“The Big Floor.”
“Yeah! You’re doing good! Down on the Big Floor, something like movie sets. Separated by walls. An Indian tepee on a stretch of prairie, walls painted to look like more. World War One trenches in another, a barbed-wire no-man’s-land stretching away in front. An actual house in another. An exact replica of a house right here in Winfield, but the way it was in the twenties. And a man living in it: me.” He sat grinning at Rube.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m all ears.”
“Real Crow Indians living in the tepee; had to be taught the language, though. Guys in the trenches wearing 1917 U.S. Army uniforms. All of us getting the feel of how it was, you see. Before we moved out into the real thing. Indians out onto an enormous stretch of real prairie. Doughboys in France in genuine World War One trenches restored. Because the Project, Major, was a search for a way to move back in time.”
He sat waiting but Rube outwaited him, looking at him expressionlessly, and McNaughton smiled, leaning closer. “It was you, Major, who first told me all this, the first day I joined the Project. Standing up on the catwalk over the Big Floor; you could walk anywhere on the catwalks and look down on the sets. Big banks of lights up there to imitate day, night, cloudy, sunny, rain, anything. Machinery to control temperatures: winter on one set, heat wave on another. You and I stood up there looking down, me brand-new to the Project. You said that according to Einstein, time is like a narrow winding river. And we’re all in a boat. All we can see around us is the present. But back in the bends behind us the past still exists. Can’t see it, but it’s there; really there, Einstein said. And meant it. Well, Dr. Danziger—”
“What were his initials?”
“E. E.”
“Right! Right: E. E. Danziger.”
“Major, let’s get out of here, the guy’s starting to listen. Pay him for—what does he call this stuff? Coffee, I think.”
Outside they crossed the street to a lone bench in the little paved-over square. “Danziger said that if the past really exists—and Einstein says it does—there ought to be a way to reach it. Took him two years but he got money for the Project. From the federal government.”
“Where else?”
“Well, who pays you?”
Rube smiled.
“He got, must have been a few million. Built the Project, and, Major, they bought this town, the whole town. Couldn’t have been many holdouts, because look at this garbage dump. Out here in the middle of nothing but played-out farmland going back to brush. Nobody here anymore but drunks, druggies, and dropouts. Can’t make it anywhere else, come up here, get on welfare, and drink. Or raise marijuana on land don’t belong to them. Misfits. No-goods.”
“Including you?”
“Why not? But the Project restored this whole town to the way it was in the twenties.” He sat watching Rube make a show of looking around at the dilapidated town, and smiled. “Oh, it doesn’t look like it now, I know. Kind of a mystery here, Major, but one thing at a time. Take my word for it, they restored this place, made it a ‘Gateway’—as Dr. D called them. Makes it easier to slip from the simulation into the real thing. I did it. Made the transition to the real Winfield of the twenties. Damn few can do it, Major. You couldn’t. Tried, but couldn’t do it. But a few of us could, and I was one, and Major . . . it took me where I’d wanted to be all my life. You should see this little town in the twenties. Beautiful, so beautiful. Quiet dirt roads, trees, trees everywhere. And a drugstore that—”
“Spare me the nostalgia.”
“I hate that word. You know who uses it mostly? Time patriots. Same people who live in the best country in the world. Must be the best because that’s where they live. And they live in the best of times; has to be best because it’s their lifetime. You even suggest there just might have been better times than here and now, and it’s ‘nostalgia, nostalgia.’ Don’t even know what the word means. Means overly sentimental, for crysakes.”
“Give ’em hell, John.”
“What I’ll give you is the present—look at this street. But you should see it—oh Lord, you should see it in the twenties. Saturday night, say; in the summertime. Main Street here jammed; townspeople, farmers in from the country. They knew each other, stopped to talk. Someone else would come along and join in, and there’d be a little group on the walk. Not like the damn shopping malls. Go to a shopping mall a hundred times, and it’s always mostly strangers you never saw before, and never see again. In the twenties this miserable dead little square was beautiful; trees, grass, shrubbery, paths, green benches, and people. Some of the farmers came in buggies or wagons. Hitching posts along the curbs, not parking meters. There were cars, sure. Mostly Model Ts. But I had a job, mechanic at Pierce-Arrow.”
“Surprised you could stand the cars, John. All those nasty exhaust fumes.”
“Maybe so. Maybe twenty, thirty years earlier Winfield is even better. Be happy to go see. Major, I have got to get back, got to.”
“Why the hell did you leave?”
“The stuff that killed the cat, if you can believe it. I came back to the present, just for a day or so, I thought, to see what was happening at the Project. You took the Project over, you know.
Once it succeeded. You and Esterhazy. Forced Danziger out. Too cautious for you: he worried about altering events in the past because you couldn’t tell, he said, how the change might affect the present. Dangerous. But you and Esterhazy were rubbing your hands! Couldn’t wait to try it, and find out what would happen. But what I came back to, Major, was this. It’s no Gateway anymore. I can’t get back from this!”
“John, it’s sure interesting, all this stuff. And you tell it so well! But I’ve been to your Project. Yesterday. And Beekey’s Moving and Storage warehouse is a moving and storage warehouse. And always has been. You can see that with one look!”
“That’s true. In a way.”
“And it took fifty years for this stinking town to get like this; it’s never been restored!”
“Also true. In a way.”
“Pretty good way!”
McNaughton nodded several times, then said, “Major, four, five weeks ago I took the bus to Montpelier. State capital. Walked to the state library, and they got out a back file of the Winfield Messenger for me. They’ve got it all, 1851 to 1950; paper couldn’t quite last out the full century. I got the volume for 1920 through 1926, and stole something from it, cut it out of the paper. And I keep it with me all the time. Because it’s all I’ve got left now.” From his inside coat pocket he brought out a trimmed-down manila folder, and handed it to Rube.
Rube opened it. Taped to the inside lay a three-column-wide section of newspaper. A portion of the masthead across the top read, essenger, and just below that, between two rules, the date, June 1, 1923. Below this, the caption over a photograph, which Rube read aloud, “ ‘Crowd Throngs Parade Route.’ ” He bent over the photograph, examining it: several ranks and files of marching young men, rifles on shoulders, all wearing shallow metal helmets and high-necked uniform blouses. Preceding them, two more uniformed men carrying the American flag and a banner. Rube read aloud the banner’s inscription, “ ‘American Legion Post—’ ”