment ahead of him was meant to accommodate only one. Two smallish, thin people could probably squeeze in, but it was going to be a tight fit. And there would be only one safety belt.

Holly had squeezed herself over to one side. “Come on, Norlund, I won’t be able to talk to you if you ride back there. I’ve got to know how close you have to go to the damned tower, and when you’ve seen enough of it. Then you can go back in the cabin and play with your radios.”

He stuffed himself into the seat somehow, with Holly’s thigh pressed tightly against his. Then he reached back to pull the cabin hatch closed behind him. The safety belt was going to go unused.

They taxied, with guidance by arm-waves from a man trotting beside them on the ground. In tail-down position the aircraft’s nose was so high that it was almost impossible to see anything directly in front of it from the cockpit. Then Holly evidently got some kind of visual signal from the tower, for the next thing Norlund knew they were in a takeoff roll at deafening full power. He tried to find something other than a control handle to hang onto.

The engine had plenty of power. In seconds they were off the ground, gaining altitude fast.

Holly leveled off amid cloud-puffs, at about two thousand feet. She shouted toward Norlund’s ear: “How come Jeff just thought of this?”

He tried to make plausible noises. “Maybe something he noticed about the mast in Chicago. You know the airship people are getting nervous, especially since the
Akron
went down.” That had been only last February; Norlund had been catching up on his current events in newspapers and magazines. “Seventy-three men lost. They want to be really sure about everything before anyone tries mooring over downtown Manhattan.” He had been privately racking his memory of his previous sojourn through this decade, and he couldn’t recall anything about a dirigible ever actually mooring there. There was only the faintest suggestion that he might have heard of such a project once being planned.

Holly grumbled something that he couldn’t hear very well, about damned Nazis and the
Graf
.

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.