Time and Again (46 page)

"Yes."

For as long as a minute we both stood looking down its length, remembering what it had been. Then Julia glanced at me, managing a smile, and we walked down Fifth, passing the shining immensities, the breathtakingly handsome and the miserably ugly architectural confections along the mile or so that at least half the people in the world have seen in actuality or on film. Those great smooth-faced buildings and walls of glass are alien even to modern eyes, and I'm not sure Julia was able to apprehend them fully, they were so divorced from anything and everything she knew. It was so nearly impossible, I think, to take in and even try to comprehend, that when she looked across Fifty-first Street just ahead, suddenly narrowing her eyes to be sure she really saw it, she felt as I once had, but even more strongly — she burst into tears at sight of St. Patrick's Cathedral standing almost unchanged in this other world. Across the street from the cathedral at Rockefeller Center — which I don't think Julia ever even noticed — there are stone benches, and I led Julia to one. Then we sat while she stared over at St. Pat's; then she looked up Fifth Avenue, back at St. Patrick's for a reference point; then she looked down Fifth to the south; then once again her eyes swung back to the old cathedral for relief. It helped convince her that she was where she was, its familiarity a comfort and reassurance, and presently we walked on. Here and there Julia found familiar old names; women's stores she'd seen last on Broadway. And we'd stop while she stared at the glittering display windows, drinking it in, fascinated by the jewelry, the clothes, the furs, hats, and shoes. I said. "The Ladies' Mile, Julia," and she nodded.

"I think I like it. I think possibly…" She hesitated, then continued, "They're very strange, but I think possibly I'd come to like these things." Once more she looked slowly up and down the length of Fifth Avenue. "Even these buildings." She shook her head. "Who could believe it? Who could ever imagine
this?"

At Forty-second Street we looked at the soot-marked white building of the main Public Library, and I marveled with Julia at the absence of the great slant-walled reservoir. Then — she needed rest from looking — I took her to a small bar I remembered on Thirty-ninth Street. At first she refused to go to "a saloon," but then she accepted the knowledge that today women did many things they once hadn't done.

We had a table off in a corner away from the bar, only one other couple there, whispering in a corner. Julia had a glass of wine, I had whiskey-and-soda, and Julia relaxed. By tacit agreement we hadn't talked until now about what we'd left behind us; we'd needed relief from it, and had had it, but now again we talked of the fire… of Jake Pickering… of Carmody's strange behavior, and our flight from Inspector Byrnes. In this room, the sounds of today's New York a part of the very air, the names we spoke sounded odd to me, remote, even faintly comical. To have actually been frightened of walrus-mustached Inspector Byrnes who had never heard of fingerprints seemed absurd; had we really been scared or only participating in some sort of harmless make-believe? That was something of the tenor of my thoughts as we quietly talked over our drinks, and the reason I spoke with a little smile. But Julia was serious, not understanding my smile, and of course I understood that for her we were talking of a world in which Byrnes, Pickering, Carmody, and the fire in the World Building were far more real than this.

We said nothing new; we were only obeying a necessity to talk things over. Julia was worried about what her aunt would be thinking now, and hanging unspoken over everything we said was the question of Julia's future. But that needed time to work out, and I said nothing about it because I had nothing to say, though I had a lot to think about.

I had other things to show Julia, and after a while we left, and found a cab. It was still light, and I took Julia down to the Empire State Building, and we went up to the observation floor. In the elevator during the long long express ride past dozens of floors, Julia watched the floor-number panel, trying to believe we were really moving up this fast and this high, and her hand, holding mine, squeezed tight in the realization that we were. On the stone-railed open-air platform some ninety-odd floors above the earth, she looked out over the hazed city, making herself understand that here high over Thirty-fourth Street the distant greenery far ahead was really Central Park, and that the network of car-filled streets spread out far below us was really the city she'd known intimately but here no longer did. She looked out at the city, the park, the rivers. Then she looked around at the sky and pointed out a remarkable cloud; she'd never seen one anything like it before. I looked, and in a sense I suppose it really was a cloud — it had become one. High in the sky the air must have been windless, and a jet trail, its sharp edges gone, had puffed itself up into an absolutely straight, thin, mile-long cloud touched by the lowering sun. And then I, too, saw it not as a jet trail but as a strange elongated, ruler-straight cloud, and had one more glimpse of the different view Julia had of my world.

She was interested when I told her what the cloud really was; and she enjoyed her visit up here, impressed and excited by it. But presently she turned from the railing, sighing a little, and said, "And now it's enough, Si; this is all I can stand right now. Please take me home."

So instead of a restaurant for dinner — I'd meant to show off one of the nicer places — we stopped at my building's delicatessen, and I picked up some chopped steak and frozen vegetables. The vegetables — corn and some broccoli frozen hard and sealed in transparent plastic, and which I dropped into boiling water in their sacks — fascinated Julia. As we all do, she liked the easiness of preparing them, but of course the taste or tastelessness was something else, though she was polite.

We took our coffee into the living room, and, refreshed and revived, Julia said, "I've seen your world now, Si; I've had a glimpse of it, anyway. Now tell me what's been happening during all the years — it's so strange to say this — between my time and this." She snuggled back into the davenport cushions, looking at me as expectantly as a child about to hear a story.

I suppose I responded to her smile and expectation of pleasure, because — pausing to think,
Where do you begin? How do you sum up decades? —
I found myself hunting for good things to say. "Well, smallpox has been almost eliminated; you never see pock-marks now. And cholera. I don't suppose there's been even a case of it for years. Not in the United States, anyway." Julia nodded. "And polio — infantile paralysis. It's been just about eliminated, at least in all the big civilized countries."

She nodded again; she seemed to have expected this. "And heart disease, too? And cancer?"

"Well, no, not yet. But we're replacing hearts! Surgically removing the damaged heart and replacing it with another one from someone who just died."

"That's miraculous! And they
live?"

"Well, not too long, usually. It doesn't really work very well. But it will."

"And how long do people live? To a hundred or more, I'm sure. I read a prediction in the
Atlantic Monthly —
"

"Actually, Julia, people don't seem to be living much longer, if at all, than in your time. Matter of fact, there are some new things that, ah — are killing us off and shortening our lives that don't exist in your time. Air pollution, for example. But we have air conditioning."

"What's that?"

"Machines that cool off the air in summer."

"Everywhere?"

"No, no; just indoors. I've got one in the bedroom — that thing in the window, if you noticed it. During a hot spell it'll cool the air to seventy degrees."

"What a luxury."

"Yeah, it's pretty nice. And they have them in most offices now, restaurants, movies, hotels."

"What are movies? You've mentioned them before."

I explained that they were like television only much larger, much clearer, and — every now and then — much better. Then I found myself talking about electric blankets, supermarkets, radar, air travel, automatic washers, dishwashers, and even, Lord forgive me, freeways.

Julia finished the last of her coffee, picked up my empty cup and saucer, and took it with hers to the kitchen. She walked back into the living room saying, "But what's been
happening,
Si? Tell me about that." As I thought about it, in terms of actual events, she began wandering about the room, fingering the drapes, looking at the back of the television set, flicking the overhead light fixture on and off a few times. I was stuck for an answer. It reminded me of letter writing; you can fill several pages describing a weekend, but try bringing an old friend up-to-date with the events of the last five years, and it's not so easy. What had happened in more than a lifetime?

"Well, there are fifty states now."

"Fifty?"

"Yep," I said as smugly as though I'd created them. "All the territories are states now. Also Alaska and Hawaii. And they've changed the flag; it has fifty stars now."

Julia nodded, interested; she was poking through the magazine rack at the end of the davenport, and now she pulled out a newspaper.

"And, let's see. Well, there was an earthquake in San Francisco in… 1906, I think. The city was pretty well destroyed, mostly by the fire afterward."

"Oh, I'm so sorry; it's a lovely city, I've heard." She nodded at the newspaper in her hand. "You have a way to print photographs, I see." She put down the paper and walked to my bookshelves.

"Yes, also in color. There ought to be an old
Life
magazine around somewhere with some color photos. And — my God, how could I forget! We're shooting rockets into space! They carry capsules with men in them. A couple of them have traveled to the moon, and landed. With men in them. And returned to earth."

"Do you mean that? To the
moon?
With men in them?"

"Yes, it's really true." Again I heard the ridiculous note in my voice sounding as though I'd had something to do with it.

She looked delighted. "Have they been
on
the moon?"

"Yep. Walked around on it."

"That's fascinating!"

I hesitated, then said, "Yeah. I suppose so. But not as much as I'd have thought when I was a kid reading science fiction." She looked puzzled, and I said, "It's hard to explain, Julia, but… it doesn't seem to mean anything. After the excitement of the actual trip — it was on television, if you can imagine that, Julia; we could actually see and hear the men on the moon — I almost forgot about it. Right away, too; I seldom thought about it afterward. It was unbelievably courageous of the men, and yet… somehow the project almost seemed to lack dignity. Because it didn't have any real purpose or point." I stopped because she wasn't listening.

As I'd talked, Julia had been looking over my book titles and presently she'd taken down a novel and begun leafing through it. Now, suddenly, she swung around to face me, and her face and neck were scarlet right down to the white collar of her blouse. "Si. Things like this" — she glanced at the open pages of the book in her hands, horrified — "are said in
print?"
She clapped the book shut as though the words could crawl off the page. "I would never have believed it!" She couldn't look at me.

I had nothing to say. How explain the changes in thought over more than a lifetime? But I was smiling; the novel she'd looked at was really very mild. There were others on the shelves that might literally have made her faint.

Disturbed, agitated, Julia had reached out and plucked another book from the shelves almost at random. She read the title aloud, hardly listening to herself, anxious to bury the subject of the horror she'd come onto. " 'A Pictorial History of World War Eye,' " she said. Then the meaning of the words came to her. "A war?
World
war? What does that mean, Si?" She started to open the book, and as her hand moved I was on my feet and walking quickly toward her.

It's always astonishing to realize later how lightning-fast the mind can sometimes work, what a lengthy series of thoughts and images it can produce within a fraction of a second. It had been a long time since I'd looked through the book Julia was opening. But during two very fast steps to her side I was remembering dozens of the photographs it contained: a destroyed town, only rubble and partial walls, and in the foreground a dead horse in a ditch… refugees on a dirt road, the frightened face of a small girl looking at the camera… an airplane going down in flames… a trench half filled with dead bodies in uniform, their legs wrapped in cloth puttees, the face of one of them decomposed so badly it was mostly skull, though the hair remained. And one photograph I particularly remembered in every detail: On a shelf-like projection shoved into the wall of the trench sat a bareheaded soldier, alive. His feet were ankle-deep in water at the bottom of the trench directly beside a corpse, and he was smoking a cigarette, looking out at the camera hollow-eyed, stupefied, as though he'd never smiled or ever would. These horrors, I had suddenly realized, mustn't be revealed to Julia unless she joined the world that had produced them, and — making myself smile — I took the book from her hand just before she could open its pages. "Oh, yes," I said easily, turning the book to look at the gold letters of the title on the spine, as though to confirm the title. "That happened a long time ago."

"A world war?"

"They called it that, Julia, because… all the world was concerned about it. It was everyone's business, you see, and… they soon put a stop to it. I'd almost forgotten it."

How much sense that made to her, if any, I don't know. She said, "And what does 'World War
Eye'
mean?"

"Well…" I couldn't think of anything to say but the truth. "That isn't a letter of the alphabet. It's a number, Julia, a Roman numeral."

"World War…
one?
There've been
more?"

"A second one."

She was suspicious. "And — what was it like?"