"Honey,” I said, "I know I am regarded as an irritating cluck with a low ethical standard. But have you ever seriously thought what an opportunity there is here for reform?”
"Yes,” she said, decisively, and in quite the wrong tone.
"What I mean is.” I told her patiently, "if you happened to be looking for a good work to devote your life to, what could be better than reformation? The scope is tremendous and—”
"Is this a proposal of some kind?” Sally inquired.
"Some kind! I'll have you know that in spite of my dubious ethics . . . good Godl" I broke oil.
We were in Tyler Street, rain-swept, and empty now except for ourselves. What stopped me was the sudden appearance of a kind of vehicle farther along. I couldn't make it out clearly on account of the rain, but I got the impression of a low-built truck, with several figures in light clothes on it, crossing Tyler Street quite swiftly, and vanishing. That wouldn't have been so bad if there were any street crossing Tyler, but there isn't: the truck just came out of one side, and went into the other.
‘‘Did you sec what I saw?" I said.
We rushed to the place where the thing had crossed, and looked at the brick wall on one side and the house-fronts on the other.
“You must have been mistaken,” said Sally.
“Well, for ... I must have been mistaken!"
"But it couldn't have happened, could it?”
“Now listen, honey—you saw it, didn't you?”
But at that moment someone stepped from the solid brick, about ten feet ahead of us! A girl! We gaped at her.
I don't know whether the hair was her own, art and science can do so much together; but the way she wore ill Like a great golden chrysanthemum a foot-and-a-half across with a red rose in it a little left of center. She had on a kind of pink tunic. Maybe it was silk. It wasn't the kind of thing you expected to see in Tyler Street on a filthy wet night, but for sheer coverage it would have got by—well, maybe in a girlie show. What made it a real shocker were the things which had been achieved by embroidery. I never would have believed a girl could—oh, well, anyway, there she stood, and there we stood.
When I say "she stood," she certainly did. but somehow she did it about six inches above ground level. She looked at us both, then she stared at Sally just as hard as Sally was staring at her. It must have been some seconds before any of us moved. The girl opened her mouth as if amazed. She took out a piece of paper—looked like a picture of some kind—from somewhere. She gazed from it to Sally, seemed to laugh with delight, then excitedly turned, waving the paper, and walked back into the wall.
Sally stood quite still, the rain shining on her slicker. When site turned so that I could see her face under the hood there was an expression on it quite new to me. I put my arm around her, and found she was trembling. "I'm scared, Jerry," she said. .
I was badly rattled myself, but she needed an act.
“No cause for that, honey. Bound to be a simple explanation—”
“But it's more than that, Jerry. Didn't you see her face? She looked exactly like mel"
“Not nearly so pretty," I argued nobly.
“Jerry, she was exactly my twin . . . I-I'm scared.”
“Must have been tome trick of the light. Anyway, she's gone.”
All the same, it stood my hairs on end. That girl was the image of Sally, all right
Jimmy came into my room next morning with a copy of the News. It carried a brief, facetious story on the number of local citizens who had been seeing things lately.
“They're beginning to take notice at last,” he said.
"How’s your research going?”
He shrugged. “I guess it's not quite the way I thought As I see it, it’s still in the experimental stage, all right, but the transmitter may not be around here after all. This may just be the area he has it trained on for testing.”
“But why here?” "How would I know?" He paused, looking portentous. “It could be mighty serious. Suppose some enemy had a transmitter, and could project things or people here . . . ?"
"Why here?” I said again. "I’d think Oak Ridge, or maybe Brooklyn Navy Yard . .
"Experimental,” he said, reprovingly.
I told him what Sally and I had seen the previous night. "She sort of didn't look the way I think of enemies," I added.
Jimmy shook his head. “Might be camouflage."
Next day, after half of its readers had written in to tell about the funny things they'd been seeing, the News dropped the facetious angle. In. two days more the thing had become factional, dividing sharply into what you might call Modem and Classical camps. The former argued the claims of teleportage against three-dimensional projection or some theory of spontaneous molecular assembly: in the latter, opinions could be sorted into beliefs in a ghostly invasion, a suddenly acquired visibility of habitual wandering spirits, or the imminence of Judgment Day. In the heat of debate it was becoming difficult to know who had seen how much of what, and who was enthusiastically bent on improving his case at some expense of fact.
On Saturday Sally and I met for lunch. Afterwards we took the car en route tor a little place up in the hills which seemed to me an ideal spot for a proposal. But at the corner of Jefferson and Main the man in front of me jumped on his brakes. So did I. and the guy behind me. The one behind him didn't quite. There was an interesting crunch of metal going on on the other side of the crossing, too. I stood up to see what it was all about, and then pulled Sally up beside me.
"Here we go again,” I said. "Look!”
Slap in (he middle of (he intersection floated a—well, you could scarcely call it a vehicle—it was more like a flat trolley or platform, about a foot off the ground. And when I say off the ground, I mean just (hat. No wheels. It kind of hung there from nothing. Standing on it, dressed in colored things like long shirts or smocks, were half a dozen men looking at the scenery. Along the edge of the platform was lettered: PAWLEY' S PEEKHOLES.
One of the men was pointing out New Saints Church to another; the rest were paying more attention to the cars and (he people. The cop on duty was hanging a goggling face out of his uniform. He bawled, he blew his whistle, then he bawled some more. The men on the platform took no notice. He got out of his box and came across the road like he was a volcano which had seen a nice place to erupt.
"Hey!” he bellowed.
It didn't worry them. When he got a yard or two away they noticed him, nudged one another, grinned. The cop's face went purplish; his language was a pretty demonstration of fission. But they just watched him with amused interest. He drew his slick, and went closer. He grabbed at a fellow in a yellow shirt—and his arm went right through him.
The cop stepped back. You could see his nostrils kind of spread, die way a horse's do. I-Ic got a hold on his stick and made a fine circular swipe at the lot of them. They just grinned at him as die stick went through them.
I'll hand it to that cop. He didn't run. He stared at them a moment, then he turned and walked deliberately back to his position; just as deliberately he signaled the north and south traffic across. The guy ahead of me was ready for it. he drove right at, and through, the platform. It began to move, but I'd have just niched it myself had it been nickable. Sally, looking back, said it slid away on a curve and disappeared into the First National Bank.
When we got to the spot I’d had in mind the weather had turned bad; it looked dreary and unpropitious, so we drove around and then back to a nice quiet roadside restaurant just out of town. I was getting the conversation around to the mood where I wanted it when who should come over to our table but Jimmy.
"Fancy meeting you two," he said. "Did you hear what went off at Main and Jefferson this afternoon, Jerry?”
“We were there," I told him.
“You know, Jerry, this is something bigger than we thought—a whole lot bigger. That platform tiring. These people are technically way ahead of us. Do you know who I think they are?"
"Martians?” I su
ggested.
He stared at me. "Gee! How did you guess that?” he said, amazedly.
"I sort of saw it had to come,” I admitted. "But,” I added, “I kind of feel Martians wouldn't be labeling anything Pawley’s Peekholes’ ”
Jimmy went away sadly.
But he’d wrecked the mood. My proposal waited.
On Monday, our stenographer, Anna, arrived more scattered than commonly.
"The most terrible thing just happened to me. Oh my, did I blush all over!"
"All over?” inquired Jimmy, with interest.
"I’m serious! I was in my shower this morning, and when I looked up there was a man in a green shirt standing watching me. Naturally. I screamed at once."
"Naturally,” agreed Jimmy. “And what happened then, or shouldn't I . . . ?’’
"He just stood there," Anna said, firmly. ‘Then he sniggered at me, and walked away through the wall!
Was I mortified!"
Jimmy said: "Very mortifying thing, a snigger—and at you, too—"
"That's not what I—what I mean is, things like that oughtn't to be allowed," Anna said. "If a man's going to be able to walk through a girl's bathroom walls, where’s he going to stop?"
Which seemed a pretty fair question.
The boss arrived just then. I followed him into his room. He wasn't looking happy.
"What the hell's going on in this damned town, Jerry?" he demanded.
"I'd like to know," I told him.
“Wife comes home yesterday. Finds two incredible girls in the sitting-room. Thinks it's me. First bust-up in twenty years. Girls vanish," he sad, succinctly.
That evening when I went to see Sally I found her sitting on the steps of the house in the drizzle.
She gave me a bleak look.
"Two of them came into my room. A man and a girl. They wouldn't go. They laughed at me. Then they started—well—acting as if I weren't there. I-I couldn’t stay, Jerry."
Then, not altogether accountably, she bum into tears.
From then on it stepped up. By the end of the next day the town was full of mothers crying shame and men looking staggered, and the mayor and the police were snowed under with protests and demands that somebody do something about it.
The trouble seemed thickest in that district which Jimmy had originally marked out. You couldmeet them elsewhere, but in this one area you were liable any and every minute to encounter a gang; the men in colored shirts, the girls with amazing hairdo's and more amazing decorations on their skirls, sauntering arm in arm out of walls, wandering indifferently through automobiles and people alike. They'd pause anywhere to point out things and people to one another and go into helpless roan of silent laughter. What tickled them most was when folks got riled with them. They'd make signs and faces at them until they got them tearing mad—and the madder the funnier.
You couldn't seem to be free of them any place in the area though they appeared to be operating on levels that weren’t always the same as ours. In some places it looked as if they walked on the ground or the Door, but in oth-en they were inches above it, and elsewhere you’d find them moving along as if they were wading through the solid surface. It was soon very dear that they could not hear us any more than we could them, so there was no getting at them that way.
After three days more of It Center City was in chaos. There just wasn't any privacy. At the most intimate moments they were liable to wander through visibly giggling and guffawing. All very well for the police to announce that there was no danger, that the visitants couldn’t do anything, so the best way was simply to ignore them. There are times and places when giggling bunches of youths and maidens take more ignore-power than the average guy’s got. It sent even a placid fellow like me wild at times, while the women's leagues of this-and-that, the purity promoters and the like were living in a constant state of blown tops.
The news getting around hadn't helped, either. News hounds of all breeds burned the roads into town. They overflowed the place. Pretty nearly every street was snaked with cables of movie cameras, televison cameras and microphones, while the press-photographers were having the snappy-shot time of their lives.
But there was more to come. Jimmy and I happened on the first demonstration of it. We were on our way to lunch, Jimmy quite subdued. He’d given up theories on account of the facts had kind of submerged him. Just short of the lunch bar, we stopped, noticing a commotion further along Main Street. After a bit, a vehicle emerged from a tangle of cars farther down and came towards us at some seven or eight miles an hour. Essentially it was a platform like the one Sally and I had seen at the crossing that Sunday, but this was dc luxe. There were sides to it glistening with new paint, red, yellow and blue, enclosing scats set four abreast. Most of the passengers were young, though there was a sprinkling of middle-aged men and women dressed in a soberer version of the same fashions. Behind the first platform followed half a dozen others. We read the lettering on their sides and backs as
PAWLEY’S PEEKHOLES
INTO THE PAST
GREATEST INVENTION
OF THE AGE
HISTORY, WITHOUT TEARS—
$10.00 A TRIP
SEE HOW GT. GT. GRANDMA
LIVED
YE QUAINTE OLDE
20th CENTURY EXPRESSE'
EDUCATIONAL!
LEARN PRIMITIVE
FOLKWAYS & LIVING
CONDITIONS
VISIT ROMANTIC
20th CENTURY—
SAFETY GUARANTEED
KNOW YOUR HISTORY—
GET CULTURE—$10.00
BIG MONEY PRIZE—
IF YOU IDENTIFY
YOUR OWN GRANDAD/MA
That last one explained the mystery ol Sally’s twin of the ether.
I noticed that most of the occupants of the vehicles were turning their heads this way and that in gogeyed wonder interspersed with spasms of giggles. Some of the young men waved their arms and addressed us with witticisms to the admiration of their companions. Others leaned back, bit into large yellow fruits, and munched. On the back of the next to last car was lettered:
HOW GOOD WAS
GT. GRANDMA?
FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF
SPOT THE FAMOUS—
SHARP EYES MAY WIN YOU
A BIG PRIZE
As (he procession moved away it left the rest of us looking at one another kind of stunned. Nobody seemed to have much left to say just then.
I guess that show must have been something in the nature of a grand premiere. After that you were liable almost any place about town to come across a platform labeled HISTORY IS CULTURE—BROADEN YOUR MIND, or KNOW THE ANSWERS ABOUT YOUR ANCESTORS, each with full good-time loads aboard, but I never heard of a regular procession again.
Well, work has to go on. We couldn't fix to do anything about it, so we had to put up with it. Quite a pack of families moved out of town for privacy and to spare their daughters from getting the new ideas about dress, and so on; but most of us had to stay. Pretty near everyone you met those times looked dazed or scowling—ex-the "tourists.”
I called for Sally one evening about a couple of weeks after the trolley procession. When we came out of the house there was a ding-dong going on down the road. A couple of girls with heads that looked like globes of gilded basketwork were scratching the living daylights out of one another. There was a guy standing by looking mighty like a proud rooster, the rest were whooping things on. We went the other way.
"It just isn't like our town any more," said Sally "Our homes aren't our homes any more. Why can’t they go away and leave us in peace, damn them! I hate them!” But outside the park we saw one little chrysanthemum-head silling on apparently nothing at all. and crying her heart out. Sally softened a little.
"Maybe they are human,” she said. "But why do they have to turn our town into a dam amusement park?”
We found a bench and sat on it, looking at the sunset. I wanted to get her away out of it.
"It'd be grand
to be off up in the hills now," I said.
"It’d be lovely, Jerry." She sighed.
I took her hand, ’and she didn't pull it away.
“Sally, darling—” I began.
But before I could get any further, two tourists, a man and a girl, came to anchor in front of us. I was angry. You might sec the platforms anywhere, but walking tourists didn't find much to interest them in the park as a rule. These two did, though. They stood staring at Sally. She took her hand out of mine. They conferred. The man unfolded a piece of paper he was carrying. They looked at the paper, then at Sally, and then back. It was too much to ignore. I got up and walked through them to sec what the paper was. There I had a surprise. It was the Center City News. Obviously a very ancient copy indeed. It was badly browned and tattered at the edges, and to keep it from falling to bits entirely it had been mounted inside some thin, transparent plastic. I looked where they were looking—and Sally's face stared back at me from a smiling photograph. She had her arms spread wide, and a baby in the crook of each. I'd just time to see the headline: "Twins for Inventor's Wife,” when they folded up the paper and made off along the path running. I guessed they were hot on the trail to claim one of their infernal prizes—and I hoped it poisoned them.
I went back and sat down again beside Sally. That picture had kind of spoiled things. I'd never invented anything more than an excuse in my life—and I had to do that again right now to avoid telling her what I'd We sat on a while.
A platform went by labeled:
Beyond the End of Time (1952) Anthology Page 16
