Denver

Denver is the novel’s clearest measure of how time changes the ordinary world around Dan Davis. When he reaches it from Yuma in the later era, the city has become a crowded national capital whose familiar streets have disappeared into an immense New Plan metropolis; when he returns to 1970, it is still an unsettled Western city, not yet the future he remembers. The contrast makes Denver both a setting for Dan’s work and a landmark by which he feels the distance between two times.

The capital in the later era

After following Ricky’s trail through Calexico, Brawley, and Yuma, Dan abandons the chase when he learns that she has married. He jumps a ship for Denver, stopping only to send Chuck Freudenberg instructions to clear his desk and pack his room. The city he finds is so changed that he cannot even locate Colfax Avenue. He had understood that essential government functions were buried beneath the Rocky Mountains; aboveground, Denver nonetheless seems more crowded than Great Los Angeles. Its transformation turns a destination into a shock of estrangement: Dan has reached the national capital, but not a place he can readily recognize.

The remembered Denver belongs to a city reshaped by the Six Weeks War. Dan notes that he and Miles Gentry had gone directly to California after Denver became the capital, and that he had not returned since. His expectation that government had moved underground does not prepare him for the sheer density of the city aboveground. The contrast between hidden federal infrastructure and the visible, crowded metropolis gives the future capital a double character: political functions may be buried, but urban growth is unmistakably on the surface.

A city between versions

In 1970, Denver is smaller and more legible. Dan describes it as quaint, with an old-fashioned flavor, and says it has fewer than two million people. Buses and other vehicles still use streets that remain streets; Colfax Avenue is easy to find. These details answer the disorientation of his later arrival with specific measures of what has not yet happened: the maze-like New Plan city has not swallowed the older urban layout, and the capital has not yet become the metropolis he remembers.

Yet 1970 Denver is already changing. It is still adjusting to its new role as the national seat of government, and the construction of offices and housing is spreading in all directions to accommodate bureaucrats, lobbyists, contact men, clerk-typists, and other government workers. Buildings rise so quickly that the city seems capable of enclosing a cow within their walls. Its growth remains geographically bounded: it reaches only a few miles past Aurora to the east, Henderson to the north, and Littleton to the south, while open country remains before the Air Academy. To the west, development runs into the high country, where federal bureaus tunnel into the mountains.

Work, return, and temporal contrast

Denver is also where Dan turns a desperate journey into the practical beginning of a new enterprise. After buying ten kilograms of fine gold wire in Denver and carrying it around his waist to Boulder, he finds Hubert Twitchell there and seeks his help. The gold gives Dan portable capital; the meeting brings him into contact with the aging, disappointed scientist whose temporal displacement device will matter to Dan’s return. Denver is the point of passage in this sequence, linking the failed search for Ricky to the technical and financial preparations that follow.

On his second arrival in 1970, Dan’s work takes a more concrete form. After John Sutton converts the gold’s bullion value into cash, Jenny Sutton drives him around Denver on 5 May, and he rents a small loft in the old commercial district. Its drafting table, workbench, army cot, utilities, and easily clogged toilet make an austere workshop rather than a home. From that base he designs Drafting Dan and Protean Pete, first establishing working models and then preparing their patent drawings and descriptions. The city is not merely a backdrop to invention: its accessible workshop space and the resources Dan can obtain there give his return a material starting point.

Denver’s two versions make the novel’s time travel visible in streets, scale, and construction. In the later city, Colfax has become impossible for Dan to locate; in 1970, it is still there. The capital’s expanding buildings and mountain-bound government foreshadow the future metropolis, while the older city gives Dan room to work before that transformation is complete. Its changing landscape measures both historical development and the personal dislocation of a man who has arrived in his own past.