A Century of Progress (3 page)

“No need. We’ll provide everything.”

Almost to himself, he asked: “Do you think I ought to tell her that Sandy will get well?”

“She will get well. My promise stands. Tell Marge whatever you like, as long as you don’t mention me or what we’re doing.”

Norlund gave her a long look. The blue eyes looked back at him, and he read both sympathy and amusement in them. Then he turned away and went into the drugstore, found the booth and made his call.

He was faintly surprised at how readily Marge accepted his story about a business trip—he supposed that his daughter’s attention and energies were focused elsewhere. For a little while he talked with her about Sandy. Norlund was optimistic, but made no direct predictions. Tomorrow morning, he told himself, he would call the hospital from wherever he was. Then he would know . . .

Walking back through the drugstore to the parking lot he felt light-headed, a little crazy. But there was the Datsun waiting for him, as real as any other car. Somehow Norlund could not generate a great deal of worry about himself personally in this situation. He wasn’t wealthy enough for anyone to concoct an elaborate plot to kidnap him. And now he was at least doing
something
, which was a hell of a lot better than simply sitting in the hospital waiting for a little girl to die.

He got back into the Datsun, and with an energetic movement closed the door. “Ginny, you say. Short for Virginia.”

“Yep.” His guide, employer, whatever she was, drove out of the parking lot and slid expertly back into the street’s traffic. Now they were heading west.

“Where we going, Ginny?”

He had expected more mystery, but her answer was frank, or at least sounded that way. “Out near Wheaton. There’s an old house out there, a former farmhouse actually, that we use as a kind of base. We’ll put you up there for tonight, and tomorrow you’ll be on your way. Meanwhile, the rest of this afternoon and this evening will be spent largely in explanations.”

“Hooray. I’ll be on my way where?”

“That’s one of the things the explanations are going to cover.”

“Do you suppose we could start them now?”

She glanced sideways at him. “It’ll be much easier if we do it at the house, believe me. It’ll be a sort of show and tell.”

“Okay. As long as you guys understand I’m not worth kidnapping, I give the plan a tentative okay.” Norlund sat back, watching the passage of ordinary houses and humdrum people. Then he turned to Ginny. “You know, right now I feel like thanking you. I don’t know what this is going to turn out to be, but at least it’s something. Know what I mean? At this moment, for me, life is not terminally dull and grim.”

Ginny showed him her best smile yet. “Now that’s the kind of man I like.”

With his first look at the place in Wheaton, Norlund silently agreed that it must have been a farmhouse once. It was a large old structure built on a hill, as a lot of farmhouses had been when there was endless land around to choose from. Now it was heavily surrounded by suburbia. Its shingled sides were painted a dull gray-green, as if in some attempt at camouflage, and it was set back a good distance from both of the streets bordering its large corner lot. One of these streets was lined with aging middle-class houses. The other was commercial, with some empty lots, and a scattering of shops and gas stations. The former farmhouse looked as if it could not make up its mind which street to belong to. To Norlund, approaching now along the residential way, it displayed an oversized set of sliding garage doors. The garage was obviously a comparatively recent addition, and made the whole structure look something like an auto repair shop. If it was, there were no signs to advertise it.

One of the garage doors rolled up automatically as Ginny pulled in off the street and up the long, shaded drive. Then the car was inside, the only vehicle in a garage easily big enough for three or four. As the door rolled down automatically behind them, she sighed with what sounded like relief.

“So far,” she pronounced, looking at Norlund. The look she gave him was for a moment happy, almost twinkly; but in a moment her business-like attitude was back.

“You live here?” Norlund asked, as they got out of the car.

“I stay here from time to time.” And she smiled again, this time as if at some private joke.

Norlund stretched his arms and shoulders, damning tiny modern cars as he usually did whenever he had to ride in one of them—how did the big guys manage? Then he looked around the garage. It appeared quite ordinary, maybe somewhat cleaner than most, with less casual junk and debris. Here and there the concrete floor was oil-spotted. Along the rear wall a bench held a few tools and boxes, suggesting that work of some kind was done here at least from time to time.

“Lead on,” said Norlund resolutely. And Ginny obligingly led him out of the garage and through an interior door that Norlund expected was going to bring them into a laundry room or kitchen. He was surprised by a narrow passage that traversed the width of the house to deliver them to another garage as big as the first one. The vehicle doors here were on a different wall of the house, and Norlund thought that the driveway approaching them must lead to the commercial street.

The single vehicle now occupying a space in this second garage was facing away from the large doors, straddling an old-fashioned grease pit sunken in the concrete floor. There were a lot more tools in here, including an overhead engine hoist.

But it was the vehicle that drew most of Norlund’s attention. It looked at least as old as the grease pit—probably older. It was a small truck, of the kind that in a modern version would have been called a van—a tall, dull black, slab-sided squarish machine that indeed looked as if it had been built sometime around nineteen-thirty. RADIO SURVEY CORPORATION, read the legend painted in hard-to-see dark red on the flat black side, along with an uninspired zigzag of yellow lightning.

Ginny would have led him across the garage to exit by another interior door, but Norlund delayed, looking at the truck. It appeared to have been quite well cared for, but it was no museum piece. There were small dents in the large rounded fenders, and a film of gray road dust on the dark paint. A small old-fashioned nameplate informed Norlund that the vehicle was a Dodge.

Ginny had paused, waiting for him patiently. “Think you can drive it without any trouble?”

Stepping closer to the vehicle, Norlund looked in through the open side window. From the design of the gearshift, and the other old controls, he judged the truck to be even a few years older than his first estimate. Behind the two front seats for driver and passenger, the large windowless interior held two floor-to-ceiling equipment racks with a short aisle between them. Almost in the very rear, at the end of the aisle, was another seat, facing toward the rear with its high back concealing whatever it faced. The two side racks, of three or four shelves each, were mostly filled with what looked like appropriately antique radio equipment. Not for decades had Norlund seen gear remotely like this: wooden cabinets, alternating with black crackle-finished metal boxes, bulky transformers nested in cloth-insulated wiring, exposed vacuum tubes the size of sixty-watt light bulbs. From all this stuff archaic power cables led down into lower wooden cabinets, in which Norlund could picture primitive lead-acid batteries arrayed in series and parallel.

“Don’t see why I couldn’t drive it,” he answered. “But what’s all this junk here in back?”

“Come along, Alan. We’re going to start explaining that right away. Among other things.”

“Good.” He followed.

The old building was even larger than it had appeared from the outside. They ascended a narrow stair, old enough to show deep wear on wooden treads. At one place the head clearance closed to a minimum, but Norlund was short enough to negotiate it handily. Once they were upstairs, modernity reasserted itself in the form of a vinyl-floored hallway with fluorescent lighting. The doors on either side of the hall were closed. Norlund hadn’t seen anyone else since entering the building, but now he could hear brief footsteps, and a door closing a couple of rooms away.

He looked round sharply when Ginny led him into a large room, sunlit from a row of windows fronting on trees and lawn, but unoccupied. This room, thought Norlund, looked like the place where the sales force might meet to plan monthly strategy. In the center was a large conference table, the wooden top shiny and unmarred though the edges and legs were definitely experienced. The room still had plenty of space for assorted other furniture; one table against a wall held a small modern coffee-maker, contents looking ready to pour. A light breeze came in through the well-screened windows, to stir casual scatterings of papers on various desks and tabletops.

The most eye-catching thing in the room was a huge photomural that all but completely covered the wall opposite the windows. Blown up black-and-white photographs had been put together on a special board to form a montage of a single scene. It was some kind of a street, or a pedestrian promenade, with a waterfront in the foreground and a row of unusual buildings in the rear. No people or vehicles were to be seen. There was a scattering of trees in full summer leaf, and what appeared to be flowerbeds among the walks. Central among the buildings was a skeletal tower, its top too high to be visible in the picture. In the background beyond the buildings there was more water, some kind of lagoon perhaps, and beyond that land again, with at least one more rank of exotic architecture. The buildings that were clearly visible were a varied lot, and certainly not ordinary houses. The whole thing reminded Norlund somewhat of a zoo—but there were no cages. A design for a museum? The world of tomorrow? Wait a minute . . .

“Have a seat, Alan. Coffee?”

“Sure. Thanks.” He pulled out one of the ordinary chairs that surrounded the conference table, and seated himself so he could keep looking at the giant picture. “Sugar and milk if you’ve got ‘em.” He couldn’t puzzle the picture out.

Norlund glanced around at the empty room at the couple of silent typewriters. “Is your organization somewhat undermanned? Or aren’t they back from lunch yet?” Suddenly he was a skeptic again, feeling an urge to needle, to demonstrate independence. Any moment now, he thought, the fanatics are going to burst out of concealment and start teaching me the true path to salvation.

Ginny had removed her raincoat and hung it in a small closet. Now she was busying herself around the coffee-maker. “We come and go. You’ll meet some of your co-workers later.” She turned her head to Norlund briefly. “I expect you’ll be able to recognize one of them.”

“Oh?” But it appeared that no details were going to be provided just now. “All right, lady, you know how to keep me interested.” Norlund found his eyes kept coming back to the huge picture. Something about it nagged him, as if the scene it showed ought to have been familiar.

He gave up on it for the time being and looked around at the room again, at the papers on a small nearby table. The top one looked like some kind of printout, with columns of incomprehensible numbers. In through the windows came the genteel murmur of traffic from the suburban residential street, invisible behind the summer screen of trees.

“Inconspicuous,” Norlund pronounced. “Though not really secret. Is that the note you guys are striving for?”

“All organizations have certain secrets.” Ginny came to set down a steaming styrofoam cup on the big table near his hand. “We do have some we consider vitally important, but we try not to work at it unnecessarily.”

Then, with her other hand, she placed another object on the table for his inspection. Somewhat smaller than a banana, it was vaguely the same shape, dark, smooth, hard-looking, a near-cylinder with tapering ends and a light curve. On each end there were a couple of small flanges with holes in them, evidently for mounting. “These will be a part of the job you do for us—a large part. Go ahead, pick it up and look it over.”

Norlund first took a sip of his coffee, which was hot and good. Then he picked up the so-far unnamed object. It was indeed hard and smooth, and moderately heavy. Metal? No, he decided, some unusual ceramic.

He asked: “What is it?”

Ginny had perched sideways on the big table now, swinging one foot lightly and sipping from her own styrofoam cup. The jeans and sweater showed her figure to good advantage. “It’s a kind of recording device. Think of what we’re doing as taking a kind of survey; your part of the job will be to distribute a number of objects, twenty or so, similar to this one, according to a plan that you’ll be given.”

“A survey of what? What do they record?”

“You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Huh. So I’ll be driving around in that truck downstairs, distributing these?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “Forget what I just said about you guys trying to be inconspicuous.”

“To distribute the devices properly, you’re going to need help. Either you or your partner will have to take certain readings on the truck’s electronic equipment, while the other person puts the devices in place.”

Norlund drank coffee again. “First I’ve heard about a partner.”

“You’re going to need one. It could be someone from here—it could, as a remote possibility, even be me. More likely it’ll be some local man that you hire when you get where you’re going.”

“Or woman, I suppose?”

Ginny’s smile returned faintly. “Anyone you hire locally for this particular job will almost certainly be a man.”

“Let me guess. Saudi Arabia?”

“Oh no.” She turned, directing his attention to the huge photo on the wall. “You’re going there, in among those buildings—you’ve been there before, actually. You used to live in that city.”

“Mystery, mystery. Is it all right if I have another cup of this? You make good coffee.”

“Sure, help yourself. I don’t want to be mysterious, really, Alan. I want to get on with the job. It’s just that there’s a right way and a wrong way to explain things.”

“Sounds like I’m being prepared for a shocker.” He poured himself coffee, then judiciously measured in a little sugar. He’d go without cream this time. “Sounds foreign. Not that I’d necessarily mind. I’ve lived in a fair number of countries at one time and another.”