Time and Again (6 page)

I couldn't see what lay on the other side of the door, but a man immediately came through it, closing it behind him. Then he walked toward the corner putting on a hard-topped, flat-brimmed straw hat with a black band. His white shirt collar was open, his tie pulled down, and he was carrying his suit coat. From five stories above the man's head Rube and I watched him stop just short of the corner, shove his hat to the back of his head, sling his suit coat over one shoulder, and bring a wadded-up handkerchief from his back pocket. Dabbing at his forehead with the handkerchief, he began to walk tiredly, and turned the corner to move slowly along the brick sidewalk past the man on the porch, who sat reading his paper.

"Listen," said Rube, cupping a hand beside his ear, and I did the same. From far below but clearly enough, we heard the man on the sidewalk say, "Evening, Mr. McNaughton. Hot enough for you?" The man on the porch looked up from his paper. "Oh, hello, Mr. Drexsler. Yeah, it's another scorcher; paper says more of the same tomorrow." Still trudging by, a hot tired man on his way home from work, the man on the sidewalk shook his head ruefully. "Well, it has to end sometime," he said, and the man on the porch nodded, smiling, and said, "Maybe by Christmas."

The man on the sidewalk turned, cut across the street at an angle, climbed the steps of one of the false fronts across the street, and opened a screen door. "Edna!" he called. "I'm home." The screen door slammed behind him, and we watched him climb down a short ladder, duck under the scaffolding behind, and open a door in the wall. He walked through it, and it swung silently closed behind him.

In the false front next to this a screen door opened, and a woman walked out onto the porch and picked up the folded newspaper. She unfolded it and stood glancing over the front page; she was wearing an unusually long blue-checked housedress, its hem no more than a foot from the ground. At the sound of her opening screen door, the man on the porch across the street had glanced up momentarily, then gone back to his paper. Now, his arms spreading wide, he opened his paper, then folded it back to an inside page. The woman across the street walked back into the false front, carrying her paper. Propped in a curtained window beside her front door was a foot-square blue card printed in block letters, and I leaned forward a little, straining to read it. "It says ICE," Rube said. "On each edge is printed 25, 50, 75, or 100. You set the card in your window so that the number of pounds of ice you want the iceman to deliver when he comes along your street is at the top of the card."

I turned to look at Rube's face, but he was watching the scene below, forearms on the guardrail, his hands clasped loosely together. I said, "I don't see a camera but I assume you're either making or rehearsing some kind of movie down there." I couldn't help sounding a little bit irritated.

"No," said Rube. "The man on the porch is actually living in that house. It's complete inside, and a middle-aged woman comes in to cook and clean for him. Groceries are delivered every day in a light horse-drawn wagon labeled HENRY DORTMUND, FANCY GROCERIES. Twice a day a mailman in a gray uniform delivers mail, mostly ads. The man is waiting to hear whether he's been hired for any of several jobs he's applied for in the town. Presently he'll hear that he's been accepted for one of these jobs. At that point his habits will change. He'll begin going out into the town, to work." Rube glanced at me, then resumed his contemplation of the scene below. "Meanwhile he putters around the house. Waters his lawn. Reads. Passes the time of day with neighbors. Smokes Lucky Strike cigarettes. From green packages. Sometimes he listens to the radio, although in this weather there's lots of static. Friends visit him occasionally. Right now he's reading a freshly printed copy, done an hour ago, of the town newspaper for September 3, 1926. He's tired; it's been over a hundred down there in the afternoons for the last three days, and in the high eighties even at night. A real Indian-summer heat wave with no air conditioning. And if he looked up here right now all he'd see is a hot blue sky."

Keeping my voice patient, I said, "You mean they're following some sort of script."

"No, there's no script. He does as he pleases, and the people he sees act and speak according to the circumstances."

"Are you telling me that he actually believes he's in a town in —»

"No, no; not that either. He knows where he is, all right. He knows he's in a New York storage warehouse, in a kind of stage setting. He's been careful never to walk around the corner and look, but he knows that the street ends there, out of his sight. He knows that the long stretch of street he sees at the other end is actually a painted perspective. And while no one has told him so, I'm sure he understands that the houses across the street are probably only false fronts." Rube stood upright, turning from the railing to face me. "Si, all I can tell you right now is that he's doing his damnedest to feel that he's really and truly sitting there on the porch on a late-summer afternoon reading what Calvin Coolidge had to say this morning, if anything."

"Is there actually a town and a street like this?"

"Oh, yes; a street with houses, trees, and lawns precisely like that, right down to the last blade of grass and the wicker baby-carriage on the porch. You've seen an aerial shot of it; it's called Winfield, Vermont." Rube grinned at me. "Don't get mad," he said gently. "You have to see it before you can understand it."

We walked on, high up on the spider web under the humming machinery and just above the hundreds and hundreds of lights. We crossed directly over the house with the man on the porch, and it was strange to think that if he should look up here from his paper he wouldn't see us but only an apparent sky. He didn't look, though; just continued reading his paper until the eave of his porch roof cut him from view. Angling to the left onto another length of catwalk, we passed over a wall and the area was gone from sight.

It was instantly cooler, with a hint of dampness and a feel of rain, and we stopped to stare down. Far below lay a section of prairie and through it ran a tiny stream. On the other side of the area from where we stood grew a scattering of thin white-trunked birch trees. These were stragglers at the edge of a much thicker woods which stretched up and over the crest of a rise. Most of the woods, I realized now, was painted on a wall but it looked very real. Almost directly under our feet stood three tepees made of hide and daubed with faded circles, jagged lines, and sticklike figures of men and animals. A thin smoke drifted from the open top of each tepee. Before one of them a puppy lay tethered to a peg; he was worrying something held between his paws. As we stared, some of the lights aimed into the area went off one by one — we could just hear the clicks — and the triangular shadows of the tents slowly deepened on the grass of the prairie, and now we could see an occasional spark in the trickles of rising smoke.

"I love this one," Rube murmured. "Montana, about sixty miles from where Billings now stands. There are eight people — men and women and one child — in those tepees; all of them full-blooded Crow Indians. Come on."

In our felt boots, moving almost soundlessly on the narrow metal grill, we walked on across space, again crossing over a wall. We stopped high above a triangular-shaped area and stood directly over its shortest side facing ahead toward its farthest point. A white stone building rose from the floor almost to our feet. Again, it wasn't what it seemed from its front and one side; there were only two walls, supported at their backs by iron-pipe scaffolding. Extending outward from the base of these walls lay a rough stone pavement. Between the cracks of the pavement four men in overalls were planting narrow strips of sod and little clumps of weeds which they took from baskets. The rough slab paving ended in a short grassy slope which led down to what seemed to be an actual river. Water flowed there, brown and sluggish, moving along one side of the triangular area toward its point, off ahead.

Something about this pseudo building of white stone, which ended only a yard or two under our feet, was becoming familiar, and I walked on along the catwalk to where I could get a better view of its front. The side wall along which I walked was flying-buttressed, and then I saw that the front rose into twin square towers. From the sides of the towers projected carved stone figures; one was nearly close enough to reach down and touch. The figures were winged gargoyles and the buttressed wall and twin towers were those of a cathedral; this was Notre Dame of Paris; now I recognized it from movies and photographs.

Watching my face, Rube saw that I understood what we were seeing, and now he pointed across the river. I saw winding dirt roads trailing off into the distances of the other side; a few score of low wooden or stone structures; most of the area was farmland or woods. "Medieval Paris in the spring of 1451." Rube smiled. "It will be, that is, if we ever get the damn thing finished." His arm lifted, his forefinger pointing again, and now, across the river and far ahead, I saw a man in tan cotton pants and blue work shirt streaked with paint — a giant standing before houses and trees that reached no higher than his knees. A palette lay on his left forearm, and he was carefully painting in an extension of the forest, drawn in charcoal on the area wall on the other side of the brown, slow-flowing Seine. "Hell of a lot more work to be done here," said Rube. "Every stone of the cathedral to be aged with acid washes and stain; after all, in 1451 it was already several centuries old. In a sense this is our most ambitious project, but I doubt if even Danziger really thinks it can work. Ready? Let's move on."

Without stopping we walked over an empty area roughly rectangular in shape, one end a little wider than the other. Far below two men on hands and knees were marking off the area with strips of cloth tape and with colored chalk. "I don't quite remember what's going in here," Rube said, "but I think it will be a field hospital of the AEF near Vimy Ridge, France, 1918."

We looked down at a section of a snow-covered North Dakota farm in the dead of winter of 1924. The air over it was sharply cold; within half a minute we were shivering. We stood over a Denver street corner of 1901; it included a cobbled street with streetcar tracks, and a little grocery store with a tattered awning, into which two overalled men were wheeling supplies. Leaning on the rail beside me Rube murmured, ''Reconstructed from seventy-odd photographs and snapshots, including one magnificently clear stereoscope view. Together with Lord knows how many present-day, on-the-site measurements. We're not finished yet; they're stocking the store now, everything absolutely authentic to the time. When it's done, it'll be the way it was, you can be certain of that." He glanced at his watch. "There are a few others, but it's time to meet Danziger now." We turned to walk back, Rube just behind me. "And our New York site doesn't need to be duplicated; we'll catch that after lunch. You hungry? Confused? Tired and irritable?"

I said, "Yeah, and my feet hurt."

4

We ate in a small cafeteria on the sixth floor, a windowless fluorescent-lighted room tiled in pale blue and yellow and not very much larger than a big living room. Danziger was already waiting, seated alone at a table. As we picked up trays he waved to us; on the table before him stood a piece of apple pie and a bowl of soup covered with a saucer to keep it warm. Rube and I slid our trays along the chromed rails. I took a glass of iced tea, and a ham-and-cheese sandwich from a stack of them already made up and wrapped; Rube had Swiss steak and mixed vegetables, served up by a nice-looking girl. There was no cashier at the end of the rails, no charge, and Rube picked up his tray, said he'd see me later, and walked over to join a man and a woman just starting to eat. I carried my tray to Dr. Danziger's table, looking the place over as I walked. There were only seven or eight people besides us, with room for about a dozen more, and as I stood unloading my tray after speaking to Danziger, he guessed what I was thinking and smiled.

He said, "Yes, it's a small project. Maybe the smallest of any importance in the history of modern government, a pleasing thought. We have only about fifty people who are fully involved; eventually you'll meet most of them. We can and do occasionally draw on the services and resources of various government branches. But we do it in a way that doesn't suggest what we're up to or arouse questions." He lifted the saucer from his bowl of soup. "No chocolate pie today, damn it."

He picked up his spoon and sat watching me unwrap the sandwich I didn't really want. I was too tense to feel like eating; I'd have liked a drink. He said, "We maintain secrecy not by stamping things 'Classified' and wearing lapel badges but through inconspicuous-ness. The President, of course, knows what we're doing, though I'm not sure he thinks we do. Or that he even remembers us. Unavoidably we're known to at least two Cabinet members, several members of the Senate, the House, the Pentagon. I could wish that somehow even that weren't necessary but of course they're the people who get us our funds. Actually I can't complain; I make my reports, they're accepted, and they haven't really bothered us."

I made some sort of reply. The couple eating with Rube across the room were the girl I'd seen practicing the Charleston and a young guy about the same age. Danziger saw me looking at them, and said, "Two more of the lucky ones: Ursula Dahnke and Franklin Miller. She was a high-school mathematics teacher in Eagle River, Wisconsin; he managed a Safeway store in Bakersfield, California. She's for the North Dakota farm, he's for Vimy Ridge; you probably saw him bayonet practicing this morning. I'll introduce you next time, but right now: How much do you know about Albert Einstein?"

"Well, he wore a button sweater, had bushy hair, and was terrible at arithmetic."

"Very good. There are only a few other things to say after that. Did you know that years ago Einstein theorized that light has weight? Now, that's about as silly a notion as a man could have formed. Not another human being in the world thought that or ever had; it contradicts every feeling we have about light." Danziger sat watching me for a moment; I was interested, and tried to look it. "But there was a way to test that theory. During eclipses of the sun, astronomers began observing that light passing it bent in toward it. Pulled by the sun's gravity, you see. Inescapably, that meant that light has weight: Albert Einstein was right, and he was off and running."

Danziger stopped for several spoonfuls of soup. My sandwich, I'd found, was pretty good: plenty of butter, and the cheese actually had some taste; I was hungry now. Danziger put down his spoon, touched his mouth with his napkin, and said, "Time passed. That astonishing mind continued to work. And Einstein announced that E equals MC squared. And, God forgive us, two Japanese cities disappeared in the blink of an eye and proved he was right again.

"I could go on; the list of Einstein's discoveries is a considerable one. But I'll skip to this: Presently he said that our ideas about time are largely mistaken. And I don't doubt for an instant that he was right once more. Because one of his final contributions not too long before he died was to prove that all his theories are unified. They're not separate but interconnected, each depending upon and confirming the others; they largely explain how the universe works, and it doesn't work as we'd thought."

He began peeling the red cellophane strip from the little package of crackers that came with his soup, looking at me, waiting. I said, "I've read a little on what he said about time, but I can't say I really know what he meant."

"He meant that we're mistaken in our conception of what the past, present and future really are. We think the past is gone, the future hasn't yet happened, and that only the present exists. Because the present is all we can see."

"Well, if you pinned me down, I'd have to admit that that's how it seems to me."

He smiled. "Of course. To me, too. It's only natural. As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we're like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can't see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it's there."

"Did he mean that literally, though? Or did he mean —»

"He always meant exactly what he said. When he said light has weight, he meant that the sunlight lying on a field of wheat actually weighs several
tons.
And now we know — it's been measured — that it really does. He meant that the tremendous energy theoretically binding atoms together could really be released in one unimaginable burst. As it really can, a fact that has changed the course of the human race. He also meant precisely what he said about time: that the past, back there around the curves and bends,
really exists.
It is actually there." For maybe a dozen seconds Danziger was silent, his fingers playing with the little red cellophane strip. Then he looked up and said simply, "I am a theoretical physicist on leave here from Harvard University. And my own tiny extension of Einstein's giant theory is… that a man ought somehow to be able to step out of that boat onto the shore. And walk back to one of the bends behind us."

I was struggling to keep a thought from showing in my eyes: that this might be an intelligently, plausibly, mildly deluded old man who'd persuaded a lot of people in New York and Washington to join him in constructing a warehouse full of fantasies. Could it possibly be that I was the only one who'd guessed? Maybe not; this morning Rossoff had made a joke — an uneasy one? — about my joining a booby hatch. I nodded thoughtfully. "Walk back how?"

Danziger had a little soup left, and now he finished it, tipping his bowl to get the last of it, and I finished my sandwich. Then he raised his head, his eyes looked directly into mine, and I looked back into his and knew that Danziger wasn't crazy. He was eccentric, very possibly mistaken, but he was sane, and I was suddenly glad I was here. He said, "What day is this?"

"Thursday."

"What date?"

"The… twenty-sixth, isn't it?"

"You tell me."

"The twenty-sixth."

"What month?"

"November."

"And year?"

I told him; I was smiling a little now.

"How do you know?"

Waiting for a reply to form itself in my mind, I sat staring across the table at Danziger's intent, bald-headed face; then I shrugged. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"Then I'll answer for you. You know the year, the day and the month, for literally millions of reasons: because the blanket you woke up under this morning may have been at least partly synthetic; because there is probably a box in your apartment with a switch; turn that switch, and the faces of living human beings will appear on a glass screen in the face of that box and speak nonsense to you. Because red and green lights signaled when you might cross a street on your way here this morning; and because the soles of the shoes you walked in are a synthetic that will outlast leather.

"Because the fire engine that passed you sounded a hooter, not a siren; because the teen-aged children you saw were dressed as they were; and because the Negro you walked by eyed you warily, as you did him, each of you trying to conceal it. Because the front page of the
Times
looked precisely as it did this morning and as it never will again or ever has before. And because millions and millions and millions of still other such facts will confront you all day long.

"Most of them are possible only in this century, many only in the latter half of it. Some are possible only this decade, some only this year, others only this month, and a few only on this particular day. Si, you are surrounded by literally countless facts that bind you to this century… year… month… day… and moment, like ten billion invisible threads."

He picked up his fork to cut into his pie, but instead he raised it to touch his forehead with the handle. "And in here there are millions more of those invisible threads. Your knowledge, for example, of who is President at this moment of history. That Frank Sinatra could now be a grandfather. That buffalo no longer roam the prairie, and that Kaiser Wilhelm isn't generally considered too much of a threat any more. That our coins are now made of copper, not silver. That Ernest Hemingway is dead, everything is turning to plastic, and that things don't go one bit better with Coke. The list is endless, all of it a part of your own consciousness and of the common consciousness. And it binds you as it binds us all to the day and to the very moment when precisely that list and only that list is possible. You never escape it, and I'll show you why." Danziger crushed his paper napkin and set it on the edge of his plate. "Finished? Want anything more?"

"No, that was fine. Thank you."

"Pretty frugal lunch but good for you. So they say. Let's go up on the roof. I'll take my pie along."

Outside, at the end of a short corridor, we climbed an enclosed flight of concrete fire stairs to a door that opened onto the roof. The morning rain had stopped, the sky was nearly clear again except for horizon clouds, and several girls and men were sitting out there in canvas chairs, their faces lifted to the sun. At the sound of our feet on the gravel as we stepped out onto the roof, they turned and spoke, and Danziger smiled and flicked his hand in a wave. The rooftop was immense; a city block square of tar and gravel, ordinary enough except for scores of new skylights set into it, and a forest of stacks and vents. Ducking under rusting guy wires attached to the taller stacks, walking around an occasional puddle, we crossed to a glob of noon shade around the base of the wooden water tower. Danziger cut into his pie, and I stood looking around.

Far to the south and east, I could see the outsize bulk of the Pan Am Building overshadowing and dwarfing the entire area around Grand Central Station. Beyond it I saw the dull-gray tip of the Chrysler Building, and to the right of that and farther south the Empire State Building. After that, there was only a nearly solid wall of mist already stained yellow with industrial smoke. To the west, only a block or so away, lay the Hudson River looking like the opaque gray sewer that it is. On its other shore rose the cliffs of New Jersey. To the east I saw a between-buildings sliver of Central Park.

Danziger gestured at the invisible horizons with his fork and said, "There lies what? New York? And the world beyond it? Yes, you can say that, of course; the New York and world of the moment. But you can equally well say that there lies November twenty-sixth. Out there lies the day you walked through this morning; it is filled with the inescapable facts that
make
it today. It will be almost identical tomorrow, very likely, but not quite. In some households things will have worn out, used today for the last time. An old dish will have finally broken, a hair or two come out gray at the roots, the first flick of a new illness begun. Some people alive today will be dead. Some scattered buildings will be a little closer to completion. Or destruction. And what will lie out there then, equally inescapably, will be a little different New York and world and therefore a little different day." Danziger began walking forward toward an edge of the roof, cutting off a bite of pie as he walked. "Pretty good pie. You should have had some. I made certain we got a damn good cook."

It was nice up here: As we walked, the sun, deflected up from the rooftop, felt good on the face. We stopped at the edge of the roof and leaned on the waist-high extension of the building wall, and again Danziger gestured at the city. "The degree of change each day is usually too slight to perceive much difference. Yet those tiny daily changes have brought us from a time when what you'd have seen down there instead of traffic lights and hooting fire engines, was farmland, treetops, and streams; cows at pasture, men in tricornered hats; and British sailing ships anchored in a clear-running, tree-shaded East River. It was out there once, Si. Can you see it?"

I tried. I stared out at the uncountable thousands of windows in the sooty sides of hundreds of buildings, and down at the streets nearly solid with car tops. I tried to turn it back into a rural scene, imagining a man down there with buckles on his shoes and wearing a pigtailed white wig, walking along a dusty country road called the broad way. It was impossible.

"Can't do it, can you? Of course not. You can see yesterday; most of it is still left. And there's plenty of 1965, '62, '58. There's even a good deal left of nineteen hundred. And in spite of all the indistinguishable glass boxes and of monstrosities like the Pan Am Building and other crimes against nature and the people" — he waggled a hand before his face as though erasing them from sight — "there are fragments of still earlier days. Single buildings. Sometimes several together. And once you get away from midtown, there are entire city blocks that have been where they still stand for fifty, seventy, even eighty and ninety years. There are scattered places a century or more old, and a very few which actually knew the presence of Washington." Rube was up here now, I saw, wearing a felt hat and a light topcoat, deferentially waiting a few token paces out of earshot. "Those places are fragments still remaining, Si" — Danziger's fork swept the horizon once more — "of days which once lay out there as real as the day lying out there now: still-surviving fragments of a clear April morning of 1871, a gray winter afternoon of 1840, a rainy dawn of 1793." He glanced at Rube from the corner of his eye, then looked back to me. "One of those survivals, in my opinion, is close to being a kind of miracle. Have you ever seen the Dakota?"