“Kind of you to say so. What sort of step up?”
“Specifically, we’re going to need experienced security personnel for next year’s tours. Hard work but major rewards. Are you interested?”
Tour security was a coveted job. It might nearly double his income. He nodded.
“There’s a learning curve, of course, but we’ll have you up to speed by the new year. In the meantime I have a temporary duty assignment for you.”
“Sir?”
Booking reached into a desk drawer, took out a small wedge of plastic, and handed it to Jesse.
Jesse stared at it. It was a pass card, visually identical to the one he already possessed.
“We’ll need your old card back. You’ll find this one opens a lot more doors. Tower Two and Tower One—the job involves some crossover. Ms. DePaul can explain it to you.”
“Can she?”
“She’ll be your supervisor from now on.”
Everything comes at a price, Jesse thought.
“Oh, and I put in a call to the supply room. You can pick up a new pair of Oakleys next time you stop by.”
2
“I’ll contact you when I need you,” Elizabeth DePaul had told him. “In the meantime, keep your pager handy.”
Jesse waited the rest of the day. No page. He went to his dormitory room and slept. The bedside clock woke him at six the next morning. No page. He lingered over breakfast in the commissary. Nothing. By ten o’clock he had breezed through a second breakfast and enough coffee to call forth Lazarus. Boredom set in.
He went to the bank of elevators that serviced the guest floors and slid his new pass card into the slot. His old card would have been instantly rejected. His new one caused the small red light on the card reader to turn green. The elevator door slid open. Jesse stepped inside and touched the button marked MEZZANINE. A recorded female voice said, “You have selected mezzanine.”
Technically speaking, with the new card, he was permitted to do this. But he had been systematically excluded from the guest zones for years, and it felt like he was committing a trespass. Which made it even more interesting.
The mezzanine level of Tower Two was a vast rotunda. Its ceiling was three stories tall, a pale blue dome that glowed with the light of hidden electric lamps. In the center of the rotunda was a sort of desk or counter under an illuminated sign that said VISITOR INFORMATION. Other City employees were positioned throughout the rotunda. The employee nearest the elevator banks was a young woman with an immaculately crisp uniform and a fixed smile. She glanced at Jesse as he stepped out, registered his security badge, and lost all interest in him. She was here for guests, not staff.
The rotunda wasn’t crowded, but it was busier than Jesse had ever seen it. He had visited the mezzanine before—once just before the City opened for business, on a walk-through arranged for employees so they might know what the guests were paying to see, and a few other times on after-hours guard duty. The security personnel who worked the rotunda by daylight were from the future and bunked in Tower One; the same was true of the night shift, but when they were shorthanded they sometimes called up local hires like him. Jesse had taken night duty three times in four years. But the rotunda and the guest galleries were different after business hours, when the lights were dimmed and the gallery displays switched off. By night, this echoing chamber had seemed to Jesse as dark and ominous as a pharaoh’s tomb; by day, it buzzed with life and color.
The rotunda was the hub of a wheel. Four galleries projected from it like fat spokes: the Gallery of Science and Industry, the Gallery of Twenty-first Century Life, a Gallery of the Arts, and a Guests’ Gallery, which housed food vendors and souvenir shops.
It hadn’t taken Jesse long to figure out that the mezzanine was really just a sort of inside-out museum. A museum, in that it collected and displayed artifacts of another time; inside out, because its collections depicted the future rather than the past. He had been told the Galleries, with their soft lighting and genial atmosphere, were a way of acclimating guests. Anyone wealthy enough to buy a ticket for a week’s stay at the City would have known at least roughly what he was getting for his money—a glimpse of the future—but the details could be dismayingly strange. It had been a full year after the City’s founding before respectable publications began to admit that people from the twenty-first century had actually contrived to build a kind of vertical resort city on the plains of Illinois—a notion so expansive it barely fit within the compass of a human skull. Skepticism was natural. Derision would have followed, had the City not provided evidence of its claims.
The City itself was evidence. The Galleries were evidence, a way to ease the passage between the clashing rocks of awe and incredulity. An even more convincing demonstration waited at the far end of the Gallery of Science and Industry. Jesse headed in that direction.
Grasping the concept of travel in time wasn’t the last hurdle a visitor had to surmount, merely the first. The future represented here was so strange as to be intimidating, and guests were introduced to it one marvel at a time. Once you were comfortable with the mezzanine you could proceed to other levels of the City, where theaters presented moving pictures, where a heated swimming pool made its own waves, where acrobats and musicians imported from the twenty-first century performed on a nightly schedule. It was a lot to absorb, but the guests shuffling through the mezzanine seemed eager enough to absorb it. Jesse moved among them, insulated by his uniform. They were wealthy, and he was not. The women in the crowd wore fine silk bodices with bustles (and Jesse had once lived among women who would have killed, perhaps not just in the figurative sense, to own such things); the men wore waistcoats, frock coats, plain or checkered trousers, wing collars, elegantly knotted ties. Most of the guests appeared to be from the east, but the wealthy of Chicago were prominently represented, and Jesse saw a few less carefully dressed gentlemen who might have made their fortunes out west. There was a sprinkling of likely Englishmen and Frenchmen, too, and one conspicuous southerner in a white cutaway sack coat. City hosts guided visitors in groups through the various galleries, and Jesse followed one of these groups as it entered the Gallery of Science and Industry, hanging back so as not to make himself conspicuous.
The displays, dioramas, and mounted exhibits were eye-widening but vague on details. That was by design, Jesse knew. The rationale had been explained to him in one of the seminars local employees were required to attend. Too much explicit information about the future would be disorienting; it might also be unfair. In the world today men were laboring to invent a practical electric light, for instance, and the existence of the City of Futurity suggested that their labors weren’t futile; but if the City handed out engineering details, the native inventor of such a light would be made instantly irrelevant; geniuses would die unhallowed and impoverished simply because the City had revealed too much too soon.
So the Gallery of Science and Industry spoke in generalizations, and the history it portrayed was a shadow in a shadow. Here were horseless carriages, depicted in photographs and displayed behind glass, and claims that these devices would one day dominate the roadways of America, but no hint of whose fortunes might be made or broken by the use of them. Similarly the flying machine: soon to fill the heavens with commerce; soon to transform the art of war. A huge diorama depicted “Aircraft in the Great Wars of the Twentieth Century.” Winged airships hung in motionless combat against a painted sky full of smoke and fire. Guests were free to infer that there would be world-consuming wars in the coming century—but when, or with whom, or with what result, the gallery was careful not to say.