"So now, after his death, he's gone back there. In some manner or other." Runciter is in Zurich, he thought, and also in Des Moines. In Zurich he has measurable brain metabolism; his physical, half-life body is suspended in cold-pac in the Beloved Brethren Moratorium, and yet he can't be reached. In Des Moines he has no physical existence and yet, evidently, there contact can be established - in fact, by such extensions as this instruction booklet, has been established, at least in one direction, from him to us. And meanwhile, he thought, our world declines, turns back onto itself, bringing to the surface past phases of reality. By the end of the week we may wake up and find ancient clanging streetcars moving down Fifth Avenue. Trolley Dodgers, he thought, and wondered what that meant. An abandoned verbal term, rising from the past; a hazy, distant emanation, in his mind, canceling out current reality. Even this indistinct perception, still only subjective, made him uneasy; it had already become too real, an entity which he had never known about before this moment. "Trolley Dodgers," he said aloud. A hundred years ago at least. Obsessively, the term remained lodged within awareness; he could not forget it.
"How come you know that?" the shop foreman asked.
"Nobody knows that any more; that's the old name for the Brooklyn Dodgers." He eyed Al suspiciously.
Joe said, "We better go upstairs. And make sure they're all right. Before we take off for Des Moines."
"If we don't get to Des Moines soon," Al said, "it may turn out to be an all-day trip or even a two-day trip." As methods of transportation devolve, he thought. From rocket propulsion to jet, from jet to piston-driven aircraft, then surface travel as the coal-fed steam train, horse-drawn cart - but it couldn't regress that far, he said to himself. And yet we've already got on our hands a forty-year-old tape recorder, run by rubber drive-tire and belts. Maybe it could really be.
He and Joe walked rapidly to the elevator; Joe pressed the button and they waited, both of them on edge, saying nothing; both withdrew into their own thoughts.
The elevator arrived clatteringly; the racket awoke Al from his introspection. Reflexively he pushed aside the iron-grill safety door.
And found himself facing an open cage with polished brass fittings, suspended from a cable. A dull-eyed uniformed operator sat on a stool, working the handle; he gazed at them with indifference. It was not indifference, however, that Al felt. "Don't get in," he said to Joe, holding him back. "Look at it and think; try to remember the elevator we rode in earlier today, the hydraulic-powered, closed, self-operated, absolutely silent-"
He ceased talking. Because the elderly clanking contraption had dimmed, and, in its place, the familiar elevator resumed its existence. And yet he sensed the presence of the other, older elevator; it lurked at the periphery of his vision, as if ready to ebb forward as soon as he and Joe turned their attention away. It wants to come back, he realized. It intends to come back. We can delay it temporarily: a few hours, probably, at the most. The momentum of the retrograde force is increasing; archaic forms are moving toward domination more rapidly than we thought. It's now a question of a hundred years at one swing. The elevator we just now saw must have been a century old.
And yet, he thought, we seem able to exert some control over it. We did force the actual contemporary elevator back into being. If all of us stay together, if we function as an entity of - not two - but twelve minds -
"What did you see?" Joe was saying to him. "That made you tell me not to get in the elevator?"
Al said, "Didn't you see the old elevator? Open cage, brass, from around 1910? With the operator sitting on his stool?"
"No," Joe said.
"Did you see anything?"
"This." Joe gestured. "The normal elevator I see every day when I come to work. I saw what I always see, what I see now." He entered the elevator, turned and stood facing Al.
Then our perceptions are beginning to differ, Al realized. He wondered what that meant.
It seemed ominous; he did not like it at all. In its dire, obscure way it seemed to him potentially the most deadly change since Runciter's death. They were no longer regressing at the same rate, and he had an acute, intuitive intimation that Wendy Wright had experienced exactly this before her death.
He wondered how much time he himself had left.
