chapter 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'up to or arouse questions." He lifted the saucer from his bowl of soup. "No chocolate pie today,(re) 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'the people who get us our funds. Actually I can't complain; I make my reports, they're accepted,(re) 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 beenmeasured—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 struggling to keep a thought from showing in my eyes: that this might be an intelligentl(was) y, 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 partlysynthetic; 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?" "The what?" He nodded. "If you'd ever seen it, you'd remember that name. Rube!" Rube stepped smartly forward, the alert lieutenant responding to the colonel's call. "Show Si the Dakota, will you, please?" Outside the big warehouse, Rube and I walked east to Central Park; I'd picked up my hat and coat in the little ground-level office. In the park we turned onto West Drive, which is the street just inside the western boundary of the park. We walked along under the trees; a few still had their leaves, clean and greener now after the morning's rain, and Rube said, looking around us, "This park itself is something of a miracle of survival, too. Right here in the heart of what must be the world's most changeable city are, not just acres, but several square miles that have been preserved practically unchanged for decades. Lay a Central Park map of the early eighteen eighties beside a map of today, and there on both maps are all the old names and places: the reservoir, the lake, North Meadow, the Green, the pool, Harlem Mere, the obelisk. We've photocopied some of the old maps to precisely the size of a modern one, then superimposed one over the other between glass sheets, and shot a good strong light through them. Allowing for small mapmakers' errors, they've coincided, the sizes and shapes of the things in the park unchanged through the years. Si, the very curve of this road, and nearly all the roads and even the footpaths, are unaltered." I didn't doubt it; off to our left, the low boundary wall of the park was not quick-poured concrete but old carefully mortised cut-stone, and the very look of the park, of its bridges and even its trees, is old. "Details are changed, of course," Rube was saying. "The kinds of benches, trash baskets, and painted signs, the way the paths and roads are surfaced. But the old photographs all show that except for automobiles on the roadways there is no difference you can see from, say, six or seven stories up." Rube must have timed what he was saying, or maybe it was past experience at this, because now as we passed under a final tree beside the walk, rounding the curve that led off the West Drive and onto the Seventy-second Street exit from the park, he lifted an arm to point ahead. As we walked out from under the branches of the tree he said, "From an upper apartment of that building, for example," and then I saw it and stopped dead in my tracks. There across the street just outside the park stood a tall block-wide structure utterly unlike any I'd ever before seen in all New York. One look and you knew it was what Danziger had said: a magnificent survival of another time. I later came back—it was after a snowfall, as you can see— and took photographs of the building, a whole roll of them, the super even taking me up to the roof. The one at the top of the next page I took from where Rube and I stood; the building you see there is pale yellow brick handsomely trimmed in chocolate-colored stone, and as one of my later shots shows, each of its eight stories is just twice as high as the stories of the modern apartment house beside it.
It's a wonderful sight, and the roof almost instantly pulled my eyes up; it was like a miniature town up there—of gables, turrets, pyramids, towers, peaks. From roof edge to highest peak it must have been forty feet tall; acres of slanted surfaces shingled in slate, trimmed with age-greened copper, and peppered with uncountable windows, dormer and flush; square, round, and rectangular; big and small; wide, and as narrow as archers' slits. As the shot that I took on the roof shows—at the bottom of the previous page—it rose into flagpoles and ornamental stone spires; itflattened out into promenades rimmed with lacy wrought-iron fences; and everywhere it sprouted huge fireplace chimneys. All I could do was turn to Rube, shaking my head and grinning with pleasure. He was grinning, too, as proud as though he'd built the place. "That's the way they did things in the eighties, sonny! Some of those apartments have seventeen rooms, and I mean big ones; you can actually lose your way in an apartment like that. At least one of them includes a morning room, reception room, several kitchens, I don't know how many bathrooms, and a private ballroom. The walls are fifteen niches thick; the place is a fortress. Take your time, and look it over; it's worth it." It was. I stood staring up at it, finding more things to be delighted with: handsome balconies of carved stone under some of the big old windows, a wrought-iron balcony running clear around the seventh story, rounded columns of bay windows rising up the building's side into rooftop cupolas. Rube said, "Plenty of light in those apartments: The building's a hollow square around a courtyard with a couple of spectacular big bronze fountains." ''Well, it's great, absolutely great." I was laughing, shaking my head helplessly, it was such a fine old place. "What is it, how come it's still there?""It's the Dakota. Built in the early eighties when this was practically out of town. People said it was so far from anything it might as well be in the Dakotas, so that's what it was called. That's the story, anyway. I know you won't be astonished to learn that a group of progress-minded citizens was all hot to tear it down a few years ago, and replace it with one more nice new modern monster of far more apartments in the same space, low ceilings, thin walls, no ballrooms or butler's pantries, but plenty of profit, you can damn well believe, for the owners. For once the tenants had money and could fight back; a good many rich celebrities live there. They got together, bought it, and now the Dakota seems safe. Unless it's condemned to make room for a crosstown freeway right through Central Park.""Can we get in and look around?" "We don't have time today." I looked up at the building again. "Must get a great view of the park from this side." "You sure do." Rube seemed uninterested suddenly, glancing at his watch, and we turned to walk back along West Drive. Presently we walked out of the park; ahead to the west I could see the immense warehouse again, and read the faded lettering just under its roofline: BEEKEY BROTHERS, MOVING STORAGE, 555-8811. If I'd expected Danziger's office, as I think I did, to be luxurious and impressive, I was wrong. Just outside it the black-and-white plastic nameplate beside the door merely said E.E. DANZIGER, no title. Rube knocked, Danziger yelled to come in, Rube opened the door, gestured me in, and turned away, murmuring that he'd see me later. Seated behind his desk, Danziger was on the phone, and he gestured me to a chair beside the desk. I sat down—I'd left my hat and coat downstairs again—and looked around as well as I could without seeming too curious. It was just an office, smaller than Rossoff's and a lot more bare. It looked unfinished really, the office of a man who had to have one but wasn't interested in it, and who spent most of his time outside it. The outer wall was simply the old brick of the warehouse covered by a long pleated drape which didn't extend quite far enough to cover it completely. There was a standard-brand carpet; a small hanging bookshelf on one wall; on another wall a photograph of a woman with her hair in a style of the thirties; on a third wall, a huge aerial photograph of Winfield, Vermont, this view different from the one I'd seen earlier. Danziger's desk was straight from the stock of an office-supplies store, and so were the two leather-padded metal chairs for visitors. On the floor in acorner stood a cardboard Duz carton filled to overflowing with a stack of mimeographed papers. On a table against the far wall something bulky lay covered by a rubberized sheet. Danziger finished his phone conversation; it had been something or other about authorizing someone to sign vouchers. He opened his top desk drawer, took out a cigar, peeled off the cellophane, then cut the cigar exactly in half with a pair of big desk scissors, and offered one of the halves to me. I shook my head, and he put it back in the drawer, then put the other half in his mouth, unlighted. "You liked the Dakota," he said; it wasn't a question, but a statement of fact. I nodded, smiling, and Danziger smiled too. He said, "There other essentially unchanged buildings in New York, some of them equally fine and a lot older,(are) yet the Dakota is unique; you know why?" I shook my head. "Suppose you were to stand at a window of one of the upper apartments you just saw, and look down into the park; say at dawn when very often no cars are to be seen. All around you is a building unchanged from the day it was built, including the room you stand in and very possibly even the glass pane you look through. And this is what's unique in New York: Everything you see outside the window is also unchanged." He was leaning over the desk top staring at me, motionless except for the half cigar which rolled slowly from one side of his mouth to the other. "Listen!" he said fiercely. "The real-estate firm that first managed the Dakota is still in business and we've microfilmed their early records. We know exactly when all the apartments facing the park have stood empty, and for how long." He sat back. "Picture one of those upper apartments standing empty for two months in the summer of 1894. As it did. Picture our arranging—as we are—to sublet that very apartment for those identical months during the coming summer. And now understand me. If Albert Einstein is right once again—as he is—then hard as it may be to comprehend, the summer of 1894 still exists. That silent empty apartment exists back in that summer precisely as it exists in the summer that is coming. Unaltered and unchanged, identical in each, and existing in each. I believe it may be possible this summer, just barely possible, you understand, for man to walk out of that unchangedapartmentandintothatothersummer."Hesatbackinhis(a) chair, his eyes on mine, the cigar bobbing slightly as he chewed it. After a long moment I said, "Just like that?" "Oh, no!" He shot forward again, leaning across the desk toward me. "Not just like that by a long shot," he said, and suddenly smiled at me. "The uncountable millions of invisible threads that exist in here, Si"—he touched his forehead—"would bind him to this summer, no matter how unaltered the apartment around him." He sat back in his chair, looking at me, still smiling a little. Then he said very softly and matter-of-factly, "But I would say this project began, Si, on the clay it occurred to me that just possibly there is a way to dissolve those threads." I understood; I knew the purpose of the project. I'd understood it for some time, of course, but now it had been put into words. For several seconds I sat nodding slowly, Danziger waiting for me to say something. Finally I did. "Why? Why do you want to?"He slouched back in his chair, one long arm hooked over its back, and shrugged a shoulder. "Why did the Wrights want to build an airplane? To create jobs for stewardesses? Or give us a way to bomb Vietnam? No, I think all they really had in mind was to see if they could. I think it's why the Russki scientists shot the first satellite into orbit, no matter what supposed purposes they advanced. For no other real reason than to see if they could, like kids blasting a firecracker under a tin can to see if it'll really go up. And I think it was reason enough. For their scientists and ours. Impressive purposes were invented later to justify the horrible expense of these toys, but the first tries were just for the hell of it, boy, and that's our reason, too." It was okay with me. I said, "Fine, but why Win-field, Vermont, in 1926? Or Paris of 1451? Or the Dakota apartments in 1894?" "The places aren't important to us." He took the half cigar from his mouth, looked at it distastefully, and put it back. "And neither the times. They're nothing but targets of opportunity. We'renotespeciallyinterestedin theCr(are) ow Indians. Of 1850 or any other time. But as it happens, there are some thousands of federally owned acres of Montana land still virtually untouched, unchanged from the 1850's. For four or five days at most the Department of Agriculture will undertake to close the road through it—no cars or Greyhound buses—and to keep the jets out. They can also provide a herd of approximately a thousand buffalo. If we could have the area for a month we wouldn't need the simulation down on the Big Floor. As it is, our man will get used to it here, and—we hope—be ready to make the most of the few days we'll have in the real location. "As for Winfield—" he nodded toward the wall photograph. "It's just a very small town in an area of played-out farmland, virtually abandoned when we got it. For forty years the town was slowly dying, gradually losing population. For the last thirty of those years hardly anyone wasted money modernizing and trying to fight the inevitable. It's an old story in parts of New England; the ghost towns aren't all in the West. This one was more isolated than most, so we bought it through another agency simply as a target of opportunity. Supposedly to build a dam on its site." Danziger grinned. "We've closed off the road into it, and now we're restoring it; God, it's fun! The reverse, for a change, of running a freeway through the heart of a fine old town or replacing a lovely old place with a windowless monstrosity; it would drive the destroyer mentalities insane with frustration, but our people are having a wonderful time." He sat smiling like a sailor talking about his all-time-best shore leave. "They're ripping out all the neon, they'll tear out every dial phone, unscrew every frosted light bulb. We've carted out most of the electrical appliances already: power lawn mowers and the like. We're removing every scrap of plastic, restoring the buildings, and tearing down the few new ones. We're even removing the paving from certain streets, turning them back into lovely dirt roads. When we're finished, the bakery will be ready with string and white paper to wrap fresh-baked bread in. There'll be little water sprays in Gelardi's store to keep the fresh vegetables cool. The fire engine will be horse-drawn, all automobiles the right kind, and the newspaper will begin turning out daily duplicates of those it published in 1926. We're working from an extensive study andcollation of photographs and town records, and when 'finished I think forgotten little Winfield will once more be the way it was in 1926; now what d(we) o (re) you think of that?" I was smiling with him. "Sounds impressive. And expensive." "Not at all." Danziger shook his head firmly. "It will cost, all told, only a little over three million dollars, less than the cost of two hours of war, and a better buy. All this for the benefit of one man; you saw him this morning out on the Big Floor." "The man on the porch of the little frame house." "Yes; it's a duplicate of one in Winfield. In it, as well as he can, John is doing his level best to work himself into the mood of living in Winfield, Vermont, in the year 1926. Then, when he's ready and when we are, for about ten days—the longest period that is practical—some two hundred actors and extras will begin walking the restored streets of Winfield, driving the old cars, sitting out on the porches if it's warm enough. They'll be told it has to do with an experimental movie technique; hidden cameras catching their impromptu but authentic actions, which must be maintained at all times when outdoors. Among the two hundred—all those having actual dealings with John—will be some twenty-odd people from the project. We hope John will be mentally ready to make the most of those brief ten days." Chewing his cigar stump, the old man sat staring across his office at the huge photograph on the wall. Then he looked at me again. "And that's the purpose of all our constructions down on the Big Floor. They're preparatory: temporary substitutes for the real sites because they're either not available yet not available for a long enough time. There aren't many thousand-year-old buildingsanywhe(or) re, for example, but one of them is Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The actual site will be given to us for less than five hours, between midnight and dawn of one night only. Electricity and gas to be turned off on the .le de Cite and along the Right and Left banks within eye range of the cathedral. And we'll be allowed to stage-set the immediate area. It's the best we could arrange—through the State Department—with the French government. They think it's being done for a movie. We even prepared a full shooting script to show them; realistically bad, which I expect convinced them. No one in the project has a great deal of hope for this particular attempt; there will be only a matter of hours in which to make it, not nearly enough, I'm afraid. And it'reaching a long way back; could anyone really achieve a sense of what it was like? I must doubt it,(s) but still I have hope. We do the best we can, that's all, with the sites we discover." Danziger stood, and beckoning me to follow, he walked to the covered table. "And now, except for countless details, you know what this project is. I've saved the best for last: your assignment." He pulled the dust from the table and exposed a model, three-dimensional and beautifullymade.Fromabody(cover) of white-capped green water a wooded island rose to a peak. Facing the island across a strait, a slanted cliff rose from a boulder-strewn beach. Above the rock face of the cliff grew timber, and among the trees stood a white house with a railed veranda.
"We're building this down on the Big Floor." Danziger touched the peak of the wooded island. "This is Angel Island in San Francisco Bay; it is state and federally owned. Except for a long-abandoned immigration station and an abandoned Nike site, both hidden by trees, the island looks now as it looked at the turn of the century when this house"—he touched its tiny roof—"was new. It was the first house built here, and it took the best view, nearest the water. The actual house still exists, and except from its rear windows you can't see the newer houses around it. And Angel Island blocks off the Bay bridges. So the site is as it was except for modern shipping and power boats passing through the strait. For two full days and three nights we can have the strait as it was, including two cargo sailing-ships and some smaller ones." Danziger smiled at me and put a big heavy hand on my shoulder. "San Francisco has always been a charming place to visit. But they say the city that was lost in the earthquake and fire of 1906 was particularly lovely, nothing like it on earth anymore. And that, Si—San Francisco in 1901—is your assignment." No one likes anticlimax: There was a kind of innocent drama about this moment that I liked, and I hated to spoil it. But I had to, and I shook my head, frowning. "No. If I have a choice, Dr. Danziger, then not San Francisco. I want to be the man who tries in New York." "New York?" He moved one shoulder in a puzzled shrug. "Well, I wouldn't myself, but if you like, you may. I thought I was offering you something exceptional, but—" I had to interrupt, embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Dr. Danziger, but I don't mean the New York of 1894." He wasn't smiling now; he stood staring intently into my eyes, wondering if he hadn't made a big mistake about me. "Oh?" he said softly. "When?" "In January—I don't remember the date, but I'll find out—of the year 1882." Before I'd even finished he was shaking his head no. "Why?" I felt foolish saying it. "To ... watch a man mail a letter." "Just watch? That's all?" he said curiously, and I nodded. He turned abruptly, walked to the side of his desk, picked up the phone, dialed two digits, and stood waiting. "Fran? Check our records on the Dakota; they're on film. For parkside vacancies in January 1882." We waited. I put in the time studying the model on the table, walking around it, stooping to squint across it. Then Danziger picked up a pen, scribbled rapidly on a scratch pad, said, "Thank you, Fran," and hung up. He ripped the sheet from the pad, turned to me, and his voice was disappointed. "I'm sorry to say there are two vacancies in January of 1882. One on the second floor, which is no good. But the other is on the seventh floor and runs for the entire month, from the first of the year on into February. Frankly, I'd hoped there would be none, and that your purpose would therefore be impossible, ending the matter. Si, there can be no private purposes inthis project. This is a deadly serious venture, and that's not what it's for. So maybe you'd better tell me what you have in mind." "I want to. But I don't want to just tell you, sir, I want to show you. In the morning. Because if you actually see what I'm talking about, I think you may agree." "I don't think so." He was shaking his head again, but once more now his eyes were friendly. "By all means show me, though; in the morning if you like. Go on home now, Si; it's been quite a day."