Long before we were finished I knew I could do the same thing. I didn't need Urquhart now or anyone else; I, too, could look at an old cut or photograph and do the work of getting myself into and fully perceiving it until I found and touched the long-ago realness that had produced it. I could do it as well now as the makers of most of the new drawings I'd seen up there on the screen — better, I thought. Whether I could show it as well, whether I was artist enough, I wasn't sure; I doubted it. But I knew I could do it in my mind.

Walking to the cafeteria for lunch, I said so to Martin, and he nodded. "It's how we hoped you'd feel; Rossoff predicted it. But you won't have much time for actually sketching, and the point of this morning was to give you a head start; we've got a lot of stuff for you to study and translate for yourself." I spent three days then, alone with the projector looking at scene after scene of the eighties, staring, working at finding the actuality that lay under the surface of each, gaining experience and speed as the time passed.

At four o'clock one afternoon, in the tailor's workroom, I was measured from head to foot. Then I stood in my socks, holding a pail of sand in each hand, while a bootmaker traced the outlines of my feet.

During most of one week Martin lectured from file-card notes. What was the population of the United States in 1880? he asked me for a starter. I cut our present population in half and said a hundred million, but Martin told me to cut it in half again; there were only fifty million Americans then, most of them living east of the Mississippi. In the West, buffalo still roamed the open prairie, the new transcontinental railway was a national marvel and excitement in a way that even space travel isn't today, and Indians were still scalping Whitey. It was a very different country and world; there were animals alive that are now extinct, and social systems, too; Europe was full of kings, queens, emperors, czars and czarinas then, and they weren't figureheads, they ruled.

Martin talked about how the world traveled and moved its goods. There were steamships, and the railroad was decades old. But just the same, cargo vessels still moved largely by sail and most of the world traveled as it always had, on foot or by horse. Most people in America lived and died in the state or even the town they'd been born in; more people traveled across the ocean than across the country. Yet different as the world of the eighties was, Martin said, it was closer to ours than it seemed; walking through that horse-and-buggy United States, Lee De Forest was a nine-year-old boy already thinking about the problems involved in the invention of radio, sound movies, and television. At the end of one day, waiting at the elevator with me, Martin said, "It's a hell of a different world, Si, but it isn't alien to this, and I think you could be at home in it."

Kate thought my collar-length hair and my new brown beard — I'd begun trimming it — made me particularly handsome, and I agreed. She'd begun helping me with my homework at night now. I'd taken her to lunch one day, at a Madison Avenue restaurant, inviting Rube and Dr. Danziger, and they'd liked her. Katie is attractive, physically and personally; she's intelligent, tactful, and can be witty if she's in the mood; she has charm. And after that, they let her visit the project; Dr. Danziger himself showed her the Big Floor, then his secretary showed her through most of the rest of the project. I wasn't along; I was too busy with Martin Lastvogel.

So now, in a sense, Kate was fully in on the project, and on more nights than not, usually at her place though sometimes at mine, she drilled me on facts from Martin's lectures, using his notes. And she worked with me on getting the feel of the eighties from the photographs and woodcuts I brought home. One Saturday morning I took her to the project and showed her the reconstructed dresses, hats, gloves, and shoes of the period, and she was fascinated, wishing she could try an outfit on. She was a big help, and I think she speeded up the learning process for me. Martin thought so anyway. And she was a tremendous help with the self-hypnosis technique; Kate got it right away just from my description of how you were supposed to do it. That made me realize it was really possible, and from Kate's description I got an idea of the actual feel of slipping into "trance." So that one night at her place, sitting in her antique rocker, a very comfortable chair actually, I made it: My arm genuinely would not, could not, move, and I sat staring at it, fascinated. I told myself then that it was now free to move, tried it, and it did. Now I told myself that I would forget my own street address and stay in trance until Kate spoke. Then I sat there trying to recall my address, and it simply wasn't there to remember; it was both fascinating and a little frightening. I looked over at Kate who was reading through some of Martin's notes, and she happened to look up at the same time. She smiled and said, "Any luck?" and I knew my own address just as always, and could feel that I was out of trance.

"Yeah, finally," I said. Then we spent an hour studying samples of money; coins of the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, including gold pieces; big old bank notes issued by local banks pretty much in their own designs and actually signed by the bank presidents; and the ones I liked best of all, gold certificates redeemable not in silver but in gold and printed on the backs in an orange-colored ink suggesting gold.

Once in a while Kate and I did other things: took a drive on a weekend, took a walk, even saw some friends. And one night — Kate and I had been seeing almost too much of each other, I felt, and I think she did, too — I phoned Matt Flax, but got no answer. Kate was going to iron, wash her hair, that sort of thing, and get to bed early. But I felt restless, and I phoned Lennie, and then Vince Mandel, who lived in town, but got no answers. So I stayed home and read, deliberately getting my mind off the project in a one-night vacation from it. In my living room I sat reading a one-volume complete Sherlock Holmes which I generally picked up whenever I had nothing else to read. At Dr. Danziger's request I'd quit reading newspapers, magazines, and modern novels; I'd also unplugged the television and my radio, no hardship.

Every day at the project I sat listening to Martin, a clipboard in my lap, and I spent part of one afternoon tasting food. That was after lunch, which I'd skipped at Martin's request, and the cafeteria was empty except for the fat middle-aged cook, Dr. Rossoff, and me. First the cook brought in a plate of mutton, potatoes and beets, all boiled, and set it down in front of me. Rossoff sat across from me, and the cook stood beside the table, both watching me, and grinning a little. I ate a little of each of the things on the plate, tasting, staring off into space like a wine connoisseur. I'd never had mutton before, and didn't know what to expect; it seemed all right. But the potatoes and beets tasted — not quite the way they should have. I chewed away, trying to figure out the difference, and pretty soon Rossoff said, "Well?" I swallowed, and said, "They're better, they taste better. They have more flavor than I'm used to."

They both grinned some more, and Rossoff said, "Vegetables were grown in the eighties without chemical fertilizers, insecticides, or special treatments before planting. Also, no preservatives or additives." The cook said, "And they were boiled in chlorine-free water."

I had some fudge made with sugar refined in a way I didn't follow, it tasted about like any other. I had a small piece of longhorn steak, tougher and distinctly different in taste from any other I'd ever had. I had some marvelous ice cream made with unpasteurized cream. And I had a straight shot of whiskey, especially distilled for me; rough, raw, and powerful.