"Sam,” said Opal.

"It's okay,” he said, grinning at Axel. “I'm a doctor. I'd be there if you fainted, too."

In the AT&T Building they took a hearing test and tried the Voice Mirror that let them hear their voices as others heard them; they sounded thin and squeaky in their own ears, even Axel's, which was studiedly rich and low. In the Demonstration Call Room, Opal was chosen by lot to be one of those allowed to make a telephone call to anywhere in the United States, no part of it unreachable any longer.

"Oh, that's too funny,” Winnie said. Opal stepped up to the operator in uniform and headphone and gave her the number of the county clerk of Breshy County, Kentucky, who lived in the town of Bondieu. The operator turned to her switchboard and put through the call. Everyone in the Demonstration Call Room could hear the call make its way through the national web, from operator to operator, as lights lit up on a great map of America.

Central, said the operator in Bondieu, and the people in the Demonstration Call Room in Long Island made a small sound of awe.

The World's Fair operator gave her the number of the county clerk.

Oh, he ain't home, said Central. (Her name was Ivy. Opal felt a stab of homesickness.)

"Please put the call through,” they heard the operator say.

I can tell you he ain't home, said Central. I just now seen him out the winder, on his way to the drugstore.

Now people in the Demonstration Call Room were starting to laugh.

"This call is coming from the New York World's Fair,” the operator said, as primly, as mechanically as she could. “Please connect."

Well, all right, said Ivy. But y'all gone get no satisfaction.

Everyone but the operator was laughing now, listening to the phone ring in the empty house far away; laughing not in an unkind way, but only to show they knew that the World of Tomorrow might be a little farther off than it seemed to be here, which was no surprise really, and reflected badly on no one, not the backward little town or the flustered uniformed lady in her swivel chair. It was just time, time passing at different rates everywhere over the world, faster or more slowly.

It was said that in that very moment the Polish cavalry officers were riding into battle on their horses against the German tanks, their swords lifted.

Before Poland's building at the Fair, tall and steely, almost hard to look up at in the noon sun, there was a statue of a Polish king on horseback, his two swords lifted and crossed in an X as though to bar entrance. “Ladislaus Jagiello,” said Axel, not reading from the guidebook, where this king was unmentioned. “It must be."

"Well, sure,” Sam said.

"Yes. Who defeated the Teutonic Knights. Yes.” And he touched his straw fedora, to tip it back, or to salute.

They had come into the Court of the Nations, having lost the main way, so many forking paths. Axel kept stopping to pick up things on the ground, study them, discard them in the trash bins: helping to keep the place pristine, Sam said to Opal. There were flowers everywhere, banks and carpets and reaching spires, the same now as they had always been, always would be. “I love hydrangeas,” Opal said, and cupped tenderly a round blue bloom as big as a baby's head.

It seemed that among these orgulous or clean-limbed buildings with their muscleman statues and ranked flags an argument was being conducted, claims put forward or refuted, that Americans like them were supposed to hear, if they could. “The Jewish Palestine pavilion,” Axel read, somewhat asweat, unable to stop reading to the others even when they didn't listen. “A series of dioramas depicts the Holy Land of Yesterday and Tomorrow. Various displays portray the work of reclamation accomplished by Jewish settlers—the irrigation of desert wastes, the cultivation of farmlands. An answer to the charge of unproductiveness leveled at the Jew."

"Maybe it's time for lunch,” said Sam.

Without noticing where they walked, they had come before the Czech pavilion. There was no longer a Czechoslovakia, and yet the pavilion was not closed, a plain smallish place like a new clinic or grade school. They walked around it but didn't go in, as though they might intrude on a private grief. They remembered hearing on the radio, the Red and the Blue Networks: the German army coming into Prague, the distant noise like the sea's roar that was the engines of the trucks and tanks or the sound of people cheering, for there were some who cheered.

"Where will they go now, what will become of them?” Winnie asked. She meant the stranded Czech workers inside.

"They can go home. I think they can."

"I think I wouldn't, even if I could."

"'An exhibition is devoted to the country's history and civilization,'” Axel read. “'A colorfully arranged travel exhibit illustrates scenic attractions within the recently revised borders.’”

"Bastards,” said Sam.

There were letters running along the top of the building, carved in the stone, or made to look so. “What does it say?” Winnie asked.

"'When the wrath of the nations is passed,'” Axel and Sam read together, pointing up, “'the rule of thy country shall return to thee, O Czech people.’”

"Oh my God."

"It means the founding of the republic, after the war,” Sam said. “It was meant to suggest that, I'd guess. Means something else now."

"Who said it? Whose name is it there?"

"Comenius,” Sam read, and shrugged to indicate the name meant nothing to him, and turned away.

"Comenius,” said Axel loudly, standing forth and seeming to glare at Sam, as though finally he had had enough, but of what? “John Comenius. The Bohemian educator and thinker. Sixteen hundreds. The founder of education, of modern education, educational methods, yes right. A man of peace, exiled, roamed the world looking for help. From every king and ruler. Every king and ruler."

He snatched his hat from his head, and pressed it to his bosom. “Yes. Yes. The Thirty Years’ War. The wrath of the nations. He fled. Fled the invading Hapsburg army. Wandered the world for years, never to return."

They all looked at him, for they hadn't heard anyone say never to return like that and mean it.

Never to return. To many Fair visitors in that month, not just to those four, there would come a moment like this one, when they knew what way the world would take, indeed had already set out on. Sam and Opal, Winnie and Axel: even though almost two years followed in their lives that seemed not so different from other years, when people got married and had children and died and were buried and the world of tomorrow both arrived and came no closer, everything at last did take that way, which no one wanted and everyone expected.

* * * *

Pierce Moffett, Axel and Winnie's son, would come to know this story well: he would make his mother tell it over to him before he could really understand it, for it contained the mystery of his origins. How his mother- and father-to-be rode out to the Fair side by side in the subway, and said not a shy word to each other; how his aunt Opal put in a call to the little town in Kentucky, and everyone laughed. How Axel then took Winnie to spaghetti restaurants in the Village, museums uptown; how they got their marriage license at City Hall, amid the soldiers and sailors and the girls they'd soon be parted from. And how in the middle of the war he, Pierce, came to be; how glad they were, how much they loved him.

The day after Pearl Harbor, Sam Oliphant went down to the recruiting center, and within weeks he was uniformed and in command of a medical unit. Doctors were badly needed. He came home on leave for a week and kissed his children and his wife farewell and flew out to Hawaii, and then he was sent farther and farther into the great Western sea. Winnie watched the gray battleships cut the brilliant water in the newsreels, the flotillas of planes cut the foamy clouds, planes whose crews Sam attended. Opal sent on to her the flimsy sheets of V-mail that Sam wrote, jokey and sweet and scary. Often he couldn't name the places he was, but sometimes he could, and Axel and she would look at the atlas and try to find them. Adagios of islands, Axel said.